Corn at the harvest (large)
GMS (Great Monochrome Safari) Update: I took the plunge! Delayed by COVID.
After several weeks of paralysis by analysis, I decided to convert the Sigma fp rather than the A6600. And off it went, yesterday morning.
Wet asphalt (large)
I photographed both days this weekend. Got some okay things. Whatever the result is, I really like being out and looking around, and I'm very gratified when I'm able to enjoy good light. Taking B&W pictures again is very satisfying. I'm aware, in a lot of situations, that I haven't quite found the picture; but that's okay. The important thing is being out looking for it. I like the process for its own sake.
Rain across the valley (large)
In some essential way, I really do trust the process of working away at something. I can already feel my processing decisions getting not only incrementally better, but also incrementally easier. Gradually, I'll get better at working with this equipment as I do more of it.
Barn roof (large)
I'll keep you posted! I'm excited to get the fp back.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Annie Leibovitz. At long last, the unlimited trade edition of the humongous, limited Sumo edition by Taschen. Mind you, this is still a huge book—15.4 inches high, 556 pages, and almost 13 pounds. And the price! (But that's nothing—the Sumo weighed 57 pounds and cost $7,500.) This is the closest ordinary folks (with ordinary shelves) will get to the ultimate Annie.
The book link above is a portal to any purchase at Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Daniel: "I believe Fuji should make an X-ProM. A Monochrome camera using the X-Pro body. Leica is doing well with Monochrome and Fuji is 'the poor man's Leica,' even to the nice set of 'Fujichron' lenses."
Mike replies: Well, I had been waiting for something like that for many years by the time the Leica Monochrom came out, and that was more than a decade ago now. Photographers have been extremely ill-served by digital when it comes to B&W. I'm not sure I'm entirely satisfied by the crude solution of stripped sensors, but I want to get back to work; it's been too long.
It wouldn't require genius-level engineering for one of the cameramakers to design and make a sensor specifically designed for B&W, which at this point could certainly include tweaking the spectral response. I imagine they could solve the digital highlight problem by making it so that different photosites had different sensitivities. Fuji did do that many years ago—as Thom Hogan writes, "Back in their DSLR days (and a few compacts, as well), Fujifilm made sensors that had dual photosites per pixel position: one gathered highlight info, one gathered shadow info." With today's ultra-high resolution sensors, it seems possible that they could do the same thing better by just applying ND filtering on every other pixel. I don't know the science. But it's probably true that a sensor deliberately designed for B&W could run rings around all the solutions we have available to us now. It's a shame we've been without that for so long.
Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'The important thing is being out looking for it. I like the process for its own sake.' Bullseye 🎯 ! I’ve not found any activity that gives me more visual and creative enjoyment than simply walking around with a camera. I 'shoot' nothing but pictures. I 'take' nothing but images. Glad to see you’re healthy again and out with a camera, Mike. Nothing better for the mind and body!"
Jeff Hohner: "Hot damn. What is it that thrills me so about B&W? It's not just nostalgia. It must be my photographer's eye which was calibrated by B&W and still is. Thanks for sharing your work. I'm following your B&W adventures with much envy and vicarious pleasure."
Not everything has a silver lining, but, for me, COVID has had one. I was discouraged that I was still testing positive at Day 16, but I slept around the clock again on Wednesday night...11:00 p.m. to 11:00 a.m.
It's been nostalgic to revisit, in very early old age, the way I used to be able to sleep when I was younger. I'm not into having COVID, but I've enjoyed being able to sleep. I suffer from a form of insomnia called EMA—early morning awakening. I often pop awake at 4:15 or 5:30 or some ungodly early morning hour and, more than half the time, can't get back to sleep. Well, on Thursday morning I got dragged out of sleep at 5:45, looked at the internet for a while on my tablet, conked out again, and enjoyed basically a whole second night's sleep. I haven't slept that late in years.
The oximeter
If you get COVID, a handy device to have around is something called a "fingertip pulse oximeter," or just "oximeter" for short. It's that little clip that goes on your fingertip that measures your pulse and the oxygen saturation, or the percentage of oxygen, in your blood. A normal, healthy adult or child with functioning lungs has a blood oxygen level of between 95 and 100%. My impression from various things I read about COVID early on was that people who are otherwise asymptomatic can have a condition called "happy" (also called "silent") hypoxia, which means you have low blood oxygen levels but you're not aware of it. Fingertip pulse oximeters were widely recommended during the early days of COVID as a way to detect happy hypoxia. However, in poking around on the web, I came across a study at Penn Medicine that indicated that automated text messaging—regularly asking people with COVID whether they felt short of breath—was just as effective in terms of outcomes as patient self-measuring with an oximeter.
However, I don't get automated text messages from my doctor's office asking me about shortness of breath. In fact I've yet to see a sign from them that they're interested in how I'm doing. So I've been using the oximeter. There are a zillion pulse oximeters on Amazon; this is the one I happen to have, not that that matters. I just slip it on my finger a few times a day to check. Mainly reassurance, I guess.
After I encountered that Penn Medicine study, though, I figured I might need to know a little more, from an expert. So I reached out to John Hansen-Flaschen MD, a TOP reader who is also a highly distinguished pulmonologist (as well as, of course, a photographer). Here's what John told me:
Early on, when COVID infection was frequently life threatening, some people were found to have a low blood oxygen level before they developed severe shortness of breath. Other chest infections did not typically do this. Also, there was no quick COVID testing then. So, at that time, we encouraged people to buy a finger pulse oximeter and to test themselves at the first hint of any new respiratory symptoms.
Current omicron strains do not behave this way, so we no longer recommend pulse oximetry for early detection. Instead, when someone is known to have acute symptomatic COVID, a pulse oximeter can be useful in deciding when to go to an emergency room and when to be admitted to a hospital. A drop in oxygen % saturation of greater than 4 mmHg to below 92% is a reason to go to an ED for further evaluation. Below 85–88% may be a reason to admit someone.
So I guess I'm doing the right thing keeping an eye on it. John also told me that I'm at risk for long COVID, mentioning that "our clinic is overrun with people who have this distressing condition." Yikes. But then, I guess we've all known all along that COVID is inherently a "yikes" kind of thing to start with. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I won't have that.
Finally, I called my doctor's office, and was told by a nurse that people who've had COVID can continue testing positive for up to 30 days even if they've recovered. She told me to stop testing myself, sort of implying that all I'm doing is driving myself crazy. So, okay.
Anyway, I am feeling a lot better—the penultimate remaining symptom, a cough, seems to be almost gone. The ultimate remaining symptom seems to be...good sleep. Not sure if I want that to go away. But I guess I'll know I'm really better when it does.
Good health to you and your family! In all ways, and always.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."
This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Tom Burke: "Very glad to hear you're getting better, Mike. Like you, the cough has been the last thing to disappear for me.
"You mentioned above that you're still testing positive. Is that PCR tests, or lateral flow test? It's well known that PCR tests can continue to pick up non-infectious viral proteins anything u to 90 days after infection.
"I think I mentioned in an earlier comment that I had found a reference to a study that looked at when people stopped being infectious. I've dug out the references. First, the summary from the Imperial College site; and this is the link to the study report in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.
"The message seems to be that the study found that less than a quarter of cases were shedding virus before the onset of symptoms; and that lateral flow testing was a poor indicator of the onset of infectiousness, but was very good at spotting the moment when you cease to be infectious. In my case I tested negative on two days in succession at the end of my illness (10 days after symptom onset) so I was OK to go out. Four days after that, however, a PCR test (in connection with a survey I'm enrolled in) came back with a positive result. I decided that the latter result was an example of the problem with PCR test results after you've been ill."
Note that I'm not reviewing the Sigma fp. I'm interviewing it. That is, checking out whether it's suitable for my own personal use.
I'm also not recommending it, as I stated once before. My personal needs and interests here are not typical. As a reviewer, I often recommend things for others, but that's when I'm putting other people first, taking their part and considering their needs and interests first and foremost. It's a different mindset. I am quite capable of doing that, but I am not doing it now. Now I'm thinking of myself.
I admit I got derailed there for a few days—I got COVID. I seem to be over it now, knock on wood, although I'm still fatigued and a bit weak and low on energy. (And sleeping like I did twenty years ago, which is delicious.) But I've continued to make some modest progress anyway.
Background
Jason M. loaned me a Sigma fp that he'd had converted to monochrome (i.e., black-and-white only) by Monochrome Imaging Services (MIS), one of several small businesses that strip the color filters off color sensors to render the cameras monochrome-only. Which made it into an "fp-M," a non-Sigma appellation meaning fp Mono. I used it for a few weeks and decided to buy my own.
After some delays (one part was backordered), my camera is here. It is currently unconverted, and I've tried a few alternatives with it—namely, shooting with its own internal Monochrome profile, and shooting in color and converting the to B&W in software. These experiments have made me unhappy, largely because I've done all this before with other cameras. Briefly: the Sigma DNG Monochrome profile is useless to me, because you need to use Sigma Photo Pro as a raw converter to process the files as B&W. In Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) they open as color files. With capture set for JPEG, they do open as black-and-white, but the JPEGs preserve even less highlight detail than Jason's converted camera does. Finally, I can of course open color raw files and set the profile to Monochrome in ACR, and then edit the B&W file to optimize it.
Before I get any farther, the results of doing that look very good. You don't lose a lot of sharpness, and the conversions offer more control than shooting with the fp-M...
...Which is what I don't want. Before you know it I'm dealing with two complications I don't want, namely 1.) would this image look better as a color image? and 2.) the B&W Mixer. When you change from "Color" profile to "Monochrome" profile in ACR, the "Color Mixer" changes to "B&W Mixer." It looks like this:
And the sliders change the value of each of those colors in the file conversion.
This is exactly what I don't want—a palette of endless possibilities for spectral ranges tailored to each individual image. The bottom line is, I don't want to deal with color when I'm shooting or post-processing. This isn't an accommodation to lack of competence; I'm perfectly competent to do that and I don't mind doing it. What it is is a preference: I don't want to do it.
I want to work in black-and-white. Currently, Leica is the only manufacturer that understands this from an artistic, aesthetic, creative perspective. All the rest of them DON'T GET IT. Say what you will. They do not understand.
Punk rock commitment
So that's why checking out the B&W options for the color fp are making me unhappy—I've been there, done that, and that's not what I want. What's been resonating in my head is Andrew Chalsma's comment: "I think sending it out for conversion before taking a color image is the only way to go. Punk rock commitment."
I did use the new camera just enough to check out whether it has any problems. The next step is that it goes off to MIS for conversion.
If you feel I've shortchanged the parts of this process you might have been interested in, I apologize, but I'm on the trail of something I've long wanted and I have to keep pressing. May I please use COVID as an excuse?
Meanwhile, my friend at B&H Photo sent me all four of the fp hand grips they sell, and it took me all of an hour to choose which one I like best. But that's a separate post.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."
This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links as they help support the site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Rob de Loe: "I gained another, but different, window into your thinking recently. I'm not a potential Hasselblad X2D customer, but I was curious about Hasselblad's Natural Color Solution. Long story short, Hasselblad has built a nice route through the complexity of colour that starts with finely tuned cameras, and passes through their Phocus software to give you what amounts to one choice out of the box for colour. As a Fujifilm person, it was striking to open a Hasselblad X2D file in Lightroom and realize, there is only one camera profile. In comparison, with Fuji, there's a boatload of film simulations from which to choose. I'm not sure what I think about the Hasselblad approach, but I get the concept of keeping it simple for people who like things simple."
Herman Krieger: "Black-and-white is beautiful."
JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I think this all makes perfect sense. And it immediately makes me thing of two analogies. First, the decades-old MAC/PC debate. I remember the PC people always talking about the endless configurations and option of the PC platform. But I was never looking for an endlessly configurable computer—I just wanted a machine built for what I needed. Turnkey, very few choices, very few options. Apple provided that. And recently when re-engaging with film, all of the mentions of varying options of processing B&W film was also a turn-off. When shooting film I really don't want options. Part of the reason I'm shooting it is to limit options. Limit the available choices. An attempt to simplify the process of photographing down to the parts I love and value most—the capturing and sharing."
Christopher May: "Let's not forget fact that the Queen was an avid photographer, too. Several photos exist of her with Rollei 35s and Leicas. One photo with the latter was even used to commemorate her sixtieth birthday on a stamp:
"As an American not terribly invested in the every move of the royal family, her passing doesn't affect me directly like it does much of the world. I'm always saddened by the departure of a fellow photo-dawg, though. May she rest in peace."
Christopher
Mike comments: Hear, hear. Although I imagine the Queen might have felt that being referred to as a "dawg" would be beneath her dignity. So perhaps "photo-corgi" would be more appropriate in her case. And right, how can you not like someone who was into dogs, horses, and cameras all her life?
(Just wanted to mention: it occurred to me this morning as I lay in bed before getting up that the real reason I write OT diet posts is probably that they inspire me. Every time I write one it makes me enthusiastic about redoubling my efforts to cook and eat healthily, and I get strength to resist my bad habits. Because the reason I'm so preoccupied with this stuff is that I naturally have bad food instincts, so I have to make up for that with knowledge and conscious effort.
So thank you for putting up with me. Because I need the kick in the butt.)
Mike
Book o' the Week
Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past. TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced.
These book links are a portal to Amazon.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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Featured Comments from:
ChrisC wrote, yesterday: "I’m not sure if this is something you have already posted about, but to add to your comments on economics: Boots Theory.
Cool.
Here's The Boots Theory, in case you don't want to follow that link: "The boots theory comes from a passage of the 1993 novel Men at Arms [by the late Sir Terry Pratchett], the second novel to focus on the City Watch, in which he muses about his experiences of poverty as compared to his fiancée Lady Sybil Ramkin's conception of poverty:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I've never heard of "Boots Theory" per se (thanks for that) but I've written about that very thing, for instance in the first paragraphs of this post from 2015. Three points by way of commentary: I heard once that the MacArthur of the MacArthur "genius" grants made his fortune in insurance, but that he self-insured his own cars. It might be apocryphal that he said "insurance is a ripoff" by way of explaining why. Next point, consider that my father, when we moved to Washington, D.C. in the 1970s so he could work for NASA, paid $200k for our house in Maryland just across the D.C. border (Zillow "Zestimates" its current value at 11 times[!] that), and he paid cash. (He was Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey was Dave Ramsey.) Then consider that for most middle-class people, the no. 1 or no. 2 expense of their entire lives is the interest on their house. As I said in that 2015 post, "the reality of having no money is that it costs more. Not 'more' in any diffuse general sense, taking into account intangibles like limitations on life choices and personal satisfaction: it just costs more in plain ol' money." The third point: my grandfather, an investment banker whose lifestyle I like to semi-humorously describe as "Downton Abbey at one-quarter scale," used to say you should "buy the best." When I was a young teenager, I asked him why, and he said "if you buy the best you only have to buy it once." There's Boots Theory right there...
...And a bit of advice I probably should have followed when it came to cameras!
And believe me, I've often thought about what might have been. I actually wrote a manifesto-style little essay in the 1980s declaring that I wanted to be like Eugene Atget, and continue doggedly with one technique for my whole life, except in my case it would have been what I called my "Photo 101 technique": a 35mm camera, fast B&W film, and smallish prints reproducing the whole negative out to the blackline:
Photo-101-technique prints. Paper size is 11x14 inches.
At the time I couldn't even image how such an ordinary technique would be come obsolescent, although of course now it has. So what might my life have been like if I had stretched for that out-of-reach M6 at Industrial Photo off the beltway in Maryland back in 1984, and then kept using it and actually fulfilled my little manifesto? I might still have it today, and be using a newer one or an M7 or something. Would I still be at it?
If I had bought an M6 and three lenses back then and kept using it, I would have been way ahead of where I actually am. I can't estimate how much I've wasted spent on cameras since then, but $20,000 is way too low an estimate.
Of course, it's a moot point, because I turned out to be a writer—a magazine/Web writer—rather than (primarily) a photographer. I didn't know that's what was going to happen, at the time. (Funny, though, I still consider "Photo-101 style" B&W my "real" work. I've never been able to completely "own" digital inkjet prints in color as being wholly "me.")
My point here is smaller than you think
And an answer to Thom and everyone else who suggests used gear: it's been my observation that a certain subset of hobbyists prefers used gear, probably because it's a financial win: it's cheaper, still useful, and satisfies an urge for thrift that's important to them. But by "hobbyist" I certainly didn't mean "rank beginner." They're not hobbyists. Yet. A hobbyist would more likely be someone who already has a number of older cameras (the older they are, the older their old cameras). I would counter the "buy used" approach with another subset you're very familiar with: those who are so eager to own the latest thing that they'll discard superseded models that are still in great condition and still have a lot of life left in them. (Y'all know who you are. Haven't we all done it at least once or twice?) The ones who own an X-Pro2 and just have to have an X-Pro3 as soon as it appears. That's a big group too.
I won't ask Thom how many times in his career he himself has been satisfied to buy a 5-year-old camera for his professional and personal work. It's not a fair question, as I well know, because we have to write about the newest gear and we need to be familiar with it, he much more than I.
Several readers took me to task for creating a litany of "apex" cameras and not considering the reasonably-priced alternatives that are good enough. D B wrote: "Re: the question 'are hobbyists being priced out of the hobby,' I agree with Ken T.: you (we) are not. What the heck do you (we) need a Z9, A1, or GFX 100S for?"
But that's an interesting aspect of this: how can an enthusiast site survive if it doesn't consider the best gear in the field at least occasionally? But it's been getting sort of pointless. If I write about a $6,000 camera body, the portion of readers with a real interest in the product is just so small, for the simple reason that most of them would not spend that much on a camera even if they can. I know I wouldn't. Some of you would read it anyway and might even enjoy it, but, well, there's that "what has this got to do with me" reaction that I worry about, too. The equation has gotten more...fraught, let's say.
All I was really saying with the post is that the trend to five- and six-thousand dollar camera bodies might be putting a damper on enthusiast participation in the hobby, merely because those prices close off what is conventionally considered to be the most interesting and most desirable end of the market to a greater proportion of us—that is, the total set of "all hobbyists" or all enthusiasts. I do think that's true to some extent, notwithstanding a.) those who don't desire the apex cameras, b.) those who are satisfied to buy five-year old cameras, and c.) the existence of capable intermediate-priced models. (I'm also saying that those models wouldn't exist at all if we lived in a more egalitarian society, but that's just theoretical musing.)
As John Camp wrote, "Your complaints are reflected in virtually every hobby that equipment freaks have come to dominate—hi-fi, photography, music, horse competitions, computer gaming, sporty cars. But at the extremes, except perhaps for a very, very tiny professional minority, it's all Veblen."
Anyway, I don't mind if you disagree with me. It was actually a smaller point than many people took it to be. It's just a bit of a practical problem for me these days, that's all—since I ought to be making smart decisions about what to write about.
Mike
Book o' the Week
All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Nick: "When I started reading about cameras and photography in earnest, ca. 2009, I coveted the near-top models: Not the huge, pro-grade cameras, but the higher-end enthusiast cameras, like the Nikon D70. I talked myself down a bit ('for the time being,' I said) and bought into Micro 4/3 for a fraction of the price. I figured I'd sell it and get a 'real' enthusiast camera in a couple of years.
"Now, 13 years later, my income is higher, but I've stopped reading gear sites almost entirely. I just made my first gear purchase since the pandemic started: A $320 used OM-D E-M10 Mark II to use as a second body. My last purchase before that? A $320 used OM-D E-M10 Mark II to replace a Mark I that died a week before a scheduled trip to Japan. I make a good bit more now (even inflation-adjusted) than I did then, but between the rapidly increasing prices of enthusiast gear and my contentment with what I had on hand, my covetousness dwindled to almost nothing and my priorities shifted. My (still limited) disposable income goes to getting to new places to take cool photos (see above about the trip to Japan), not on the gear with which to take them. From my point of view, the lack of focus around here on gear, especially stratospherically-priced gear, is definitely a feature, not a bug."
Mike replies: I'll tell you what else pertains: consistency. Once you've done 13 years of Micro 4/3, you might want your new pictures to continue to look like your old ones. I understand this isn't always the case; sometimes people are eager to make a break and create work that has a new look. But sometimes we don't want that.
Stephen S.: "I have owned thirty Micro 4/3 camera bodies, from the bottom of the range to the top, all purchased used. Regardless of how much they were used (going by shutter count and cosmetics,) the factor that most determined which ones would fail was how much they originally cost. The lower-end cameras were far more likely to have shutter failure, command dials that didn't respond, broken battery doors, and LCD screens that blanked out, sometimes at varying degrees of tilt. It seems to me some corners were cut in their design, in order to cut costs. When they were new, it may have had made sense to save several hundred dollars by buying a lower-end camera that could produce the same images, even if it was lacking a few features. However, if buying older gear used, it now only costs a little bit more for the higher-end models, and in my experience they are far more reliable. With warranties expired, and in some cases even paid repairs completely unavailable, this is an even more important factor."
MIKE: "Boots Theory? So true, but instead upgrade to Furniture Theory. Do we imagine that the rich have to go out every two or three years to replace their IKEA furniture? Or do we conjecture that the family probably hasn't bought a new table in centuries, not since great great great great (you get the idea) grandfather bought the Chippendale table that's still in the dining room. My Dad always said the Rich live cheap."
David Lobato: "Several years ago there was an article about tripods. Photographers often bought cheap ones to start. Then when its limitations arose they bought an incrementally better tripod, and so on. Turned out that it was much more cost effective to initially buy an expensive tripod."
Mike replies: It's about the only thing I've done right. I bought a very expensive Gitzo Studex in maybe 1982, used it for 30 years, then replaced it with a very expensive carbon fiber Gitzo Mountaineer which I'm sure is my last tripod.
"When a rival called him 'two-faced' during a political debate, Lincoln replied: 'I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?'"
—from Lincoln: A Photobiography
I spent yesterday happily immersed in learning more about Lincoln, which evidently you did not—I don't think any recent post here has gotten less response than yesterday's! Sorry about that. (Note to self: TOP readers are not interested in Lincoln.) I also got pretty far into the Benjamin Thomas biography.
Among the things I learned: Lincoln had a lazy left eye, which accounts for the fact that there is only one portrait of him (O'Sullivan's) looking straight at the camera; he was the first President with a beard, which he grew at the suggestion of a young girl who wrote him a letter saying he would look better with one; the killer of John Wilkes Booth, a soldier named Boston (originally Thomas) Corbett, was completely crazy—at the time he shot Booth he had already castrated himself with a pair of scissors to help himself resist the lure of prostitutes, and he later lived in a hole in the ground, which, believe it or not, you can still visit (in fact, there are a large number of Lincoln-associated places you can visit, including the site of a town Lincoln lived in that is no longer there). Corbett eventually escaped from an asylum and more or less vanished.
Abraham Lincoln's last confirmed descendant, a fellow named "Bud" Beckwith, died in 1985. However, George Clooney is a distant cousin.
I don't think I'm ever going to need to know that.
Books of Lincoln photos
Regarding books of Lincoln photographs, I came across this list, on the frankly named "Abraham Lincoln Research Site":
"Among the Abraham Lincoln books that include his photographs are: Lincoln's Photographs: A Complete Album by Lloyd Ostendorf, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln by Frederick Hill Meserve and Carl Sandburg, Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life by Stefan Lorant, and The Face of Lincoln compiled and edited by James Mellon. Additionally, there is The Lincoln Family Album by Mark E. Neely, Jr. and Harold Holzer. Also recommended are Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography by Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, and Lincoln: A Pictorial History by Dr. Edward Steers, Jr."
The Kunhardts' book is the one I remember. It's been a long time since I've seen it; I'm pretty sure it was in the library of the Corcoran School. My impression was favorable, although I can't say that with assurance. But I guess we've already determined that you don't care anyway.
Mumlered
And check out this weird thing:
Mary Todd Lincoln was said to be "erratic" later in life, which may be her right after having lost three of her children and her husband. Her only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who evidently inherited none of the traits of his father in any respect, tried to have her committed to an asylum. She managed to extract herself, but the two of them were estranged afterwards.
Wikipedia says of the above, "In 1872, she went to spiritualist photographer William H. Mumler, who produced a photograph of her that appears to faintly show Lincoln's ghost behind her (photo in Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana). The College of Psychic Studies, referencing notes belonging to William Stainton Moses, claims that the photo was taken in the early 1870s, that Lincoln had assumed the name of 'Mrs. Lindall,' and that Lincoln had to be encouraged by Mumler's wife to identify her husband on the photo. [This would have been only a year after she lost her son Tad at 18—maybe he was the one she was trying to summon from the spirit world —Ed.] P.T. Barnum, testifying against Mumler in his eventual fraud trial, presented a photo featuring himself with the 'ghost' of Abraham Lincoln, demonstrating for the court how easy it was to make one of Mumler's images. The image is recognized now as a hoax created via double exposure (by inserting a previously prepared positive glass plate featuring the image of the 'deceased' into the camera in front of an unused sensitive glass plate)."
Maybe we could say that a Photoshopped digital file has been "Mumlered."
And now let us move on.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman. A very brief, illustrated overview of the life of America's 16th President suitable for young people.
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Just wanted to briefly follow up on a few things relevant to the subject of "Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece":
First, among many other types of people, I've been hearing from photo organizers around the world! As you might know, it's a career now: people who hire themselves out to help you curate your heaps of family pictures, old and new. One I've corresponded with, Isabelle Dervaux, headquartered in Brooklyn, was herself profiled in The New Yorker a year or so ago. I read it at the time. The ones contacting me are of course interested in the topic, and, sure, may also be interested in advertising their services (so here's her website)—but I'll bet they have perspective on photo editing and peoples' habits and responses that is different and fascinating. I'd love to talk to her. Actually, I'd love for us all to talk to her. I think I'll ask her if we can do an interview. The New Yorker piece introduced her profession to outsiders, but, here, we could talk nuts and bolts.
Second, someone on a thread about the article at Hacker News (thanks for the link, Jernej) commented (the first line is the subhead of the article):
> Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding the good ones
Google already did this for you.
Yeah, well, maybe someday we'll really achieve that Brave New World. A camera you wear on your cranium will take pictures whenever its algorithms sense something important is happening in your life (based on what it overhears people saying to you, your pulse, brainwaves), but only when it recognizes a good composition based on popular agreement about taste. This mass of raw material, which you will never even see and will not require your attention at all, will be stored somewhere "safe" but not very accessible, and then every few years an auto-edited mini slide-show will crop up unbidden on your favorite device. Your Aunt Mandy's funeral, for instance, on the seventh anniversary of the event, or whenever sociological research suggests is the time you will have recovered from any possible grief. Your brain will think at you, "Mandy? Was she a character on Game of Stones or Dunces and Draggings? Oh, Mandy! My mother's sister." You'll realize belatedly that you knew her in old-fashioned reality, which by that time will be a poor and boring relation of all the much more appealing virtual realities. When the Aunt Mandy slideshow comes up, you'll swipe passively through the first eight of the 17 machine-learning-curated pictures, glancing at each of them for 1.1 seconds, or maybe a little less, noticing neither that the bots have converted everything to B&W (because it's a somber subject) nor that somehow there is a perfectly clear full-color billboard for an insurance company in the background at the gravesite and that the bouquet of flowers clutched to your weeping Mother's bosom has been helpfully transmogrified into a slightly too large red and white container of Coke. You'll reach the limit of your attention span before the end of the slide show, and shut it down. Coke and the insurance company will be auto-billed; your responses will be analyzed and a decision will be reached (the passive voice seems apropos, because it won't be a human that makes the decision) as to whether that slideshow will ever be provided to you again. As for you, you'll muse very idly about Aunt Mandy for twenty seconds before the next distraction.
Later, your brain will think at you: you know, I kinda feel like a Coke.
Even that will not be the ultimate, which would be, of course, never having to look at either the thing photographed or the photographs of it at all, ever. Just think how great it would be if we could remove ourselves from the process entirely. Then we wouldn't have to waste any time on pictures at all. We can live to hope.
(No disrespect at all intended to the OP. I'm just riffing. It's never wise to make hackers mad at you.)
Third (antidote to the above), there's a streaming film coming up called GRAIN (thanks to Lorna Clymer via KK for the link). No, it's not about wheat. Film grain. Directed by Tommaso Sacconi and Alex Contell. And it's listed as a "teen-friendly" film, which sounds like a good thing even though I'm not exactly sure what it means. Here's part of the blurb:
Digital photography, with its sharper edges, higher definition, and instant gratification, dramatically changed the way we capture and consume the imagery in front of us. But these 'perfect' shots we see on our phones—in a world more distorted than ever—may be doing us all a great disservice. Millennials worldwide, whose childhoods were slowly overrun by all-things-digital and looming screen time addictions, are driving the return to film photography and the need for a slowdown. ... Now, with more people craving real over flawless, the documentary GRAIN captures how shooting analog brings passionate photographers joy as artists and how the uniqueness of film may be here to stay.
Looks like that was written by Amy Brown. Gets to me, I can tell you that. I need a slowdown. I crave real over flawless. What was that Jada Pinkett-Smith posted? "I'm here for it."
It makes me kinda happy and not happy. Happy if young people are really discovering "slow photography" in any significant numbers (statistics needed), but not happy because it wouldn't have the same meaning if I did. Because, of course, it's only hip and happening (he said, aware that hip and happening is not a hip and happening phrase) if you're young. If you're old, then you're just stuck in your ways, afraid of new things, rigid in your thinking, etc. etc.
Sigh. Still, I want to see the film. Is it also ODD (Old Darkroom-Dawg)-friendly?
Bet it is.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Larry Clark, Tulsa. A classic of 20th century photography. Teenage Lust (NSFW) was always the hard title to get—$500+ for the paperback right now—but it wears its voyeurism too much on its sleeve. I have them both, and Tulsa, IMHO, is the better book. Available at a good price right now, but not always. Get it while it's cheap.
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Mike Chisholm: "Ach, these film-fantasists and their nostalgie de la poo... Just wait until they try a few darkroom sessions, and realise you have to get wet, squinty, and dog-tired just to produce one good print. And then do it all over again, exactly the same, to make a second.... And don't even think about colour! Not so hip and happening now, eh, youngster? Listen to Uncle Mike (no, not him) and get yourself a beautiful pigment printer and use it!"
Tam: "Re: Millennials and film photography. This is definitely true. I’m surprised that when you order Ilford from Amazon, the algorithm doesn’t suggest that 'people who shopped for this also shopped for skinny jeans and beard oil.' I spend a fair amount of time and, alas, money in the used department at Roberts Camera here in Indy and some of the staff behind the counter, most of whom are young enough to be my kids, don’t even own any digital cameras."
["Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. might ramble down one of many memory lanes.]
So here's one sequence of events in my life from the past couple of days/weeks:
So this is just one example, out of hundreds and hundreds, of the reward of writing a site that is blessed with so many humane and intelligent readers. I just never know when or by what little byway I'm going to learn something that leads to something else that leads to something else. Like an inexhaustible rag-and-bone shop in which unexpected and always surprising trinkets or treasures never fail to come to light.
And about that phrase: note that I wrote in Thursday's post, "Annie Hall is a singularly brilliant movie about what Paul Simon called, in the song 'Hearts and Bones,' 'the arc of a love affair.'" Not only do the song (1983) and the movie (1977) tell the same kind of story, but I had completely forgotten that Paul Simon appears in Annie Hall, playing a fictionalized variant of himself. Was there some sort of artistic connection made there, somewhere? Could be.
By the way, all facts herein are provisional. You do a fine job of keeping me honest, by and large, and I always remain willing to stand corrected.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Larry Clark, Tulsa. A classic of 20th century photography. Teenage Lust (NSFW) was always the hard title to get—$500+ for the paperback right now—but it wears its voyeurism too much on its sleeve. I have them both, and Tulsa, IMHO, is the better book. Available at a good price right now, but not always.
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We're in the middle of an issues discussion, which is unusual around here. First, I have to address the departing supporters, who have withdrawn their Patreon contributions: I'm sorry you were offended—the aim here is indeed for that not to happen, and I strive for that. I don't want anyone to feel the way you'd have to feel to yank back your helping hand. But I don't think it would be wise for me to submit to the blunt command, "No more politics," either. Sometimes, politics enters in, and I write about what I'm moved to write about. That's the way it has to be in a daily blog that's been chugging along for going on 17 years. Everything's fodder. The deal is, you pick: like a newspaper or a magazine. It's not homework. Read what you want to read, leave what you want to leave. I can't do it for everyone. Consider: with everything I ever write, there are at least a few people who love something most people hate, or at least a few people who hate something most people love. If I had to tailor everything to everyone—well, couldn't be done. The post previous to this one wasn't labeled "OT," because it wasn't off-topic: I related the "current event" to the question of untangling art from the morality of artists. Which led, I might add, to some reader comments that might be among the best this site has ever gotten. I'll re-read them at some later time I'm sure. (I still haven't gotten them all up, but I have little else to do this afternoon.) [UPDATE Fri. evening: One of the three readers who left has already come back. I'm glad. —MJ.]
As for the Smith-Rock affair, Mike Plews pointed to the best analysis he's seen, by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Kareem touches on all the repercussions we can know about, with crystal clarity. Short and worth reading. I truly admire that guy, by the way, and have for a long time. Not just because he's a deep jazz fan. And not just because he happens to be about the first celebrity I ever saw up close and personal—he used to come in to the Bay Point Pharmacy where I worked when I was 14 and 15, back when his name was still Lew. He's a role model, IMHO.
And finally, I did promise I'd share my own take on "untangling art and the morality of artists" before we move on to the important topic of the Leica watch :-) . So here it is. It's not a political position with me, and it's not even an intellectualized stance: I just have trouble enjoying art when I know the artist is a shitheel in some obtruding or offensive way. It's an emotional response, and I wrestle with it. It causes me anguish, too, because sometimes I want to engage with and enjoy art or entertainment made by people I no longer trust or like. Even before the MeToo charges later leveled at him, I already had left Louis C.K. behind, for instance, because of the vile (to me) things he would say about his children. (With me, as with Dickens, mistreatment of children is the cardinal sin.)
I have a particular problem with Woody Allen, because of Annie Hall, the transitional movie between the broad, Marx-Brothers-inspired schtick of his early career and his later, Ingmar-Bergman-wannabee serious films that in my opinion encompasses the best of both. Annie Hall is a singularly brilliant movie about what Paul Simon called, in the song "Hearts and Bones," "the arc of a love affair." As moviemaking, the ideas tumble out in a dazzling torrent almost offhandedly, like Jimi Hendrix moves from musical idea to musical idea in "Born Under a Bad Sign." The pathos/but the humor/but the pathos of that little boy saying "I used to be a heroin addict, and now I'm a methadone addict"...what a way to say that fate awaits all innocence. The movie is well written, full of Allenesque quips like, after Annie parks, "That's okay, we can walk to the curb from here," and there are a remarkable number of cameos and first or early appearances—the young Christopher Walken as the psycho brother, can't do better than that. But the things I like best are the gags and vignettes that can only work as film/video: the brief panning shot across the three people in the front seat driving to the airport, ending on Alvy's puddle-of-fear face. Can't do that in a theater or a book or in anything but a movie. Annie actually is what has become a movie-blurb cliché, a tour-de-force. It earns its bittersweet, elegiac feeling-tone. Maybe I just have too many failed relationships in my life. But then, I didn't when I first saw it.
At any rate I have resisted circling back to Annie since Allen took up with his adopted daughter [UPDATE: This is an error. See correction below]. It's been a long time now. Before I can do so I'll no doubt have to delve into the details of he and Soon-Yi Previn, and I'm not sure I want to. With eyes averted it's still possible to believe it's a wholesome coupling of consenting adults who happen to have an unconventional meet-story. They're still together, and he was never convicted of a crime.... On the other hand, it's possible I'll die before ever seeing Annie again. But I'll always want to.
Orwell
I'm not actually proud of my molten moral core when it comes to art. It's just a psychological fact of me that I deal with. It was never a decision. Didn't I write a piece once called "Never Meet Your Heroes"? I think I did. And that's why. Scott Abbey writes, in the Comments,
As to the question of separating the artist from the art, it depends. It depends on how close in time, space and culture the transgressor and their transgression is. I haven’t watched a Woody Allen movie in years, although I used to really enjoy them. Bill Cosby’s comedy albums were a source of joy to me and my friends as teenagers; I can’t listen to them. Certain current musical artists—giants in my mind—have robbed me of some of the enjoyment I get from listening to their artistry due to them going out of their way to encourage people to skip getting vaxxed. Picasso was a long time ago (to me), and he was never a favorite of mine. So I like his work about as much as I ever did. So, it depends. I don’t have a good decision-making framework here.
I sympathize.
As for Yoram Nevo's recommendation of Orwell's "Benefit of Clergy": know it well. And it does treat this subject better than almost anything. One of my touchstone books is Orwell's Essays (Everyman's), a thick brick of a tome that I habitually root around in to find a truffle. I read it like the pious read the Bible, in snips and pieces, and, like they, I'll never stop. Well, until I have to. I believe I could feel the truth of Orwell's judgment of Dali, unarticulated, directly from the art itself, by the age of 12 or so (I spent my youth engaging with painters, mainly)—the sense that the obscene immorality and surreal morbidness is the only thing that enlivens the otherwise conventional Edwardian draughtsmanship ("a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow," writes Orwell piercingly, ever the master of le mot juste). Just as I read the essays of E.B. White aloud alone (and have always done) to steal a little reflected light from his cadences, I return time after time to the watering hole of Orwell to linger a little in the company of a mind like mine only better.
And an exquisite little touch about "Benefit" I only just learned: see the little note at the bottom about it being included in a collection of essays but then being physically cut out of all the copies because the publishing house changed its mind and decided the essay wasn't fit to print. To which one can only observe, wow, how...Orwellian.
Dead heads
Once when I was young, I attended a lecture by Joel-Peter Witkin, a photographer who once posed two severed human heads as if they were kissing. (He had worked out an arrangement with a Mexican hospital that allowed him to sort through unclaimed corpses and discarded body parts to use in his photographs.) He had a photograph he told us was of his own then-six-year-old son, naked or nearly so, with a collar on, and the collar was attached by a chain to the nipple of an naked obese woman. Witkin told us, with a delighted smile, that the "little guy" was "confused" and was crying. That's all I heard; I walked out, and have never looked at Witkin's work again on purpose, and never will.
It's just the way I am, can't help it. My first role model, age six, was Popeye, who said "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam." Gotta be yourself, like you have any choice.
Your homework for tonight (I'm kidding, kidding, don't go all Will Smith on me): read "Benefit of Clergy." It's goooood.
Kindest regards,
Mike
CORRECTION: I did look into the matter of the Allen/Farrow household, a little, thanks to a helpful reader, J Lee. Moses Farrow, the adopted son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who states he is a licensed therapist, has a web page which states that:
She [Soon-Yi] is not Woody’s daughter (adopted, step, or otherwise), nor is she developmentally challenged. (She got a master’s degree in special education from Columbia University!) And the claim that they started dating while she was underage is totally false.
In truth, Woody and Soon-Yi rarely even spoke during her childhood. It was my mother who first suggested, when Soon-Yi was 20, that Woody reach out and spend time with her. He agreed and started taking her to Knicks games. That’s how their romance started. Yes, it was unorthodox, uncomfortable, disruptive to our family and it hurt my mother terribly. But the relationship itself was not nearly as devastating to our family as my mother’s insistence on making this betrayal the center of all our lives from then on.
I will admit that I'm in over my head here. Moses' page made me uncomfortable to read, and it appears various family members have a history of feuding. I'll leave this post up, but I think I'll watch Annie Hall again.
Book of Interest this Week
Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past. TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced. This is his exploration of his home territories, and it's great.
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John Krumm: "The end of your post made me laugh, because my wife was recounting a bad meeting where someone made her angry, and she said ugh, I just wanted to Will Smith that guy. He (Smith) managed to verb his own name."
Nikhil Ramkarran: "I can speak only for myself, but it is one of the hardest things in the world for me to give credibility, or even just acknowledgement, to differing opinions on controversial issues where I sympathise with one side. And yet, I believe it is one of the most valuable skills I could possibly learn. I have recognised the value of dissenting opinions a long time ago, decades, but I still have to fight most times, first to even recognise my own intolerance, and secondly, to moderate it. Just as an aside, there's no opinion you express Mike, that will cause me to pull support. Your approach to controversial issues over the years have been a model (or, in other words, I wanna be you when I grow up, but rich 😆)."
Lothar Adler: "I would like to say something about your experience and reaction to Joel Peter Witkin. For many years I have been very impressed, moved and disturbed by Witkin's photographic work. I have seen much of his work, read things written by him, seen many large original enlargements, spoken with him personally at an exhibition.
"The story you have reported with his six-year-old son also strikes me as repulsive and unjustifiable. But: Mr. Witkin is Mr. Witkin is Mr. Witkin, whether he uses a camera or not. And he shares his personality and his view of life through photography.
"In my understanding, it cannot and must not be that only people who are morally, ethically, legally, politically ('political correctness') correct are allowed to express and communicate themselves artistically. With that we would be directly on the way to a superordinate censorship, even if this first takes place only in our heads, in the context of a self-censorship. Of course, everyone is free to decide what he wants to ingest or not. But is it in the concrete case really the very own decision or does one believe only to have to fulfill the current social norms?
"I admit, however, that also for me a border would be crossed, if a reprehensible action against a living, feeling being, against its will! takes place only because of it, in order to produce a product of the art. In this case I will rather renounce this art product, but would hesitate to reject the other life work of this artist altogether.
"In a video interview Witkin said about the content of his photography that his pictures would show 'conditions of being.' That seems very important to me. For me, art is a way to explore and communicate the human dimension of 'conditions of being.'
"The older I have become, the more I have experienced that human life, human existence considered in its entirety, is often far beyond what young people are usually taught in so-called education. This is one reason why it is difficult for many people to come to terms with the fact that many things are in fact quite different in the course of their lives.
"I would find it tragic if then also in the art only the well-behaved, adapted to social rules and venerable people were allowed to make their messages."
Mike replies: I appreciate that you've expressed your opinion of this photographer, with one little cavil: I didn't say that he shouldn't be allowed to express himself and communicate artistically. I just said I would no longer be part of his audience. It's not up to me to convict him of anything, but I do think it's wrong to mistreat a child the way he described.
Keith: "A number of years ago I was reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. I found the book to be an intriguing, thought-provoking, and well-researched work on the challenges of the many unfortunate people who are trapped in a low income existence, and the rigged socio-economic platform that keeps them there. About halfway through the book I read the passage where the author casually mentions that she is an atheist. Having been raised in a very conservative Christian (Southern Baptist and Republican) family and community, I was stunned by the author's admission, and dismayed that I had supported an atheist by purchasing her book with my discretionary income. I immediately closed the book and laid it aside for a couple weeks.
"As the initial shock subsided and I pondered over my initial reaction, it occurred to me that the fact that the author was an atheist did not change the value of the content in the book. I picked up the book and continued where I had left off. Reflecting on my thoughts after completing the book revealed two things. First, it reinforced my concern of the pitfalls of properly regulated capitalism (whatever that may be), which can become a runaway freight train that can create an imbalance in wealth distribution. But more importantly, it became a turning point for me in that I realized that we do not have to agree with or condone an individual's personal morals or actions in order to recognize and learn from the value of their contributions. The content and delivery of 'Bill Cosby—Himself' is no less funny or brilliant now than when he first created it. Our perception and appreciation of the creator may influence our interpretation of the work, but it does not change the objective strength of the content."
[Comments have been added.]
Here's our day yesterday. My address is 740 East Lake Road, and the addresses here are the mileages from the town line—so I'm 7.4 miles south of the southern border of the hamlet of Penn Yan, up at the top of the Lake.
Curiously, we get different weather than they do. Snow squalls spill over the massif of the bluff and descend on us—once I got to watch a little one come at me, and I saw it all the way, which was thrilling—but they sometimes hit us and leave Penn Yan alone. Yesterday I was coming from town, and the weather up there and for about the first four miles was fine. No snow and clear roads. Down here it was a different story. We got two or three inches in an hour or two.
It's not the first time I've observed this. Weather is very local in these parts.
Question: When should you not zap up a digital picture with Dehaze and Clarity and so forth? Answer, when you're trying to show a heavy atmosphere. If I kick up the contrast and clarity of the truck in this, I can make it almost look like it was a nice day.
OoP (Out-of-camera. Or should it be OoP?)
Improved? Not sure about that. You be the judge.
As you can see, I opted for something in the middle. When editing digital images, as in darkroom printing, the how is always the easy part. You can master that relatively easily. What to do—judgement, as I call it—is always the tougher question.
Futbol
Just as a followup, it was quite a weekend in the NFL. To quote Ben Shpigel of the New York Times, "I’m not prone to hyperbole, but THAT WAS THE BEST WEEKEND OF FOOTBALL IN THE HISTORY OF EVER. In case you weren’t watching—and if you weren’t, why not?—all four divisional-round games ended on the final play: three field goals and an overtime touchdown."
The Divisional Round is the quarterfinals, in case you don't know. The remaining four teams will meet in the championship games, to determine the AFC (American Football Conference) and NFC (National Football Conference) champions. The two champions square off in the Superbowl—which is typically a pretty snoozy game.
One little tiny flaw in the picture is that our local team, the poor Bills, from the City of Eternal Football Heartache, fell just short again. They were ahead with 13 seconds left. Unless you've hardened your heart against enjoying any sport ever as a matter of principle or of crankiness, you really should watch the ending to that game. Even if you're not a fan of American football—or of sports at all—you'll get it. Remarkable.
I was rooting for Green Bay, Buffalo, and Tampa Bay, in that order, so all of my teams are out of it, knocked down like bowling pins. I guess I'll root for Cincinnati now. (That means they'll lose. I'm a Jonah, I guess.)
Pool this morning! So I need to get breakfast. At least I often win at that. As my friends put it, I cheat: I practice. :-)
Mike
Book o' the Week
Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory, Fifth Edition. "As far as I know nothing in the past 50 years is a better explanation of how humans see." —Hugh Crawford
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Mark Sampson: "I've spent thousands of hours driving through the murk your photo so accurately describes. That picture makes me recall the mingling of accomplishment and relief I would feel upon reaching my destination, after a long journey in those conditions. Your 'improved?' version merely looks like it was taken an hour later, towards dusk. And Mike, nothing you can do to that image will make it look like a nice day."
Bill Bresler: "When it comes to image adjustments in Photoshop or whatever, I'm reminded of the Cajun Chef who, regarding spicing food, declared, 'A little too much is just enough.' I agree with the chef when I'm cooking. But when I'm editing photos, I tend to stop just short of what looks good on the screen. Sometimes I'll change my mind later, but as long as I still have the raw file, it doesn't matter."
[TOP now publishes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Comments will be posted later.]
What I got for Christmas: a gift certificate from B&H thanking me for being an affiliate, which I used to buy an extra battery, a charger, and a tripod plate for the A6600. Thanks to B&H Photo.
Another gift: my "Mike's Miniatures" sale was a success. I sold 39 prints. I'm happy about it. Grateful thanks to everyone who purchased one. They'll be delivered by the end of January. I hope you like. Thank you!
And from an Australian reader: a copy of a most amazing book, A Few of the Legends by Peter Adams. It's an astonishing piece of work, like QT Luong's National Monuments book except for those of us who love portraits. More about this one later. You can see a few samples here. I'm greatly enjoying every dimension of it.
Friday: time for resolutions.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography Edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle
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Photo by John Dersham
Kenneth Wajda sent me to John Alexander Dersham's Classic Fine Art Photography pages on Facebook. There, I found the photo I originally wanted to use for the Fotomat post. I had come across an obviously secondhand, cropped copy of it on the Web, and was pretty sure I shouldn't snitch it and use it without permission. However, Kenneth found the picture at its source, and I've gotten permission now from John, so here you go. It's a record shot, but documentary pictures gain in stature (that's my feeling, anyway) as the things they record become unrecoverable otherwise. As long as they're well done.
Note that two of the businesses seen in the background were also once common and are now less so—a travel agency and a bakery.
The Fotomat post comments are also late, but now (finally) they've now all been posted on the original post.
It's been one of those weeks. On the other hand, traffic was unusually strong for the posts this past week, so maybe I need to turn my attention to OG O/C* photography and yarns about ye olden days more frequently.
Mike
*Optical/Chemical, e.g. film creating a record of the lens image.
Book o' the Week
This is the book that sold 1,100 copies through our links, back when it first came out in 2007. It's essentially a catalogue raisonné of the work of the iconic American landscapist. I suppose it won't sell any more, since everyone already has a copy, but the link can be a portal to Amazon for your holiday shopping. Thank you kindly for helping to support The Online Photographer!
The following logo is also a link if you click on it:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Sharon: "I don’t use Facebook, so I was glad Mr. Dersham made those photos available for anyone to see. That series was great. I found it interesting that I didn’t see any women working in those shops. Thanks for posting his work."
Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "Re: 'so maybe I need to turn my attention to OG O/C* photography and yarns about ye olden days more frequently': Yeah! Absolutely yes!"
Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "Re 'so maybe I need to turn my attention to OG O/C* photography and yarns about ye olden days more frequently': If, as a long-time reader and occasional contributor to TOP, I may provide some 'VOC' (Voice of the Customer) to Ye Humble Editor...please don't. Personally, I'm not interesting in looking backwards."
Mike replies: Hard to please all the people all the time....
Oh, ouch. Ain't that just the way it goes? There I was, gassing on about how I moderate comments, and...then I realized that the Featured Comments for the "Ideal Format" post never got posted.
Or rather, they did get posted, but then I probably saved the wrong version of the page and "disappeared" them again. [Inarticulate frustrated strangling gurgling noise.] I hate it when that happens. Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is plagued with a disorganized mind.
Since they would just be buried if I published them underneath the older post, here are the Featured Comments for the "Ideal Format" post, with my apologies to their authors for the delay. Here is a link to the original post.
+ = + = + = + = +
darlene: "The square is ideal. You get three formats in one: square, portrait and landscape. I started my career as a comp artist working in advertising then later became a commercial photographer, so my creativity is accustomed to the perspective of the page or print. When I shot events with a Speedlight next to a Hasselblad on a bracket for handheld shooting, no need to turn the camera sideways and screw up the flash direction. In-camera cropping is easy as pre-visualizing (designing) as I shoot, so for me there is nothing not to like about the square format. Just wish we had a square sensor."
Mark Roberts: "I'm more than happy with my full-frame camera but it's not my ideal. I really dislike the 2:3 aspect ratio and I don't like 3:4 any better. My favorite ratio by far is 5:7, but no one makes a camera that shoots that way natively. It's odd because 2:3 prints out to 5 x 7.5 inches and you wouldn't think trimming a quarter of an inch off each end would make much of a difference. But, for me at least, it really does. So for now I'll just keep shooting with what I have and trimming most of my shots just a wee bit."
Mike replies: During my time with the view camera—my first 4x5, a Wista—I actually attached a bar to the inside of the back standard that cropped each image as I took it to 5x7 proportions. So as far as aspect ratio was concerned it was a mini-5x7. (I had really wanted a Deardorff 5x7 but couldn't afford one.)
Tom Burke: "For me, it's APS-C, and Canon APS-C at that. I've had a couple of full-frame DSLRs, and ultimately found the outfit that collected around them just too big and too heavy. I've briefly tried Micro 4/3—I bought a secondhand Olympus E-M10 from a local photo dealer—but perversely found it too small and light—the controls were too small and too close together. So for me the ideal size is a well-spec'd Canon APS-C DSLR. It might also be significant that my current such camera, a 90D, has a very similar size and weight to the first Canon film SLR that I ever owned, an EOS 650. I used that camera (and an almost identical successor, the EOS 600) for years, and perhaps that size and heft are burned into my brain as 'what a proper camera should feel like in my hand.' If I was just looking at lens choices, however, I'd be very tempted by a Fujifilm X camera."
Dan Khong: "Ideal format? It's a no-brainer: 35mm of course. I'm partly biased because I shoot film plus digital, soup and print the film in my darkroom, smelling fixer in the process. My B&W negatives are as archival as one can get nowadays. So when I bought an affordable FF Canon RP, I could not ask for anything more."
Gordon: "5x7. Back in the 1980s I met a guy taking photos with a 5x7 Deardorff. Before then I’d never heard of the format and thought it peculiar. It produced a negative too large for an affordable commercially available enlarger and a tad small for contact prints, though doable. But today I find it suits my 3:2 images, which otherwise seem too elongated. It comes pretty close to 4x3, but not quite as fat."
Stephen S.: "The E-1 was my first DSLR, and one of the main reasons was the 14–54mm (28–104mm-e) kit lens. Other camera companies were still just offering lenses from their film cameras, which meant a pair of 17–35mm (27–56mm-e) and 28–70mm (45–112mm-e) which did not appeal to me, especially considering the problems with dust getting on the sensor when changing lenses. That the E-1 was the first camera (that I know of) to offer a built-in sensor cleaner just helped seal the deal. The 'designed for digital from the ground up' strategy really was unique at the time, and had very real benefits."
Joseph: "There was a time when Micro 4/3 made sense to me. I used both a E-M5 and a E-M5 II extensively for a number of years and liked both cameras very much. But I look back at the files and wish I had lugged my D800 along with me instead. Now that something like the Nikon Z7 with the 24–70 ƒ/4 lens exists, I just don't see the advantage of Micro 4/3 for my needs. The Z7 isn't quite as small as the E-M5 but has much better image quality. A good compromise."
SteveW: "APS-C seems the optimal sensor size for me. I've used Nikon FF and APS-C cameras, and a year or so ago changed to a Fuji X-T4 primarily to use the small ƒ/2 primes. For the way I shoot, and I'm a hobbyist, APS-C is sufficient. That said, I prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio, and I frequently crop to 4:3. If the Fuji X-T4 had a 4:3 aspect ratio APS-C sensor, that might be the ideal for me. But cropping is no big deal."
Roger Bradbury: "I bought my first DSLR in 2009. It was an APS-C camera, because that's what was within my budget, both for the price of the camera and because its well established mount meant there were plenty of used lenses around. This format turned out to have the depth of field I need; enough when I want a lot, but not so much that I can't control it enough to throw a background enough out of focus. The 35mm format I was used to before I bought the DSLR sometimes didn't quite have enough depth of field for me."
(Posted belatedly by)
Mike
Products of the Week
Which one is best? Panasonic S1R (47.3 MP), Sony A7R IV (61 MP), Canon R5 (45 MP), Nikon Z7 II (45.7 MP), or Leica SL2 (47 MP)? You know the answer.
The above are links to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link if you click on it:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Words and photo by Dave Levingston
As a fan of Clarence White, Sr., and someone who has used orbs in his own photos, I thought I'd give you a little info on orbs that goes beyond what I put in my comment on TOP. White was a native of my home town, Newark, Ohio, and I have often photographed in some of the same locations, such as Blackhand Gorge, where he did some of his most well-known photographs.
White was fond of orbs. Stieglitz, not so much. There are quotes of him complaining about White using them. I've not dug those quotes up, but here is a note from page 227 of the book Clarence White and His World by Anne McCauley:
"The glass orb, which became one of White's trademark props, had been used since the Renaissance as a symbol of the Holy Spirit (because it echoes the orb of the world), of the transparency of the soul (as in Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Catholic Faith [ca. 1670–72], in which it hangs from the ceiling), or of the vanity of earthly things, akin to a soap bubble (in seventeenth-century vanitas still lifes). It was also traditionally associated with virginal purity, as in Cesar van Everdingen's Amor Holding a Glass Orb (ca. 1660). Later it reflects the mystical practice of scrying, in which the future appears in a crystal orb. A typical Aesthetic movement example of the use of glass orbs is Edward Burne-Jones's cycle The Days of Creation (1870–76), in which each stage of creation is envisioned in a crystal orb held by a female allegorical figure. Underlying all its symbolic uses, the glass orb presented painters and photographers like White with an interesting play of transparency and reflections that challenged normal optical perception and complicated the process of representation."
So as I've been working on a project in homage to White, I've used orbs quite a bit. Above is one of my favorite and most popular examples.
On a related note, in photo school I was taught that Pictorialism was a mistake, a dead end that didn't actually advance photography. I think that is wrong. The modernist ƒ/64 group photographers reacted against Pictorialism and put it in disrepute. But I think it was crucial in the process of photography being accepted as a legitimate medium for art and not just a representative craft. And, looking back from today, I think we can see that Pictorialism is one way to do photography, just as valid as any other technique or genre.
Dave
Mike adds: The most famous glass orb in art recently was of course the one in Christ's hand in Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, which (the painting, not the orb) sold at Christie's in New York City for approximately $450 million in 2017. That one caused quite a bit of controversy, which appears to be resolved now. P.S. here's me and Dave last time he was in town.
Book o' the Week
The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."
This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Bill Tyler: "The controversy Mike alludes to is in part whether Salvator Mundi is actually by Leonardo, and in part about the fact that Jesus' robe, seen through the orb, is not shown inverted. I'm astonished at the misunderstanding about the inversion. Writing on the topic seems to reflect a mistaken belief that objects viewed through a glass sphere always appear inverted. This is not always so. A glass sphere is in effect a lens with a focal length that is quite short relative to its size. Looking through such a lens at an object more than one focal length away will indeed show the object inverted. However, if the object is closer than one focal length, it will appear erect, not inverted. That orb in the painting is very close to Jesus' robe, and thus the lack of inversion is completely optically accurate.
"Here's a photo of a solid glass sphere resting on my keyboard, illustrating the point. The letter G seen through the sphere is right-side-up, not inverted. It's how an ordinary magnifying glass works—the focal length there is a bit longer relative to the magnifier's size, and you see the subject erect. The article Mike references has a bunch of computer scientists doing simulations with hollow and solid spheres. If they'd bothered to open a first-year physics textbook, or any introduction to optics, this point would have been explained in detail. Failing that, glass spheres are easy to obtain and inexpensive. An actual experiment seems to me to be far more convincing than a numeric simulation."
Jnny: "That is a mesmerizing photo. Kudos."
Things are going well. I appreciate all the advice, pro and con, the good wishes, the admonitions, the compliments and complaints. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who signed up at Patreon and all the people who increased their donation. Thank you! Thank you.
I had a great writing day today. Was in the saddle by 7:00 and didn't run out of steam till 1:00. Wrote 1,700 words. For those who've asked and are curious, I'm not imagining myself as a bestseller author, novelist, or instant millionaire. I'm going to write a series of modest books either on practical topics or for reading enjoyment. From each one I aspire to earn around $20k. I intend to put the profits into paying off my mortgage. Assuming I can hit that target, I'll need eight books to pay it down to zero. More if they earn less, fewer if they earn more. I'm really looking forward to it because I love coming up with ideas for projects and I anticipate that I'll get better at the process after I get a couple under my belt.
I'm going to try to find an agent to offer them to mainstream publishers, but I don't have a lot of illusions about that; most probably they'll end up self-published on Amazon and marketed as well as I can by myself. If I can't make 50k words worth $7.99 or so to most anybody then I'm not worth my salt. I'm confident I'll have few if any dissatisfied customers. I just know I can offer more than $8 worth of entertainment for $8, that's all.
I'd like to get at least three of these under my belt before I tackle the book about Xander. That one will be the only full-length book. It's really a fantastic story, the best story I have by far; all I really have to do is not mess it up. But I don't want it to be my first book because I want some practice before I tackle it. However, I've finished a very good first chapter for it and a solid draft of a proposal. It's an uphill climb to sell a book proposal to a real publisher for an advance, but I'll be prepared just in case.
The small books will be about 40–50k words each, although I'm the type who tends to add more words as I revise, and I love to revise. (I live for it.) So maybe a draft that starts out at 40k words will grow to 70k naturally as I work it over.
Y'all are going to love the first book. It's just pure fun, and pure pleasure to write. It's a series of entertaining tales based on my life (but fictionalized some, too). In the past two days I added 4,000 words. And it's some of the best writing I've done lately. I'm really, really enjoying it. I feel energized and happy.
I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning and get back to work!
Mike
[UPDATE: Emma Raducanu of Great Britain won the United States Open Tennis Championship Women's Singles, 6-4, 6-3. If you are ten years old and live to be 110, you will never see this again—a qualifier ranked 150th in the world winning a major championship without dropping a set. It's the very first time and highly likely to be the last time it will ever happen.
Wonder what it's like in Old Blighty tonight?]
Malcolm Myers answers: "We have all gone Emma crazy in Blighty. It's been decades since we've had a female tennis player who was even in contention, so for Emma to storm through the way she has—breaking every record on the way—is quite astounding. We all got to watch it free-to-air and it was a really competitive match. I think Leylah Fernandez played extremely well. As one commenter here said, shame that only one of them could win. However, Fernandez will no doubt have her day, probably may times, over the next decade. Brilliant stuff."
I've been following the U.S. Open closely, or as closely as I can given that I don't own a TV. It's been a fascinating and wonderful tournament so far, really fun to follow.
The big news, apart from the fact that Novak Djokovic of Serbia is still in contention for the first true Grand Slam in men's tennis since 1969, is that two previously little-known, unseeded teenagers (one a qualifier, no less) are in the final of the Women's draw for the first time in more than two decades—since a young Serena Williams of the USA, age 17, defeated Martina Hingis of Switzerland, who was 18 at the time, in the 1999 final.
The two are Leylah Fernandez of Canada and Emma Raducanu of the UK. Emma is 18 and Leylah just turned 19 a few days ago, in the midst of the tournament. Leylah is ranked 73rd in the world, and Emma, ranked 150th, is the one who had to come through the qualifying tournament. Since rankings were initiated in 1975, only five women outside the top 50 have ever reached the U.S. Open final. Both young women will make meteoric rises in the world rankings following the tournament, Raducanu especially. Both will probably emerge as the No. 1 ranked female players in their respective countries.
Photo courtesy of Sirobi Tennis Photos
Leylah Fernandez of Canada at this year's French Open
Leylah has been a true giant-killer, beating a succession of formidable opponents to make it to the final. These include defending champion Naomi Osaka of Japan, the first Asian woman ever to hold the World No. 1 ranking; three-time major champion and former World No. 1 Angelique Kerber of Germany; No. 5 seed Elina Svitolina of Ukraine; and World No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, a seasoned and particularly powerful player. Fernandez is the youngest woman since Serena Williams in 1999 to beat three Top 5 players on her way to the final, and only the fourth Canadian, male or female, ever to appear in the final of a major.
Photo courtesy of Sirobi Tennis Photos
Emma Raducanu of the United Kingdom in 2018
Emma, meanwhile, playing dazzling tennis, has steamrolled her way through the draw without dropping a single set—and that includes her three qualifying matches. She is the first qualifier ever to reach the U.S. Open finals, and the first British woman to reach the finals of any major since Virginia Wade—who is in attendance at this year's tournament—in 1977.
Leylah's mother, Irene, was born in Canada of Filipino parents, and although her father Jorge's family moved to Canada from Ecuador when Jorge was four, he later played professional football (soccer) for Ecuador. He is his daughter Leylah's coach, and, more's the pity, he's not at this tournament (think about it. They never know how far she'll advance. How was he to know this would happen? Nobody else in the world did). Emma's mother Renee is Chinese and her father Ian is Romanian—both are financial executives. Although she lives in London and plays as a UK citizen, Emma too was born in Canada.
It probably doesn't hurt their exploding global popularity that both of the teenage finalists are beautiful, charming, and well spoken, with dazzling smiles. In interviews they come off as typical giggling teenage girls, bright and happy. These off-court outward attitudes contrast sharply with the unyielding killer instinct and no-nonsense confidence each of them shows during matches, when they have seemed as composed and mature as players in the primes of their careers.
Spectacular and rare
It's such a pity to me that my brother Scott isn't here to see this. He would have been loving it. He was a fan of women's tennis no less than the men's—he thought the women's game was a subtly more relatable form of the art of tennis because brute force and strength don't play quite so much a part. This year's finals could possibly be the sensational first flowering of a new rivalry in women's tennis, but, even if it isn't, it's a rare and spectacular occurrence all on its own. Too bad I can't watch it! I hope I'll get to see the whole match someday. My prediction: Raducanu in three, and I'll say one set will go to a tiebreaker. As they say in tennis, sometimes it's a pity there has to be a loser.
If my prediction comes true, it would be the first major tennis tournament ever won by a qualifier. If you're able to, you might want to try to catch it even if you're not normally a fan. It's only the eighth time two teenagers have contended in the finals of a major. As Emma Raducanu herself said, "we’re both playing good tennis so it will be a good match." The women's finals commence at 4:20 p.m. Eastern U.S. Time tomorrow, Saturday, September 11th.
If you do get to watch, enjoy it for me!
Mike
[CORRECTION: I deal with dozens of names every day, and try hard not to make mistakes, but the original version of this post spelled Leylah Fernandez's name wrong. All eight times it appears. That is a bad one. Sorry for the error. —Ed.]
Book o' the Week:
The second edition of old friend Bruce Barnbaum's The Essence of Photography is just out. Bruce wrote for Photo Techniques when I was Editor. I always enjoy his insights into the art and craft, even if his technique isn't the same as mine. I still learn. Mastery is fun to read about.
The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's the new edition of The Essence of Photography at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
robert e: "I agree with Scott. I find that nuances seem to both matter more and are easier to discern in the women's game. There are dimensions of tennis that don't really come across on TV, while other aspects are easier to see, and this may have something to do with the difference as well. Relatedly, there's more stylistic variety in women's tennis at the moment, which makes for more intriguing matchups.
"It's been an Open full of surprises and an extraordinarily high level of tennis. Notably, the fans packing the main stadium seem more than ready to make their presence and preferences known, and they've found in these two teens willing and charismatic partners. That's yet another precocious quality these teens share—they seem very much at ease engaging with large and enthusiastic crowds, especially at critical moments. They're also surprising everyone with their tactical smarts.
"At least in my area, the free trial of YouTubeTV includes ESPN, which carries the U.S. Open. Possibly goes for other online TV services as well.
"But for some a service isn't even necessary, as increasingly in the US many without TV are able to watch at least some TV thanks to their internet or cell phone provider's relationship to one or another media giant. Might be worth checking USopen.org or ESPN.com and seeing what you can see. I understand that in the UK Amazon Prime is carrying matches."
Lisa S. Gorrell: "Maybe you could hang out at Best Buy or Sears to watch the game."
Mike replies: Actually I got a trial to YouTubeTV like robert e suggested and it works (this time). But your comment reminds me that when I was young I used to stand in the photo section of the bookstore in Georgetown and read whole books of photo criticism! The clerks knew I was a poor photo student and they let me do it. I read all of A.D. Coleman's Light Readings and most of Robert Adams's Beauty in Photography that way, among others.
AndrewH: "Happily Belgium is showing all of the US Open. I am backing Emma and Novak for wins in the finals (sic), one for the huge achievement (Novak) and the other for the sheer charm (Emma). It is so nice to see a happy professional sport player."
