The Online Photographer

Reify and Redact

A. D. Coleman uses two particular words with respect to photography that I think are illuminating. They're both scholarly-sounding words, and I think Allen uses them in ways that he has refined somewhat beyond their dictionary definitions. The words are "reify" and "redact."

"Reify" means to make real. This is of course an important word for artists, since artists are all the time getting ideas. An artistic project can actually have a rich life and and an elaborate structure in your head without being anything more than a notion; but until you "make it real," it's unlikely that anyone else is going to be able to get much out of it. Also, of course, the process of reifying any idea usually changes the idea, which is the fodder for so much of what goes on in art schools, not to mention what happens when you go out with a camera.

You might have the idea that you want to photograph the logging industry, or make a series of pictures that are all blue, or whatever else you might think of, but to be art the idea has to be made real by being put into some transmittable form.

"Redact" is a word the meaning of which, unless I misread him, Allen has extended somewhat. Strictly, it means to edit a text for publication. More generally, it can be thought of as putting any kind of creative project into final form.

Redaction is the reason why so many successful artists prefer to work toward some sort of culmination with any given body of work. For some it's to publish the work as a book, for others it's to have a show. There's no standard form for fully redacted work, of course; the concept simply implies that the work is wholly and completely reified to the limits of the artist's intentions, abilities, or resources.

Redaction, I think, is what really "separates the men from the boys," if the women reading this will forgive the expression. Most of us don't even edit our work, much less redact it into some coherent final form. Redaction, as those of you who have done it even once will be well aware, is very hard work. It requires that edits be hard, sequences be set in stone, final prints be made and matted, and the work be submitted to judgment with no excuses. For some it's even threatening work, requiring a certain kind of courage, since to finish something is to close it off to future improvements either actual or imagined.

The redaction project that is most common among photographers is the portfolio. (As you read this, ask yourself: do you have a portfolio that you could present without a single excuse or elaboration as being representative of what you've done as a photographer?) A custom book is also a great project, or even the humble "photo album." A fine print framed and hung can reify and redact a single picture.

Redaction is anyone's best shot at a legacy of any sort—whether it's to be worldwide fame in times to come or a considerate heirloom for the great-grandkids. The better the print, the less likely someone will be to throw it away. The more complete and finished the project, the easier other people find it to understand and appreciate, and the more likely they are to value and preserve it. It can be anything; but whatever it is, finish it. It will help it to endure.

Whatever form it takes, redaction is really the key to accomplishment, as well as to a "legacy."

Mike

[TOP is on hiatus this week. This was
originally published in 2007.]

Are You "Demanding" Enough?

This post relates to the next one pretty well. (Coming up.)

In a recent email, our friend the book author John Camp wrote:

"A couple of weeks ago you had a guy who wrote that if a street photo isn’t something a friend would tap you on the shoulder about—'Hey, look at that'—then it probably wasn’t a worthwhile street photo. I thought about that for a few minutes, and decided that the shoulder-tap was a great criterion for a street photo.

"Then I went and ordered that Bystander street photography book (from your site; I’ll thank myself on your behalf), and it really is a refutation of the should-tap idea. A very large proportion of the street photos I liked best were not shoulder-tap photos—they were photos of something a skilled photographer saw and snapped in an instant. For example, the very first photo in the book is the famous Cartier-Bresson shot of a man jumping across a puddle. If you tapped somebody on the shoulder and he turned to look, all he would see would be a man in a dark suit walking along. The moment would be gone. There are all kinds of shots that were made because of transitory facial expressions or split-second shots of kids acting out and in several cases, or because of shadows and contrasts that you walk through all the time…and they’re really good. So I’m somewhat down off the shoulder-tap idea, although it may still may have relevance for a certain kind of shooter."

It's a fair point, and broadly I agree. But to me, Kenneth Wajda's "shoulder tap" idea (here's the original article again) isn't exactly that you should be able to tap a friend on the shoulder and say "look at that" before making an exposure; it's that what you photograph ought to be something that someone else might agree is worth a second look.

There's at least one complication: we all differ over what's worth looking at. As an example of that, a reader sent me a link to a camera review recently. I thought the illustration pictures were particularly dreadful, and I said so. He wrote back and said he'd had the opposite reaction, that "they seemed of much better quality than the usual rote images." Another friend sent a group email with a link to some photos he liked, and one of the recipients thought the color was out of whack "in a way that makes the pictures really unpleasant to look at." Clearly, one person's trash is another's treasure, and vice-versa.

So then where's the useful nexus of this idea?

For me it's that we need to be sufficiently demanding of ourselves, our subjects, and our photographs.

I got this idea from photographer and artist Shirley True many years ago. She taught at the Corcoran, where I studied photography, but I wasn't in any of her classes. We were working in the school group darkroom once, and I asked her opinion of the picture I was printing.

Well, she didn't like it. She thought it was too flat, for one thing (she was probably right; I was really into low contrast for quite a while). That was the response everyone expected while printing—amounting to, how's my judgement here? Have I got the exposure and contrast right? But she went further—she said she didn't think much of the picture, either. She thought it was missing something, that it looked more like a reject than a select, you might say. Almost offhand, she made a curious comment—she said I wasn't "demanding enough" of my subject.

I chewed on that for a while afterwards. At a gallery show opening a few weeks later I asked her what she had meant by her comment. It's difficult here to put Shirley's own words back into her mouth when I've long since forgotten what the original picture was—and because thirty-odd years have passed!—but the meaning I took from it was that we have to have the courage and perseverance to get the best out of what we're photographing or we haven't really done our subject justice. She'd probably intuited that I'd been too shy to really confront the woman in my photograph, because I'd been afraid of the reaction I might get if I more aggressively went after the picture I really wanted. 

She was doubtless right on. I was just too egotistic at the time to agree.

I've had that thought many times over the years since—I'll look at a portfolio or set of pictures and it's just clear that the photographer isn't demanding enough of his or her subject. They haven't made enough exposures to get the shot they were after, they didn't want to follow the subject or get into their space, they photographed them surreptitiously in some way—from the back, say, or when they weren't looking—or the camera was just too far away from the subject, the photographer not close enough. The result is not entirely a "no," but not completely a "yes" either.

Snapcrap
I think the same concept applies to pictures themselves. We're living in an era of anti-editing—anyone can post their own pictures anywhere. On the one hand, we congratulate ourselves on the freedom this allows, and decry the former world in which self-appointed gatekeepers kept our pictures from being seen. It's a fair point, but the opposite hasn't proved to be much better—now we live under a virtual Niagara of pointless snapcrap because many people don't even try to edit the good shot from all the ones they took around it. They just chuck everything up on the Web, presumably to let the hypothetical viewers sort it out themselves.

I think you could also call this "being demanding," but of our pictures. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to just show the good ones; but of course it is. In an era of freedom and self-direction, more discipline and more principle and more restraint are needed, not less.

I get the feeling I've done a poor job of explaining my ideas here. This should probably be a five-day essay, not a one-day one. I hope you're able to fish from this gob of words the ones that got to the point. As a summary:

• Photographers should be demanding enough of their subjects, applying enough of whatever is needed—courage, boldness, energy, persistence, or whatever it is—to get the shot they really want. To go to whatever lengths necessary.

• As self-editors photographers should be demanding of their own work, recognizing the real successes and having the self-discipline to realize when they almost succeeded but didn't quite, or when a decent shot was just part of the process of getting a better one.

Anyway, that's the context in which I think the "tap on the shoulder" idea is useful. I can easily see that if Cartier-Bresson showed his puddle-jumper picture to ten friends, probably at least nine of the ten would understand why he thought it was a picture worth looking at. He has in effect tapped them on the shoulder and said "look at this"—and they knew why. Whereas with a great mass of the effluvium on the Internet these days, I can all too easily imagine showing a print to a friend or a passer-by only to elicit a response of, why are you showing me this? Why should I look at this?

I think that's the essence of the tap on the shoulder idea. It's a sort of minimum indicator of whether a photo works or is simply self-indulgent. Although, as I say, tastes vary, and sometimes a photographer does take pictures other people don't get.

I'll try to get the next post done today, since I think it at least partly relates to this one. [UPDATE: To be posted Saturday.]

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The brand new 2021 Apple 10.2-inch iPad (Wi-Fi, 64GB) in Space Gray. My iPad is my least necessary but most-loved Apple device. I could get by with my phone and a desktop computer, but I use this constantly and I like it best. Check out that price.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

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:

Rob de Loe: "Someone once asked me for my opinion on their work, which took the form of a Flickr site. There was a huge mass of images. Some of this and some of that. A sea of pictures. I think she uploaded her camera card each time it filled, with no curation at all. Definitely not demanding.... So I asked her to choose five pictures I could look at. Apparently that was an impossible request because no pictures were forthcoming."

Wiley Bogren: "I very much appreciated both the topic and the thoughts and experiences that went into it. Thought you did a perfect job (for me at least) conveying the intended gist, without extra vapor or grist. Well written on a great topic. Thank you!"

Mike replies: Thank you. I should really take more time.

Q: "At the risk of sounding persnickety, may I suggest a slight change in wording?

"I'd like to suggest that we should be demanding of ourselves or our processes, as you originally suggested, rather than of our subjects. In your summary, you do say this yourself: 'Photographers should... [apply] enough of whatever is needed—courage, boldness, energy, persistence, or whatever it is—to get the shot they really want.'

"As someone who's terrified of walking up to a person on the street and saying, 'Excuse me, may I take your picture?', my initial reaction was to think, 'I'm already asking them to do something for me; now I need to demand that they hang around until I'm satisfied that I've accomplished my goal?' Also, as primarily a landscape photographer, I can't exactly say to a wave, 'I love that curl—hold it right there!' or to the fast-setting sun, 'Wait—keep the light on the tops of those trees for just a few more minutes while I try different angles!'

"The salient difference, to me at least, is who's doing the work. Saying that we need to be demanding of our subjects suggests that it's the subjects that need to do the work; what your article says (I think) is that we as photographers need to do the work: anticipation and timing, perspective, framing, and so on. And I agree completely with that.

"I also agree that we need to be rigorous in editing. Here you've been very helpful, to me anyway: I've (more or less) adopted your process of selecting a few pictures from each outing and sitting with them for a few days to see which ones have staying power. Thank you for that."

Sunday Support Group: Do You Have a Portfolio?

Lots has changed in photography since I entered the culture as a boy. It used to be that photographers communicated mainly through books—other publications as well, but the published book was the ultimate final form of accomplishment, and you needed to see a photographer's book or books before you could have any claim to know what they were up to. That's changed. The camera used to have some authority, commanding respect or at least attention wherever it appeared. Anyone remember what a big day it was when the photographer came to do your school pictures? And if the newspaper sent a photographer, it meant the story, whatever it was, was being accorded a certain respect and importance. No more. Nowadays, some guy with a big DSLR isn't even a potential terrorist or a scummy Princess-killing paparazzi any more! (To name two of the slanders against us that pertained in recent decades and thankfully seem to have subsided.) Photography used to be a specialized skill that took some effort to master, which had the effect of elevating the status of those versed in the art—and of keeping the hordes at bay. Those days might not quite be gone, but they seem to be going.

Book or box
In those days, your main calling card was your portfolio, an idea that seems to have become...quaint, let's say. The portfolio, which took the form of a box or book of prints (in fact it was called your "book" in several branches of the craft), was the well-arranged and carefully judged shop window of your expertise—it showed people not only the best of what you could do, your skills and competencies, but also who you were...your concerns, your way of looking at things, your style, your chosen subjects.

This was as true for art photographers as for pros of all sorts. Editors called to see your book if they got interested by your mailings or heard of you some other way. Engaged couples were shown the photographer's book in a carefully orchestrated meeting while deciding on a wedding photographer. Artists dropped their boxes off at museums for review, picking them up a week later, so the curators would learn their names, see what they were up to, and consider their work for purchase or exhibition.

Great care and attention was lavished on what form the portfolio should take. In art circles it was often a deluxe solander case with beautifully matted fine prints inside—sometimes you'd find a pair of cotton gloves carelessly tossed in on top of the pictures as a convenience for whomever would be handling the pictures (replacing dirty mats was an inconvenience for the photographer, expensive or at least time-consuming). In professional circles the form of the book was endlessly discussed, and part of the creativity of the, er, "Creative" (an unfortunate shorthand name I never did like). One guy I remember had his pictures laminated by an outfit that made paper art into placemats! As in, for the dining table. The resulting mats were rigid and had a soft felt backing. Unfortunately the hard plastic covering was not quite transparent, so his pictures had a soft matte sheen to the surface that didn't suite every image. He did think the presentation was distinctive, but he did it mainly because they wore like iron, as serviceable placemats must, so he didn't have to re-do them so often.

Of course amateurs, wannabes, students and hobbyists often imitated the pros and artists in this aspect of the practice of the art, as in others. So they, too, were encouraged to create portfolios. How else could anyone see a formal and considered presentation of your pictures?

Well, that's over, clearly. Slap a JPEG on the web. One picture can be exchanged for another with a few clicks, and the whole pile can be accessed by anyone the world over at any time (as long as they have a desire to go see it, which turns out to be the hardest part), and it never wears out from handling. And you can have five portfolios, or ten. Even though the limits of a physical portfolio were a great help in staying focused and keeping it all on point.

Doldrums
I wonder, though, if the portfolio might not be a key learning experience for many of us still. I heard from a reader the other day who finds her creativity in the doldrums. "I feel quite stuck and uninspired," she writes. "I keep asking myself questions about photography, but I just don't have a vision about it (pun intended). The state of the internet these days sure does not help: you know better than me how depressed to the bottom the landscape is, and how gear-driven and content-empty. I'm convinced that if it was not for TOP, I would not be into photography any more and with young kids and little spare time, I just can't engage in classes or activities...."

She was looking to me as if I'd have some answers, but, actually, my first reaction was to think, I know how you feel! I'm in a similar boat, I guess.

The art of the portfolio
It did kindle a glimmer of memory, though—a memory of how deeply satisfying it was to work on a portfolio. From the photographer's vantage point, a portfolio wasn't just a motley collection of the best snaps they had managed in the past. It was a hopeful statement for the future: this is who I want to be, it said; this is what I really love. This is me, in short.

Because, really, a portfolio had to be composed of things you had done in the past, but what it really was was a projection of the work you wanted to do in the future. If you were a wedding photographer but you wanted to do commercial product photography, you showed a portfolio of the latter. If you were a jobber photographer-for-hire doing grip-and-grins but you wanted to be a wedding photographer, you shot a few weddings for friends and relatives and put that work in your portfolio. For pros, as much as possible you made the portfolio show the kind of work you wanted to be hired for going forward. I remember reading stories of hardworking assistants, eager to strike out on their own and make a name for themselves, holing up for months in the studio to create a portfolio of new work in a new style, hoping to transform themselves.

I suspect the same relationship translates to a personal artistic portfolio as well. You can reinvent yourself, reimagine yourself. Start with a core of a few shots you've taken that intrigue you and work outward; pare away everything that's not what you do best. Keep questioning the work: what are you doing? Who are you?

Don't pander. No clichés, no "likes-bait," no conventional "I'm-supposed-to-do-it-this-way" kind of stuff. Maybe even head the other way. Challenge the viewer; find your depth. Use your online communities to help edit; make online versions so you can see, visually, how each picture works with its neighbors; carry a miniature version made of tiny prints so you can show willing friends and acquaintances, and watch their reactions as they look through it.

To put together a group of pictures that shows who and what you are as a photographer: it's a tougher task than it might seem at a glance.

Does it sing?
In a recent book review, Charles Yu writes: "In his craft memoir, On Writing, Stephen King describes a moment in his process when he asks himself the 'Big Questions.' The biggest of which are: 'Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song?'" Good questions for a portfolio, too.

When you find the right work, it flows. Sings is a good word too, because what's a song but notes in the context of others? A picture in a portfolio has to be in balance and harmony with the others.

Just a thought, really. I don't have a portfolio now and it's been a long time since I've put one together. And I know many of you already do practice what I'm preaching—I've seen great portfolios by readers who've come to visit. Thoughtful and coherent sets of pictures in self-published books and calendars and many other forms have crossed my desk. But I wanted to say this anyway: I guess one thing I have left over from the old culture is a faith in the powers of the portfolio and a faith in the creative rejuvenation of portfolio-crafting. As a curative, and a restorative, a way to rekindle and reinvent. A tangible stakepost in the ground that says "here's me, now." And as a way to forge forward, a way to get out of the doldrums, and get wind in your sails again.

Mike
(Thanks to Daniele)

Product of Interest this week:

As Porsche does with the 911, Fujifilm just keeps refining its perfect pocket camera and making it better and better. Also available from Amazon.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "I suspect that the days of assembling a portfolio of work as an aid in soliciting photo work are long past for many TOP readers, if they ever occurred at all. I also suspect that the traditional portfolio—i.e. a large, heavy book of plastic-covered prints—is itself a bit of a relic.

"However, this statement at the end of your essay is as valid now as it ever was: '...the powers of the portfolio and a faith in the creative rejuvenation of portfolio-crafting. As a curative, and a restorative, a way to rekindle and reinvent. A tangible stakepost in the ground that says "here's me, now." And as a way to forge forward, a way to get out of the doldrums, and get wind in your sails again.'

"More to the moment, the act of building books or magazines of one’s work is a powerful medium for self-realization, creative expression, preservation of work, and, yes, representation of one’s work. It’s something that nearly everyone can do today through desktop tools that you may already have. Even if you never print a single copy of your book or magazine you will be stronger and rejuvenated just by the act of curating some of your work into a cohesive collection. Guaranteed.

"I have made four self-published books of my own work and have plans for three more. I’ve just come to treat it as part of the creative photographic cycle."

John Camp (partial comment): "I know this post was about portfolios, but: Too many people think they have to go to some grand vision of 'art' to be a real photographer. To the woman who feels uninspired, and believes she doesn't have time to do serious photography, I'd say (from the perspective of 77 years and two kids and three grandchildren) DO THE KIDS. No matter whatever else you do in photography, or how great it turns out to be, when you finally get old, that's what you'll come back to, time after time."

[Full texts of "partial" Featured Comments are published in the full Comments section. Click on "Comments (#)" in the footer of the post. —Ed.]

Bob Rosinsky: "The thing about physical portfolios is most galleries choose to look at websites instead. It's like trying to pull teeth to get a curator to view actual prints. I am greatly chagrined by the lack of interest to view prints...I've spent 45 years devoted to the craft of printing, both analog and digital."

DavidB: "Just the other day, while looking for something else on my crowded shelves, I came across my portfolio album. Putting aside my immediate task, I sat down and flipped through it looking at the prints I had made at a time when I was considering becoming a full-time photographer. I never took that path but looking back at the portfolio was an opportunity to think 'What if?' The portfolio did its job. I showed it to many business owners and was granted the opportunity to display and sell prints in local businesses as well as one art gallery. The gallery showing was so much fun!"

Gordon Haddow: "I often aspired to having a portfolio, but procrastination always seemed to get in the way. I managed to produce a website for a show but this site is now woefully behind my photographic production (procrastination again). For my annual performance review at work, I had a long-running joke with my boss that my one of my three goals was to work on my procrastination 'but it was taking longer than thought' or 'I have not managed to start.'

"I gave up on the portfolio but always wanted to show my family and friends what I was working on. Then in 2007 I hit on the idea of giving them a calendar of photographs as a Christmas gift. The rule was that I had to print and produce it myself. They are archivally printed on matte paper. Only the binding could be done in a shop. Usually, they were photographs taken the previous year, or a particular subject, or a particular location. That year I printed 20. Last year (a calendar of San Miguel De Allende) the gift list had grown to 100. Some years are better than others, but it has revived my interest in photography, gave me an ongoing project and lots of feedback. It has given me much joy to see them hanging in the homes of my family, friends and colleagues. Many tell me that they still have all of them and treasure them.

"Maybe next year when I will be retired, I will work on a portfolio (and my website) but the calendar will come first."

Richard Skoonberg: "I have had the opportunity to share my 'book,' a portfolio box of large, curated prints, in face-to-face meetings with gallery owners, museum curators, and directors of photography centers. They like to see large, finished prints, 13x19", without plastic sleeves, unless, of course, you have a clear reason why they should be smaller. The print is the final artifact; the item to valued, exhibited, and sold. Your book should contain no more than 20 of your best prints and you should be able to talk about each one."

Mim: "My local photo club runs an annual portfolio process for all members who wish to participate. At your own level, you put together a coherent set of photos on one subject. Continuous support and feedback is available from specified volunteers in the club, and also in several structured meetings during the year from the membership as a whole. It culminates in a show at the end of the year. I've found it to be a really worthwhile process that stretches my abilities and challenges how I think about my photography. It's been great to think about how images fit together, and not just whether I've got one good (lucky?) shot."

Mike replies: I remember trying to collate and group together all my own "one good (lucky?) shots." The effect was rather disconcerting...they didn't work together very well, and each one seemed to be a little diminished in the presence of the others. I guess that's what happens when the whole is less than the sum of its parts, rather than more.

Sharon: "Well, we all should be making prints of our work. We may not need them to lug them around as much but the physical print is a different cat than looking on the web. There is a deep, deep satisfaction in holding a beautiful print. I put ours in archival boxes. I love the documentary The B Side, about Elsa Dorfman. She pulls print after print out of boxes and flat files and talks about them. That would have been a lousy movie without the prints."

Adam Lanigan: "I tried a few times over the years to put together a portfolio as it just seemed like the thing to do, but it flopped every time.

"I've totally fallen in love, though, with putting projects into book form via online self-publishing tools. As you said, pulling together the notes and stringing them from page to page to sing together is hugely satisfying. It's really helped me focus the work, but also shifted my perspective away from always just showing the very best shots (the melody) and elevated marginal ones (the harmony) that lay the foundation, build out the context, and let the melody photos sing louder. (Apologies for any metaphor abuse.)

"I've got three separate books on the go right now and it's great to push back and forth between them depending on what I'm feeling when I sit down at the computer to move them forward. I may print them all, I may not. (I've fallen in love with the possibilities offered by layflat books, which, of course, are far more expensive.)

"For me, these project books have replaced the need and function for a traditional portfolio, helping me get shows in the past, showing various aspects of what I do, putting that focused vision on a subject, etc. In fact, for the last show I did at the central library, they purchased a copy of the book and it now sits on their shelves, which is still the coolest damn thing to me. I'm currently working on reorienting my website around this project/book focus."

Thomas Walsh: "I would like to second what John Camp wrote about doing the kids. If one is blessed with grandchildren, the possibilities of building portfolios of their growing up are infinite. Who cares if my wife and I are the only ones who see them? The happy memories that they bring are worth far more than any accolade that may (more probably may not in my case) come from any photographic merit they possess."

Tom Duffy: "I endorse John Camp's advice. 'DO THE KIDS.' I was an early adopter of COVID, getting it in March of 2020. While recovering, I realized that if I didn't print my countless sheets of B&W negatives of my kids growing up, these pictures would essentially be lost forever. For every negative worth printing I make three 5x7s, one for each of my daughters, whether they are in the picture or not. They'll each get the same complete set of about 400 pictures. I'm objectively a mediocre photographer, but the number of really good pictures is pretty impressive when all is said and done. This will be my only photographic legacy but it turns out I'm happy with it and hopefully my kids will be too, come Christmas."

How to Pack Photo Prints for Mailing or Shipping

This might sound a little harsh, for which I apologize in advance. However...

I've noticed a pattern over many years, namely that photographers who ship prints only every so often tend to package them inadequately and then blame the Post Office or the shipper when they arrive damaged. Actually, though, it's not the shipper's fault if prints arrive damaged. It's the sender's fault. (Sorry.)

So as you might have guessed, I've opened another Print Crit print that was damaged in the mail. I suspect we might have a disconnect here. A difference of viewpoint, you might say. Maybe I'm too conditioned by art school followed by a fairly lucrative career marketing prints online, but, you see, to my way of thinking, a print with any flaw is a ruined print. It's either 100% right, or it's a loss. So some readers might be thinking "so what, it's only one little crimp/crease/tear/blemish, let's just look past that"—whereas I'm thinking, reject. That might account for the fact that I am disconcerted to receive a damaged print in the mail, whereas some senders seem to be rather too casual about the fate of their creations in transit.

Obviously, it's possible to package a print so well that damage will not occur except in extremely unusual circumstances. For instance, you could buy a strapped shipping case like this one:

(If Amazon has these, I don't know what they're calling it so I can't search for it. I found this one here. B&H has some, too.)

Unless the shipper just loses it, or drowns it somehow*, it's very likely your print will arrive undamaged. I used to use such cases to ship artwork, simply enclosing return postage and a return mailing label so the recipient could return the empty case to me. Although this might seem improbable, no one ever failed to return my shipping case, and I still have it.

This shipping case survived many back-and-forth trips, and it's also how my most valuable photobook, a pristine original copy of The Decisive Moment, survived three moves unscathed.

This isn't practical when shipping a large number of prints as we do for our print offers. We know from experience that when we ship a large number of prints, a small number will not survive the trip. We can pack them to minimize the possibility of damage, but there are disadvantages to that, namely that the packaging materials will then cost more to buy, and also be heavier, such that the packages are more costly to ship. In that case the trick is to balance the packaging cost and shipping weight well enough so that most of them (say 96–100 out of 100) will arrive undamaged but they'll cost a reasonable amount to pack and ship. If one is lost or arrives with damage, we keep a few extra prints in reserve to send out as replacements.

ABC Box, back in Waukesha, used to make up for me a flat corrugated cardboard box with two fitted sheets of corrugated that went inside it. I put the print between the two sheets of flat corrugated then inserted them in the box. Very nice, but of course it has to be built to a specific size.

How-to
Here's an easy way to pack any small- to medium-sized print for shipping:

1. Get some sheets of plain, flat corrugated cardboard at least two inches larger in each dimension than the size of the print(s) you're shipping. Four to eight inches bigger is better, especially for larger prints. You can sometimes buy these at office supply stores, but for inflated prices; check your area for outlets that supply cardboard boxes of all types. You can usually find plain sheets of corrugated there. Uline calls then "corrugated pads," and sells larger ones in double and triple thicknesses. Other materials can be used, for instance plastic corrugated, chipboard, or foam boards such as Fomecore, but alternatives are usually either heavier or more expensive or both. If you get square ones, you can alternate the orientation of the corrugations for added strength.
2. Get a roll of plain brown Kraft wrapping paper.
3. Sandwich the print with a stack of two to five of the corrugated sheets on one side and the same amount on the other side.
4. Wrap the stack in the Kraft paper as if you were wrapping a birthday present.
5. Address and ship.

There are a few more things to think about: it's wise to cover the face of the print with a sheet or two of plain paper, to protect the print surface or prevent the print paper from picking up any texture. Also, remember that the recipient isn't necessarily going to know where in the stack the print is! So make it easy for them, either by taping or gluing the stack on each side of the print together. Also, do not swaddle the stack in excessive amounts of tape. People preparing shipments have a tendency to entomb the blasted things in yards of tape like it's a time capsule meant for the year 2075, forgetting, apparently, that someone on the other end has to open the darned thing. When I'm Packing Guy, I always keep Unwrapping Guy in mind. You might also want to hold the print centered by making corners out of strips of copier paper and taping the print down using the corners. As an experiment, I once sent a loose print in a stack of corrugated with nothing taped down at all—the print was loose in the stack and the stack was simply loose sheets of cardboard. It was all held together by the Kraft paper wrapping. It arrived fine, with no issues.

What I used to do, though, was to stick three, four, or five sheets of corrugated lightly together with drops of white Elmer's Glue, times two, position the print on top of one stack using just two corners so it couldn't migrate, position the second stack on top, and then, using four pieces of masking tape, one on each straight side, tape the two sides together; then wrap that. I left tabs on the masking tape by folding over one end on itself to provide a convenient handle for tearing the tape off again.

The package protected the print, was easy to open, and the recipient could separate the sheets of corrugated again for reuse (although I never knew if anyone actually did).

Six sheets of, say, 10x12" corrugated, eight sheets of 11x14", or ten sheets of 16x20" or larger corrugated cardboard provide a stout but light package that can be tossed around without hurting the print cossetted safely in the middle.

Suit yourself
Of course, this is just one suggestion; you can pack prints any way you want to. Flat boxes work well too, as long as the print is somehow held away from the sides and (especially) the corners inside the box. But remember...

...If the print doesn't make it, you know whose fault that is.  :-)

Mike

*I once had a mailing tube delivered to me sopping wet.

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

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Jim Meeks: "I've been shipping prints in a similar manner for years and use a slightly different method. The major difference is to cut the interior out of one or more sheets of cardboard, just slightly bigger than the work. Place your print or matted work in the void wrapped in a poly bag, sealed and secured with tape so it can't move. I've also used fluted plastic sheets (Coroplast) instead of cardboard. Coroplast is puncture resistant, waterproof and pretty tough. Similar to cardboard, when you cross the direction of the flutes it's even stronger. I'll usually tape the edges and mark where to open the package."

Jimmy Reina: "I'm a pretty handy guy, and in my day, I have hung out with a considerable number of artists. Occasionally, I have been asked to make a custom shipping container, and when asked about shipping insurance, my glib reply was often, 'the best insurance is the container.' I wasn't trying to snag a job, just trying to be realistic. If the shipped object is the result of your labor, what is the real price? It's a little different with prints, but reproducing and reshipping (under pressure) is no picnic."

Why Desaturation Doesn't Work: Tim Soret

Ever wondered why simple desaturation is so unsatisfying as a way to render a color original in monochrome? Tim Soret explains, in a Twitter thread. With nice example illustrations.

Tim is a 31-year-old French art director, cinematographer, and tech artist living in London.

Good stuff.

Mike
(Thanks to Phil Gyford and Tim Bradshaw)

ADDENDUM by Tim Bradshaw: There's a comment at the end of the Twitter thread that our eyes are most sensitive to blue so none of it makes sense. I thought I would explain that, because it's right in an interesting way, but also wrong. As you can tell from the length of this comment, I haven't got enough to do right now. The physics below is right, but the details of how eyes work may not be (but they are, obviously, constrained by physics).

First of all, blue light is relatively short-wavelength and hence relatively high-frequency, as wavelength, λ and frequency, ν (that's lambda and nu) are related by ν = c/λ. The three kinds of cone cells in our eyes have sensitivities which peak at around 560nm (red), 530nm (green) and 420nm (blue), corresponding to frequencies of 536THz, 566THz and 714THz respectively.

Well, a famous person, whom I'll call 'Albert' because that was his name, worked out in 1905 that light comes in little chunks we call photons, and that the energy of a photon is given be E = hν, where h is a constant, Planck's constant. Interestingly Albert is much more famous for doing something else, but he won his Nobel prize for this work.

What that means is that the amount of energy per red, green and blue photon is in the ratio 1, 1.06 and 1.33 respectively: blue photons have about 33% more energy than red photons.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to understand how the cone cells in our eyes work in detail, but there are two things which anyone who has done B&W printing in a darkroom will now immediately understand.

Firstly, safelights mean that the detection of light at all depends on its photons having enough energy—of them having a short enough wavelength, in other words. Safelights are generally red: the photons they emit have energies low enough that the papers we use don't detect those photons, at all. In particular, anyone who has worked in a darkroom in recent history will know that LED safelights (just buy the LED stoplights for cars) are a wonder: because they're LEDs they have a very non-thermal spectrum which means they can be both really bright and also have no high-frequency photons at all, which makes working under them both easy—you can see—and safe—they don't fog paper, at all.

(Incidentally, this effect—photons needing to have enough energy to be detected at all—was what Albert explained so brilliantly in 1905.)

Secondly, some detection mechanisms require the reception of more than one photon to trigger a detection. Film photographers know all about this as well, in fact: many (perhaps all) film emulsions require the reception of more than one photon to register anything at all (really, for the chemical change that is part of forming a grain to happen). And they also tend to 'forget' each photon after a while if they have not seen enough yet. So long as photons arrive fast enough, everything is well; the emulsion just sits and counts '1, 2, 3, 4: OK, seen enough now!'; but if photons are arriving too slowly the count goes '1, 2, er, 1, 2, er, 2, 3, er, 1, 2, er, 2, 3, 4: finally I've seen enough now!' and you need a lot more photons arriving. This is why reciprocity failure happens in low light: photons are arriving slowly enough that the emulsion has time to forget they've arrived.

(As far as I know Albert did not work on reciprocity failure.)

OK, so now we're ready to explain the whole blue light thing.

First of all, in very dim light not many photons are arriving. The energy, and therefore frequency and therefore colour, distribution of the photons may be the same as it is in bright light (it may not be, but this is not why very dim light seems to be blue), but there are hugely less of them than there are in bright light: we're now definitely in the regime where photons are arriving at cone cells one at a time.

Now we can infer that red and green cone cells need to see multiple photons before they register they've seen anything at all, and they also have this 'forgetting' property (I think this is just that the chemical process which happens in the cell has to get reversed because things have to be 'reset' so they can count another photon: you would not like your eye to be like film and only able to see something once!). So in very dim light, the red and green cone cells simply start forgetting fast enough that they stop registering.

But the blue cone cells are detecting significantly more macho photons: they're a third again as macho as red photons. And these photons have enough energy that you need to see significantly fewer of them for an event to be registered.

So in very dim light, the blue photons are still triggering the blue cone cells, because they have more energy, while the red and green cells are not getting triggered as they need more of the lower energy photons, and they're forgetting fast enough.

So very dim light seems blue to us. Or, to be precise, the last colour we lose in very dim light is blue: very dim light has no colours to our eyes at all, as even the blue cone cells then have time to forget, and only the rods are seeing anything at all.

But this behaviour in dim light is nothing at all to do with the behaviour in bright light, where there are plenty of photons for all the cells to register and the whole forgetting thing stops being a problem. The relative brightness of colours we see in bright light has nothing to do with the relative brightness in very dim light, which is dominated by the ability of our eyes to register very tiny numbers of photons, and hence by the quantum mechanical properties of those photons. So, yes, our eyes are 'most sensitive' to blue in the sense that it's the last colour we lose as the light gets dim, but this is nothing to do with the properties of our eyes when the light is bright.

(As a final note: I believe that the dark-adapted human eye can detect—that is, we can notice—around 10 photons. Cats can notice individual photons. Cats, as always, are better than us.)

CRITIQUE by Frank Gorga: "I agree that Tim Bradshaw's physics is spot on as far as this retired biochemist can tell. His knowledge of the biochemistry of the eye is, however, as he admitted, lacking. The defect in his argument is made at the juncture of switching from physics to biochemistry. The fact is that the primary photoreception event in cells that respond to different wavelengths of light is exactly the same. The same compound (retinal, a form of Vitamin A) absorbs a photon and undergoes a light-induced change in its shape (a photoisomerization) to initiate the process. The retinal is bound to a protein (opsin) which is slightly different in each of the three types of cone cells. The sightly different slightly forms provide different environments for the retinal and thus 'tune' the absorption of a photon to the three different color sensitivities. The rest of the process by which that primary event (the absorption of a photon by retinal) is converted to a neuronal (electrical) signal is the same in all three types of cone cells.

"What happens next in terms of how the brain processes these signals into what we perceive as color is nowhere close to being fully understood. However, it is clear from work beginning in the middle of the last century by many folks, most notably Edwin Land (yes, of Polaroid) that color is mainly constructed in the brain and not by the retina.

"One last correction...another commenter asserts that 'the photosensitive pigments in animals' eyes are close chemical relatives of chlorophylls and other phytochemicals in plants.' This is simply not true. The structure of retinal is not related, at all, to the structure of chlorophyll, except maybe that they are both organic molecules."

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

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Craig: "Well, sure. This is why lighting for B&W is very different from lighting for color. In color, you can trust something red and something blue to be visually separated. In B&W, you have to be careful about the values, and you use lighting and filters to ensure things of similar value are separated as you want them to be.

"This was at the heart of Roger Ebert's criticism of colorizing B&W movies back in the '80s. The process inherently ruins B&W movies that had been carefully lit to get exactly the effect that the creators wanted. Simple desaturation is kind of like colorizing in reverse. You take an image that you originally saw in color (because that's how our eyes work), composed with that in mind, and you reduce the colors to grayscale according to a simple algorithm that has no artistic understanding of the image you're working with. This is unlikely to produce a good result.

"When I want a B&W image from a color digital image, I carefully adjust the color sliders in Lightroom's B&W mode to get just the effect I want. It's not really a perfect solution (the ideal solution would involve lighting, at least if you're in a studio, and filters, which people don't often seem to use with digital) but it works acceptably most of the time. The core point is that you need to think about how you want the image to look in B&W, and then you need the tools and the skills with the tools to reduce your color digital image to B&W in a way that achieves the look you intended."

Mike replies: If anyone were to colorize my B&W photographs—I don't see why they'd care, but never mind that—I would consider it vandalism!

Christopher Mark Perez: "Hah! Brilliant, this. As an aside, I have very much enjoyed your series on digital black and white photography. Following this latest post I took a group of color wheels gathered from around the 'net (including pastels and subtle color variations—not just prime colors) and did two things. First, using the Gimp I added a black layer over the color wheels and set its blend mode to LCh (Luminosity Channel). Perfect! Second, using RawTherapee I enabled the 'Black and White' module, and selected 'Method—Luminosity.' Perfect! Both are Open Source Software programs and they seem to implement the color math correctly."

Patrick Murphy: "Seriously? The best way for Tim Soret to get this information out was with a series of tweets with 11 (!) GIFs that have to be individually clicked on?"

Patrick Murphy: "For example, couldn't this information be put on a blog (like Mike's!) as a single article?"

Patrick Murphy: "And instead of GIFs which fade between two values, just have the before-and-after picture? Also makes it easier because we can visually compare side by side as fast as we want, without waiting for the GIF cycle."

Patrick Murphy: "Or put it at a website, or even (gasp) Facebook—someplace where people can see the thread—sorry—of your argument all at once, instead of chopped up pieces."

Patrick Murphy: "I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything gets pounded. And when all you have is Twitter, thoughts get chopped up into 19 tiny bits that start-stop, start-stop, start-stop, start-stop like trying to drive down a street where you hit Every Damn Light One By One By One."

Mike replies: I see what you did there.

Moose: "He's right, of course. But what a convoluted way to go about it. Photoshop provides simple desaturation, but also provides a very powerful Color-to-B&W conversion tool, capable of everything from wild effects to great subtlety. Repeating myself from 4/15: 'In Image > Adjustments > Black & White (Alt-Shift-Ctrl-B), Photoshop provides enormous control over the conversion. Once you get a conversion you like, you can save it.'"

Orgadisnization

This morning I am hard at work closing browser windows. I have so many windows and tabs open—there must be more than five hundred—that it's slowing down my browser and/or my computer, and making it difficult to find things. I have more than 5,000 bookmarks already and no time to sort them all and jettison the ones I no longer need or that no longer work, but I'm adding the URLs I need to keep to two new categories of bookmark. The impetus this morning: I started a new post on a browser page and can no longer find it. It's lost. I don't think it's gone; I just don't know what window it's in or where the tab is.

It's hell being disorganized. Despite sporadic attempts at bringing things under control, I'm naturally not very well organized. It's a mental aptitude and I don't have it. My best defense has always been to limit complexity, and limit the number of possessions I have to keep track of. I haven't done very well with that.

This is dated now, because it concerns film negatives and proof sheets, but here's my longtime pet theory on "photo asset management": At first, we don't have much work. We've only shot a few dozen or a hundred or three hundred rolls of film, and it's reasonably easy to find things simply by looking for them. This stack? That box? Ah, here they are. No prob.

That's the attitude we start out with. A comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system? Why? What's the need? Seems like overkill.

...Until it doesn't. One day follows the next, one month the next, the year ends and a new one starts; the years go by. We keep taking pictures. Negatives or slides pile up; we think, hmm, I should organize that lot soon. But there's more immediate work insisting on being done, and the organization tasks keep getting shoved to the back burner. 

I did attempt to catch up once...in 1987. I took the whole Winter and organized all my rolls of negatives into PrintFile folders and made fiber-base (the term of art was not "fiber-based" but "fiber base") contact sheets, and put them in sequence in archival binders with slipcases (some of you remember Light Impressions). It was an enormous amount of labor. And it was expensive. I never did it again.

Sooner or later, it's too late. We've gotten into sloppy habits, we have piles of prints and negatives and contacts of all manner of description in every stage of completion and it's all over everywhere and it's overwhelming. It's now too late to start that comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system we were certain at first we didn't need.

And everybody's like that. Two stories: in the early '90s I was waiting to talk to a photo gallerist at the AIPAD Show in New York City. She was on the phone; clearly some kind of crisis. She kept giving me signals that said she knew I was waiting for her and implied that she would try to get to me. At a pause in the conversation, she covered the mouthpiece of the landline phone and explained: the Angels are missing!

She was on the phone with Salgado in Brazil. She had orders for the Angel picture—real title, "Primeira comunhão em Juazeiro do Norte, Brasil, 1981" (First Communion in Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil, 1981)—that had been on the cover of the then-recent bestselling photobook An Uncertain Grace...and Sebastião couldn't find the negative.

As far as my digital asset management is concerned, you really don't want to know. As an indicator, I'll just mention that my first three years of digital shooting—2003–2006, with an Olympus C3040z—is no longer extant. I lost it all somehow, between now and then, in some data transfer or another or on one failed hard drive or another. No idea, really. I do remember some of the pictures. My son's first day of second grade; good times with my friends at Spring Lake. But it's all gone.

Second story: Arnold Crane was visiting Walker Evans in Connecticut to photograph him. Evans, always a natty dresser even in his youth when he was poor as the proverbial church mouse, was very neatly turned out, according to Arnold, and his entire house was clean as a whistle and neat as a pin—the objects on tables were as arranged, Arnold said, as exquisitely and artfully as a Japanese rock garden. But then Walker took Arnold to see his archives, and led him to an office room that was considerably messier. There, filling the far corner of the room, were the archives of the great Walker Evans—in heaps and jumbles of prints and negative sleeves and papers and boxes! Not even the habitually fastidious Walker Evans kept his prints and negs in order. Arnold showed me the photo of it. Made me laugh.

And so it goes. Evans died in 1975, and the Walker Evans archive is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where presumably it is organized in a suitably orderly fashion. And now I'll get back to work attempting to close my open tabs and browser windows, and finish my tea.

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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Joe Holmes: "I haven't dug through my negatives for quite a long time now, but I do try to maintain good organization habits with my digital images. I firmly believe that if you don't keyword an image as soon as you import it, you might as well throw it away. Immediately after importing a day's images into Capture One, I add keywords to every single image. If there's an image I don't feel like keywording, I move it to the trash. And I try to add every conceivable keyword I can think of. I might keyword an image 'ford mustang' but that won't help if someday I search for '1968' 'green' and 'car.' (And 'steve mcqueen.') (I also have a personal rule to keyword everything in lower case. Otherwise I end up having to search for both 'Mustang' and 'mustang.')

"And that leads to my highly recommended method for organizing images: create Smart Folders, or Smart Collections, or Smart Albums or whatever your asset manager calls them for every possible project or theme. Smart collections are wonderful because they allow you to organize a single image into multiple collections. You can view a smart collection through any additional filter, and if you ever need to move your image library to a new asset managing applications, all you need to do is create the same smart collections, because every asset manager transfers keywords. And all the asset managers I'm familiar with allow you to put smart collections into folders, for even more organization.

"That's it. Good keywords will allow you to find any image you ever took. And smart albums let you organize groups of images by project, person name, country, vacation, whatever."

Keith B.: "That is why I tell people that I used iPhoto and now Photos. The automatic organization tools are good enough for me, so that it fits my lazy workflow, just throw them in and be done with it. I have started to add some keywords and places, but just enough to help other people find things."

John Camp: "It is apparently widely agreed that messy desks—what you essentially have—is a sign of genius. I suspect you knew that, but were too modest to mention it. Some time back in the 'aughts, I went to Iraq and flew with an air assault battalion. The images, from a Nikon D3, are carefully filed in a stand-alone Lightroom program. I can't find the computer."

Mike replies: Genius, no, but creative...I do think of ideas all the time. It's exhausting. I wish I could give it a rest, and concentrate calmly on one or two things and let everything else go.

BTW, you loaned me that D3 and its amazing but huge zoom for a post, do you remember? Thanks again for that.

Peter Wright (partial comment): "Your story about losing your new post in your browser fairly boggled my mind! That would seem to bring disorganization to new heights (or new depths). And I thought I was bad!"

Martin D: "Every missing file, every mislaid print: from now on I will think of Walker Evans, and in my grief for the missing picture, I will smile."

Mim: "This is very familiar. I've never been naturally organised—I lived in what looked like chaos, more or less kept up with things that people demanded of me (or that I promised them) and had a kind of mental map of where stuff was—a bit like your early 'photo asset management' except it covered my whole life. I could usually put my hand on something I needed reasonably quickly but did spend an hour (or two or three) per week digging for stuff.

"...Until I got a chronic illness. For two years I barely got out of bed and now I have about three or four useful hours per day with my mental energy taking just as hard a hit as my physical energy. Suddenly I couldn't track my whole life in my head anymore, and I couldn't spend an hour searching for something because that was a quarter of my day gone. For a while I worried that I was forever going to live in chaos and never find anything ever again. Then I (slowly) got neater. More organised. I'm still not great but most things have a place and most are actually in their place most of the time. My photos are on my computer neatly sorted by year and even backed up on my NAS and it's rare that I can't find the one I want in quick order.

"So it is possible to improve—but I doubt I ever would have done it if I hadn't been forced into it; it certainly doesn't come naturally."

Tom: "When I worked on a newspaper in the film era there was film everywhere. We printed from the whole 36-exposure length and afterwards it was loosely coiled and left on shelves and tables. We never got on top of filing unless it was a neg we wanted for our portfolios in which case we quietly, individually stored them properly. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what became of the tens of thousands of black-and-white prints we produced either. They simply seemed to disappear after their trip to the process camera and we never gave them a second thought. Such was the pace on a newspaper."

Rand Scott Adams: "Dang...I hate being the voice of reason. I used to have your disease. But it isn’t a mental aptitude. It’s pure discipline. For me, the pain of the consequences finally outweighed the pleasure of sloth. I once took a seminar on 'office efficiency' wherein the instructor recommended OHIO. 'Only Handle It Once.' You pick something up, you 'deal with it' before you put it down. Changed my life. Applies equally to literal and virtual 'things.'"

The Little Game (Part 1 of 3)

I have a little game in mind, one that might be revealing and helpful to you in your work. There are three distinct parts to it. But I think it might be good to do it in order, so I'm only going to give you the first part today, for those who want to do it "in real time." If you don't want to play the game now, you can always go back and read all three steps later. But I think it will be most beneficial to do the first two parts before you know where it's heading—otherwise, I suspect you might be tempted (even subconsciously) to alter the outcome by manipulating the early inputs.

Here's the first step. This weekend, get a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper and spend some serious time looking over and reviewing your own picture archives. The goal is to write down the list of the 25 categories of things you most like to take pictures of, or that you consider within your area of visual competence and your usual practice.

I'm not talking about professional work or work you do to please others, unless that work also gratifies your soul. Pay attention only to your personal work, the pictures you take for yourself.

What do I mean by "categories"? Well, anything that can be identified. The most obvious would be genre—landscape, sports, glamour, portraits, or any other genre you can think of. Might be subject matter—kids, cars, clouds, or any of a myriad others*. Might be a type of strategy—constructed tableaux, still lifes**, aerial photography and so forth. Might be a certain style or look—snapshot style, documentary style, blurs. Might be a technical category—large format film, fill flash at dusk, studio lighting. Might be a certain commercial category—wedding photography, editorial portraits. It might be a property of the pictures—high HDR, light tones ("high key"), primary colors. Might be a theme—vacation destinations, loneliness, ancient holy places.

It might also be something more subtle—like a personal connotation, a kind of graphic design element, or a feeling, whether it's something you feel or something you're trying to make the viewer feel. It can even be something random or stupid. If it often inspires you to stop and snap a pic.

Anything you can think of along any of these lines. Just anything you can identify as being "one of the things I often shoot."

Or come up with your own possibilities. I've only listed a few, so don't be limited by the few categories I've mentioned.

Much as I'd like to provide a comprehensive list, I don't think it can be done. There are too many possibilities. But you'll see it in your work. Look for the commonalities, the patterns, the repetitions.

Pay special attention to those few pictures you've made in your life that you consider to be total successes, the ones you're proudest of. How would you describe the category they fall into? What is it about them that really cements their appeal, in your mind or your feelings?

When you get to 25, you don't necessarily need to stop looking, because maybe something you haven't thought of is actually more important to you than something you have on your list. For example, I've taken a few cat pictures I'm proud of, because I'm conscious that...well, that it's a category. But I might have overlooked the fact that bodies of water are an important theme in my work. So I might put "bodies of water" on the main list and jettison "cats."

•     •     •

This is the hardest, most work-intensive part of the Little Game, by the way. The next step is much easier, and the third and final step is all payoff, no work. This is 85% of the work, right here. But the more care you put into this step, the more dividends you'll get from steps two and three.

If you don't want to play, don't sweat it. Not every post is for every person.

But give it a try if you have time. There's more to come.

Have a nice weekend! I'm off tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to stay away on Sunday.

Mike

P.S. Even if the whole idea of categorization makes you grouchy, play along. Remember, it's a game.

*The Latin root of "myriad" means "ten thousand."

**That's the proper plural of "still life," by the way.

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Peter: "My first thought was 'Twenty-five!?!? That's too many kinds of photographs. I don't have that many.' But then I decided to just do it and within a few minutes I had 21. Heeding your observation that this should be the most intense part, I kept going and was still adding categories after 35. Now I am reconsidering and re-ordering. When you announce Step 2, I will delete categories numbered higher than 25. Can't wait to learn what it is."

Mike replies: You're doing great. You'll get a lot out of this.

I found it difficult at first too because I was just doing it in my head. When I started looking at my actual pictures it became much easier.

Gerard Kingma: "I like the idea of a game, you got me interested. However! For me, there's a big 'Yeah, but...' to this game, namely that it appears to be exclusively about the subject of the picture. In my humble experience, the subject is, more often than you'd think, the least important aspect of the picture.

"People often ask me, 'What do you take pictures of?' and I usually say something like, 'Oh well, whatever's in front of the camera that makes me want to frame it and push the button.' Similarly, I read an anecdote once (probably here on TOP because I start here every day) about a photographer (and I hope someone can help me with the name) who, when asked the question 'What do you take pictures of?' replied something like: 'I don't take pictures of stuff. I take pictures about stuff.'

"Whatever triggers me photographically is usually a combination of light, shape, frameworthiness, quirkiness, and rarely about the thing that I point the camera at. During Jay Maisel's workshop that I was honored to attend in Maine he badgered us all week about three aspects that make an interesting image: 'Light, color and gesture.' The actual subject is not among those three, and not even the fourth, fifth or whatnot. As you always say, I'm just sayin.'"

Mike replies: I'm sorry to hear you say that, because it means I flubbed my writing task. I took (or tried to take) pains to explain that it's not "exclusively about the subject of the picture" as you say. It's just categories, and you determine the categories. "Gesture" is a category. I think "color" and "light" both need more specification to qualify and be useful ("light in darkness" is one of my categories—see here for a couple of examples)—but it's your list and they're your categories. You be the judge.

Also, the categories don't all have to have names that other people would understand. As long as you're clear about what you mean, you're fine.

And if I may have the temerity to suggest it, I suspect you might benefit from this exercise more than others.

YS: "I don't think you flubbed it, I've got quite the list now. It's an interesting game! I've got subjects, technical and artistic qualities down in my list!"

Mike replies: I'm doing it too, and it's not entirely easy to get 25. Don't forget to look at your phone photos too! There were some good clues for me in there.

Calibrate That Monitor!

I used to love these...great way to calibrate that monitor. I don't need them any more because my NEC came with its own colorimeter, but the Datacolor Spyder5PRO is on sale as part of B&H's Mega Deal Zone, which has been extended until Midnight Saturday. The sale price is only $89.99. (Current price at Amazon, where it's an "Amazon's Choice," is $134.36.)

Do note that your remaining window to get the sale price is very limited—it's Saturday evening Eastern U.S. Time between 6:00 p.m. (when B&H reopens from Shabbat) until 11:59 p.m. (when the Mega Deal Zone ends).

They're easy to use.

Mike

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Editing Headaches

Which is better:

or

?

I learned a lesson long ago. I was on the Mall in D.C. for one of the regular "festival"-type gatherings of the throngs—I forget what it was, maybe the Fourth of July—it was hot—and I came across an open hydrant which had created a sea of mud in front of it. In the sea of mud, a large, muscular black guy was taking on all comers in mud-wrestling contests. He won a number of challenges, until a shorter, dumpy-looking white kid with a strangely confident smile stepped up. The white kid beat the big black guy. It quickly became obvious to me why: the big guy was not a trained wrestler, and the shorter guy was; I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the white kid had been on a college wrestling team and had put in thousands of hours of focused practice. But the bigger guy, without animosity, seemed genuinely curious as to why he was getting beaten. So each time he lost, he insisted on another contest—and he would lose again. There was no hostility in it. There was quite a large crowd watching, the whole time. After about four goes, the new champion begged off, washed all the mud off himself in the spray from the hydrant, and wandered away in the company of his girlfriend, and the black guy asked for new challengers. The crowd began to disperse.

As I watched all this, I took a roll and a half of pictures—maybe 50 frames or so. That was a lot, at that time. I probably took those 50 frames over 15 or 20 minutes. I didn't photograph quickly—I was taking care, picking my spots, doing the best I could. I figured I had it covered.

But when I got to the darkroom—what a headache! I made at least 15 workprints (my method at that time was to make quick 8x10 workprints on RC paper to edit from—my rule was that I had to make at least one workprint from every roll of film—that was to overcome laziness—and I couldn't make any more than six—that was to enforce selectivity at the stage of viewing the contacts with the illuminated loupe, which was the first pass in the editing process.

But rules are made to be broken, and I wasn't sold on any of the first six workprints I made of the wrestlers, so I made more. There just wasn't one standout shot that rose head and shoulders above all the others; a number of them were competent.

Now, I suspect that the best way to tell the story might have been to pick three or four that worked synergistically and mat them together, in a row. I didn't consider that at the time. (I'd been trained to be an exhibiting art photographer, but I wasn't one. I never did become one—the difference is that, then, I thought I would someday.)

I finally did manage to choose one, and I made a fine (i.e., final) print of the selection. (On Ilford Galerie, if any of you remember that!)

The lesson I took from the experience was maybe a little contrary: I decided I shouldn't shoot so much. I loved it when Jane Bown, the great English portraitist (I think she actually is English—born in Herefordshire and brought up in Dorset?), said that she noticed the first few and last few pictures she took during a sitting were the best, so she stopped taking all the ones in the middle! Heh. I'm always trying to take fewer shots, because the fewer shots I take, the more I try to get it right before I push the shutter button.

And the easier the editing is.

There are always editing headaches, though. Especially with landscapes—for me, landscapes are particularly difficult to edit. The differences are subtle and the effects you think you notice aren't always perceptible to others.

In this case, I think the second picture is stronger. It puts the main subject—the still surface of the pond reflecting the sky—a little more centrally, it prevents the black clump of trees in the upper left from drawing too much attention from the eye while still letting it balance the bit of fence at the opposite corner. And it shows more of the fence.

Took me a while to get there, though. They're so close to the same. Should have only taken one!

I should really go see if I can find that old shot of the wrestlers to show you. Surely it's around here someplace....

Mike

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Bandbox: "Re 'Should have only taken one!' Usually true, and the thing about digital is that you can shoot all around your subject and take as many as you want. I do it all the time with landscapes and interiors, and it's made me careless and less decisive because it allows me to put off the decision until I view all the images on a computer screen. The good shooting habits and visualization acquired over fifty plus years of using film have flown out the window."

Peggy C.: "When I first saw the images, I preferred the first one. I found my eyes being drawn to the sunlight on the field. However, once I started to compare them by bouncing back and forth between them, I found myself being drawn very strongly to the second image. I like the effect of the dark shore line, blue lake and the dark grasses and fence. If it were me, I’d even go so far as to crop out the field just where it meets the shadow of the shore.

"Drives one of my sisters-in-law crazy (for various reasons I truly enjoy, shhh) because she loves trees. And I mean, really loves trees...to the point that she believes it should be a jail-able offense to ever cut them down. Even if they are on another person’s property! However, my favorite time of year to photograph trees is after they’ve lost all their leaves. I am more strongly drawn to the pattern of bare branches than at any other time of year. Even in my astrophotography I am more likely to show the stars through bare branches. Probably why I am drawn to the pattern of the fence and grasses in your second photo. For me, the pattern is in the grasses."

Steve Jacob: "I used to take lots of shots of things that looked interesting, but didn't make interesting images. No amount of tinkering would change that. If I couldn't pick one it was often because none of them really grabbed me. When a series of images all have potential, it's usually obvious which one hit's the mark. If you have to analyse, if you have to look too hard, the chances are that none of them work. I learned to know what would possibly make a good picture, and what wouldn't. If I am not sure, I check in the VF, but I'm usually right the first time.

"I take far fewer images now, but I would have deleted the rest anyway."

Philip Storry: "I prefer the first. Mostly because it has more symmetry between the sky and the water. And more importantly, in the second picture you've lost much of the gradient in the sky. That's what suggests the symmetry—we can't see the deep rich blue of the sky above, but we can see the reflection in the water. And without that additional gradient from horizon to sky in the first picture, the suggestion of that deep rich blue sky is lost. The reflection on the water becomes almost incongruous.

"No matter which way this discussion goes, what's probably more fascinating is that this is an example of how a photo isn't reality. What you're trying to convey is, you feel, better served by the second picture. And if I never saw the first, I might have been quite satisfied. But having seen the first, I now imagine cloudless skies of deep rich blues—which may not have actually been the case. As ever, the camera captures a mere slice of both time and space, and you could have been hiding all kinds of things in your framing. There could easily be a building site to either side, or behind you, ruining the idyll that's presented! And yet the discussion is about the choice of a few degrees of FOV.... Isn't photography marvelous?"

Peter Williams: "The bottom photo seems more succinct to me. It also feels better balanced across the frame. It's the one I'd choose to show from the two if they were mine."

Paul: "Your wrestling story reminded of a workshop I took with a Magnum photographer. It was made very clear I was to be shooting for at least eight hours and at least 500 photos per day, preferably more. It was also explained we had to 'work the scene' whenever we came across something like your wrestlers and visually search whilst shooting, getting closer, moving back, forward, lowering oneself until we found the perfect spot. I would end up with perhaps 150 photos by just doing this. All slightly different and usually one or two outstanding images which I would not of captured if it had not been for this approach.

"Now Mike you probably would not have worked this way due film costs and it begs to think how many still approach shooting digital with the same way they shot film. Which just isn't necessary. These requirements proved to be the most important aspect of the workshop. It's very hard to explain, but let me say my photography changed for the better. I began to see images I had never noticed before. My mental, visual and physical approach with the camera also evolved—I loosened up, I was freer. I became at one with the camera and, Mike, the whole concept kept reminding me of your advice on reading Zen in the Art of Archery. It was impressed on me I wasn't to edit whilst shooting. Just to let go and not to think too much. Shooting like this and with a daily deadline looming over made me push myself like never before."

Dogman: "I recall William Eggleston saying he only takes one shot of his subjects because it's too hard to pick the best shot when there are several. I tend to agree but I usually make a few insurance shots anyway. Shot number two would be my pick between the two shown here."

Jack Stivers: "I liked the first, but it took a bit of time to reach that conclusion. I'm a little too familiar with this process and sometimes change my mind after as much as a year (or more!) of looking at the image I originally chose."

Sharon: "I quit posting photos for critiques on forums because the advice was always to crop out the sky. That ain’t my style.  :-)  . But it does seem to be your style so I might ask why have the sky at all in this shot. I like the fence post with chicken wire in the bottom left. That could be an interesting component."

John Krill (partial comment): "You should do more of these. I'm waiting to see what everyone says about the images. It's a good way to learn composition and what folks think is the best composition."

[For the full text of partial comments, see the full Comments Section. —Ed.]

Recommended Portfolio Boxes

A few suggestions for print storage boxes:

My personal favorites are Century Archival boxes. These are simple, sturdy, plain boxes but much more elegant than single-wall board boxes such as metal-edge boxes.

"Slimline" (shallow depth) Century Archival box

I prefer the ones that aren't too deep because once they're full of prints you can store them vertically on bookshelves. Of course that works better for the smaller print sizes. I particularly like the elegant 11x14x1 size, which fit on the same bookshelves I keep my photo books on.

8x10-inch Century Archival box

11x14-inch Century Archival box (1 inch deep, B&H; 2 inches deep, B&H; 1 inch deep, Amazon; 2 inches deep, Amazon.)

14x18-inch Century Archival box (B&H Photo, Amazon)

13x19-inch Century Archival box (1.5 inches deep, B&H Photo, Amazon)

16x20-inch Century Archival box

(For larger sizes, museum cases are sturdier. Read on.)

Solander cases
If you have the luxury of storing boxes flat, you're in luck these days. When fine, thick-walled archival Solander cases were made by American and British bookbinders, they cost so much that the market for them gradually withered away. I have an old Spink and Gabor (formerly "Gaborc") Solander case with a leather handle that is gorgeous. But now, China to the rescue!

Actually I don't know where these are made. China's just a guess.

Museum cases

The classic drop-back design was invented by the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander (1733-1782) while working for the British Museum

Anyway, offshore (shall we say) fabrication has made Solander cases accessible again. Here are two brands that are beautiful but aren't too expensive:

Archival Methods 14x18x2.5" Solander Museum Case (see the dropdown menu at the web page for other sizes)

Print File 14x18 Solander case (search the website for other sizes)

Note that the Print File cases are special-order products and can take a while to arrive.

For plain out-of-sight storage, search the term "metal edge box" at B&H Photo, Amazon, or other sources.

Plain ol' utilitarian metal edge boxes are acid-free and
will not rot your photographs

If you need a full-line archival museum supplies company, try Conservation Resources International in Oxford, UK, and Virginia, USA. Be aware that such businesses in general sometimes have a wait time before shipping product. CRI is better than some others.

Mike

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Kenneth Tanaka: "I second Mike’s endorsement of the Century brand clamshell print storage boxes. They are rather pricey but they are quite robust. One key distinction they have over less expensive boxes is that the ends are robust enough to remain at 90 degrees rather than beginning to poke-out over time. I would also caution people to strongly consider whether or not they really need “museum cases”. Having spent much time in museum vaults handling museum cases my warning is that they are heavy. Darn heavy!. Their frames are made of wood and the panels must be made of lead (at least they feel that way by the end of a day schlepping them). If you go with simple archival metal-edged boxes (which are also just fine) be sure to get ones that feature drop-front bottoms. It makes removal of prints so much easier than simple closed-in edges."

Peter Komar (partial comment): "Wow, I actually own all three types of these cases, they all work quite nicely. My favorite is the hinged type with the carry handle but I only have one of that style. The others work just fine and I consider the last one for work-in-progress prints that have not yet been matted for presentation."

Rodger P. Kingston: "My biggest problem with portfolio boxes is that so few of them are available in digital print sizes: 8.5x11, 13x19, and 17x22 for example. If all us digital photographers can get used to these new sizes, you'd think that the box manufacturers could adapt as well. I'm forced to use the rather flimsy boxes and envelopes that printing papers come in (they don't look too impressive when you're showing work to a curator or gallery director). Does anybody out there know if any of these boxes mentioned above also come in the digital sizes? Or know of any other brands that do?"

Mike replies: Mark Hobson, who visited here a few days ago, told a funny story about using paper boxes for prints. He had a presentation to make at Kodak some years ago. He was careful to print the pictures for the proposal on Kodak paper—anything else was considered a major faux pas—but when he was in the elevator heading to the meeting at Kodak headquarters, he suddenly realized he'd had a major brain fart and was carrying the prints in an Agfa box! With no way to change at that point, he just soldiered through the presentation. He was lucky—it didn't turn out to be his last job for Kodak.

It's really strange that after a great many years with standardized photo paper sizes, we somehow decided to switch to completely different sizes for digital inkjet paper. It makes no sense, and furthermore I don't know by what odd mechanism the new consensus was reached. It seems to have to come about by some type of black magic or mass delusion. However it happened, it's pointless, needless, and confusing.

JOHN GILLOOLY: "I've been following these posts with particular interest. My personal experience is that when I use boxes, I seem to never actually open them! The prints seem to go in and never surface again. I have settled on a hybrid of your suggestions. I have settled upon 8.5x11-inch stock and I print various image sizes on that canvas. But I have decided to use the Itoya Art Profolio products. Most of my printing consist of 6x9 on 8.5x11 stock. Usually Epson Premium Luster or Portfolio Rag. Most of these prints are of family and I have been making a concerted effort to write the appropriate info on the back of each print. For these family images, I have been using the thicker volume book which has 90 pages for a 180 print book. For "art" prints, I do have some in the archival boxes but also mostly use these same Itoya products for that as well. I often pick through those books and send prints to a client for some occasion. But I love the idea that was mentioned of the 'wine party.'"

AN: "Regarding the change in standard photo paper sizes, I imagine it's due to copier/printer manufacturers (and copier/printer paper manufacturers) sticking with the ANSI standards they were already using before they all got into the photo printing market. Epsons and HPs and Canons and Ricohs were all primarily printing text documents before dabbling in graphics...and then better graphics...and then 'photo quality' graphics...and before you know it, there's a photo printer designed for standard document-size paper, and a bunch of paper options that have crept along the same development path in parallel. The fact that ANSI sizes are all a bit bigger than the closest classic photo print sizes (and therefore can be cut down, if desired) would just ease any friction in the transition."

Preserve Your Photos!

We heard from David Sparks about the Black Skimmer post. You might want to check out his response if you enjoyed that post.

David, who is 80, said, in part, "The Black Skimmer project and the other projects I am working on now is an effort to preserve some of the successful images in a format that will be more accessible to family and friends when I am no longer around. Unless I do something to give prominence to selected photos they will just remain part of the bloated Lightroom catalogs where they now reside."

I'd like to try to give heart to those who don't see any usefulness in their archives past their own physical lifetimes. I used to make two recommendations—one was to notate, on the back of prints, the people, places or things that appear in them, for the benefit of heirs and posterity. The other was to simply create a separate box and segregate all your best or favorite work into it, labeling it "---- ----'s Best Photographs" or something like that. The idea there is that your heirs might find it overwhelming to confront a roomful of photographic detritus and many boxes and filing cabinets full of unorganized prints and negatives, but few descendants are likely to throw out a single box labeled Grandad's best.

Of course, those recommendations seem very quaint now, unless you're one of the minority for whom printmaking is a part of the hobby. Few people have prints now and fewer prints start out as negatives, and you can't label a TIFF file with a pencil.

Still, there are a few logical ways to respect and honor some of the work you've done. A lucky few are able to find a repository for it, such an historical society or a curated archive, club, or local museum. (We're at an odd point in history, when exponentially more photographs are being made but exponentially fewer will likely survive the next hundred or hundred-and-a-half years.)

David's strategy is a good one—make small finished presentations that have a point and a purpose. I've always thought that another good way to insure the survival of work is craft—people tend to value beautifully made things, especially if they telegraph good craftsmanship even to people who don't entirely understand its value. Your own fame and the value of your work is another good preservative, as we've discussed several times, although that's neither really in our control, nor, for most of us, in the cards.

But generally, I'd say: try not to be fatalistic about it. Have some compassion for your own work! Have some sympathy for the effort you've put into your work and the fun you had making it, and don't shut the door on doing something that might help a little of it survive beyond your own span. Maybe you don't care, and that's fine—it's your work and you can do with it what you wish—but it's also not that hard these days to share it with others in a form that will let it last. Why not?

That part can be fun too, by the way!

Mike
(Thanks again to David Sparks)

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Rob de Loe: "Curate and print. I think those are the only two viable options. If you don't care enough to curate and print your own work, who else is going to care?

"Books are a great idea. I've been thinking about making simple photo books for projects. There are some very basic binding techniques that will get the job done, e.g., Japanese Stab Binding. Even something as basic as a nice archival box with interleave tissue sends a signal that something worth saving is inside.

"But the key is to curate. Choose your best work, and organize in ways that make sense (projects, themes, etc.). Or become famous so a museum will do it for you. That works too."

Nigel: "I am slowly making digital copies of my best negatives with a contraption I had made for the job.

"It is amazing and shocking to see London and Italy as they were forty to thirty years ago. These pictures taken when I was in my 'street photography' phase are now becoming historical documents, and certain pictures that were not interesting at the time have taken on a new life. The most interesting ones are the pictures I took for the short period when I first came to live in Italy and I was lucky to find a job with a local news magazine. Photography was much easier back then. There were not the neurotic privacy problems we have today if you shoot certain subjects.

"Regarding what I will pass on to the future: well, my theatrical photography will go to the musty archive of the local theatre. But I suppose most of my photography will disappear with me. It does not bother me at all. Most of my photography, particularly my hiking photography, is done to preserve memories for myself. I have/will make a few Blurb books of London and Italy 'as they were.' These are probably the only photographs that will be interesting to others and as they do not take up too much space may not end up in the house clearing skip. I am at an age where I have had to take part in quite a bit of what we call 'house clearing' of deceased relatives. It is a sad, brutal business. Inevitably one reflects on oneself whilst doing this awful job. We could only keep very little of what our relatives left us. It made me get rid of an awful lot of photographic gear that was lying unused for example. If my son keeps the few Blurb books I have made of holidays together and my documentary projects, I will be happy.

"Here is my ebook of Italy."

Joseph Brunjes: "My father died in October and I have the tough duty of going through his negatives and prints. He taught high school photography so he not only had thousands of his own negatives but hundreds of negatives from students. He photographed sports teams, clubs, and every day high school life for 30 years and has quite a visual history of his high school. Only a small portion of the entire collection was sleeved and organized. I found twelve 100 foot bulk canisters full of shot negatives with family and school related images intermixed. It will take me years to go through it all. Luckily for my dad, I still shoot film and can scan and archive his best photos in my spare time. His photos for the most parts are not artistic, but I have already found some real gems (and enough blackmail photos of my brother in his youth to last the rest of my life). It has also been fun going through the negatives of all the unknown students who left their negatives in the HS darkroom and were preserved by my father. It has helped me put my own collection of prints and negatives into perspective and I am currently working to make it easier for my family to know what is worth keeping."

 

Editing 'It Must Be Color'

Two ideas for future Baker's Dozens: subtle color, and matching colors. More about this later...I think if I announced another BD before presenting the acutely late "It Must Be Color," a number of you guys would put out a hit on me.

In editing the "It Must Be Color" submissions I suspect the big problem is that the concept isn't entirely secure in my mind. Mostly I'm pretty confident when it comes to editing; I have my methods and my typical "queries" with which I approach any given picture. But I recognize a number of different ways that readers approached the challenge—that is, the criteria by which you chose your own selections—and I recognize that many of them are somewhat different, but that your choices are valid nonetheless. This makes it more than usually difficult to eliminate contenders.

As you might expect, the big challenge, accordingly, is...eliminating contenders. Usually, the easiest parts of editing are the outliers: the obvious "nos" and the obvious "yesses." It's those "hmm, maybes" that are maddening. But in this BD, there just aren't as many obvious yesses and nos.

I would say in general the easiest ones to eliminate are pictures that I think are clearly good but that I'm not convinced have to be in color...rightly or wrongly, I think they'd work in B&W as well. And, the pictures that I admit have to be in color, but nevertheless don't seem to be entirely successful as photographs.

Two other kinds of submission I've been able to be a little harder on are standard naturey subjects, and pictures that are mostly just "of" subjects that happen to be colorful. But even these aren't easy to dismiss, because there are some of each kind that are very good.

I'll put up examples of each of these types, but not until I pick the final Baker's Dozen. Never know what's going to make the final cut until the final cut is made.

All in all this has been more than a bit humbling for Yr. already Hmbl. Ed. I can't say I've done much more than circle around the task for weeks, without getting down to work, but that's because I know I'm not on footing that's as solid as I usually stand on.

More anon; I'm gaining on it. Thanks again for all the submissions, and no, I haven't forgotten about the Younger Photographers group.

Mike

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Joe: "I've been in your position, Mike, and it sure helps to be part of a small group making such decisions. It's also easier when there's a hard deadline with no extensions. Might not make for better decisions, but it makes for decisions."

Curt Gerston: "I’m looking forward to seeing your choices for this...I’ve recently assigned 'color' as a subject-assignment to my students, and it’s a bit difficult to explain the concept to middle-schoolers. I’m hoping to show your contest winners as examples."

Open Mike: Four Odd Topics

Subaru WRX STI

I guess I didn't actually want to take time off this week. I have stuff rattling around in my head as usual. I guess what I was really saying is that I need some more incubation time for thinking about the B&W submissions so I can build a better Baker's Dozen post...that's what I wanted more time for.

That's topic #1 for the "Open Mike" Editorial Page today: the role of TIME in editing.

The magical moment in photographic editing happens for me when you a) do a bunch of shooting; b) choose the shots you think are "good"; workprint a bunch of them and put them up on a wall or corkboard where you can look at them a lot; and then—here's the magic part—contemplate them regularly for three or four days.

The sorting takes place subconsciously, i.e., magically. Here's what will happen: you will start off thinking that all the pictures are more or less equal, and that all of them are pretty good. You will end up thinking that one, two, or three of them are really good and all the rest are throwaways.

What happens in between? I don't know. But it does. Call it visual intelligence. It takes time for this to happen...time going past, and time spent looking at your pictures with your eyes. It's easier, mechanically speaking, to edit on your computer, but better to do it with physical prints you can look at.

Time spent with your eyes on the pictures is the crucial key, and the fact that no one does it that way any more might be partially to blame for the fact that pictures are worse now than they used to be.

Topic #2: Crime in the United States is way, way down, and no one knows why. Recently the national murder rate reached HALF of what it was in 1990. We get distracted by the enormity of mass shootings, but that might be something altogether different than crime; personally I think it's an example of the sort of contagious mental illness that contributed to the epidemic of "anarchist assassinations" of the thirty years prior to WWI (which was touched off by, yup, an anarchist assassination), or the popularity of duelling in 17th-century France, which killed about one in ten (the literal meaning of "decimated") of that society's aristocratic and upper-class men, or the fact that every so often, suicide becomes popular. Popular?!? There's no other word for it...in Germany at the time Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther there was an absolute craze for youth suicide with a "romantic" cast to it. Suicide happens in clusters to this day. It has the same features as a fad. It worries me greatly that the psychological illness causing the craze or fad that has fed mass shootings now seems to be shifting to police assassinations; that is, socio-psychologically speaking, a very bad trend that needs to be stepped on in the strongest possible way, with the most concerted response we can muster.

But all of this should not disguise the remarkable fact that crime has declined very steeply in recent decades in the United States. The fact that no one can explain it just makes it interesting; explicable or not, it's still a very good thing.

Topic #3: As a car nut, I kind of hate modern cars. I hate electronic nannying, 500+ horsepower monstrosities, and feature-encrustation. We're approaching some kind of tipping point in automotive technology; I personally believe that a) self-driving cars will never happen but that b) all cars will be battery-powered thirty years from now. In the meantime, I still like what I like, namely, old-fashioned, light, moderately powered, "slow-car-fast" sporty cars that can be driven for fun on public roads rather than on racetracks. Luxury muscle cars shaped like trucks that have to be driven dangerously on closed courses to have anything approaching fun in 'em are decadent, twisted, and misbegotten, not to mention mentally unhealthy, if you ask me.

Saddest thing about modern cars: the traditional, simple, engaging, involving, connected manual transmission is going away. "Bah, humbug" ten times over! I don't give a flying fig if John and Jane Q. Public don't want stick shift in their appliance transportation, but cars meant to be fun for the driver to drive oughtta have 'em, dagnabbit. The reason I bought my 2014 Acura ILX is that the better engine (naturally aspirated 2.4 liter) only came with a stick shift. (Now you can't buy any Acura with a manual.) And no, I don't give a flying fig if dual-clutch automatics shift faster; it's my experience that matters to me, not the stopwatch. Who cares how fast road cars actually go? It's like caring about the golf scores of a weekend golfer. Matters not to anyone. What matters about cars is how fast they feel and how fun and satisfying they are to drive that way, not a meaningless tenth of a second here or there.

Here's a list of the cars you can still get in 2018 that have stick shift. And, per that article, special kudos to the Subaru WRX STI, one of the few cars left that comes only with a manual transmission.

Here's my ideal automobile: two seats side-by-side, rear wheels driven, a willing, high-revving, naturally-aspirated engine that's low-powered enough that it encourages you to stay in the powerband using the gearshift, with excellent, communicative hydraulic steering and excellent tires. Oh, and a convertible top. The Mazda Miata comes close enough to this ideal (or would, with the addition of some mods) that I feel like I'm safe for the end of my life. (The fact that I can't afford one is on me. At least it exists.)

And while we're on the subject of Mazda: the best and most practical general-purpose vehicle you can buy today is the 2018 Mazda CX-5. Some Subarus come close. Here's why:

• The best car is mass market, with more of its cost in the initial engineering and less involved in handbuilding, exotic materials, luxury features, spec-sheet excess, and the moneysucking combo of big advertising/small volume.
• The best car is an SUV because that's what's popular now—midsized SUVs are to 2018 what midsized family sedans used to be—but small enough for four cylinders and decent mileage.
• Gotta look really sweet. The 2018 CX-5 in soul red paint is gorgeous.
• Nice interior...but not too nice. Cars are meant to be used.
• Not too precious. Who wants the responsibility of driving something irreplaceable? Not moi.
• The CX-5 handles much better than most SUVs.
• Can be used to transport dogs.

I rest my case. I would rather have a CX-5 than a Ferrari—and I can say that, because I can't have a Ferrari.

Topic #4: In human culture, lots of things are driven by popularity. We do things because they're the things we do. Things happen in cycles; what goes up must come down; people do things because other people do them. I like cue sports, and the popularity of cue sports is plummeting toward death like two drunks careening down a ski jump on a toboggan.

This glorious antique Glass Pfister was fully restored by
Blatt Billiards in New York City

Pool used to be one of the most popular sports in America, believe it or not. When baseball was America's most popular sport, pool and billiards (now called "three cushion," a game played on a table with no pockets) were not far behind: in the 1920s, there were almost as many articles in the newspaper about billiards tournaments as there were about baseball games. Willie Hoppe's earnings rivaled Babe Ruth's. And there were 5,000 pool halls in New York City alone. (Now there might not be 5,000 in the world, if you leave out the Philippines.) Not for nothing is there a steady trade in restored antique pool tables...there are lots and lots of them out there. A pool table used to be as much of a status symbol in the home as a piano. (Neither are in very many homes now...but people in the future will look at the homes we build and wonder why in the world we put our kitchens in the living room and made the counters out of stone. We are truly weird!) 

Pool in the U.S. is in the process of dying. In much better health is a game that's popular in other parts of the world but not in the U.S., and it's popular in part because it's a much better game than any pool game. It's called "snooker," and it was supposedly invented by bored British imperial officers in India in the time of the Raj. They sure did a good job...the game is as subtle and rich as baseball. The Michael Jordan of snooker, the virtuosic Ronnie O'Sullivan, is still playing, and it remains to be seen what will happen to that game once he retires.

But Google "antique pool tables" someday, and poke around. It's really amazing what's out there. I hope to visit Bankshot Billiards, a local antique pool table restorer in Albany, and if I do I will file a report.

That's enough from me for today!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Joe: "Way back in the early '70s I bought a 1969 yellow Fiat 850 Spider. What a piece of junk. The thing broke down literally every few hundred miles. The convertible top leaked all over me when it rained and kept the interior freezing cold in the winter. And the tiny 850cc engine was smaller than some of my friends' motorcycles' engines. This is the car, with my then-girlfriend: 

"But hot damn that thing was fun to drive. Really fun. Really really fun. More fun to drive than any other car I've ever been in. It turns out that 850cc is plenty for a tiny two-seater. Zooming along with the top down in the summer, I've never felt less between me and the road (except when I owned a motorcycle). I had a friend who loved muscle cars and who drove a monster of a Camaro, and she took a spin in that Fiat one day and it opened her eyes. She had no idea what it was like to drive a car that probably weighed the same as the passenger door on her Camaro. She didn't become a convert, but she understood what I loved about driving that car.

"I wouldn't buy a Fiat again, and the breakdowns were way more of a pain than the joy the 850 brought me, but bring me joy it did."

Robert Roaldi: "Really, you need two cars. At least two. You need an everyday grocery-getter that does most things OK, starts every time, room for the dog, etc. Then, for that Saturday afternoon drive that you do for fun, you want a Miata, Alfa GTV, Volvo P1800, FIAT X1/9, etc.

"One car can't do it all; it's just like with cameras. You don't take a large format film camera to a cyclocross bicycle race, and you don't want a manual shift MGB in a three-hour rush-hour drive in a hot humid August heat wave. Having more than one can be expensive, but then you don't need to buy new ones."

Geoff Wittig, who masquerades as a mild mannered, middle aged small town doctor but is actually One Cool Dude, replies to Robert: "Robert, That's actually one of the many joys of Subaru's WRX STi. You can only get it with a hand-built six-speed manual transmission, and it's stupid fast, with chassis tuning that is perfectly calibrated for America's typical rutted winding two-lane rural roads. Yet it's a very practical daily driver; the back seat fits actual adult humans, and the trunk is quite capacious. My trunk generally houses a large tripod and a huge LowePro pack with two DSLRs and six lenses, with room for groceries left over. And you can drive it in the snow!"

CGarrison: "I’ve owned a lot of cars and motorcycles over the last 18 years and slowly progressed toward higher and higher power and complexity. This culminated in an R35 GT-R Nismo with 600 HP and a very smart AWD system. This car was amazing to drive at 8/10ths or above, but less inspiring most of the time. I also then had a 200 HP Ducati Panigale R which features an amazing engine, amazing brakes, electronic suspension, and amazing traction control/engine braking control, etc. What a fun motorcycle on a twisty road, but a nightmare everywhere else.

"I sold the Nismo and the Panigale and looked into a similar list of attributes as you described. I considered (another) Mazda RX8, a Honda S2000, a Subaru BRZ or WRX STi, and others.

"Here’s where I’ve ended up. For a motorcycle I have a hand built Ducati based upon an old air-cooled, carbureted Ducati 900SS motor. It’s loud, light, reasonably quick and a blast at normal speeds. It’s very simple in every way and almost the entire motorcycle was fabricated by hand.

"For cars I ended up with a Ford Focus RS. It’s at 350 HP, all wheel drive, has a simple and practical interior, has a very fun engine and transmission combination, and is an absolute blast to drive hard, anywhere. The AWD is similar in feel to a GTR but the car is so small and light that you can enjoy full throttle and all gears on the street.

"The Focus RS is a lot of fun and I’m keeping it, but the steering is light and noncommunicative compared to the GTR and certainly to any hydraulic RWD setup. The suspension is way too stiff in all settings, and there is an occasional feeling that you don’t quite know what the throttle and differentials are doing when driving hard. I still wanted something more pure so I then ended up with a car that ticks a lot of the boxes you listed, an Ariel Nomad.

"Rear wheel drive. Manual steering. Manual braking. Sixteen hundred pounds. Honda K24 engine and six-speed transmission with 240 HP. No electronic assistance at all. This is the most fun I have ever had driving anything. It’s likely not even close and I’ve driven a lot of cars on street and track. Ariels are expensive (Atom or Nomad) but offer such a pure driving experience and so much fun. You have to try one if you can. The Focus RS (a pretty aggressive street car) feels soft now, in steering, the clutch, the shifter, the throttle, everything but the suspension."

Mike replies: You've more resources than I. Unfortunately for me I mostly read about cars rather than drive them. I've never driven an Ariel and most likely never will, but I have memories of (briefly) driving a Lotus Super 7, the car that convinced me of the wisdom of "slow car fast" and set my preferences for light, go-carty cars. On paper, hear hear to your journey!

Baker's Dozen: Smartphone Photographs

For this fortnight's "Baker's Dozen" readers' portfolio, I asked for smartphone photos, and got as many as I thought I would...lots and lots. I have to apologize to the many people who sent great shots that I won't be using today. If it's any consolation, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing everyone's pictures and reading their comments. Great fun for me.

With several avenues wide open for exploring, I thought I'd concentrate on showing some of the things I think people particularly use smartphones for.

To make a colorful beginning, macro shots! Lots of people are finding that the tiny sensors (with their extreme D-o-F), excellent lenses, and SOTA processing are ideal for photographing things close up. Depth-of-field (D-o-F) is proportional to focus distance—all else equal, the farther away the plane of focus, the greater the D-o-F. The closer the object distance, the narrower the D-o-F (more bokeh, in other words). Another way of saying this: if you have three inches of D-o-F when focused on something nine inches away from the sensor, you'll have 30 feet within the D-o-F when you're focused on something 90 feet away. Specifics can vary, but that gets the principle across.

Tiny sensors and the very short focal-length lenses that are "normal" for the formats make macro photography pleasant. This would have been a very difficult shot to make with a FF DSLR. Peggy Collins, 58, of Lancaster, Antelope Valley, in Southern California shot this orangelicious poppy using a Samsung Galaxy S5. It's far from her only camera, though—she's been a serious photographer for decades (a Pentax shooter mainly) and is a part-time pro.

The inset picture is me cheating on the "baker's dozen" limitation by sneaking in an extra example of a nice shot that utilizes large D-o-F. It was taken by David O'Bryan, 49, of Mechanicsville, Virginia, on an iPhone 6+.

Rick Forgo's nighttime street scene is a perfect example of what I was talking about the other day in the "No Such Thing As Image Quality" post. Mature artists understand the properties of the materials and equipment they're using and apply them with sensitivity to best effect regardless of what those properties are. This is a wholly successful shot, regardless of how well it does or doesn't conform to the "ordinary and usual" notions of IQ. Rick, who is 34 and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, took it with an iPhone 4s, and says, "it's one of my favourite shots regardless of the camera used."

Here's a "particularly pleasing conjunction" (Huw's words), taken of Stonehenge from a slow-moving car in traffic where the road narrows. So what does this show us about phone cameras? That they're an excellent way for kids to enjoy photography! It was taken by eight-year-old Harriet Hitchin, who lives in England. Her father Huw reads TOP. Aside from being one of the youngest photographers ever featured on TOP, Harriet is obviously also one cool kid:

Note the shirt in the picture on the left! Love it. Father and daughter obviously have fun with photography together. Thanks to both. And nice shot, Harriet.

Continuing with the impromptu "daughter" theme, Bruce Greene's painterly iPhone 5 shot of his daughter in a restaurant illustrates what I think is another exceedingly important aspect of phone cameras: they're fun to play with. Not that you can't play with other cameras, as I should know, but I often find myself playing with the phone's camera in situations where I wouldn't ordinarily be taking pictures, just because I can. And play can be very good for creativity.

Full caption: "A loadmaster from the Tennessee Air National Guard's 164th Airlift Wing directs an all-terrain forklift onto a C-17 aircraft at the Kentucky Air National Guard Base in Louisville, Ky., Aug. 29, 2017, to support rescue operations in Texas following Hurricane Harvey. More than 30 Kentucky Air Guardsmen and 90 tons of equipment are being airlifted from Louisville to Houston to stand up an aeromedical evacuation and air cargo hub. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Lt. Col. Dale Greer)"

Switching gears, I think Dale Greer's dramatic news photo here illustrates very well what is conventionally meant by "the best camera is the one you have with you"—a role that phone cameras play for many people in many situations. Dale works as a public affairs officer in the Kentucky Air National Guard and frequently shoots news coverage with several D750 Nikons. On the day he shot this, however, he says "...my focus was assisting local news media who were covering the deployment of Airmen from our base for Hurricane Harvey relief operations. Thus, I was not packing my customary 20-pound load of camera gear; I only had an iPhone to shoot photos." Good thing he had that along—his photo went on to receive wide national distribution, including on network news programs. And of course TOP.

Anthony Reczek, Moon Over Nubble

Here's another example of not as good being better: lifelong New Englander Anthony Reczek, born and raised in Vermont, actually had his big Canon and a tripod along on this night, and took a picture of this scene with it, but says that "there's something about this smartphone shot that rivals the cleaner/clearer results of the 'better' camera and lens." Anthony recently returned to playing music (in nursing homes) after retiring from a career as a psychiatric social worker.

Burdette Parks illustrates for us the old "what if you see Elvis stepping out of a flying saucer?" principle: sometimes cool things you couldn't invent just happen in front of your eyes, and beg to be photographed. "This is a shot I grabbed during a rehearsal for a play we're doing here in November. The show is Sylvia and the young lady is playing a dog that has an operation in the course of the play. Coincidentally, her pet was visiting us at rehearsal and had just come from the vet. An unposed moment captured due to the quick availability of my phone." Burdette is 72 and lives not far from TOP Rural Headquarters—in the Adirondacks here in Upstate New York, about halfway between the villages of Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake.

Above: Ridley Scott. Below: Ridley Scott.

Continuing the doggie theme (because dogs make life better), Tim Bloomquist, 55, of Des Moines, Iowa, can't understand why people keep asking him why he named his dog Ridley Scott: "He looks just like him!" Well...except I'd have to say Ridley Scott's ears are just a little bigger than Ridley Scott's.

Of course, given the number of pictures on Facebook (slightly less than infinity—for the time being anyway) and the ease of texting pictures (or sending them the old-fashioned way, by email), the Number One use of smartphone cameras is doubtless for taking pictures of friends and family and sharing them. Kurt Holter of Frederick, Maryland, sent us this charming shot of his 91-year-old mother Facetiming with her soon-to-be one-year-old great-grandaughter near Christmastime last year. Kurt's brother, wife, and daughter were all sharing the moment with her. None of them noticed him taking a picture with his iPhone. Kurt's been a full-time photographer since he started out with a newspaper in 1976, but he says, "in all of my years as a photographer, this is one of my all-time favorite pictures."

Another of the undoubtedly interesting aspects of phone cameras is that you can get them into places normal cameras won't go—or won't go without a little more care and work. When Saturn was going to be occulted by the moon on April 17th, 2014, Marcelo Guarini prepared his small but optically excellent backyard telescope and waited. Holding his iPhone 5s up to the eyepiece of the telescope by hand, he took both this still photograph and also a video of the event. The telescope enlargement is around 120X.

I've seen phone pics taken through microscopes, too, and I've used mine to photograph through the viewfinders of larger cameras to show readers the layout of the viewfinder.

Of course, you can just use a phone for photography, too. TOP reader Giuseppe Pagnoni, a researcher and professor of neuroscience at a university in Modena, Italy, took this at a traditional wedding in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, of a group of women dressed up in their tehuana clothes waiting in line for their turn at the Ladies (Damas) restroom. He says he wishes he had used the Lightroom app to shoot raw (because of course we photographers are never satisfied and always want more). But he had his Ricoh GR with him at the time: "Sometimes you just prefer to use the phone because of the instant feedback and manipulation possibility." Besides the GR, Giuseppe also has a Fuji X100, and he says he recently made the "unreasonable" purchase of a Leica M6 with a Summicron 35mm, which he blames on me (the OC/OL/OY thing). Okay, I'll take the blame.

...And then there are apps, which are endless. Margaret Rainey of London, United Kingdom, took this picture on a rainy day in her native Glasgow, in Scotland, while playing around with the Slow Shutter app, which, she says, "is something I never do on my 'proper' camera, so this would not have been taken otherwise." I like it.

In the inset (yes, I'm cheating again), another shutter effect: a strange rubber propeller captured by Frank Petronio, who is 57 and reports that he lived after taking this. I can't even begin to explain why his phone created this effect; he didn't say if it was accidental or deliberate. But now I want to go up in a propeller plane.

And one more for good measure: Kristine Hinrichs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, happened across this sand graffiti while taking a break from traveling in the Pacific Northwest. A sweet shot she says is one of her most enduring.

•

Again, I just want to thank all the photographers featured here and everyone who submitted work. This one was painful; I had to leave so many nice shots out. Sorry again to be late with this—it took me longer to compile than almost any other post I've ever posted on TOP, about 12–13 hours. There were just so many submissions and so many different ways I could have organized it.

The next Baker's Dozen will be posted two weeks from now (well, with any luck) on Friday, November 24th. I'll post the call for work on Monday. Hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Mike

"Baker's Dozen" (13) is a new feature we're trying out. Readers answer a call for a particular kind of work, and then Yr. Hmbl. Ed. chooses a dozen to post along with one extra one for good measure.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Giuseppe Pagnoni: "Elated and humbled at the same time to be featured among such good pictures! While I wish I would have taken the picture with the Ricoh GR I had with me, mainly because of the high-contrast scene, it's kind of telling that sometimes we just prefer to use the phone: as pointed out before here, it must be the tempting combination of instant examination on a good screen (much better than camera LCDs), quick post-processing of the files, and sharing on the web.

"On the topic of image quality, I found that capturing raw images with the iPhone in Lightroom mobile really makes a big difference: even if you just export straight to JPEG, the output file has very little of the frosted-glass, plasticky artifacts that the heavy-handed noise reduction and sharpening algorithm of the iPhone (and most other cell phones) produce—you hardly notice them on the phone screen, but they become obvious (and jarring to me) once you open the file on your computer. Sometimes, I further process the file with the RNI Films app, which has a good selection of filters based on actual film emulsions and scanned grain and is often successful in removing the elusive 'digitalness' of the phone pictures (although I feel I should eventually grow out of this type of nostalgia).

"So, thank you very much for this. I am loving the baker's dozen idea and looking forward to the next variations on the theme!"

A Baker's Dozen: Large-Format Contact Prints

Up first is an image that isn't even a contact print, but might go one better. It's a unique image made directly in-camera on Ilford Harman Direct Positive Paper. Reader Johan Verhulst, 58, who lives in Lebbeke, a small village in the Flanders region of Belgium, uses a brass Suter Petzval lens from the 1800s on his Sinar P 8x10 camera. Because he rates the paper at ISO 2, he says "my poor models suffer a very high dose of flash light."

Denise Ross, Summer Sweet Corn, whole plate camera. Denise writes, "Age: not quite Medicare yet; location: home, by way of the Newport, Oregon, Farmers Market."  :-)  A beautifully simple photograph that I'll bet is considerably nicer "in person" as a contact print.

John Wyke writes from the North of Spain: "Here's me with one of my recent contact prints. I use the Intrepid Cameras 4x5 camera and I'm quite happy with the way it's going. I've always loved contact printing, and I'm happy to have a plate camera now rather than just medium format. I do my darkroom stuff at the La Puerta Verde photography school in Oviedo, Spain, which is run by my friend Ricardo Moreno (La Puerta Verde—Escuela de Fotografía). Although he offers courses in digital photography by necessity, his first love is analog and there are about fifteen of us who use various analog cameras, from Holgas to Hasselblads.

"I'm in the process of working on dual exposures contact prints like the one in this picture. I'm not quite there yet, but the joy is in the journey, not the destination. I'm also looking at Tintype style images. I do like the idea of a one shot, no copies, just a single object that you produce."

Stephen Schafer, Santa Monica Post Office, California (HABS index card)

Although the call was for contact prints, this is too interesting to leave out. Reader Stephen "Schaf" Schafer, who works all over California and Nevada, makes his living with 4x5 and 5x7 sheet film documenting heritage for the HABS/HAER/HALS collections. This is a sample of the so-called "digital contact prints" he submits along with his original negatives to the Library of Congress, where the work is in the public domain.

HABS = Historic American Buildings Survey; HAER = Historic American Engineering Record; HALS = Historic American Landscape Survey. This is true documentary work, and it's a great way to get out in the world with a camera.

William F. Whitaker, Three Vanities, 2004

Will Whitaker, 61, from Salisbury, North Carolina, says that most of the tools, processes and techniques he uses date back to the early 20th century, a period he especially admires in art, photography and design. "This image was taken with an 8 3/4" Wollensak Verito at approximately ƒ/6.3 (which is important because of the nature of the Verito lens whose character changes as it is stopped down). The Verito dates from 100 years ago, so fits right in with the aesthetic I admire so much."

At first I thought these 8x10 contact prints from reader Thom Bennett's website might be the same young lady at different ages, but it turns out they're sisters. Thom is 58 and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Currently he works in 8x10 but he says he will soon be acquiring a 7x17, which sounds like something he'll have fun with.

Although an in-camera original and not a contact print, I also couldn't resist including an example of the Tintypes people sent me, and this one's a whopper. Literally. In fact it sounds like Monty McCutchen is "all in": he shoots in 10x12, 7x17, 16x20, and 20x24 and, for the most part, contact prints his work with platinum/palladium, Pt/Pd gumovers, and Ambrotypes/Tintypes. (He did send me several JPEGs of actual contact prints.) He says he uses a lot of Lodima paper from our friends Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee, who you remember from our large format contact print sale a few years back. He writes that he resides in Asheville, North Carolina, "and within the confines of my own photographic geekery."

As they say in New Hampshire, eeyup. One measure of how deep Monty's geekery goes? One of his many ultra-large-format cameras is a 20x24 Ebony with a 16x20 reducing back! Ya gotta love that. He says of it, "I am acutely aware of how silly that sounds. At one time getting a 16x20 reducing back seemed to make sense. As the years have progressed I am having a hard time remembering the conditions in my life that would have constituted that decision being of sound mind and body."

Why "whopper"? The original of the JPEG shown above is a 20x24 (!) Tintype, which must have gobs of presence in the flesh—or, er, tin.

Of all the images readers sent in, this might have been the only Kallitype (an iron-silver alt process similar to Van Dyke brown). Although not his main way of working, Steve Wolfe of Columbus, Ohio, says he still occasionally shoots 4x5" black and white film, usually Ilford HP5+, with his Graflex Crown Graphic. He contact prints them and tones the prints with platinum/palladium.

By the way, if you're wanting to dip a toe into large format (LF) and contact printing, a Crown is a good place to start. I loved playing with those cameras. Vulch on eBay for a good one, and take your time looking. Great ones at reasonable prices are still being passed around among photography enthusiasts. Use yours for a few years then pass it back.

A lot of LF photographers I know make digital snaps of their setups when they work. (As well of promising scenes when they're scouting for locations.) Although the top picture above is from a scan and thus a bit outside the call, reader Gary Nylander, 59, of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, was kind enough to include just such a documentary record shot, taken with his phone:

With large format, you really do engage in a deep way with your subject—it's usually a relaxed, contemplative, engaged, take-your-time-and-get-it-the-way-you-want-it process. Nothing rushed or lucky about it, usually.

The picture in the picture is called Living the Dream: Stuff, and More Stuff

Since we're stretching the boundaries here (lots of readers sent things other than JPEGs of "purist," or straight, all-analog contact prints), I can't resist including this "selfie" by reader Mike Rosiak. "The print in my right hand was contact-printed from the negative in my left hand, Van Dyke brown process, on paper I hand-coated. The negative is on 8.5x11" Pictorico OHP film, printed from my Epson P600. Original image taken with a Lumix GF1, IR conversion by LifePixel, and using the Olympus body cap lens. Silver Efex Pro to make into B&W, then channels reversed to make the negative. So, the whole thing is pretty much a hybrid.

"The print behind me is another contact print, a Cyanotype. What looks like a print in the big red clip is my first 'negative,' which is positive! Early learning curve.

"Both Van Dyke brown and Cyanotype processes were in existence about a hundred years before I was born. (I'm 75). The Cyanotype print got a second place in a local (Southeast Pennsylvania, Northwest of Philadelphia) art group's Spring show, while the other print was accepted as a finalist in Pennsylvania's annual Art of the State event, and hung in the Harrisburg State Museum from June until September.

"I mostly shoot digital (99+%), haven't had a darkroom in maybe 20 years, but this stuff is fun to fool around with, and requires only a 'mostly dim' room."

Mike has two 4x5 cameras, a Crown Graphic and a (Kickstarter) Wanderlust Travelwide.

And here's Michael Boudreaux, 33, from Austin, Texas. "I shoot primarily a Hasselblad, a 4x5 Chamonix, and an 8x10 Deardorff recently purchased from Blue Moon Camera in Portland," Mike writes. "I'm holding my first contact print out of this (rugged) beauty, shot on Ilford HP5+, developed in Pyrocat HD and printed on Ilford MG Classic FB.

"I sit at a computer all day at work, so I gravitate towards vintage machines like goofy old cameras and quirky British roadsters." I get that.

You've met photography teacher Jeff Dionesotes before—he's the guy who bought my once-beloved SaltHill (made by my late friend Joe Saltzer, RIP) print washer when I moved away from Wisconsin. (Actually, I gave it to him—it was originally a review sample that I ended up paying nothing for, and thus it would have been unethical for me to profit from its sale.) This is a contact print of some of his students made with a Zone VI "Ultralight" 8x10.

...And, for good measure, one more:

Reader Chris Fazio, 61, of Chicago, Illinois took this dignified portrait of his 92-year-old mother this past September, on her birthday. He writes, "I started to get serious about photography in 2005, at the end of the film era! I love making contact prints using the Lodima paper Michael Smith makes." He has recently begun a project photographing people in profile.

•

That's it for this, the inaugural "Baker's Dozen." As I've mentioned, I'm going to try to repeat this feature at two-week intervals—at least for a little while. The next call for work is for smartphone pictures that you wouldn't have made but for the fact that you had your smartphone with you...but please read the call for work before submitting. I'm already awash in submissions (really fun to see them) so it's going to be important for you to follow protocol if you want your submission to be considered. (The amount of email I get is an organizational headache. An assistant, an assistant, my kingdom for an assistant!)

I had about three times as many submissions for this week's feature as I had space for, which is surprising given that traditional LF is such a small niche. It was excruciating to have to leave some of them out. I went for variety and "ancillary interest," you might say, and no judgement of quality is implied for those who didn't get chosen! I really enjoyed hearing from everyone and seeing your work—especially all of those who appended nice personal notes to their emails. Really good to hear from you. Sorry I don't have time to personally reply to anyone. (I really barely have time for email correspondences these days, if you're wondering why you never got an answer to an email. I do read everything that comes in.)

If you'd like to add an image in the comments, TypePad isn't really set up for that, but there's a workaround. First, the image must be on the Web and have a URL; and second, it can't be more than 470 pixels wide or it will get truncated. With those two conditions met, you can use this code in the comment box:

...Where the bit between the quote marks is the URL of your image. Leave the quote marks there.

That it for us for this week—I'm off to work on my book for the weekend. Hope you had as much fun with today's post as I did. We'll be back on Monday, and next week on Friday we'll take another trip Around the Web—I've already gotten started on that.

Mike
(Thanks to everyone who submitted work)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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Call for Work: Smartphone Snaps (Baker's Dozen)

Butters sniffing a purple onion skin.
Your shot need not include a dog.

Do you shoot with a smartphone regularly, especially a late model one, especially one you bought specifically for its camera?

My theory is that regardless of what you shoot with, sometimes you get a shot that works for you. Have you gotten a "hit" recently with your smartphone? Doesn't have to be art, just something you like. Show us something quirky or personal, something you wouldn't have shot if it weren't for your phone.

Send it to m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m with the subject line "bakersdozenphone" and I'll pick 13 of the most interesting ones and post them on Nov. 10th. The JPEGs should be saved in sRGB and 800 pixels wide, and please include them in the body of the email.

Let me know your name, age, and where you live, too. Any other comments welcome too, of course. Please don't forget the subject line, or I might lose it in the email stack.

Amish cauliflowers. Your shot need not be colorful.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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Another Function of a Portfolio

In the "How I Practiced Portraiture" post, Steve Caddy wrote:

So many of these problems boil down to a difference between what the customer thinks they're buying and what the photographer thinks they're selling.

Amen, and my experience was a vivid illustration of that.

Steve was probably talking mainly about the business dealings between the photographer and the customer, but it applies equally well to the aesthetic side of the transaction as well. When I started doing portraiture, in Washington D.C. in the late '80s, I took out a text-only ad in the Yellow Pages. I got a number of jobs from it, but a certain peculiar problem popped up—I had a difficult time determining what people wanted. I quickly realized that, when they say "portrait," everyone has a different thing in mind.

Sometimes the differences were subtle, but sometimes they were flagrant. For instance, one woman, it turned out, had in mind a romanticized, idealized, hand-colored B&W picture of her beribboned and well-coiffed pair of poodles, whereas another woman wanted what amounted to a softcore "boudoir" photo of himself as a gift for her husband (their marriage later failed, sadly). Neither one of those things is quite what "portrait" means to me.

Another rather vain gentleman of late middle age had a pile of example photos of himself that supposedly illustrated what he wanted. The only trouble was, the photos he showed me were a complete motley—I was mystified as to what they had in common (and I'm pretty good at that sort of thing). After considerable discussion and a lot of thought, it finally dawned on me—in all the various pictures he showed me, he had a certain "boyish" look. What he wanted was a picture of himself looking younger! (I was not able to satisfy that client, I'm afraid. In all my pictures of him, he looked about the age he, well, looked. He rejected all the proofs. Now you could satisfy a guy like that, but that was before Photoshop.)

So the first task with every client I got from the Yellow Pages was to interrogate them as to what "portrait" meant to them so I could figure out how to come up with what they wanted. In some cases this was easy, but in others it was not. Some people are remarkably inarticulate about all things aesthetic—all they could tell me was something along the lines of, "you know, a portrait." In many cases it was simply that people had a set idea of the style they preferred, and they were picturing it in their mind's eye, thinking that's what "portrait" meant—without realizing that their idea of "portrait" was only one kind of portrait.

Portrait

Portrait

Portrait

The solution to the problem worked extremely well. My friend who owned the frame shop in Georgetown invited me to exhibit about 14 of my portraits in her store. I was able to show not only exactly what I did best, but the kind of work I wanted to do—which turned out to be a great boon for my marketing. People would see my portraits, and if they wanted that kind of portrait I did, they would call me.

Those clients knew exactly what they wanted—they wanted exactly what I did. And, apropos Steve's comment, when either of us said "portrait" we both had the same thing in mind.

So I went from chasing a hodgepodge of wildly different ideas, never quite knowing if I was going to get what the client really wanted, to getting just exactly the sort of work I wanted to do.

It was a powerful demonstration of the purpose of a portfolio. Ever since then, I've been careful to explain to students that there are two purposes for your portfolio—one is to show what you can do and how good you are, of course, but the other is to attract the kind of work you want to do in the future. 

Mike
(Portrait 1: Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, oil painting; Portrait 2: Audrey Hepburn by Yosuf Karsh, B&W film photograph; Portrait 3: Kevin Rollins, Former CEO of Dell by Kirk Tuck, color digital image)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

What else did you have in mind?
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bt: "I am in a somewhat unrelated field, architecture. One thing is for sure in the 'creative' professions. The work that you have previously done well is what leads to new work, usually of a similar character. Quite literally one thing tends to leads to the next. The old saying about this is: 'Be careful about what you get good at.' Because that's what you're going to be doing. You can try to change tracks, if you want, but it can take a lot of effort and, as you point out, there's a lot of motion and energy spent trying to define or even understand the (new) client and how you might deal with their needs, which you may not relate to or be a good fit with at all."

Bob Curtis: "'A good portraitist would be unlikely to admit it, but on a very basic level one might say that a portrait is a battle between two wills for the control of the sitter’s soul. The best portraits, then, would not be those where the artist wins too easy a battle (as with John Sargent) but the contests that end in hard-won ties: and the greatest of those would be between two champions, e.g,. Velazquez vs. Innocent X, or Rembrandt vs. himself.' —John Szarkowski, from the Introduction to Still Life by Irving Penn."

Ed Hawco: "All this talk of commercial portraits reminds me of my own short and horrific career shooting high school grad portraits. I will spare you the sordid details. But the mention of 'boudoir' reminds me of a friend who doesn't own a camera, has never owned a camera, and doesn't have a scrap of interest in photography. Yet he spent the better part of a year touring the Australian outback doing 'boudoir portraits' under contract from some Sydney-based studio that spent about 15 minutes showing him how to set up and focus the camera and trip the shutter. All else was up to him to figure out. When we get together and lament the woes of our lives he always trumps my short-lived and disastrous portrait career story with his own."

How I Practiced Portraiture

I love portraits, and used to do them, both for pay and for art. I got a nice "blast from the past" last week when when I did a senior portrait for the daughter of a friend of a friend. (Or at least I think I did—they have the proofs now and so far so good.)

I can't remember now how I learned about what constituted conventional practice. But what I did was to work with the subject or subjects in several different scenes or situations, almost always using natural light and "found" backgrounds. I would take several hundred shots. From these I would edit my selections and give the client/subject small proof-prints of six or eight choices. They would then pick their favorite, and I would make the final print. (This was when I was working with B&W film and making fiber-base silver gelatin prints.)

Sounds simple, but I experienced innumerable problems.

The most basic one was "who owns the picture." Of course, you know that the photographer owns the rights to his or her work, and retains them until specifically relinquishing them. Technically, legally, the client only owns the print or prints—the physical object—and doesn't have the right to reuse or re-purpose the image in whatever way they see fit. This is difficult for clients to understand, and if they do understand they often don't respect it because it seems unreasonable to them—they paid for the picture, it's a picture of them, and they think that means they own it. ("A dog with a pullet in his mouth owns the pullet," said the redoubtable Scotsman David Hume.)

You do not own images of yourself, however. The person who made the image owns the rights to it. This seems counterintuitive to many people hearing it for the first time. That doesn't mean the owner of the rights can do anything he or she wants to without the subject's permission; but neither can the client do anything he or she wants to with the images without the photographer's permission.

I never had "big" problems where this is concerned, just little ones, although I've certainly heard of big problems. My little problems included people refusing to return the proofs, framing the proofs (which were usually 5x7 or 4x6 RC prints), or having the proofs copied and enlarged as an alternative to paying me for a finished print. I solved the framing-of-proofs problem by having a mask made that put my name and logo on the bottom of each proof. This didn't work in one case, because the client framed the proof logo and all.) Because of that last, I finally resorted to including two finished prints in the sitting price (my last sitting price was $675 in the early '90s—and I photographed some prominent people, including a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a U.S. Senator, a television star of the era, several members of recognizable political dynasty families, and a number of prominent citizens in and around Washington D.C.). Once, I sent a small JPEG of a portrait to a friend (of his mother) asking him if he wanted a print. I heard nothing back. Some time later, visiting his house, I found a framed inkjet print of the JPEG (which looked terrible, of course) on display! He had printed out the JPEG on his all-in-one dye inkjet printer, on bond paper. Yikes.

Framing was another headache. I was a custom printer and a recognized darkroom expert, and I put a lot of effort into making excellent fine finished prints. I included detailed framing instructions with the prints. I have no idea how many people took the next step and had them framed, but I know it wasn't everyone. For a while I would drymount the trimmed prints to heavy Rives BKF paper*; once, I visited a friend/client's house, and found my carefully-made, selenium toned, archivally washed fine print attached to their refrigerator with a magnet, among all the color snapshots and cute sayings. Yikes again!

But offering only framed prints is not an ideal solution, because peoples' homes are furnished in different styles and to different tastes, and there's no reliable one-size-fits-all framing option. People will prefer different kinds of frames.

I handled this problem in a neat way. I simply dropped off the finished prints at a framing shop (owned by a friend). Then I called the clients and told them their prints were ready and they could pick them up at their convenience at the shop. Most of them got the point and ordered framing for the prints they picked up.

Another problem, of course, which many of you (including wedding photographers) will be all too familiar with: they want to see all the shots. Editing photos is one of the hardest things about photography, even for experienced photographers. I've heard of wedding clients who complained that they "only" got 500 proofs when they "knew there were thousands of shots." Like the photographer is holding back all the good ones?

This problem probably gets down to who controls the image. The photographer thinks he or she gets to say what the best/final image is; the client thinks that's their right. The way I look at it, providing an edited selection of proofs is a compromise between these competing interests. If it were up to me, I'd just pick the best shot and the client would never see any of the others. If it were up to the client, they'd get everything (never suspecting how difficult it is to edit and choose for the simple reason that most people don't edit and choose: they just pick everything that strikes their fancy. That's why you see dozens of similar shots posted on photo sharing sites—the person who posted them "liked them all").

My experience was, the more proofs, the longer it took to get a print order. You can offer to help, but then you find you're teaching "Editing 101" to every new client.

The last problem is that most people are very picky about images of themselves, and quirky about what they want to see. Some people are sensitive to a certain perceived defect in their appearance, and they will pick a photograph of themselves that doesn't show that defect even if it's far from the best picture overall. Or they will pick a straight-on frontal picture simply because that's what they're used to seeing in the mirror.

Once, a few years ago, I will admit to making fun of an unknown woman for the picture of herself she posted on Match.com. There was only one single picture, and it showed her sitting on a porch, holding a beer, dressed in an impressively filthy T-shirt. It made her look like she had just come from spending a long period of time underneath a car. I made a joke of this to my brother, privately, but the thing is, my years as a portraitist gave me the insight to understand why she had posted that particular picture. Most likely it was that it either showed some little idiosyncratic feature of her face that she liked, or concealed some such feature that she disliked. And never mind the dirty T-shirt.

Anyway, for whatever reason, people often pick the wrong proof. You might say it's just a matter of taste, but I say no—it's my work, and I'm a better editor, and I know best. Anyway, I often made two finished final prints: one of their choice, for them, and one of the correct choice, for me.  :-)

Anyway, I always used to tell portrait clients to let their friends and families decide which one the best picture of them was, rather than doing it themselves. I'm sure that worked.

I've never worked as a portraitist in the digital age. I'm sure things are different now. I also suspect a lot of things are the same.

My portrait clients this past week were lovely people—friendly, gregarious and warm—and their confident and nice-looking daughter had the self-assurance of a well-raised child. She did a splendid job posing, and her mother acted as a stylist and did a very nice job of that! They were great to work with and I had fun doing the portrait. I do hope it suits their needs. I charged the price of a box of printing paper, and the gentleman kindly gave me a generous tip. So far I've send them un-watermarked small JPEGs as proofs with full permission to post them anywhere they want to. If/when they make a final choice, I'll send them a prepared full file for printing, and the name of a recommended printer.

The next thing I want to try is to hire a model for a portrait. I want to experiment with what it's like when I'm completely in control and the subject doesn't have any say at all. Should be an interesting experiment, and add to my lifelong learning about this kind of work.

The payoff in portraiture is when you happen to make a picture that the subject really likes. My '90s portrait of photographer Sally Mann that I showed in this post in 2015 (it's one of the few of my portraits I have in digitized form) was one of those—Sally really liked it, so much that she asked for the negative so she could print some promo pictures for her own use.

And she never returned the negative, of course. Sigh.

Mike

*This was self-defensive, mainly: it prevented framers from dry-mounting the print using too hot a temperature, which could impart the texture of the release paper to part of the surface of the print.

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The very picture of a blog.
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John Camp: "Most people don't understand this, but they are brilliant judges of faces—most people have a forehead, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin, etc., yet we are able to instantly pick out acquaintances from the thousands of possibilities we see passing us every day. That expertise is exercised with portraits: a good photographer gives us a professional example of a subject we're interested in from birth, and because it's a portrait, rather than an actual living face, we have no inhibitions about studying it closely, every pore and freckle. And we make judgments about them too: is it possible that the woman on Match.com did just crawl out from under a car, and was perhaps interested in attracting, say, a Harley owner? The beer and t-shirt would hint at that...."

Photo Library Management

No text

Mike
(Thanks to David Bostedo [and several other readers later])

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If you don't get it
Try this

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Kenneth Tanaka: "A cute and clever illustration! Related to your earlier topic on perfectionism, library management, whatever the materials being catalogued, is one place where a perfectionist is most welcome...indeed, required!"

Two More Wonderful Portfolios

What's called "Street" appears to be one of the main currents of photography among ambitious and skilled practitioners these days. It's a photography of found subjects that takes its style cues and approaches mostly from reportorial and documentary photography*, but without the focus on an event or a story, and with aims closer to pop art. Its closest analog might be populist art such as tattoos, customized hot rods (famously the subject of Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby), or pop-songs-by-the-people before the music industry gets sinks its chompers into them.

...But I shouldn't get started on deconstructing Street as a genre. (There's a rabbit-hole.) Basically just wanted to pass on two more photographers in case you have a hankering to look at more:

Photo by TC Lin

"Street photographs" don't actually have to include the street...they can, though. This is by TC Lin, one of the photographers in the Burn My Eye collective, who comments here on TOP as "poagao" or "TC." You can see more of his work here. I particularly like Portfolio 2, and the one of the new-style photographers and the bored guard in the museum.

Photo by Alexander Petrosyan

Alexander Petrosyan is a staff photographer at коммерсант (kommersant, or "businessman"), a daily newpaper in Russia that covers business and politics. He also enjoys a growing reputation as a chronicler and poet-photographer of St. Petersburg. A good article published at Huck magazine this past week emphasizes the street-photographer aspect of his work. More of his St. Petersburg photographs and his photojournalism can be seen at his website.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

*...with a smaller dose, perhaps, of those "amazing happenstance" kinds of photos that crop up on certain populist clickbait-type websites, such as these for example...

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

At street level
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Jeffrey MacMillan: "Am stunned by the photos of Alexander Petrosyan. As said in the Huck article, they are short stories, each of them. Poetic. Comedic. I made the mistake of going to his blog. My cameras may be going on Craigslist soon. He has such a ridiculous number of notable shots. It may help that Petrosyan is in such an insanely photogenic city."

TC: "Wow, thanks for the kind words, Mike. I always enjoy opening up the browser each morning to see what's new on TOP, but it was kind of a surprise to start reading the post, scroll down and think, 'Hey, that looks familiar...is that...oh!'"