The Online Photographer

Open Mike: We Live in a World Where...

Good Morning! Or is it afternoon already?

I promised the Dogs Baker's Dozen for this morning (cardinal blogging rule: never, ever make promises), but I still need a little more time to finish it. I know that's going to frustrate some people, so I'll say a little more about it at the end of this.

Meanwhile, a more conventional Off-Topic Open Mike—

Under the category of "Signs That It's the Future," it is now possible for humans to complain that a car gets "only" 47 miles per gallon (5l/100km). Which made my small old-fashioned mind do a shock-jump.

I have a whole bunch of big purchases coming due, and I've been investigating how best to negotiate them. For one thing, the people who renovated this house didn't see fit to replace the furnace, air conditioner, or roof—I wish they had done all three—so those are going to fall in on me soon (not literally in the case of the roof, I hope). I just learned that my furnace and air conditioner are coming up on 30 years old! That's not good. Meanwhile, faithful chariot is at 11 years and 147,000 miles. I don't need a new car yet, or a new-to-me car—financial guru Dave Ramsey says no one should buy a new car unless and until they have a net worth of $1 million or more, and I already have a used car that I like—but I figured I'd better get started getting the lay of the land. So I've been watching a few videos. And I took a few test drives.

In one video, someone was complaining that they only get 47 MPG in a '25 Honda Civic Hybrid.

Well, I got my driver's license way back in the 1970s....

My father's 4th-gen (1971–1976) Buick Electra 225 could get below 10 MPG. That's 10 as in TEN. Thirteen was good. I never saw 16 when I drove it. Granted I never took long highway trips.

And not only that. My father's friend would give me the keys to his Porsche 911 Targa whenever they went on vacation. I did their yardwork. The guy's wife got the car for him for his birthday. I was 16! Damn near killed myself in that evil Porsche, which was wickedly tail-happy. You had to power through curves as if your life depended on it, because it did. Lay off the gas mid-curve and you were gonna get dizzy right quick, because the car would snap off a few high-G 360-degree spins. I speak from experience. When it happened I thought my heart was going to thump right out of my body through my mouth.

Scarred by youthful experience, I have never coveted Porsches!

However, there's this. In 1972–73, the Porsche 911 got a new, larger engine (the 2.4L, which despite its designation was 2.3 liters) and a beefed-up transmission derived from the one in the 908 race car. That vintage of 911 was called the E-series. The point I am trying to get to here is that the 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid has a significantly lower 0–60 time than that 1973 Porsche 911E (6.2 sec. vs. 7.5 sec., 1.3 seconds faster).

Just sayin'. For some more perspective.

AI Overview says that Porsche got 15–18 MPG. 

Our Volvo 145 station wagon daily driver back then, nominally my mother's car except that I happily did all her driving chores for her, had a 0–60 time of 13 seconds, and that was not considered slow for a family car at the time. The Honda Accord automatic my mother got in 1981 (the Accord's fourth model year in the U.S.) went from 0–60 in 13.1 seconds. My brother Scott and I dubbed it "Phred" and put a lot of miles on it. We remained a Honda family for some time thereafter. At least, my mother's side of our family did, although she briefly had a Peugeot 604 that my brother Charlie wrecked. My father had a Gremlin, an AMC Eagle, and a Checker among other quirky choices. He marched to the beat, as they say. You know the cliché.

Duke of Oil*
Another thing I just learned: oil change intervals are a hot topic online, much discussed and disputed. It turns out that by recommending long intervals, car manufacturers reap a side benefit in terms of carbon credits or something. So if you see a manufacturer-recommended interval of more than maybe 9,000 miles at the outside, it only means they're being nefarious scoundrels and lying to you. Next, the interval depends on the kind of driving you do—something I never knew. Lots of lazy highway miles and you can change the oil as infrequently as every 7,500 miles. Starts-and-stops as well as idling is harder on an IC engine, so if you do a lot of that you should use the classical recommendation to change the oil every 3,000 miles. Various people make various compromises to be safe but also economical: whether 4,000, 5,000, or 6,000 mile intervals is best is a subject hotly debated.

And, full synthetic motor oil and high-quality oil filters are best. Some of you already knew all this and more, some of you didn't. I didn't. Thought I'd pass it along. So there's that then.

Perfect car but with an Achilles' Heel
The 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid is the perfect car. The ride is wonderful, the steering smooth and precise (steering, above all else, sets the personality of a car), and as a hybrid it's nicely responsive to the throttle since the slower speeds are powered by the electric motor(s). And Sarah 'n' Tuned (now she's a hybrid for ya—[example]—supermodel looks coupled with the wrenching skills of a veteran grease monkey) says she got nearly 60 MPG over a 100-mile test period. Yes, as a hybrid it does have a non-manual transmission, but here we are: it is the future, after all, and we have to live in it. The interior is sumptuous and high quality (much better than Corolla or even Camry, although Toyotas have stronger warranty coverage and it has to come from somewhere).

And it fits me just right...with one major problem. The center stack jabs me in the right knee in just the wrong spot. All three of Honda's sedans that I might be interested in do the same: Civic, Accord, and Acura Integra. It set me to wondering if I could get some hot-rodder around here (I go to all the local shows, where I meet those guys) to rig up a flat pad that projects further out and meets my leg further down. But that's academic, as I do not have a net worth of $1 million.

However if you are thinking of a Honda sedan, go sit in one before you get too far down the rabbit hole. Honda made a stupid mistake with that center stack, at least for some people.

To the dogs
The Dogs Baker's Dozen has proven to be the toughest one yet. There were more than 200 submissions, and two of the best ones came in too late (one was Chris Skarbon's, which I used in the Love of Dogs post). And as many as 90% of them concern subjects deeply personal to the person who sent it. How can I resist anyone's beloved dog, especially the ones now in the Great Dog Park in the clouds, where they happily congregate together? How can I get past my emotions, having recently had Butters ripped from my arms by death? How can I resist the adorable steeliness of the recently departed and deeply mourned Spike, for example, beloved of Nick and Christine? (He came to them with that name, and they didn't care for it, but I love it. Perfect name for a super-cute little tough guy if you ask me.) But I already had a head-and-shoulders dog portrait, Charlie Dunton's. I'll cheat just a little more:

Spike

Nick says, "This is one of my few pictures of Spike that convey the utter and effortless self-assurance of this 12-1/2-pound tyrant."

As an aside, I watched Nick, a good friend, search for years to find just the right outlet for his artistic creativity apart from photography, including a stint during which he attempted to learn to play classical piano. He finally landed: it's pottery. Once he found it he matured in the medium by leaps and bounds. I seriously and sincerely love his work, in which controlled and simple forms juxtapose against complex and free glazes which accept serendipity. The contrast really hits the spot for me, and I visit his work frequently, so I won't miss new stuff, yes, but mainly for pleasure if I'm honest. Some of it might be for sale—ask him. He doesn't do it for the money. Either way, I recommend a visit! There are more links at the link.

But I digress.

Over repeated passes I narrowed down the 200+ Dog picture submissions to only 48 selects, which didn't help very much. Then, I expected more time to help, which it didn't, this time. The truth is that I could make four portfolios of 13 pictures each, in each of four areas: dog portraits, like the one of Spike above; domestic scenes; dogs in action; and environments with dogs in them, not necessarily featured or rendered large. Merging all four broad areas into one set is not going to be as cohesive as any of those four would have been, but I reconciled to that, ginned up my fortitude, and forged ahead. I continue to think the "Yellow" Baker's Dozen is still the most coherent. 

I'll keep plugging. It should be the next thing you see here. (Mike! Don't make promises!)

Cheers, in the non-alcoholic sense,

Mike

*The name of an oil-change place in West Chicagoland near where my brother lives.

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

Featured Comments from:

JimR 'Longviewer': "I remember oil changes. I definitely don't miss them and won't argue about them. My Niro EV (55k) has like-new brake pads thanks to regenerative slowing, though it is now on its second set of tires. Fine driving."

Mike replies: I would love to have an EV. The luxury of having your own private "gas station" in your own garage sounds so appealing. I already have a 50-amp panel in the garage suitable for Level 2 charging. I'd also love to have solar panels on the roof of the garage to charge the car, and never pay for gas. It's all do-able; just not yet. 

Andreas: "In the UK, oil changes are generally at yearly intervals which equates to about 10,000 miles, give or take a couple of thousand each way. So the frequency of oil changes in the US seems absurdly high, especially given that engines can run for well over 200,000 miles when serviced at the 'UK frequency.' I wonder what the situation is in other parts of the world under non-extreme usage or environmental conditions?"

Robert Roaldi: "It would be useful to keep track of an engine's hours of operation, but miles is not a bad proxy. And yes, different operating conditions warrant different oil change intervals; stands to reason. Leaving oil in there for a long time might not make any sense unless you're changing the oil filters a few times in between oil changes. Synthetic oil can last a long time but if the filter is going to bypass because it's clogged, that's not a good thing. I've known people to leave synthetic oil in for a long time, 25,000 km or so, without it breaking down (as judged by chemical analysis) but that's only recommended if you're changing the filter every 5,000 km. Trouble is, that only works if you do it yourself. Might be difficult to find a commercial lube shop that will do that.

"As for the high cost of body work [see John Camp's comment in the full Comment Section —Ed.], yup, that's real. And that was true before they put all those gizmos into the bumpers and other bits that get hit. Doesn't help that parking lots are filled with oversized vehicles now; perfect storm you might say. Lots of people miss passenger trains now. I used to like cars and was involved in amateur motorsports for years. Now I hate everything about our car-based environment. It seems like freedom at first glance, but when there is no alternative, it's a prison."

Updates

New modules: Our friend Michael from DxO writes to tell us about the latest release of DxO's Optics Modules, which power the raw conversion process within DxO's software. This month's cameras and lens updates include:

Cameras:

• Canon EOS R50 V
• Nikon Z5 II

Lenses:

• Canon RF-S 14–30mm ƒ/4–6.3 IS STM PZ
• Leica Summilux-M 50mm ƒ/1.4
• Nikon Nikkor Z 35mm ƒ/1.2 S
• Sigma 16mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN C (Canon RF-S)
• Sigma 23mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN C (Canon RF-S)
• Sigma 28–105mm ƒ/2.8 DG DN A (L-mount)
• Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN C (016) (Canon RF-S)
• Sigma 56mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN C (018) (Canon RF-S)
• Zeiss Otus 50mm ƒ/1.4 RF
• Zeiss Otus 50mm ƒ/1.4 Z

Specific: Thanks again for all the kind comments about Butters. I was in an emotional state on Sunday, and every comment and shared experience had heightened meaning to me. I got comfort from hearing from so many people. I was feeling very alone. All day I found myself looking at the phone in situations I normally wouldn't have, hoping that one more kind comment had come my way.  My cousin Liz said something eloquent and true: talking about the stillness in the house after a beloved pet has passed, she said, "It's a very specific silence." So true.

Ut wasn't him: In a controversy that supposedly "divided the photojournalism community" (even that claim would need validation, in my jaded view), World Press Photo at least temporarily suspended Nick Ut's credit for the photo titled "The Terror of War," informally known as Napalm Girl, after a film called The Stringer floated the theory that Nick Ut wasn't actually the photographer who took the picture. After a year-long investigation, the AP announced that there wasn't definitive proof that Nick Ut took the photo, but there wasn't definitive proof that anyone else took the photo either, and that AP would reinstate Nick's credit.

This kind of thing pops up from time to time. Mostly, it amounts to sketchy little people seeking attention for themselves. Sometimes, however, it reveals the truth, as when an 18th-century picture of a man who looks just like Nicholas Cage led to the conclusion that Nicholas Cage must be a vampire and is actually undead. I mean, of course he is—how else would he have gotten parts in all those movies? We've heard all sorts of things over the years—Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays, Robert Capa was scared on D-Day and blew the assignment (never mind the fact that the photos from D-Day he did take are among the most iconic war photos in history), a box of negatives discovered in the trash are by Ansel Adams and worth millions (despite the fact that negatives aren't actually worth that much to the collector market), such-and-such a picture was faked, such-and-such a caption was a lie. There's always someone who invented something famous before the person who's famous for it did. Etc., etc. One blanket comment: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Sleep experiment: I apparently like to experiment on myself. I started the practice of biphasic sleep (sleeping in two phases) three nights ago and...well, it's too soon to tell. But I'm also recovering from caring for Butters, which has fractured my sleep habits but good since last December. I've been sleep deprived for half a year. I'm assuming that this is not going to be something I'll continue, whether because I won't want to or I won't be able to I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing...writing in the middle of the night, I've gotten more work done on my books in three nights that I have in the whole of 2025 prior to this. I'll keep you posted. I do these experiments so you don't have to! 

A-flutter: The rumor sites are a-twitter—ah, I guess we can't use that word any more—a-flutter?—with the news of a new (or "new," scare quotes on) Fujifilm camera believed to be arriving tomorrow. The X-Summit is being held in Shanghai, and there's an official teaser, which is so by-rote that I'd personally feel almost ashamed to get excited by it. So I didn't. But none of that should be held against the camera, which might or might not be something good. Or great.

By the way, yes, I know about the half. I'm half interested, and half mean to write about it, if I weren't half thinking it'd be a waste of time...I'll stop now. Stay tuned to internetti tomorrow.

Pen-tell: I got obsessed with cheap pens recently, clearly in a neurotic attempt to distract myself from my worries about Butters. I've now tried about 29 of 'em. (The number is actually 30, but I'm making an attempt to underplay my rampant, blatant gearheadedness, which in this case went spinning off into pointlessness.) Of course I also quickly got into mixing and matching refills, because—well, you know me. My latest conclusion: my favorite refill is the Jetstream SXR-7 in blue (the number means the point size; SXR-7 is 0.7mm, SXR-5 is 0.5mm, SXR-10 is 1.0mm, etc.). It fits a lot of pens. To pick a pen for it, go to this page: those are all the pens it fits. I really like it in the Zebra Biotube, which comes in blue transparent, blue-green transparent, red transparent, and clear. I like it for a very specific reason, namely that the grip extends farther down the tip, which suits the way I hold a pen. The refill also fits the sturdy Pilot G-2, pretty much any Pentel (in which it feels very nice), and...well, all those others. Someday I will do a ranking of all 30 cheap pens, from the ones I like least to the ones I like best.

But not for a while. You can only take so much of my nonsense, and I know that.

Last word: You'll notice that these items have alternated between photo-related and not. Last word goes to photo-related. This via my friend Jay:

Yikes! 

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "I've been very interested in the Nick Ut controversy and had an internet exchange about it with David Burnett, who was on the scene at the time and believes that Ut took the photo. You are precisely correct with 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,' and in my opinion, the 'evidence' in this case is a mish-mash of claims and speculation by people who stand to benefit, and some of those claims are fairly outlandish. And one thing I've never seen discussed: there's no doubt that Ut was there, with a camera, is a professional photographer and that he ran toward the running girl and was taking photos. We know that's all true, for sure, so if some other guy claims the photo is his, what happened to Ut's photos, which should have been virtually identical?"

Richard Alton: "There's a very interesting podcast covering the Nick Ut controversy, by Grant Scott at United Nations of Photography. Have a listen if you're curious."

Stan B.: "The Nick Ut issue has gone back and forth in my head like the proverbial ping-pong ball. It's always good to ask questions, but...if they didn't raise the question of authorship when the one person who could have settled it was alive—I'm referring to Horst Fass (died 2012), the AP's chief Photo Editor at the time, who was directly involved with Ut and his iconic image—don't be clamoring for a definitive reversal without new and definitive evidence. It's blatantly unfair to all involved!"

Sale Update

Ctein reports that he is all caught up on notifications this morning for orders placed since Friday's start of sale through Sunday (yesterday). If you tried to order and have not received an email from him, please try him again, leave a comment, or contact me.

Here's the sale announcement with ordering instructions and here's the page with the images, now with 98% accurate updates on what is sold out and how many prints are left as of end of day Sunday.

And yes, I am working on a new post on a different subject! This has been quite a remarkable weekend here—this sale truly blew past our most hopeful expectations (it might even resuscitate our print offers in general, which I had thought were mostly over)—but "the show must go on" for everyone else. Coming soon.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Red Letter Day

We had a fantastic first day of the sale yesterday—well beyond our highest expectations. More than 15 photographs that were available yesterday are now sold out. And that's just the half of it. Overall, it was a red-letter day—in neon, with fireworks and a marching band playing "The White Rose March" by John Philip Sousa. Ctein has his work cut out for him trying to keep up. Note: He's swamped and behind with logging orders, so confirmation emails might be later than first promised. Please don't worry if this is the case for you! A couple of people who ordered multiple prints aren't getting everything they wanted, but most customers will.

Opportunities like this to own a dye transfer print for a reasonable amount of money truly are dwindling down to nothing. I heard a rumor that William Eggleston's printmaker recently (end of '24, thereabouts?) finally ran out of dye materials. Not sure if that's true. Kodak discontinued the materials in 1994, but Ctein and others stockpiled large amounts before the end. Ctein remortgaged his house in the '90s to buy dye transfer paper and matrix film.

If you've never seen Michael Reichmann's video of Ctein demonstrating and explaining how to make a dye transfer print, it's fascinating, and well worth watching.

Red Spatter Cone, Mauna Ulu, Hawaii, 2000

These are among the photographers whose work I have seen as dye transfers: Helen Levitt, Charles Cramer, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Eliot Porter, Jim Marshall, of course Ctein (I saw his entire portfolio back when it had 104 pictures in it), and Phil Davis. Phil, who was a friend I knew well, was the de facto Technical Editor* of Photo Techniques magazine during my tenure there. He used to be an advertising photographer for Detroit in the 1950s and '60 and had some gloriously "period" portraits of then-new cars—often with models, often on location—that were printed as dyes for reproduction. I recall seeing a rare Paul Caponigro color picture at the Corcoran in the '80s that was a dye. (I often remember specific pictures from exhibitions and where they were in the galleries.) I'm sure I've seen other dyes as part of mixed shows hither and yon over many years. I don't see many exhibits any more but, for instance, when I lived in D.C. in the '80s I would make a regular monthly circuit of all the galleries and museums, along with sporadic trips to NYC on the train to make a circuit of selected galleries and museums there. On one jam-packed day trip to NYC we saw photographs in 25 different locations. Of course you are going to be able to continue buying dye transfer prints of photographs by famous photographers such as Helen Levitt on the secondary market, but not for bargain prices of course.

I won't ramble (yeah, right!), but a great big engraved thank-you note to everyone who has ordered a Ctein print. May you receive what you want—in all things, not just prints.

Mike

*He refused to take the title formally because he said he didn't want to be responsible for the errors and opinions of other experts, of whom, in certain cases, he took a dim view. It's common for professional jealousy to rear its head among duelling experts, too, and Phil was understandably upset when other authors and experts built on his work and claimed it as their own, which happened a couple of times. He would not have wanted to vet those people's work in the magazine. Let's call that...an understatement; yeah, that's it.

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

Featured Comments from:

William Giokas: "I was amazed how much labor Ctein puts into his work. A true master printer!"

Can a Little Obsessiveness Be Useful?

[Ed note: This post relates to photography, I promise. It is not about what it seems to be about at the beginning! As you must often do on TOP, hang in there.]

For some strange reason I suddenly seem to own about 17 more cheap ballpoint pens than I did a week ago. How did that happen? Many are duplicates, because you're forced by the packaging to buy two, three, five, or a dozen pens in order to try just one. It's been interesting. I'm coming around to liking gel pens more and more, and I made at least one self-discovery: with the new instant-drying inks, I can write with the heel of my hand resting on the paper and thus on the desk as I write, without smudging the ink on what I've just written. All my life I've written with just the knuckle of my pinkie on the paper and the rest of my hand suspended above it, to avoid smudges. (I'm a leftie.) I wish I could say that this new discovery instantly improved my handwriting, but it did not; instead, it immediately gave me cramps due to the new and unfamiliar position of my hand.

But enough about pens. I'm going to admit here that I think I suffer from mild obsessiveness—and that's the subject here. [CORRECTION: At the suggestion of Aaron in the Comments, I'm going to change some of the instances of "obsession" in this article to "fixation"—"a strong, perhaps excessive, interest in something, not necessarily negative."] This pen thing is not OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) despite the everyday currency of that expression. I used to think I had OCD, but then I read a book about real OCD, and—oh my, do I ever not have it. Saying you have OCD when you're temporarily perseverating or fixating on an interest is like saying "I'm starving" when you're a little peckish or "I'm so depressed" when you're feeling a bit on the low side. No, no, and no. In common usage, used casually and non-technically, these are intensifiers. Intensifiers, like the way we have a hundred exaggerated ways to say "good," are an all-too-human tendency in speech—emphasis by overstatement. A recently popular intensifier for "good" in American English is "insane." I have a general rule not to amplify ordinary "dislike" into "hate"—a common intensifier—but I have to say, I hate that one.

But yeah, a little fixated. I'd say I'm going to quit buying and trying pens, but maybe after the six that are en route as I write this get here. Heh!

Settle down, Mike.

Here's the thing, though: I've long been aware that I've put my obsessiveness, or whatever you want to call it—"excessive focus"? "Unhealthy preoccupation"?—to good use. For instance: I never could have kept up my interest in photography for so long if it were just a casual, superficial source of interest and pleasure. And I never would have been able to write a more-or-less daily blog for twenty years if I hadn't been more than a little bit excessively focused or unhealthily preoccupied.

For instance, I re-wrote Tuesday's post on Wednesday morning, adding several hundred new words and an illustration. Why? Because it's the way I am. And in that post, I mentioned that Richard Nickel died documenting Chicago buildings that were being torn down (I have not one but two magnificent books of his I never look at—who can stop at one?—both notated by Amazon as "Purchased Jan 2011"). And Jamie Livingston's PAD project was only ended by his death. How could they possibly have kept those activities going if they weren't in some sense obsessions? Sometimes, I think I see signs, in others, that fixations really are rising to the level of OCD. I could name two examples I know of—one a stereo guru and one a coffee nut—but it would risk insulting real people in public and I'm unwilling to do that.

Cavemen and -women
I've always thought that subject specialization is an innate instinct of the mind, because the primordial tribe in the ancestral environment, ten thousand years ago, needed specialists. One guy is great at chipping rocks into sharp edges; he makes the tools. A woman knows all about turning animal hides into robes. Someone else teaches the children. There's the medicine man, who plays the placebo effect for all it's worth and knows how to comfort the sick and dying. Another guy is the best tracker. Another has a knack for leadership; another is strong, competitive, and a psychopath, and feels no fear in battle nor much compunction about killing the group's enemies. (The Sioux in their natural state had separate chiefs for peacetime and wartime. The UK did that in WWII, letting Churchill be their war leader but booting him out as soon as the war was over.) All these tribal specialists are needed. In an evolutionary-biological sense, that's why modern society has grown-up men who are fixated on NFL football or the Marvel Universe, chefs, Jay Leno, the guy who made the biggest ball of string, serial killers, and a guy I met when I worked for Model Railroader who had turned the whole second floor of his house into a giant HO train layout and organized every aspect of his life around model railroading. (When she came to the door, his cheery wife—clearly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome—was wearing an engineer's hat and striped denim overalls like an old-timey engineer. Instead of "come in," she opened the door wide and said, "all aboard!")

And what of my interest in photography? Not truly obsessive, I suppose, by the clinical definitions. But it's also not normal or balanced in the usual sense. I've been into it for most of my life. I've "harnessed" my naturally fixating or obsessive nature in the service of that interest and involvement, you might say, and put it to good use. If you can turn it to good use, a little obsession helps. It helps you get the work done.

The biggest change in my involvement with photography that's happened over the past handful of years is that this longtime preoccupation or fixation has begun to subside. More and more sub-topics bore me now. It's harder to get excited; I've seen it all before. Over the years I've witnessed several friends and acquaintances "emerge" from formerly vigorous fixations. I knew an audio equipment importer once, for example, who had followed his audiophilia to extreme lengths. He eventually simply tired of it all. He stopped chasing perfection, de-accessioned everything except a small but high-quality system that was not very expensive by his standards, and settled down to listening to music.

The moving ballpoint, having writ, moves on
As for the cheap ballpoints, well...they're all just pens. Yes, I'm "looking into it" at the moment—demystifying the subject, to use Oren Grad's term. I did the same thing with quartz watches a few years back, and came away with one watch I really like and wear every day. I did the same thing with shaving a while back, and settled on a simple routine that satisfies me. I did it with keyboards, trying your patience in the process, and ended up coming back around to the current version of what I've always used. (I had a wiring problem—I couldn't rewire my mind and my hand-eye co-ordination.) I'll do the same thing with ballpoints I'm sure. I'll learn about it for a while, settle on one or two products I like best, and that will be that. That's not obsession even in the colloquial sense. It's just "buying-and-trying"—a somewhat more involved version of shopping.

I'll leave it behind. I'll bet money that if you ask me a year from now, months and months will have gone by without me buying a single new pen. It's not going to remain an interest.

Not that there's anything wrong with it if it did. To each their own. But for me, these little shopping interests come and go; they're fun, because I like learning, and I like trying things for myself. Obsession, however—that's on another level altogether.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Jeff Sprang: "Interesting take on obsession. My experience with a model railroader's wife was completely different. On assignment to cover the guy who had converted his entire basement into a model railroad layout, I was greeted at the door of the home by his spouse who waved towards the basement door with a curt 'he's down there' and went back to reading her romance novel. Did another photo story on a guy who restored old Silver King tractors. His very nice ranch style house had been taken over completely by parts and tools. He cheerily told me that his wife with the kids had left him over it, like that was a good thing—to him it apparently was."

Rob de Loe: "There's a nice intersection between this post about obsessions, and your previous post that focused a lot on projects. To do a big project well, I think you have to be a bit obsessed because you may need to work at it beyond the point of common sense. I know when I've reached that stage when I'm obsessing about things that I know with certainty that nobody else will notice or care about. As a side note, my answer to the question someone asked, 'How do you know when the project is done?' is, "Big projects are never finished—only abandoned.'"

MikeR: "I'm glad you wrote that about OCD. My firsthand experience with true OCD came from living with it, embodied by my late first wife. It is a sad and horrifying thing to witness, as though a person has been possessed. Not even remotely funny, the way it's been depicted in Monk and As Good As It Gets. And by the way, I've seen a Venn diagram that illustrates an overlap among OCD, ADHD, and Autism. I think obsession is too strong a word for what you describe. But, it's more than curious, or interested. Open to suggestions."

Mike replies: I modified the post slightly to include the word "fixation." I wonder if that serves a little better.

Tony: "Sometimes obsessiveness can definitely be useful in photography; there’s a bunch of prints I have lying around that couldn’t have been possible without me going all-in on learning the ins, outs, and quirks of my system of choice. However, my current obsession is flash bulbs—a particularly expensive and insane thing to be diving into in the 2020s—and while I’ve had some successes that couldn’t really have been done with electronic flash, the jury is still out whether this obsession is going to be worth the hours of research and testing I’ve already sunk into it!"

Stuart Hamilton: "The late Kurt Stier, a brotherly friend for 60 years and a professional photographer through the annual reports years, worked in his early photo career as an assistant and darkroom printer for Irving Penn. He once told me, quoting Penn, that nothing great is ever achieved without obsession."

Sean: "People who say they're a little bit OCD will be cured by reading David Adam's The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought."

Moose:

"Pens In Mug (mug by high school art student.)"

David Comdico: "Scorsese has said, paraphrasing a bit, that Art is making other people care about your obsessions."

David Dyer-Bennet: "The study of psychology seems to have identified a lot of things that everybody does to some degree, which if done to excess can be problems. Fixations and ADD come to mind. Even bipolar disorder is a cycling between exaggerations of normal states, rather than something entirely unique. We talk about autistic people as being on a spectrum, and part of the deal is that neurotypical people are at one end of that spectrum (or towards one end; there's variety among the typical). The clinical definitions nearly all include a requirement that it interfere with functioning (caring for yourself, holding a job, maintaining relationships are all part of 'functioning'). The difference between 'focus on your professional work' and a 'fixation' is...kind of subjective, really. Not at all sure that successful professionals can reliably turn that focus on and off on demand.

"At least to some extent, we all make lemonade with the hand we have been dealt. The hands differ, and what society rewards is somewhat arbitrary, and there's also a lot of luck involved."

Eric Brody: "As a physician who spent many years training young physicians, I found that the best had a bit of obsessiveness or whatever you choose to call it; the worst were in a word, cavalier. Those who would meticulously review a chart and find what others had missed were my heroes and in my other role as a recruiter for my medical group, I sought them out and invariably they were successful. This is true so long as they also had the most important characteristic of a great physician: empathy."

Q & A on 'The Wrong Camera'

Today I thought I'd address a few of the questions and comments about "The Wrong Camera" posts, Parts I and II.

John: "I have issues with going for some kind of consistency. I shoot many different things and I want to keep shooting many different things. I’m not a pro. Why then do I always hear that I need to be consistent? Why can’t the only consistency be that I took the picture?"

Mike replies: This is important, so it bears repeating every time it comes up: do whatever you want. You own your photography; you decide. My position is that as long as people aren't being evil or hurting anybody, anything goes. My only suggestion, and a suggestion is all it is, is that you might want to make your choices consciously and thoughtfully. But even that's up to you.

J. Paul Thomas: "Your comments on 'the wrong camera' were most interesting. I am of the old school and greatly prefer to take my photos with a 'real' camera. However I do not always have it with me as I do my iPhone. Being an eternal optimist I hope every picture I take will be worthy of framing and hanging on the wall. My question may be impossible to answer, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on just how large a photo taken one of today’s iPhones can be enlarged. I realize that many factors can influence the answer, but I am interested in an idea of the upper practical limits."

Mike replies: The answer is a moving target, for many reasons. For instance, which phone? Then: for what usage? What's your standard for image quality? How far away will the print be viewed? (They've made billboards featuring iPhone photos.) How much post-processing expertise do you have? How good are you at printing? Really the only way is to set your own standard: experiment with your equipment and materials, your skills, and your sense of what's good enough (for you!) and what's not. With my first DSLR (the Konica-Minolta 7D of sainted memory) and first pigment digital printer (the notorious HP B9180, which not only discouraged me from continuing to learn inkjet printing but also drove HP out of that segment of the printer market), my standard was that I'd print up to about 15 inches in the long dimension and that was it. But I have a print made from that camera on my wall to this day that is 32 inches wide (sorry about the rollover text, I didn't notice it until too late and I'm not going back to fix it). It was made by an expert printer, Paul Butzi, who recognized that it would work at that size because only a very small portion of it (surrounding the droplets of water in the reflection area in the center of the image) were, or needed to be, sharp.

Nick: "Re your unfinished projects, is there another piece here about how to know when a project is finished? Or if not finished, just enough? So you have figured out a style and method of working and getting some good results. Is 12 excellent images a finished project? Since it was certainly finished as a time period of that work. Or are you thinking of how many images you would need to make it a book? Twelve images could certainly be enough for say a group show...but it doesn't count as finished unless it's a solo show or a complete book? Maybe having a target at the start would help people motivate to achieving that number?"

Mike replies: A question for the ages! It's really part and parcel of the art. Method is something not talked about enough, here or anywhere else. In art school, we were told there is no real answer, but maybe 40–60 pictures is a good body of work. But then, William Eggleston considered that his "Democratic Forest" project might end up being 10,000 images, and Jack MacDonough took a picture of a magnificent oak tree from the same vantage point in all four seasons, and the set has sold many times and earned him a ton. Is that a piece or a project? I think the case can be made that it was a four-picture project. Some photographers move decisively from one project to the next, with hard boundaries between them, and others could be said to be pursuing one project for their entire lifetimes—this might be especially true of portraitists, like Yousuf Karsh, Jane Bown, or Arnold Newman. Some photographers photograph many instances of the same idea, like the Bechers and their industrial structures or Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes series, while others have big, sprawling bodies of work with many different kinds of pictures included that they attempt to bring under one big umbrella, like Weegee's Naked City or Steve McCurry's multipartite portrait of Asia, Asian cultures, and Asian peoples. Some demarcate projects in terms of distinctive sets of equipment and materials; some use periods of time. A few use intervals of time, like PAD or PAW projects (a picture a day or a picture a week), all the way up to Jamie's Livingston's Some Photos of That Day, for which he took one Polaroid every day for eighteen years until he passed away. Obviously, a lot of photographers, artists and amateurs alike, use place—Paula Chamlee's High Plains Farm work, or Joel Meyerowitz's St. Louis and the Arch, or an enthusiast's pictures from an African Safari or a hiking trip in the Arizona mountains. Some are constrained by the availability of the subject—Richard Nickel was driven to photograph magnificent Chicago buildings that were being torn down, meaning he had to work as quickly as he could and settle for less than perfect portraits of old buildings—the project killed him—and Larry Sultan's elegant documentation of his parents after he was a adult. Still others consider the "energy" of a project—how long do they stay interested? When do they start to get bored? I would say for most people that they can't force it. If something doesn't have enough energy to propel itself along naturally, you're not going to get very far on willpower alone. Other things just aren't very good ideas, like a dreadful book I saw once called Sunflowers that was just an endless succession of boring snapshots of, you guessed it, sunflowers. And how conscious is it? Maybe you're just going along doing what you like, like Saul Leiter, and the commonality between the photos is just in the distinctive way you see the world. Others are doing jobs, but doing it in their own distinctive way, like Irving Penn's fashion and professional work, which managed to show his particular inimitable style. The list goes on. The variations, and how you can best match up ideas to your own skills, commitment, aptitudes, and opportunities, is all part of the fun.

John gillooly: "Mike, really enjoyed this one. Do you think that creative outlets of today, like Instagram and other social media platforms, allow for a more rapid completion of projects?

"When I started using Instagram several years ago, the medium sort of gave me some incentive to edit, finish and present small bodies of work. Many times that simply means me making an edit of my favorite 30 images after a PGA event or other work assignment. But knowing I had that outlet absolutely reinvigorated my photography as it gave me a readily available presentation place. As you mentioned in this post, before 'social' platforms, you were sort of limited to 'show' and 'book' which required an entirely different level of completion."

Mike replies: I have no idea what the answer to your first question is, except...they ought to. But, knowing that it invigorated your photography pleased me to hear, and seems like a positive indicator! It raised my spirits the day I read it.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Nick: "Mike, thanks so much for answering my question in depth! And I'm thrilled and not at all surprised to hear that the answer to 'how long is a project?' is 'it depends'! I see that just means the project is done when you say it's done, whether that is 1 picture or 10,000, or upon your death. And I was wondering whether you could actually consider your 12 good portraits to be a finished project, since 12 is a decent number for excellent images—but clearly it is not finished if you just didn't feel like you'd finished the work! Very interesting, thanks."

Richard Alan Fox: "This post takes me back fifty one years to San Francisco, 1974 (according to my artist resume). I enrolled in a photography class at the University of California extension in San Francisco. Larry Sultan was the instructor. This was his first class. I was photographing with Polaroid positive negative film, my subject was my face; some images were blurred, others grotesque in the manner of 'film noir.' Larry arranged for me to exhibit the work at the school's gallery. This was my first photo show. I printed 11x14 inch prints from the negatives and mounted a grid of the Polaroid Positives on the wall. The invitations for the show were contact printed post cards. That was a beginning for both of us, different paths, different lives. Sadly he passed in 2009. Thank you for mentioning him; may his memory be for a blessing."

Charles Rozier: "Sylvia Plachy used quite a few different formats—I remember her saying that while she was very strict with her private life, she was quite promiscuous with her cameras."

Dogs!

I.

The next "Baker's Dozen" theme will be "Dogs." So be thinking of that. The way our Baker's Dozen feature works is that readers submit pictures on a theme, from which Yr. Hmbl. Editor builds a small portfolio of a dozen pictures, with an extra one for good measure. These are usually fun. Especially for, um, Yr. Hmbl. Ed., because each morning I get to wake up to your pictures in my inbox.

Please don't submit anything until the formal "Call for Work," which I'll probably have ready tomorrow. (And now that I've said that, it will probably be Thursday.) I've gotten behind on comments again and need to catch up today.

II.

I went out photographing yesterday instead of working like I should. I couldn't resist. It was an absolutely gorgeous spring day: crisp, clean, fragrant air; 70°F (21°C); unusually bright sun and unusually deep blue sky; not a cloud anywhere; and windy. This is one of the best times of the year here, the week when the dandelions are yellow. My flowering trees are in full bloom. I cut the grass (well, some of it) for the first time yesterday and did yardwork for an hour, and enjoyed the day and the weather. All over, the trees are budding out, everything's turning green, and growing things are growing so fast it seems like you see them change in real time. The robins are definitely around—I've seen two pairs mating—but I only have one nesting female so far, in an old nest on a gutter. They seem to be staying away from the new birdhouses, called shelves, that I had made for them this year. It's quite possible they won't move into those until next year—this year they're too new, and robins seem to like nesting sites that are familiar.

One of the new robin shelves, made of cherry, no less. The old nest was on the light fixture—I called it "the high rise," because they had added more to it year on year until they barely had room to fly in under the eaves.

III.

Esther's sister contacted me in the Comments yesterday, saying, "Esther is trying to reach you!" I had inadvertently given Esther a card without my phone number on it. My new shirt is done already. Also, at the urging of a reader who used to work there, I ordered a shirt from L.L. Bean. I will of course find the perfect shirt and then lose a lot of weight so that none of the new shirts fit. That's the way of the Universe. But I'd take the weight loss. I need to get back to my WFPB diet.

IV.

...Speaking of which, I found all my notes from my WFPB experiment. I did two things: stuck to a strict WFPB diet, and practiced "intermittent fasting," also called "time-restricted eating," whereby I didn't eat after 3:00 p.m. every day. That took about three weeks to get used to. I generally ate two meals a day with a big salad in the middle. The day wasn't really long enough for three meals, because I often wasn't hungry when I woke up and didn't eat breakfast until late. I weighed myself twice a day, morning and evening, because, in a scientific trial reported by Dr. Gregor in his book, that's what the people who lost the most weight did. I meant to stick to the eating plan for six full weeks, but ended up staying on it for 18 months. My starting weight kinda depends on what I pick as a starting date, because I had been on a half-assed WFPB diet for a while at the time the strict trial started, but overall I lost about 60 lbs. (~4.3 stone), getting down to 194 lbs. 

Unfortunately then my brother died, I got depressed, and I went off the eating plan. My situation from there has been complicated by heart disease; I was in heart failure for the last five months of 2023 and got my pacemaker in January of 2024. Since then I've been as high as 269 lbs., which is not good for me or my heart, not to mention being perilously close to my all-time lifetime high of 273. I think it has something to do with the fact that my brother's BMI was around 14.4 when he died. He looked like a concentration camp victim or a prisoner from Andersonville, and he couldn't put on weight. But I can't psychoanalyze myself. Let's just say I'm working on getting back to a better lifestyle. My doctor thinks I'm actually an excellent candidate to be on semaglutide (Ozempic) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro) or something similar, for several reasons, but I can't afford it. It's been surprisingly difficult to simply get back to the plan I was on for those 18 months. I've tried multiple times, and keep failing. Very similar, actually, to when I was quitting drinking or smoking. Both of those things were a process that took a long period of many failures before I finally succeeded.

V.

To allow me to attend the Conference last weekend, I took Butters to Nancy's kennel on the hill. Nancy is nearing 80, but she's a dynamo—a year or two ago she went to Alaska and lived in the bush so she could learn to drive dogsleds. She came home with an adopted sled dog named Quartz to add to her own dog pack. She's tiny, has white hair she dyes purple or a rich, bright blue, and her beautiful house has the best view of the Lake I've seen yet. She lets her doggie boarders stay in the house with her and Steve, who is a photographer of local repute and renown. Each time I drive up there, I seem to see all kinds of wildlife. One evening I saw a single wild turkey pecking away in a field, not one but two herds of deer, something resembling a weasel in a ditch, and at one point the road was blocked by a bunch of light-gray, goose-sized birds who didn't seem to want to let me pass. I haven't been able to identify them. Maybe Esther will know. But, as has happened multiple times before, when I repeated the drive up there yesterday with the camera, hoping for luck, I didn't see a living thing. That's that trickster Universe again.

I'll try to process my new pictures today too. I have to wait till dark for that. I just have this sense that in this batch there are going to be a lot of near misses. I don't think I was quite "on." Probably because I haven't photographed in a while. It's like your pool stroke (I cleared all 15 balls this morning in one turn)—you have to keep your hand in! And you're only as good as your most recent day.

Back soon.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

psu on Cooking (OT)

A comment from a few days ago. I don't know how valuable Pete's insight might be to cooks, but it was enlightening for me as a non-cook.

psu: "A few notes that turned into a long rumination.

"There have been a few recent cookbooks that concentrate on technique rather than recipe much like good darkroom books concentrate on technique and process rather than a rote combination of steps to take blank film to pictures.

"One such was Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat which ultimately gives in and gives you recipes for things. Another was Julia Child's last book, The Way To Cook, which is broken up into many different categories, with master techniques for each kind of food.

"For me, Chinese food has always been organized this way, which is nice because you only have to learn one 'recipe' for a wide range of dishes...which is why those Chinese takeout menus always have hundreds of dishes on them.

"I think people who like cooking and cook a lot inherently get into a state where they don't really need recipes for most things, and also have most of the ingredients they use a lot on hand and don't need to worry about the cost/waste of obtaining them just to cook one thing.

"I think the hardest thing for cooks to understand is that people who don't cook don't end up in this kind of state. And the hardest thing for people who don't cook to understand is that when people who cook say something like 'oh, that's an easy dish, you just X, Y, Z, W,' there are a lot of assumptions in there about the state of your world that the cook is making that might not be true.

"For me most recipes are too complicated and fussy because they are trying to ride a line between the enthusiasts and the not interested/beginner, and so tend to have too much information for the former group and not enough for the latter, while also giving everyone too much work to do and too many ingredients to buy. Almost everything in the NYT is this way in my experience.

"Ultimately, really, the secret to getting good at cooking is the following very unsatisfying piece of advice: you have to cook a lot. Then you'll get good at it. But that's hardly helpful for people without the interest.

"I have occasionally been guilty of unfairly making fun of people who don't like to cook for not liking to cook and for complaining about recipes. It's one life regret that I have. I should have known better.

"Also, random notes from skimming the comments: Peruvian food knows how to make quinoa delicious. Interestingly there is also a fantastic genre of Peruvian/Chinese crossover food that is incredible.

"Parboil just means to drop the thing in boiling water for a small amount of time so that it soaks a bit of the water in but doesn't actually cook. In my humble opinion vegetables taste better this way than raw or overcooked. A lot of Chinese vegetable dishes are really just lightly steamed/parboiled. That's why they are better than both raw vegetables (salad) and other vegetable dishes that cook the vegetables to death."

Thanks to Pete and the rest of our excellent Commentariat!

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

psu: "Wow. Thanks for the shout out. This humble commenter is flattered and humbled. 🙂 "

Moose: "Re 'For me most recipes are too complicated and fussy because they are trying to ride a line between the enthusiasts and the not interested/beginner'.... Also, in the case of ATK and other generalist sites, they lean toward bland, perhaps fearful of offending and losing folks with old-style 'Midwestern' tastes. I always up the garlic, aromatics, etc.

"There's something else, too. I can't speak for all of us who have been home cooks forever, but I'll bet a lot are like me. I can usually "taste" in my mind how different things will go together. During a period when I was cooking for two adults and three tween to teens. I thought much of the best I did was made up from combining leftovers. I can read a recipe and see how I may alter it to my tastes. Not much use to you, Mike, except to know that other folks have different skills, and thus different experiences."

'Bones' Part V: Spinning Your Wheels

Jeez, nobody liked my Valentine's Day story. Crickets.

I have one more point to add to the "Bones" series of posts. (Why did I give it that title? I don't know. Oh, yeah, Yorick!) It's that you should do what you can to not spin your wheels. Here are the first four articles:

Bones Part I
Bones Part II
Bones Part III
Bones Part IV

If you can manage, "by hook or by crook" as my grandmother used to say, to get a little more focused on your photography—knowing who you are and what you're really up to, what subject lights your fire and what kind of results do it to you / sock you in the gut / get you where you live, etc.—you avoid what I consider possibly the worst fate for anyone in an art-related or creative pursuit: spinning your wheels.

Life isn't too short to spin your wheels—in fact I think we need to do a fair amount of it, to explore options and gather experience to make decisions. What you want is to not keep doing it. Certainly not keep doing it forever. I remember one friend, a generation older than I am, who had four sons. His youngest son started out with a talent on the guitar and for singing, and devoted himself to the idea of a career as a famous musician. The trouble was, when I heard about him, he had been trying for twenty-plus years, he was into his forties, his hair was turning gray, he was still having a struggle getting booked at tiny local coffee houses, and he couldn't support himself. His parents worried, and all but considered him a lost cause. Talk about spinning your wheels—that poor guy was up to his hubcaps in mud.

I sometimes like to translate colloquial expressions into English, so "spinning your wheels" would be "to waste time doing things that achieve nothing" (Cambridge); "to continue trying to do something without having any success" (Longmans); "To waste one's time or energy idly or frivolously" (Free Dictionary). Curiously, we have an expression of the opposite quality that's just as figurative: being on a roll. Some artistic people spend their whole lives spinning their wheels. Compare the guy I described above to a childhood friend of mine who had been accepted at Stanford School of Business, but really wanted to be a singer-songwriter. He gave himself two years in Los Angeles, and worked as hard as could during that time to advance his music and his musical career. Having made no progress at all at the end of the two years, or not enough, off he went to Stanford. That's an example of not spinning your wheels.

Self-knowledge, direction, and having a purpose that suits your talent, n.b., says nothing about what you have to decide! I know a perfectly happy photographer who has decided that he just likes to snap pictures. He doesn't even care about looking at them. But he's clear about what he enjoys and why he does what he does. And by the way: one gadfly professional-photographer reader of ours (I won't say his name, but his initials are Kirk Tuck) pooh-pooh'd the whole idea of having to have ideas, saying, "ideas are the currency of philosophers, not photographers." I disagree, because he himself had the clearest of ideas: for many years he took pictures people were willing to pay him money for, making sure they got what they wanted for a price they were willing to pay, and had a good enough experience doing it that they'd hire him again and tell others to do so as well. That was his idea. And it's also the opposite of spinning one's wheels. It doesn't have to be the currency of philosophers to be an idea.

The second coming of David
At the risk of returning to a party I've already been kicked out of, one more story about Johnson's Flower Center. There was a guy, David, who worked in the houseplant section. He was skinny and unkempt, had a thick, frizzy black beard, unbarbered black curly hair, and a stereotypically New York attitude, or 'tude, as we might have said in those days, along with his New York accent. (New Yorkers kind of stuck out in D.C. in 1980.) Never smiled; looked down his nose at you and everybody; smarter than anyone else in any room, at least according to himself; cynical and sardonic, critical of ev-er-y-thing, definitely not afraid to crack a wicked, cutting joke about people he worked with—or even you, to your face. There might have been a hundred employees at Johnson's, and David was probably the laziest. If he was asked to do something, he would do it, but as grudgingly as if each arm and leg were as heavy as a potted ficus. Every task was beneath him. As he was quick to tell anyone who would listen, he had a Master's degree, which he was sure none of his co-workers had. (He was probably right about that.) His major activities were standing around sucking on cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling not looking humans in the eye, avoiding helping customers, scowling, and being miserable about the fact that his life in no way rose to his standards. He and I had conversations on academic topics, when the boss wasn't looking. He loved to vent his bitterness about the paucity of decent employment opportunities in his "field," but his plight, I might have suggested, was not entirely something imposed on him by an uncaring world, because his Master's degree was in "managing a student center at a large public university." Not something there was a lot of call for. There were literally more jobs available locally for master medieval-style stone-cutters and stonecarvers—the National Cathedral had not yet been completed at that time, and employed stonecarvers. I had a few cynical, sardonic cracks of my own about the wisdom of David choosing such a specific course of study in the first place. It sounded to me like a program designed by the University to get people to help at the student center without having to pay them! But I kept my own counsel. Regardless, for David, selling houseplants was slumming, a holding pattern, a matter merely of necessity, below his station, a waste of his education.

Eventually he disappeared. He had quit. Naturally, I assumed none of us would ever see him again.

Eight months later, though, who should reappear in the houseplants section but a new guy who reminded me in a curious way of David. And it was David! The very same guy. He had gained a few pounds, had a neat haircut, no beard—and, amazingly, a completely transformed attitude. His mien, his outlook, and his method of dealing with others had been transformed. He looked, sounded, and acted like a different guy: friendly, happy, eager. What in the world had happened? I had to know.

It turned out he had had an epiphany. After a period of unemployment and job searching, not to mention misery and many cigarettes, he discovered that he missed his old job at Johnson's, and that, actually, he loved working with plants. So he threw himself into learning about plants, and was in the process of enrolling in a graduate program in horticulture. He had come back to Johnson's to work until school started. He had decided to devote the rest of his life to working with plants. And he was over-the-moon happy about all this. So there he was, in the exact place he had been eight months earlier, doing exactly the same work for the exact same pay, but with an attitude that was 180° the opposite from what he'd been before. It was as vivid a spiritual transformation as Mr. Scrooge's on Christmas morning. All it took was a different perspective. Embracing rather than rejecting. Replacing surliness, hostility, and pessimism with enthusiasm and willingness. Laziness replaced by vigor. And no more smoking, even—he had quit.

Really made an impression on me. I didn't know the guy very well, but I've never forgotten this story.

So it's not what you do that counts; what's important—vitally so, I'd say, and I say it advisedly—is to be conscious, be positive, make decisions, commit—and avoid spinning your wheels for any longer than you have to.

Mike

P.S. I probably could have said all this in four well-worded sentences. But where's the fun in that?

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

Featured Comments from:

Dave: "Bragging that you have a Master's degree while you're working at a job a high schooler could do isn't exactly going to impress anyone!

"Robert Roaldi reminded me of my days at a nationally-known ice cream franchise inside a mall. During Christmas, we would have a full counter with half of the people claiming they were next. So you would go over to them and ask which of the 31 flavors they wanted and they'd say, 'I haven't decided yet.' It was these people who received the regulation size scoop on their cone. (I called that a 'tension reliever.') We generally added a bit to each scoop, since they were pretty small for the price you were paying.

"Added to the crowd of people at Christmastime was the incessant roar of the water fountain. Generally once each holiday season, one of us would take off his uniform and change into street clothes, pour a small amount of dish-washing liquid into a courtesy water cup and discreetly pour it into the fountain water. This forced the maintenance people to shut off the fountain, lest the foam run all over the floor. We received dirty looks from the maintenance guys, but no one ever caught us doing it.

"One guy was pretty quick with clever comments. We had started charging for ice and water, mostly to pay for the cups. One 'customer' wanted a large cup of ice water and was complaining about us charging for it. The clever worker said, 'The water's free and the ice is free—but what are you going to put it in?'  :>)

"If you think these doings were too extreme, well, none of us murdered anyone in a fit of rage, so it all worked out to relieve the tension every so often."

Same Price

Well, that was fun. I enjoyed running down all the many interesting comments and cogitating in passing on the matter of the camera grip. I hope you had fun wading through it all. When all the dust cleared (and we raised rather a lot of dust), Francisco Cubas and ronin, in their Featured comments, cut to the core of it: cameras before autofocus, when slow films were the norm, didn't need a right-hand grip because we weren't using our right hands to hold the camera. Pretty much every instruction book recommended supporting the camera and adjusting the focus and aperture ring with your left hand under the lens, and cocking the winding lever and releasing the shutter with the right hand. And because of the often slower shutter speeds we had to use with film, we were encouraged to have a light, gentle touch on the shutter button and no tension in our right hands. Remember all the admonitions not to "stab" at the shutter button, but to press it smoothly and gently? So of course you didn't need a right-hand handgrip, because you weren't gripping the camera with your right hand—you were supporting its weight with your left hand and trying to remain relaxed in your right hand.

It was only after AF, AE, and integral, powered film-winding took over the operational functions, and, later, when digital matured and ISOs and hence shutter speeds got much higher, that one-handed shooting became feasible and we began supporting the camera with the right hands and not worrying about moving the camera when pushing the shutter button.

I might point out, not that it really matters, that I handle my B&W Sigma in the old, two-handed way, because it's almost always set on manual focus and I use my left hand to focus. (You do have to take your left hand completely off the focus ring, because if you even touch it you get the magnified view with in-focus objects outlined in red.)

Anyway.

When I wrote the last two posts I didn't have a few things sorted, quite: first is that the new OM-3 has pretty much the same guts as the current flagship OM-1 mark II, and second is that the two cameras are the same price. At least at B&H Photo currently, where the OM-1 mark II is on sale for $400 off.

Camera on the left: more features and control flexibility; big, comfortable integral hand grip: $2,000.

Camera on right: simpler configuration; lighter; lower-resolution viewfinder but with higher eye-relief; no front hand grip: $2,000.

Same sensor and IQ in both.

So take your pick. Kristine Hinrichs mentioned that the OM-1 mark II has gotten pigeonholed as a specialty bird-and-critter camera, and that the purpose of the new OM-3 might be to decouple OM System's best camera from that reputation and suggest the product anew to those who want an all-purpose, general-use body. That does make some sense. Thom's opinion is that retro is a fad and that the fad is probably weakening, but others such as Tom R. Halfhill pointed out that the new OM-3 isn't actually "real" retro (if you will): it doesn't try to recreate traditional exposure-triangle dials so you can see the settings at a glance, like the Fuji X-T[x] cameras or other retro bodies do. Retro beauty is only skin-deep on the new OM-3. I don't see anything to complain about in its appearance, quite the contrary in fact, but we all have our own tastes.

Next-to-last observation: the new OM-3 weighs 17 and a half ounces. By coincidence, that was the number I picked many years ago as the optimal weight for a camera body.

My final comment: OM System should have officially called the new OM-3 the "New OM-3." (It's been done before: you might be old enough to remember Canon's New F-1.) Somebody else—no, I can't locate it at the moment—noted that it's a bad idea to call a new product by the same name as an old product. I agree. It confuses search engines and creates confusion in discussions.

Plus, I will admit that I like the gentle humor of calling an apparently retro camera "New."

Mike

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

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Richard Sloves: "With regard to the gripping grip controversy. On 35mm film cameras of yore, the film wind lever was the grip. I would insert my right thumb between the camera body and the film wind lever, which was cantilevered about 20 degrees off the body, with my index finger on the shutter release. As you correctly noted, the left hand both focused and cradled the body. When speed was required, a right-handed, flesh and blood anatomical rapid-fire approach was initiated: fire, shutter cock, fire."

Mike replies: As I read that, I could feel what it felt like. I used to carry bare cameras around in my hand a lot. No strap, no grip, no nuthin', just carried it.

'How Am You?'

My present infirmity is a perfect microcosm of my experience of older age so far: unpleasant at times, but also interesting.

I took a bad fall on Monday night, late, and here it is Friday morning, and I've gotten worse every day. My body must be healing, but it needs me to stand down while it works at the job. Last night I slept 9 hours and 27 minutes (the CPAP machine keeps the time), and had a great deal of difficulty maneuvering my body into tolerable positions to sleep in. And this morning I am more stiff and sore than I have ever been in all my entire life before this. I want to add five exclamation points but the style sheet doesn't allow that. I inched out of bed as nimble as if I were a hundred and five. Took me twenty minutes. Getting dressed was an ordeal—I had to find an old pair of socks that were easier to put on. Once downstairs I made a beeline for the 8-hour Tylenol—the effects of the dose I took before bed had had time to wear off. I had great trouble bending far enough down to put the dog's food dish on the floor. Had to stand up from my chair to turn the desk light on.

"Old age isn't a battle," writes Philip Roth, in Everyman, "it's a massacre." And I'm not even all that old yet!

Aged P
I've always liked old people, though. We were talking about Great Expectations the other day. The greatest delights of reading Dickens are his minor characters, and my favorite character in Great Expectations is "Aged P," also called the Aged One or just the Aged, the father of John Wemmick, lawyer Jaggers's clerk. Wemmick greets him by saying "How am you?" Dickens turns Wemmick into a broad-brush embodiment of the split between one's at-work and at-home personalities, and accordingly has him living in a cottage that's been transformed into a castle, complete with moat, drawbridge, and a small cannon nicknamed "the Stinger"—a man's home is his castle, geddit? Wemmick's father, Aged P (pronounced AGE-ed, and P for parent), is a cheerful optimist whom age has transformed into a fool. But an entertaining one. It's almost a shame to make Dickens stories into movies—he needs the more easygoing pace of a lengthy novel to draw the minor characters out. Aged P makes a cameo in the movie, but is better read.

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in the arbour; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of perfection.

“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”

“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a freehold, by George!”

“Is it indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”

“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged. Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not in any way disagreeable to you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. I don’t wish it professionally spoken about.”

Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and talking, until it was almost nine o’clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe; “it’s the Aged’s treat.”

Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker, with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand until the moment was come for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and repair to the battery. He took it, and went out, and presently the Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little box of a cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made every glass and teacup in it ring. Upon this, the Aged — who I believe would have been blown out of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows — cried out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see him.

[Great Expectations, Chapter XXV, p. 196–7]

What the dickens
Here's Dickens in a photo by P. Edouard Rischgitz, a Swiss painter who moved to London sometime before 1878:

Charles Dickens by Edouard Rischgitz, c. late 1860s

Have you ever noticed how many famous people in the 1800s couldn't be bothered to even comb their hair prior to sitting for a portrait? I've seen tramps, bums and drunkards with better grooming than Dickens here. There was a fad in the late '90s for young men to deliberately wear their hair a bit longer than a crew cut and sticking up every which way—the style was simply called "short and spiky," which is a description, not a name—you still see it from time to time. I thought it was uncommonly ugly. But those guys don't have anything on Charles Dickens for unappealing haircuts. Guy hasn't trimmed his beard since he wrote his first novel. Barbers probably grumbled as he went by.

Here's an idea
This post, if it were a high school paper, would come back marked C—"poorly organized, with no central theme and no thoroughgoing argument"—but if I'm skittering from here to there I'm also touching again on a series of topics from the past few days. So I'll point out one very successful "idea" for shooting projects, since that was our topic a few days ago. It's to gradually collect portraits of famous people. It often works admirably on a practical level, because famous people are often, let's say, a bit into themselves, and tend to welcome the attention. Many photographers have used this idea over many years. The two I can think of right off the bat are Bill Jay and Arnold Crane, who both made long-term projects photographing famous photographers. Neither portfolio is online, but both are excellent, and fascinating if you like photography and its practitioners.

The Tylenol is turning the firehose on my inflammation now [UPDATE: See Dr. Taylor's comment below], so I'm feeling more myself. You know who's to blame for my doddering infirmity this morning? That would be me. I resolved ten or twelve years ago to be more careful with my footing and balance because I was falling too much. I've only fallen three times since. I tend to pay attention and not take chances. But on Monday I wasn't being careful at all, stomping across the frozen snowy ground late at night without a moon to guide my way. Serves me right to go arse over teakettle in the dark, I suppose. But the punishment is turning out to be more severe than I deserved! Compare old Mike to the young guys playing American football. Those guys throw themselves around with abandon. The move that always astonishes me is when a guy running to the end zone just takes a little hop, tucks his head, turns a flip in the air, and lands on the ground on his back. (Watch Golden Tate at 1:38 here.) That would probably be the end of me if I did that. I once heard that when players are young, they need a day to recover from a Sunday game. In mid-career, they might not recover till Wednesday or Thursday. And when they aren't recovered from the last Sunday by the next Sunday, well, that's when they know it's time to hang up the cleats.

Mike

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

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Geoff Wittig: "Love that photo of Dickens. It looks like casual grooming was a common affectation of artsy-types in the late 19th century. Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain was a bit shaggy. George Inness, probably the greatest American landscape painter ever, was coiffed exactly the same as Dickens, down to the scraggly beard and long unkempt hair, matched with the same kind of over-the-top vest and lapels. On the other hand, artists who catered to the carriage trade were far more tightly groomed. John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase were both famously dapper, right down to the meticulously folded kerchief visible from the breast pocket. They knew their customers and dressed to match."

Mike replies: It didn't even occur to me that it might be an affectation! But, of course. Artists, after all.

Jeff Markus: " Your comment about football players is right on the mark. I have a cousin who was an offensive lineman for the Chargers. He was over for dinner one night not long after he had retired and my father asked him how he had decided that the time had come. He said that the first couple of years he would wake up Monday morning feeling like he had been beaten up by a bunch of guys, but by the next day he would feel okay. The next year it took him one more day to recover, and for each year thereafter it took him an additional day for recovery. And by his ninth season he couldn't get any relief until the season was over. He did a tenth season and, before it was over, decided that this was no way to live, and retired at the season's end.

"He enjoyed retirement for a year and then signed with an NFL team for a year! Later on I asked him why he would do such a thing. He explained that they kept making him offers and he kept turning them them down because he just really didn't want to do another year in constant pain. That just wears a person down. But then he got an offer that was so good that he would have felt like an idiot if he had refused it, so he didn't. As it was, he had an injury early in the season that kept him from playing very much.

"He's been quite fortunate in that he never had any serious injuries that disabled him later in life. No blown-out hips or knees, no head injuries, no CTE. Many of his friends from those days were not so lucky."

Edward Taylor: "Re 'The Tylenol is turning the firehose on my inflammation now'—I probably should not comment as this may seem petty, but in the interest of science, may I point out that Tylenol does not have any anti-inflammation properties. It is simply an analgesic and an antipyretic. NSAIDS (like ibuprofen) are anti-inflammatory."

Mike replies: Not at all; I'm happy to be corrected.

Joseph Kashi: "A bit of levity that hopefully doesn't cause laughter to the point of further damaging your ribs. I've cracked my ribs several times, rarely from any mundane cause. The first was the silliest: We had a horse, and every Sunday afternoon, my chore was to clean up the corral area. Horse poop freezes really solidly to the ground in Alaskan winters. I usually had to use a heavy ice chipper to break it loose. One time, the horse sh*t was frozen so thoroughly, and I was chipping so vigorously, that I cracked some ribs. My doctor, who was a former military doc, laughed uncontrollably when I told him how it occurred.

"Another time, while sparring at the karate dojo, I carelessly hit someone too hard. After they recovered, I got a retaliatory roundhouse kick to my floating rib, which promptly 'sank,' and the sensei yelled at me for my careless initial strike (which was deserved). A third instance occurred while trying to retrieve our old, blind golden retriever, who fell down an ocean bluff covered with with large fallen spruce trees over a lot of ice and snow. Hauling the blind dog over the big tree trunks on that steep, snowy slope did my ribs in again.

"Good luck."

Back in Business (Update)

Yay! It's here.

With a fork for scale. I don't know that I
needed it to be smaller, but it's smaller.

In place and in action! I'm very happy
to have my computer back.

Many thanks to Hugh Crawford. I ended up not depending on his loaner laptop, but it was he who inspired me to solve my self-inflicted problem. If he had not jumped in and made such a quick and kind offer I would not have "corrected for misdirected effort" as my father used to say. I'm happy the way it turned out and I have him to thank.

It took only 55 minutes to load half a terabyte of data to the M4 Mini. My little old Lention USB-A hub is working fine, but the connectors are loose so I need to buy another one. Off to research that, if I can. (Anyone have any suggestions?)

I'll be back on Sunday.

Mike

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

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Grant: "The front C ports are 10Gbps. That is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. Look for a hub that is 10Gbps. If you use a 5Gbps hub you will be at half speed."

An Extra Port Magically Appears

James, in the comments, gave me the idea yesterday that my monitor might have more ports on it (I've already been using the one on the side). So I checked—with a flashlight, craning my neck in ways it was not designed to bend—and sure enough, way back in an indentation where they face the wrong way, it does. Has two, in fact. Plugged the mouse into one, and it works. So that allowed me to free up a Thunderbolt port, because I had one in use that was only serving as a small, cheap hub for the mouse, and as a card reader. Which in turn allowed me to plug in my fancy dedicated card reader, which is awesome.

The monitor requires two ports, one Thunderbolt and one USB. At least, I think it does. Honestly, it's an absolute wonder that I ever got this monitor hooked up and working in the first place. Take a look at the only place in the manual where it tells you how to do it:

For god's sake. I can't make hide nor tail o' that even when I concentrate. That's useful for telling someone how to do it only if they already know how to do it. Anyway, the monitor works with two separate cables going from it to the computer, and if one of them is extraneous to purposes, or if a different single cable could replace the two I'm using now, I'm sure I will never know.

Power-ful wisdom
I'm very happy with my all my photography-related gear and stuff right now, I'll tell you that. The late Mark L. Power, one of my teachers at the Corcoran School of Art, told me a secret once that I've never forgotten. I was acting lab manager, and hung around school a lot, and thus, heard a lot of student complaints. I figured out some possible responses the school might make to some of them, and presented them to Mark one night when he was waiting for some prints to wash. He listened patiently. Then he said something to the effect that over years of teaching—he was one of the founders of the program at the Corcoran—he had discovered that when students had something they were excited to be working on, they didn't complain. The complaints proliferated when a person was sitting around fallow, not excited, not working on anything—didn't have a project, wasn't excited visually, wasn't shooting, wasn't engaged. "Whenever someone complains about anything, I ask them what they're working on." Whatever the complaint, work is what cures it. Even if it doesn't seem to be related. So if I'm not happy with my photography, it's up to me to figure out how to get up, get out, and get going.

I'll tell you about my super-duper card reader when B&H reopens after Succos, because Amazon doesn't sell it. (I need to attract all the affiliate sales I possibly can, even though I hardly ever think of that.)

Mike

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

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Work Experience

A couple of recent comments that I think deserve your attention. I know you might already be tired of the topic of real-estate pictures, but I think it's always a good idea to take advantage of the vast expertise and experience that exists out there among our far-flung audience; it always interests me.

And on the topic, the World's Best Photography Magazine (does it still deserve that title since "Lens" went dormant?) has an article this morning called "A Camera in the East Village, Capturing the Now and the Long Ago." Its summary is "The photographer Susan Schiffman shoots rent-stabilized apartments in the neighborhood intended as portraits of the unseen tenants who live in them." Do you remember that several artists made books of "found" images they culled from Google Street View when it was new? I will confess that the idea crossed my mind of doing the same thing with selected real estate photos found online. But of course, with me, the ideas come easily and the execution comes hard. Without further ado:

John McMillan: "That's a very nice first effort, Mike. As someone who's done this in around 3,000 homes since I was using a Konica-Minolta 7D [2004–6 —Ed.], I'd be happy to correspond with you in depth, but here's a few quick thoughts:

"The tonality of your interiors has a calm, artistic softness that may be suitable for framing, but seems less effective at catching a buyer's attention when arrayed with competing listing photography. At minimum, I'd raise the LR Clarity control, or equivalent, for a little more pizzazz. Bold, bright and colorful is the prevailing style (which can be difficult because new homes are painted and decorated just the opposite).

"Most real estate work these days is done with HDR or layered editing. A single exposure just can't compete, especially if window views are involved. Forget the early days of overcooked, oversaturated HDR—the quality level of most photos in major markets I see is quite high. I outsource my HDR editing, because I never got comparable results. For a lower price, I also offer a single-exposure package, using supplemental flash. This does a good job in most homes, too. With the broad DR of my Pentax K-1 and a big old Metz flash aimed at the back wall, I can handle most interior scenes and preserve some of the window views.

"Your pricing seems good, but as a pro, you would have to cut down the time per job. Going back twice for a twilight shoot is fine, with an extra charge. Going back four times is a fiasco. Agents will call you Wednesday and expect to list, pictures in hand, on Friday night. Few expect perfect photos; most want good photos quickly.

"Regarding perspective correction, please just do it. Houses are supposed to be upright, boxy and straight. Anything else creates unease in the viewer, who might already be wary about structural problems in an old house. The photo of the back door with shovels and brooms is one bad example that doesn't fit with the many other photos you've corrected. As for the bathrooms, bend your knees and lower your viewpoint. Not every room should be shot from eye level; think about how you use the room.

"You'd likely enjoy this work. I know I do. It's candy for the curious eye. But like other photo trades, it's oversaturated with competition, dominated by large corporations (I work for the biggest), and always threatened with technical disruption."

And on the topic of pay for lower-end work:

Robert Roaldi: "In 2005 I was between jobs and landed a fluke contract taking pictures of used cars at dealer lots for a web-based company that produced online ads for dealerships. I was paid per car, taking a set of standard photos of each. The dealership staff are all self-employed and none of them laid a finger to help, even though getting good photos was presumably to their benefit. I had to locate the cars, find keys, take photos, rinse and repeat. I was lucky to do 6–7 cars per hour. I had to have a computer and a car and barely made minimum wage, not counting expenses. I did not make enough money to pay for oil changes let alone other maintenance of my own car, so, like many jobs in the gig economy, it was fundamentally unsustainable. It cost me money to go to work. I used a 4-MP Canon G3 to do that job, by the way—nice camera for its time. I see that some dealership sites now show 15–20 photos per car; no idea how they manage to do that. Anyway, I become buds with one of the used car managers and got a good deal on a used Mazda Protégé, so there was that."

Thanks to John and Robert, and everyone else who commented.

Mike

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Something To Shoot For

Just as a small addendum to the real estate listing photos post: remember I billed just under $600 for the whole job. Thirty-seven shots. I used to get a fee of $675 for one shot when I did portraits...that was for the sitting and two identical handmade custom prints of exceedingly high quality, with additional prints on 8x10" paper being $80 each. Of course my customers did get six really nice little individual proofs to choose from, though they had to give those back. And that was in the 1980s, 35 years ago! Inflation has been 2.5x since then.

So that's the level we're at. I really appreciate all the comments, and I listened. I like what one commenter said: they're two levels above ordinary RE photos and two levels below high-quality architectural interiors done by professional specialists. That strikes me as the right level to shoot for, for the money.

Mike

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

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Followup About Faked Photography

As a followup to the previous post, two items: first, Oren reminded me that the Met Fifth Avenue had an excellent show in 2012–13 called "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." A pretty extensive selection is still online, with writeups, but unfortunately many of the illustrations are reduced to thumbnails. (Museums can be very fastidious about the rights to their holdings, as you might know if you've attended museum photography shows with "No Photography" signs scattered about. Which always struck me as funny, but then I tend to see the world with humor and an eye for ironies.) The book is still available, although it's pricey. I wish I had it, but I am flat out of room for books. Didn't Richard III, as the last of the Wars of the Roses raged around him, cry out, "Shelving! Shelving! My kingdom for more shelving!"?*

[UPDATE: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous wrote to point out that this show and book were "made possible" (i.e., underwritten) by Adobe! In his words:

Once one knows that, all of the summary copy for the exhibit reads like it was written by Adobe’s PR department: See? Photoshop is nothing new or scary. People have ALWAYS manipulated photographs...

 

...Ignoring the reality that (as the images in the Met/Adobe book/exhibit immediately make clear) the scope, quality, and nature of photo manipulation is worlds different in the Photoshop era than it ever had been before.

 

In other words, the exhibit and book set out to score points in Adobe’s favor, but they ended up proving the opposite (i.e., that the crudeness of the historical images’ manipulations inadvertently made the point you made in your post).]

The other thing is that I should mention that my own closest allegiance in photography is to the traditions of photojournalism and documentary photography, mainly through the practices of photojournalists working like artists or artists working photojournalists, for example many of the Magnum photographers. Even in art photography I tend to like people whose work tells it like it is, from Jacques Lartigue when he was a boy to Lee Friedlander** to Vanessa Winship. I already mentioned that I like old snapshots, which tend to be unmanipulated only because they don't reach for that level of sophistication. I also think there is a lot to be parsed between photography which is honest within its limitations, vs. photography intended to deceive, which a lot of people confuse. There is absolutely nothing at all dishonest about black-and-white photographs per se.

But I'm on the way to the funeral of one of my best friends here, feeling rushed as always when I have to get out of the house on a timetable (schedules and writing do not go well together and that is just that) and I don't have time to elaborate. As ever, more anon.

Mike

*He did not. To avoid spreading more misinformation on the web, which already has enough of it, he actually said, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!", or at least he did in Shakespeare's play, Act 5, scene 4, line 13. Unhorsed and at the mercy of the enemy, he died that day. Do you get this stuff on other photography websites? You do not.

**For all the massive number of Friedlander books—with which his house is stuffed, by the way—there's been no good one-volume introduction to his work since Like a One-Eyed Cat, a book I love.

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

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John Taylor: "I saw 'Faking It' in DC; wonderful exhibition, and I regretted not getting the catalogue then. Years later, in a Santa Fe used bookstore that consists of stacks upon stacks of seemingly unsorted books everywhere, quite literally I found a copy by chance. I did not hesitate a second time."

Moose: "Hmm, just got back from the Peabody-Essex museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The exhibit 'Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums' is full of faked photos."

Lothar Adler: "The more I think about the modern possibilities of manipulating photos and, moreover, in combination with AI, the more I realize that this is not just a photographic / documentary problem, but with far greater significance a problem in the political and social sphere! If the boundaries between documentary image (in the sense of evidence) and reality can be unrecognizably blurred, then those who possess the knowledge of the elite and the associated technologies have the power over what we experience as reality. We humans form our construct of reality on the basis of the information we receive and can also be directly manipulated politically at this point without us being aware of it. I recently saw a TED talk by the head of AI development at Microsoft. She was pleased to report that almost all Microsoft software products would soon contain AI functions, even if the user would not notice them. In recent years, the degree of perfection of possible manipulation and artificial generation in the field of photography and language (including voice) has developed to such an extent that recently AI has even been able to generate videos that are indistinguishable from traditionally generated videos. Simply by writing a prompt (i.e. writing a small description).

"Again: from this level of perfection, a problem with much more significance arises in the social and political field than in the area of fine arts."

Niels: "I am surprised you haven't linked to this post of yours from 2016. I think this controversy was the final straw that completely killed my interest in enjoying photography on its own merits when it's of digital origin. I now can't really get immediate enjoyment of a photograph unless I already know that it originates from the photo-chemical process, like a Friedlander photograph for example."

richardl: "i luv [sic] conspiracy theory...."

David Comdico: "There was a huge shift from darkroom manipulation to digital and Photoshop, and now AI. No sophistry will change that. And the proof is the negative. It’s as simple as that."

Hank: "I think that the recent Framed book might be the closest thing to an 'overview' of Lee Friedlander as there is."

Terry Letton: " I just want to respond to this thread to point out that there is photography that is not journalism. Sure we don’t want to see a health guru’s face cloned onto a corpulent politician’s body touting the health benefits ofGMO filled cupcakes. (Hyperbolic example.) Photography can also illustrate mood and emotion, which often is more effective using some or all of the techniques you decry. I just received my latest issue of Black and White Photography magazine [which I used to write for —MJ] and the opening Editor's column addresses this very issue. Much of my own photography is in this mode. Truthfully I have no qualms about using Photoshop in any possible way that helps make my photo look the way I want it to and hopefully convey the meaning I hope to share."

Free Money (OT)

This is a followup to the OT Ford Mach-E EV post, and I beg your pardon. I really shouldn't write about this this morning. But I can't help myself...I need to vent.

Here's the short version. As you've probably heard, the government, at both the State and Federal level, wants to sweeten the deal for people buying EVs. So they offer consumer incentives in the form of rebates and tax credits. (As of this year, the Federal tax credit can be applied to the price of an EV immediately at the point of sale, by the dealer, so it's easy now.) In my State the incentives max out at $7,500 Federal and $2,000 State. There are a few conditions, mainly to benefit American car companies and lessen our dependency on China.

So the government wants to give me $9,500 to help me buy a Ford EV. Nice of them, huh? And guess how much the Mach-E qualifies for?

...In most cases, $500. I didn't skip a zero there—five hundred dollars. The other nine grand? Ford doesn't mind if you and I miss out on that.

G O O D   L O R D. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot! Ford pours resources and engineering into building an all-new, from-the-ground-up EV, and then they don't even ensure that their customers can avail themselves of the free money the government is giving away. What?!? Really? That has got to be one of the most self-defeating business blunders ever. If you were designing a car from scratch, and the government had designed a program specifically to help you succeed, wouldn't it be "Job One" to absolutely ensure that your car qualifies for the monetary incentives your customers will be eligible for?

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. The government did change the rules midstream in January '23—the Mach-E qualified for half the Federal incentive before that—and the lowest model configuration of the car does qualify for the whole two grand from the State. It's all the higher models that only qualify for $500. Furthermore, a used EV that costs less than $25k qualifies for $4,000 in Federal tax credits, regardless of where it was made and what kind of batteries it has. (But there are no State rebates for used EVs.) A few of the early cars have already dipped into that range, and more will follow as time passes. And, Ford was planning to build its own LFP battery plant in Michigan, which would have solved the problem—but apparently it has put those plans on the shelf because of short-term consumer hesitancy.

Ah, what a clusterf--k.

Anyway, in 2022, when the Mach-E qualified for half the Federal sweetener and was still newish, it outsold the gasoline Mustang—in fact, in April '22, Ford suspended orders, citing excessive demand. In 2023, U.S. sales (now with zero Federal rebate) only rose slightly, from roughly 39,000 to around 41,000. But how are you going to apportion the blame for that? Some of it has to be due to the denial of the subsidies. Why would you buy Car B if it meant leaving $9,500 on the table, vs. Car A which allows you to have that money? There was also a very costly recall of early cars that might have dampened Ford management's enthusiasm for the whole project. That's partly what you get for starting at the top end, rather than the low. Maybe Ford should have built a cheap EV at the same time. (Reminds me of Kyocera's star-crossed attempt to build a deluxe 6-MP Contax DSLR, the full-frame N Digital,  before the timing was right. It wasn't "the" camera that killed Contax—there were several factors—but it was the biggest.) Still, the Mach-E is currently either No. 3 or No. 4 on the list of the best-selling EVs. The first two places are held by Teslas, which qualify for all of the available government incentives.

No such thing as range anxiety
Meanwhile, two little morsels I stumbled across in my research (you know me—it's been all EVs all the time for the past several days). They give opposite perspectives on the the issue of range anxiety. The first from a guy who's making a road trip from L.A. to Phoenix and the second from a guy who charges a daily driver, a Tesla, at home.

1: A wonderful rant by Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire about "infrastructure anxiety." Start watching at about 12:00 and go to about 14:30. This is worth hearing. (Note that the sound is not properly sync'd.)

2: From a comment by a Tesla owner who goes by the name @MH-Tesla:

"Oh, and it's full every day I wake up, like having a gas pump at your home. So the one and only thing a gas car is superior at is long road trips.

"I thought the charging was going to be the thing I disliked the most. Turns out it's the best part of an electric car. Unless you do that road trip, you don't even think about range. It doesn't enter your thinking. You just use your car without a thought to 'do I have enough gas / range.' You always have enough every day so you quickly get used to not thinking about it. It's awesome."

"Like having a gas pump at home." We don't hear enough about that. In my area, you can get free electricity in the middle of the night if you are using it to charge an EV, and you can sign up to get all your electricity from local solar fields whether you have an EV or not.

Anyway, the Mach-E gets shunted to the long list of expensive cars I like but can't afford, and to say I am disappointed is an understatement. (I've really caught the jones for that car.) Well, those grapes were probably sour anyway. But supposedly the Chevy Bolt is being redesigned and re-engineered for a 2025 or 2026 return, and will reportedly be at the cheaper end of the price range for EVs. We'll have to wait and see if that will be true—and whether the GM managers have enough sense and direction to give their customers a crack at that free money.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Stephen S.: "I used to live in a condo near downtown Toronto, Canada, and they announced a plan for electric car charging in the underground parking: residents would have to pay up to $30,000 to get a charger at their parking spot, and the building could only support half of the parking spots having chargers, so everyone was encouraged to secure their spot for the future, or risk losing out forever. It sure made it look like the future was that EV ownership only for those who owned a house, and that half of the condo residents would have to give up driving entirely if internal-combustion vehicles were ever outlawed. This was not at all encouraging."

Tom Stermitz: "Yes, pay attention to the rebates, whether Federal, State, dealer or manufacturer. The Hyundai/Kia group doesn't qualify for the Federal rebate because the batteries are not U.S.-made, but the manufacturer matches the $7,500. Thanks to the supply-demand-inventory distortion of the moment, I got $17,500 off my Kia EV6.

"Secondly, pay attention to lease vs. purchase cost over the life of the deal. Leased EVs get the Federal rebate regardless of battery origin—assuming the dealer passes that on to you. This is such a good deal, that over half of the EVs sold right now are leased.

"Thirdly, pay attention to your local off-peak electric costs. My 7.5 cents means that I pay $2 per 100 miles. My electric bill went up $20/month, but my fuel cost went down $200/month.... I commute about 1,200–1,500 miles per month....

"Fourth, don't forget the little things like purchase sales tax, yearly registration and monthly insurance. These cars are tech-heavy, and a broken rear-view mirror or bumper probably includes broken cameras or sensors."

John Camp: "One of the odder and yet more intriguing speculations about why 'we're alone' in the Universe—that is, we've never found a sign of life outside the solar system—is that advanced civilizations hit a 'great filter' that destroys them, and maybe their worlds. That always seemed unlikely to me, as surely some advanced civilizations would avoid the filter. But perhaps there are several filters to avoid, and we're approaching one. One of the more ignored thoughts about global warming is that there is an enormous (truly enormous) store of methane in the northern tundra of Canada and Russia. When that begins to melt, the amount of warming gases entering the atmosphere will increase exponentially. We can probably handle 130 degrees in Scottsdale and Austin with air conditioning. Can we handle 200 degrees in Minneapolis?

"Also, to the people who argue that energy generation is energy generation, and that going to EV cars is simply moving pollution from one place to another...no it isn't. The difference is, power plants are single-point sources. There is available (if expensive) tech that will sequester CO2. But how do you do that from millions of tiny point-sources, like cars. And the answer is, you can't. If we really want to control CO2 emissions, we need EV cars and nuclear, wind and solar."

Mike replies: Wind is already 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., and the total of renewable sources is 21%, which exceeds the percentage for nuclear (source). Worldwide, the situation is better, with more than a quarter of power generation being from renewables according to the United Nations (source). One nice thing about renewables is that you can scale those down to point-sources (as you call them)—I have a number of friends who run their homes on solar, and one who runs his house on solar and has enough power left over to fuel his Nissan Leaf.

Cars are also an excellent solution to the problem of how to store solar energy! Millions of little mobile batteries can do what large-scale storage ideas can't.

More Selected Comments on 'New Work'

I've had a fun photographic week, posting some previously unseen older work and doing some new shooting. The standout was probably "Paint Spill," which was chosen for Flickr's "Explore" feature and is nearing 10,000 views (by Flickr's count) as I write this. Read the write-up, too; it was an interesting situation with an evergreen lesson for all of us.

In response to the "New Work" post this past week, we got a lot of great comments. Many of them were outstanding. As a sampling, here's a selection of responses I didn't post fast enough when they were offered:

Michael W Plant: "Hi Mike, I have just spent some time looking though your Flickr account and I have to say you are slowly getting there a body of work that reflects the place and time you live in. Can I suggest you spend more time out with your camera, so you can progress with your image making more quickly. I know what it means to sit on work for way to long and not make enough of it, then time goes and you still have not made enough images. Time is not your friend in this regard so please get to making more images."

Mike replies: It's tough. I have too much to do already and too frequently feel very weary and lacking in energy. And there are times recently when I've gone out shooting and have come back with...nothing. And it costs a lot, mainly in gasoline (petrol) as well as time. But I do enjoy photographing, and I wish I could do more of it.

Sean: "It’s hard to explain the feelings some of your pictures of your life in the Finger Lakes evoke in me. The closest I can come to is the feeling I get when faced with some indifferent beauty that tells me I came before you, continues out of your gaze, and will long outlast you. ‘Still points’ might be a good description. I don't mean to liken you to Robert Adams, but I recall him having to seek company when faced with certain scenes. Have you ever felt that way?

"Re colour management, I remember researching light booths and 18% grey wall paint for my monitor/print room. Half the time, my nose was stuck in Andrew Rodney’s book Color Management for Photographers and the other half was spent chatting in forums about colour spaces. 'Best viewed on a colour-calibrated monitor' was often said more in hope than expectation. And when somebody criticised the dynamic range of a shot, the standard response was: 'It was edited on a calibrated [x] using an [x] calibrator, you tyro.' Those silly back-and-forths seem quaint by today's internet standards."

Moose: "Re 'Prints are susceptible to looking different under different lighting, as well as different types of lighting. Museum lighting was traditionally strong and bright, and now is often the opposite.' Oh yes! A recent-ish show of St Ansel's prints in San Francisco was so dimly lit that his (archival) prints, printed for the then-usual lighting, were deeply murky. People were going in close and squinting. A woman standing next to me commented to her companion how the person on the side just didn't fit. I pulled out my pocket flashlight and lit the print. "Oh, that looks right now!" Awful. A wildly different set of prints would be needed.

"Re 'So take a look at that one when you get home.' That one looks fine, but some of the others are too dark for me. Then again, we know our tastes differ."

Mike replies: Another neat trick besides the flashlight demo is, when faced with a dark print, look at an area of it through the cardboard tube from a roll of paper toweling. You'll be amazed. It has the same effect as the flashlight, more or less.

Dan Khong: "I like your composition of the herd of cattle resting under the shade of the trees."

Jeff: "A viewing booth really helps when printing, provided it corresponds to display lighting conditions. I also like using ImagePrint software, as it provides custom profiles not just for virtually all papers, but for different lighting conditions. It also operates in full time soft proof mode. Another underrated viewing variable, besides lighting, is the type of glass used to frame a print. Without top quality glass (I bought Museum glass in bulk from a commercial supplier to drastically reduce cost), subtle tones can be lost, much like dry-down effects when wet printing. I, too, love Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective. But nothing compares to seeing the actual prints, which I had the pleasure to view at MoMA in 1996. Shame that so many people don’t experience well executed B&W fine prints, let alone do their own printing. I think I would give up photographing if screen viewing were the sole output."

Jack Luke: "I was a photography department technician at an art school for a very happy nine-month post-graduate placement. Among my other jobs, I managed nesting [do you mean testing? I don't get "nesting" —Ed.] and charging for prints on our big Epson printers. I fondly remember working on a series of prints with a young lad who carried around a portable darkroom in a briefcase (!) and wore sunglasses at all times—he really fancied himself as a bit of a Wes Anderson film character. Anyway, I had to tactfully explain that his prints were perhaps a bit blown out because he wore sunglasses while editing them.... I also had to tell the same lad to wear shoes in the darkroom because he kept frightening everyone who couldn't hear him walking. What fun!"

We'll close the comments to this post to avoid confusing me further.  :-) 

Mike

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

Mailbag

Comments are all up to date at Midnight between Monday and Tuesday.

Sorry about the recent radio silence. I've been immersed in the political events here in the no longer United States, from the assassination attempt, to the Republican National Convention in my old hometown, to "JD Vance" popping to the surface again like a cork (I have a whole lot to say about that), to President Biden stepping aside, to the rising candidacy of Vice President Harris...all of it has happened in less than ten days, which blows my mind. Normally when I get "obsessed" (as we are wont to say, inaccurately) with something, I write about it here, but I can't (or shouldn't) when it's politics.

As if that weren't enough, Bryan got me going with Frank Deford, so I've been doing a deep dive on Frank and had to start reading several of his books.

And my current pair of robins are being highly entertaining—they built a nest under the pavilion outside my back door, and I've been feeding them dried mealworms (protein-rich, good for eggs and babies), so they're half in a state of gratitude and half in a state of high alarm that I'm coming too close to their babies when I go out the back door and round the corner toward the barn. They both will dive-bomb around and chirp at me, and they'll sit right next to each other on a pine bough and scold me. This is my fourth nesting pair this year, and I've had many in other years, and I've never had a couple this proactive. I can tell the male and the female apart even when they're not together.

And here on Keuka Lake we've been living in a postcard for the past five or six days. Heat up to 80°F (26.7°C) during the day, cool in the shade and hot in direct sun; nights down into the 50s or 60s; boats crisscrossing out on the lake; families in swimwear adorning the docks; vivid blue skies past heaps of high white clouds. So I've spent a fair amount of time out photographing—and I've had two interesting and instructive failures, one of which is going to eat at me for a while. I'll tell you about those later, not now.

For now, a few comments on recent comments (which are up to date again, fortunately for me—else I daren't show my face):

About soccer, Bryan Geyer wrote: "It was Frank Deford, the notable PBS sports commentator (now deceased) who once said, 'Soccer is America’s fastest growing sport—and always will be.'"

Mike replies: That's funny, and somehow accurate. Maybe it's like the way I was named "Most Improved Player" in ice hockey in both seventh and eighth grades, which still makes me laugh. How far behind was I when I started and how far did I still have to go before I caught up? Could I have won the award in ninth grade too?

Frank Deford was also an outstanding writer, who wrote for Sports Illustrated among other outlets. He authored a wide array of books, more than a dozen, many on sports, a few being compilations of his sports writings, but which included a novel about Pearl Harbor (Love and Infamy), a thriller based on the painting "Venus and Adonis" by Peter Paul Rubens, a memoir that might have been titled "A History of Sportswriting in America," and a touching, tragic, yet somehow still joyful account of the life of his daughter Alex, who was born with cystic fibrosis and died in 1980 at the age of eight.

With all that is available, we probably don't have the book we really need, which would be a collection exclusively of his best articles for SI.

Also concerning soccer, Daniel wrote: "For the inevitable 'it’s called football' people: No, in the U.S., where Mike lives, it’s called soccer. In different countries, things have different names. I’ve never understood the condescending anger on this subject from Brits. In Italy it’s called calcio (the kick), in China, zúqiú. It’s called football in some places, and others have a different name for it. Imagine that!

Mike replies: You know, you're right, and I'm going to make a style-sheet change. A style sheet is the list of the ways a publication deals with various issues of formatting, spelling, punctuation, typesetting, etc.—basically it sets the policy for the way presentation issues are handled. To name two notorious ones, The New Yorker puts book and magazine titles in quotation marks (they should be italicized), and The New York Times refers to subjects by honorifics, which, just recently, led to a snarl of confusion in an article in which they were referencing the father of Thomas Crooks but along the way were also referring to the late Thomas as "Mr. Crooks." All by the style sheet, and believe me, Managing Editors can be very schoolmarmish about style sheets. The general habit of referring to already-introduced subjects by only their last names when there are other people in the article with the same last name tends to drive me batty. If you're discussing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, it's confusing to refer to both of them as "Clinton." But the style sheet says thou shalt introduce a subject by their first and last names and thereafter by their last name only, and the style sheet must be obeyed. Personally, I go for clarity first, effect second, and let rigid rules go limping along behind.

Anyway, I'm going to dispense with the term "world football" and just call it soccer. I'm a U.S. American and that's what it's PROPERLY called here*. I doubt any English speaker won't be clear about what I mean.

About the newest Canons, BG wrote: "$6,300 and $4,300? Wow. Are there customers for these new cameras?"

Yes, I'm sure there will be.

The way I look at it, there are three types of people who would be customers for those new cameras:

First are people who are rich enough that those amounts of money aren't very significant. They can buy a new camera as easily as a kid buys a candy bar. And how great is that? Power to 'em.

The second type of customer is someone who really, really wants one. After deep focus and study, it has become the object of their affection/fixation, and they will save and sell stuff and rationalize until they can get what they want oh so badly. (Been there, done that a time or two. ::shamefaced emoji:: )

The third type of customer for such cameras is someone who makes money with cameras and feel that ownership of one of these models will aid their enterprise.

Beyond that, I have pondered and struggled, but I can't think of any other general type of customers for those cameras. If you can come up with a fourth type, don't be shy.

Mike

*The TOP style sheet does not allow words in all caps.

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

Featured Comments from:

Yonatan Katznelson: "Re: Soccer vs. Football: the English have only themselves to blame."

Larry Wilkins: "I started reading Sports Illustrated around 1967 and had a subscription for more than 50 years. Yes, Frank Deford was a gifted writer, but when I think of him, I think of The National, the short-lived national sports daily for which he was editor-in-chief. I used to get to my office early so that I could read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal before starting work. After The National launched, I had to get to work at least 20 minutes earlier than that so that I could read that too. I loved The National—to my mind, the perfect mix of scores, stats and shorter and longer reporting.

"Fifteen or 20 years later, I saw Frank in a parking garage in Manhattan, where we were both waiting for our cars. To this day, I regret not going up to him to tell him how much I enjoyed The National."

jh: "Speaking of pricey cameras, I have seen two people carrying new Leicas recently. One was an older well-dressed guy hiking, casually carrying the camera on a strap over his shoulder. The other was a young guy at the Farmers' Market, tightly hugging the camera to his chest with both hands. That's two out of three of your types."

Benjamin Marks: "'*The TOP style sheet does not allow words in all caps.' This alone was worth the price of admission."

Sean: "The Football/Soccer debate is a consequence of TOP's international reach, which we’re all happy about. And let's not forget that the US and UK are two nations separated by the same vegetable, so let's not start throwing aubergines and eggplants at each other."

Ronny A. Nilsen: "I guess I'm sort of a forth type: people that need or can use the new capabilities of the cameras to get more or better images? For me the other three types is a bit ... odd? Why would I buy something that would not give me more or better images? But it has to be seen in context of what kind of photography one do. For my landscape photography I only need a reasonably high resolution camera, and I dop everything in manual mode. But for wildlife and my daughters horse show jumping I need low light and autofocus to get more keeper images. My current Canon R5 kan do all the kinds of photography I do, so I only need one camera."

Mike replies: I need to reply to this but I'm out of time this morning. Hopefully I'll get to it sometime today (Wednesday.)

Geoffrey Wittig: "A few observations come to mind. Yes, $4,300 is a lot of money for a camera. But in constant dollars the Canon 5Dsr cost more when it was released in 2015. This is in line for what high end prosumer DSLR and mirrorless bodies have gone for in recent years. And it's absurdly capable.

"But it's also clear to me that we're in the sad twilight of the era of photography as a serious hobby. It's rapidly heading for the same category as ham radio or model railroading: a quirky, shrinking tiny niche, regarded (if at all) with a flicker of tolerant amusement by the masses. I derived immense satisfaction and not a little joy from several decades spent honing my technical skills, learning how to use finicky gear, and teasing the best possible result from large format inkjets, all in service to a goal. That goal was creating the best possible photographic print. I still love a beautiful print, but it has become a niche skill. To the broader culture photography now means billions of technically competent snapshots captured by increasingly sophisticated smart-phone cameras flooding the Internet every single day, each with the impact and lifespan of a just-hatched Mayfly or cicada. Briefly seen then promptly forgotten.

"I recall reading Brooks Jensen's prescient comment about this perhaps 20 years ago, when he predicted precisely this situation: a minute-by-minute firehose of images where each was rendered invisible by the colossal volume. And yet, I can't help myself. I still derive some genuine joy from a perfect print of a quietly beautiful morning on the river, made with my own hands."

Half-Frame (and Other Half-Baked Thoughts About New Film Cameras)

I think it's great that my readers schooled me about half-frame after I put it down the other day, citing people who used it and books made with it, and even W. Eugene Smith appearing in ads for it.

Y'all rock.

You have to remember I used to be a custom darkroom printer. One of the constant battles custom printers had to wage was educating clients as to how large their prints could be. Imagine someone coming in wanting a tiny little section of a 35mm negative made into a 20x24-inch print, and you can see the nightmare. I don't believe I was ever hired to print large prints from half-frame negatives, but I know I wouldn't have liked it.

Furthermore, I don't agree that liking APS-C or Micro 4/3 ought to translate to liking half-frame. Consider that prior to 2000, six megapixels was considered the magic number at which digital sensors would draw even with 35mm film. (The parity was approximate, but will do for comparison purposes). Compare that with modern APS-C cameras with 24 megapixels or current Micro 4/3 cameras with 20 MP. Both have much more information than half of a 35mm negative, especially if you're using fast film, which you probably would be.

I'm sure some people will do good work with them.

I do agree that Pentax is approaching the problem of new film cameras in an enlightened way. I only hope the products don't fall victim to the "novelty" syndrome that sports cars seem to: that is, lots of pre-release enthusiasm, a surge of sales when they're new and just released, diminishing into lack of interest within a pretty predictable, and pretty short, span of time. I hope that won't be the case. Long live film! Long live photography!

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Simon: "I can understand the appeal of half-frame for young people. My daughter is now 20 and she and some of her friends are enamoured with lo-fi film photography and the novelty of instant and film-based images and prints. Lens sharpness and big prints are not what she and her contemporaries care for; they like the imperfections, the fuzzy corners and skewed 'retro'-style colour palette. I'm sure Harman's new Phoenix film is aimed squarely at people looking for those qualities. I told her it would be a lot cheaper and far easier to use an Instagram filter to get the same kind of result. But I'm also a little pleased that their generation are helping to keep 35mm film sales alive."

Stephen S.: "When film was all their was, medium format was desirable because it was less grainy than 35mm. Now, if you want an image without grain, digital does that perfectly. One of the reasons people enjoy shooting film these days is because of the grain, and the imperfection. For many, 35mm is more desirable than medium format, because medium format looks too perfect—too digital. Therefore, half-frame will actually give them more of what they want from film, in comparison to digital!"

Mike replies: A similar thing happened in furniture-making, as explained by Prof. David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, one of my favorite books. Prior to machining, a high degree of perfection in finish was prized. But as soon as machines could create a high degree of regularity and perfection of finish, roughness (such as tool marks), the imperfections of the materials, and the telltales of manufacture by hand started to be valued increasingly highly.

Kye Wood: "I have no dog in this fight, so having used half-frame Olympus Pen or Trip or whatever it was for a number of years...half-frame is crap. And trust me, I'm being kind. Yes yes yes. Someone over there did this or that with it and blah blah. Just like you can make a billboard print from an iPhone. But...given a choice, why would you? As soon as I found out about the half-frame decision, I lost all interest. Unless Pentax can change the laws of physics, it's going to be a dog.

"I'm hoping that as Pentax is not a person who posts here, and that my lack of grace and circumspection will not preclude my post from being considered acceptable.  :-) "