The Online Photographer

The Jeff Keller Article

I managed to track down Jeff Keller, who told me that the article I remembered is actually on DPReview, where he worked for almost nine years, beginning right after he closed the Digital Camera Resource Page—which, by the way, was the very first camera megasite, and lasted an impressive 15 years. (TOP is 17 years, 3 months, and 26 days old). Which made me slap my forehead and say, "of course." Not only did I read it when it first appeared, but I wrote about it once before, too. The brain cells where that information was once stored are apparently among the ones now missing.

It's called "Throwback Thursday: the ups and downs of running DCResource."

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

I'm Team Process... (More on Process vs. Project)

That was a very rewarding discussion yesterday about "process vs. project," and I'd like to thank JH again, as well as Nick Hartmann and everyone else who commented, whether featured or not. As you can probably tell, I've been trying to figure out what kind of writer I want to be for the rest of my life.

Very interesting that our friend* Kirk Tuck said, "I have to be the most project driven person I know." Kirk is just the nicest and most considerate guy, and I think I'm pretty friendly too, and when he and I talk on the phone the conversations are very warm and tend to go on for quite a while. Yet there is an undeniable tension in our attitudes to each other when we're discussing ideas in writing. I think we may have just hit on the reason, because I can echo what he said, but in the opposite direction: I have to be the most process-driven person I know. JH said, in a private email, "It’s not binary but a continuum, however most people are not in the middle." I'm way over on the process side. I don't even like "closure" at all: to put it bluntly, I dislike finishing anything. I like things to stay open-ended, because that way they're still alive; change is still possible, they can still evolve, you can still think about them some more, still be creative, still catch and fix your errors, and so on. It's only very reluctantly, and with disappointment and misgivings, that I will come to a hard stop and concede that something is done.

It's possible that the reason I liked being a magazine editor so much is that it counteracted my process-driven tendencies. Each issue was a project. There was a series of defined hard deadlines for every issue (I still dream sometimes of missing them), and there were people to help get each deadline met. Then, when the issue was printed, it was done: there was no more possibility for change. I could let go of it because I had to. If all of it had been up to me, on the other hand, every issue probably would have been late and half of them wouldn't have gotten done at all!

It's not that I can't work. I've told this story before, but when I was a freshman at Dartmouth had the honor of attending a meet-and-greet with Saul Bellow, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I waited in line after the breakfast to ask him a specific question, but I didn't get my chance, because the guy in front of me asked the exact question I wanted to ask: what's the best way to become a writer? Mr. Bellow didn't hesistate: "Write three million words." The guy who asked the question argued with that, but Mr. Bellow gave his reasons and didn't budge on the concept. The requirement was practice, and lots of it.

I was disappointed, because of course I was eighteen and wanted to be famous yesterday, but I headed right back to my dorm room, counted the words on a typed page (about 400), did some calculations, and determined that if wrote two typed pages a day, I'd be at three million words in slightly over ten years. I got right to work. Writing became a daily habit, and has stayed that way.

But then there was another problem. What the heck was I going to do with all that writing? I certainly didn't want to be responsible for it—keep it, catalogue it, store it. (Three million words with 400 words on a page is 7,500 pieces of paper, for one thing.) So I started writing letters. That way, I figured, each day's work was done and out the door in a day or three, and I didn't have to worry about it any further. It allowed me to get on to the next one.

I also wrote a lot of short stories, having the vague idea that that was how writers got started, and I might have made the switch to another kind of writing at a certain point. My girlfriend in art school wanted to get married soon and have six children, which greatly worried me. At that time in my life, I couldn't even support myself, much less myself and seven other people. (Ah, feckless youth—it never occurred to me that I could stay with her and not necessarily go along with her plan.) I knew enough about writers at that time to know how they work: John Camp described it in his comment two days ago. I had already met Larry McMurtry, and Larry's method was to write five new pages a day and revise the previous fifteen, meaning that he went over everything three times after composing it. I figured at the time that if I married Gina, I could pick a type of book, keep writing my two pages a day and revising six, and just keep letting them add up into books until the books started doing well. That was the wild card, though—I had no idea if, and when, they would ever start earning money. It got me no further toward a solution to my immediate problem. I honestly had no faith in my ability to earn a living at that point, and instead of courageously devoting myself to the one I loved and shoving off into the unknown seas of a great adventure, I broke up with her—a despicable, defeatist, cowardly thing to do, because I really did love her. (Although very bright, she's dyslexic, so there's little chance she'll ever read this.) Something I still deeply regret, all these years later. (Everything bad that happens to me in my romantic life I ascribe to karma, repayment for my perfidy. I'll either forgive myself someday, or else someday I'll die.)

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that I've easily averaged 800 words a day, lifetime, even if it's a thousand words one day and six hundred the next, or whatever. (This post is about 1,500 words.) If I do the arithmetic for the 47 years between the day I met Saul Bellow and today, that's about 14 million words in my lifetime, give or a couple of million. Even if we put it at 500 words a day, which I think is too conservative, that's still 9,500,000 words since I was 14. So I surpassed Saul's Dictum a long time ago. Put in my 10,000 hours, in Gladwell-speak.

But you've probably detected already that "writing letters" is something I'm still doing, more or less.

Because that's another thing I learned too late: only practice exactly what it is you want to do, because that exact thing is what your practice will train you to do. Practice by writing letters, and you won't get good at writing novels; you'll get good at writing letters. Blogging is perfect for me because it's just an eternal flow of process. There is no project.

Even my photography is all process. I once got an introduction to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, and instead of taking a finished portfolio to show him (I had several), I opted to maximize the opportunity by taking a bunch of bits and pieces of things I was still working on, along with some interesting failures. Very much the wrong move, highly transgressive in light of expected behavior and protocol when an artist is granted an audience with a top curator. But I was much more interested in trying to engage him in a discussion about process than I was in showing off finished work and trying, like everybody else, to entice him to buy something for the Museum's collection. That didn't seem nearly as much fun. Big mistake, but the impulse was a reflection of who I am and the way I think.

You know, what should happen is this: Kirk and I should write a book together. Call it Game Theory for Photographers, the art of the medium from the divergent perspectives of a highly project-oriented professional and a highly process-oriented teacher-type. I'd be the one to slow it down and chew on all the gristle and edit and rewrite until it's all shiny, and Kirk would be the one to slap it into shape (an outline? What's an outline?) and keep it moving forward and and to drive us up to and over the finish line. (While I wail noooooo!) The only thing is, pace Charlie Ewers' comment on Saturday, it would not be good if Kirk and I ended up killing each other!

Mike

*Just as an aside, according to The Gotti Wars by John Gleeson, in the old Cosa Nostra, introducing a guy as "my friend" meant he was just a schmoe, but if he was introduced as "our friend" it signaled that he was a made man and couldn't be messed with.

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

Featured Comments from:

kirk: "It's wonderful that good friends can disagree so much and yet really enjoy the process of it all. I'm too reactive by far but I can't tell you how much I appreciate MJ's patience with me. It's comforting. And the fact that he's produced wonderful writing for me to savor (and sometimes disagree with) over coffee each morning makes me happy day by day (bird by bird?). Thanks to JH's comment I now get it. There is no right or wrong on the subject of writing. I need to stop believing that there is. Maybe that's the secret to enjoying both process and closure. Thanks Mike!"

Andreas Weber: "I'm leaning far to the process side as well (and a mechanical engineer with quite a lot of projects under my belt...). I may have found the ideal hobby in growing bonsai—they're never finished (unless you manage to kill one)."

Aaron: "You and Kirk would not end up killing each other. Rather, he would accomplish killing you because you would never get past chewing on how and whether to actually do it. Process can get you killed.  :-)  "

John Krumm: "Wonderful and slightly heartbreaking story. I almost succeeded in breaking up with my future wife when we were 21, telling her I wanted to end it after a summer romance. I returned to college 100 miles away, thinking I might get back together with a former girlfriend (shameful, I know). Fortunately, the former girlfriend had transferred, and intense loneliness, a phone call, and a bus ticket intervened, and we are still happily together. I chalk it up to dumb luck more than anything else. Sometimes the process works."

Unexpected Epiphany (Followup)

I apologize for yesterday's post—it was a complaint, and thus annoying to some, and it was too personal—I try to make these posts personable but not personal, always trying to remain aware of how others will relate to them. You have to understand, though: on most days I sit down in the morning with no idea what I'm going to write about, and two or three hours later hit the "Publish" button. (Then, if I like the piece, I'll tinker and toil over little changes throughout the day.) Yesterday I hadn't even mulled it over the evening before, which I sometimes do, because I had planned to republish that "Self and Other" piece about Diane Arbus, not realizing that I'd already done so a few years ago. As my father used to say about his attempts to learn to cook French omelettes the old-fashioned way, "sometimes you get an omelette, sometimes you get a mess of eggs." Yesterday it was the latter, that's all.

However, it did result in a rather surprising epiphany! Last night I abruptly decided that I should stop trying to write books—give up, leave the idea behind.

In my life I have written school papers, essays, letters, a dribble of poetry, short stories, many magazine articles (like 250 all told), forum posts, and blog posts (more than 10,000). All of it short-form writing. That's what I do. That's who I am. As David Vestal often used to say and write: "So, okay."

The longest ever
In the midst of the release of the Harry Potter books, I sent a 50-page draft of the beginning of a novel for adolescents to Scholastic, the publisher of those books in the U.S. I got a rejection slip with a handwritten note on it that said, "This almost made it for us—please keep us apprised of your future projects." I have been wracking my brain, but I believe that that was the longest thing I've ever written that anybody else ever read (assuming they read the whole thing, which I guess is not something I know). On the other end, I took a class at Reed for which we were supposed to write one-page papers. It was maddening—the professor used to pepper the margins of my papers with compliments and praise, and then give me B's and C's. Some sort of didactic strategy, I suppose. It made me contumacious. But I do recall one of his scribbled reactions: "How do you manage to say so much in ONE PAGE?!?" [sic.]

Anyway, I have reached a decision. It's the opposite of what I counseled yesterday—and I will have more to say about persistence vs. quitting in photography tomorrow (or rather Sunday, as I reserve Saturdays to not do housework). No more effort wasted on books, no more daydreams of being an author, no more thinking diverted from short-form pieces. To quote my very early childhood idol, Popeye, I yam what I yam.

And now, I am very late for my exercise class.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

robert e: "My takeaway from all this is that the essential skill is, in the words of Kenny Rogers, '...to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em / Know when to walk away and know when to run.' Perhaps the next lines are also instructive: 'You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table / There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done.' I've tried to read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu at least four times. I suppose that time is lost forever."

T. Edwards: "For what it's worth, I liked yesterday's post and didn't even really notice the 'complaint' portion until I went back and re-read. I loved the Malcolm piece to which you linked and that's what I remembered."

Dave (partial comment): " I hope that this decision, this revelation to give up the long-format, would be a level of freedom for you, a breath of fresh air, if you will...I, for one, applaud your decision to give up and carry on without that burden.... Bravo."

Ben: "I think that learning how to finish things is really important. I'll share a little story....

"My daughter, previously featured on TOP [top picture —Ed.], received an iPad for her ninth birthday, in early 2020. Round about April of that year there were a few things happening in the world, so she decided to start writing a book. She had started several before, but never finished them, so I told her I'd read it when she was done. So every day she sat under a blanket and tapped away with two fingers on glass. Sometime in late June or early July she shared the document with me, all 40,000 words of it. And then she revised it; I went over it with her; she revised it again; her mother proofread it, etc....until late 2021, when I realized that she could just keep revising it every six months, and every six months she'd be a little more sophisticated, have a little better vocabulary, and that this process could go on forever.

"She and I discussed; she decided to commit to her final revision, and we self-published it through print-on-demand. She spent a lot of time on it, and I really feel that finishing a long-term project, and then letting it go, is a skill that I didn't learn until much later in life...and then only in certain things. Not sure if it's all right to post a link to it, but if that's OK, Mike, here it is. She's now revising the sequel, and I'm just a proud dad  :-)  . It's different, I think, to create and then let go of a large, bounded project, than it is to build one over time out of smaller pieces. It's harder to let go of the former, to finally call it finished. But the latter is no less real, no less valuable, and something like this blog, the consistency of creation over time, is a real accomplishment. Something like what William Matthews wrote about Mingus, 'as the work of the body becomes a body of work.' (Apologies if I'm not recalling the quote correctly)."

Another Mike: "Mike, your parents and my parents must have gone to the same parenting school. The very sad fact is that no one gets out of a situation like that without serious damage. When the people who are supposed to love you the best are the ones who are sabotaging you and ripping your very sense of self to absolute shreds, it sets up your life to be an endless struggle. People who have had good supportive and loving parents have no idea and seem very glib about what we go through. Just do this, or just be that, they say. Sure, for you maybe. People brimming with solid self confidence who have known success and satisfaction their whole lives cannot relate to other realities so easily. Just know, you're not alone. There are a lot of us out here, and we see you, we get you, and we appreciate the struggle you so openly write about. Thank you for being honest. Mike."

Ed Hawco: "For what it’s worth, letting sh*t go is how The Buddha found enlightenment."

John Camp: "I don’t know why I’m writing this, since Kirk Tuck answered you well enough. Maybe because it’s snowing and I don’t want to take the dogs out.

"You (Mike) get up most days and write a column for this blog. That’s how a novel gets done. You have a time when you write, and that’s what you do. Doesn’t have to be too long. A couple of hours a day will do it. If you write 500–1,000 words a day, you’ll have a bestseller length novel (100,000–110,000 words) in half a year, more or less.

"If I sat in a chair and looked at the back of a Stephen King novel and thought 'My God, I have to write a *&#* brick like that,' I’d never get it done. So I don’t do that. Stephen King doesn’t either. So, I write 500–1,000 words a day, just like you do. And that’s what King does and Kirk does, too—and that’s why Kirk has a penthouse at the top of the Tuck Tower in Austin. You don’t have to be inspired, you don’t have to think deep thoughts, you don’t have to be overly bright, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to write that day. You just have to work.

"Probably the best inspiration for me was negative: my folks were nice people, but didn’t have money, so if I needed some, as a teenager, I pretty much had to get myself. I started by doing fieldwork during the Iowa summers, detasseling corn and bailing hay, and the inspiration was simple: 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.' I sold men’s clothes in a department store, and drilled holes in knobs in a radio factory, carried mail, and was an Army draftee, and it was all 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"I worked for newspapers, and it took a while—better than twenty years—and again, it was 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"Is it possible that you’re at that point? If not, then maybe you can continue to do the same ol’ sh*t.

"What kind of befuddles me is that I could take the columns you’ve written since you’ve run this blog, print them all out, get some scissors, cut and paste, and come up with the structure of a pretty good book on photography. The rest would be editing. Basically, carpentry.

"Couple hours a day."

Simon: "Like a significant number of commenters above, I cannot object to Thursday's post (a self-described 'complaint') but welcome it. Some (probably many) of your readers will take more from such a piece than you probably realise. Also, without it there would be no 'epiphany' post the following day. We are all shaped by our experiences, especially those in childhood, and many of us are unaware—at best only partially aware—of just how it has made us into the people we are today. Some things are good, some are not so good. But they are what they are and I think the value is in recognising or acknowledging them as much as we are able. As a parent I try not to make some of the mistakes my well-meaning parents made but I'm conscious that I will surely repeat some of them...and add some more of my own.

"I'm looking forward to seeing more photographs and your accompanying observations. My own ventures with my OM2n and 40mm ƒ/2 are frustratingly infrequent and irregular, but the process is still enjoyable. I am finding I now think more about the sense of place and composition as a result of viewing the recent images created with your Sigma fp."

Seven Reader Comments on 'Photographs Are Beautiful'

[UPDATE 2 pm Wednesday: All the comments are posted now. I have only one thing left to do, post the comments on the "Sunday Open Mike" post. But I have to go to the gym at 2:00, so I will do that when I get back. —Ed.]

I'm feeling great this morning. Very good day yesterday. And a big relief, frankly. My medical problems weren't severe, but they were, y'know, mine. And they turned out to be less threatening than they could have been. (I told more of the story in an email to my Patreon subscribers.)

But enough about that. The post "Photographs Are Beautiful Because They're True" (you might want to re-read the original post before proceeding), which probably should have been called photographs are beautiful IF they're true (or maybe photographs are beautiful if they're honest), elicted a lot of good comments, and I fell down posting the comments in a timely manner because of all my "lifey" distractions. (There is a saying in my 12-step program: "Sometimes life gets all lifey.") So here are seven selected ones to continue the discussion. If yours wasn't chosen, it doesn't mean it wasn't good. In choosing featured comments, I try to make the mix representative, rather than just a cherrypicking of "the best" ones, whatever that means. David Aiken's, for instance, was good, but at nearly 1,200 words it's longer than the original post, so I didn't post it here. But I might have. I read everyone's comment, and always have.

Be sure to check out Greg Boiarsky's link, and remember you're not looking at the real artworks, only small JPEGs of them. (Curious circularity: make an artwork of a photograph and then photograph it. Presumably it has a distinct numinous quality as a unique artwork that is then masked by the rephotographing, obliging us to imagine the artwork's true effect.)

Without further ado:

Tex Andrews: "Boy, I am so sorry to find myself vehemently disagreeing with you. As someone trained in painting/drawing/printmaking, I would argue that they are all more true—especially so-called 'abstraction' or non-representational art, but really all art in these media and sculpture as well—because all of them are what they are and it's quite obvious that they are. Even the examples of trompe l'oeil [French for "deceive the eye" —Ed.] works. Photography masks its un-truthfulness with a verisimilitude that we take for granted as true, and most don't question. Huge difference. Easy examples: what's outside of the frame, or, how is it processed? Is it a huge demonstration in the streets with combat between the police, or is it a few dozen angry people and several cops clashing with several of the protesters? Is it a gritty Bill Brandt shot of a grey and depressing outdoor scene, or was the day actually warm with the sun peeking through after a fresh rain?

"I only started becoming successful with my personal photography after I stopped beating my head against the wall trying to capture the truth of the scene and just started wielding my cameras like my other tools. Only in my work doing fine art repro do I try to capture 'the truth,' but I'm now a lot wiser in knowing that cameras/photography can never really do that."

Jeff Hohner: "Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true.' Hear, hear. I often struggle (in many more words) to explain this to photographers who started working after Photoshop became commonplace. 'You should clone out that branch to improve that shot's composition,' someone might say. 'This was the best position I found for the camera that balanced that damned branch with the other (glorious) elements in the photo. I love that tree though. I've photographed it many times over the years as it's grown. Would you like to see some of those photos to better understand this magical spot?'

"Thanks for the interesting link. Seems to me that in addition to AI and fraud, another part of this story is social media. The fraudster makes all kinds of excuses for his behaviour but it seems clear that he's primarily motivated by attention-seeking. Growing a following on Instagram can provide material gain as an influencer. His thorough thank you's may be polite but are also an engagement tactic. There are many people who work their social media accounts like a job and make some revenue from doing so. Looks to me like this guy was just working a new (dishonest) angle for traffic."

Jon Erickson: "Surely there is room for abstraction and impressionism in photography much as there is for realism in painting. The idea of accurately reporting what is in front of the camera still applies, with unwavering vigor I hope, to photojournalism, but did it ever apply to, say, commercial fashion? I think some of Sarah Moon's work is so beautiful it transcends that genre, and I would not wonder or care whether her images faithfully reproduce 'the sound of acoustic instruments playing in a real space,' so to speak, with a salute to the late great Harry Pearson [founding editor of The Absolute Sound magazine, whose signature thesis was that live music was the absolute standard against which reproduced music should be judged.  —Ed.].

"Accurate reporting does not apply to every artist or perhaps to even many artists. I recently met a portrait photographer who travels the southeast region of the US for sessions with children in the homes of well-to-do families. His professionally lighted and posed portraits are then rendered as oil-on-canvas paintings by someone else in the company he works for. There's no deception in this. The clients understand how the process works, and though I imagine the result is far from great art, it's at least more carefully and classically realized than applying a digital filter to a photo and outputting the file as a 'painting' through an inkjet printer on fine-art paper. The person executing the painting, however, is handed an image not of her own conception or composition. Who is the artist here? Would the Instagram fraud guy be a thing if he had avoided contriving back stories for some of his subjects and worked the AI photo-like 'original' as a painting instead of finishing it out as a photograph? Would he still be lying if he took credit for the images as digital paintings?"

Mike replies: I think you have just coined the perfect term for these AI contrivances: digital paintings. It's a dignified term, not pejorative, but it distinguishes it from photography.

Also, I saw a show recently of large paintings of portrait photographs. The paintings were made by an oil painting service in China. I couldn't get the question answered as to whether the named artist actually took the original photographs or simply found them.

Cliff: "I happen to agree Mike. I love photography, and admittedly my definition is narrow, and definitely unfair. To my mind it is a human being seeing through a camera (I’m enough of a snob that I prefer the camera to be mechanical.) I do believe this gentleman is creating 'Art' since the intention is to create an emotional object. His marketing approach (i.e., lying about his process) could be his performance approach. I have no hard feelings towards him. Looking at every one of his images it’s obviously heavily processed, and not the look I love, but honestly no different to me than the majority of what we see everywhere now.

"I’m resigned to being a fan of a niche art style now. My love of traditional B&W prints is really no different than some one who appreciates hand-cut stained glass or furniture produced with hand tools. The human, mechanical process and effort matter to me. I’m older and excited to live long enough to see the next generation of artists revive what I love. It’s happening now, as young people rediscover the beauty of a chemical darkroom. Creating new fine prints in silver. Vive l'art!"

Greg Boiarsky: "As someone who obsesses over every detail in their images (to the dismay of my family), I'm conflicted about this pseudo-photographer. He's so vague about the process he uses to create his images that they could be anything from true art to a sort of photographic paint-by-numbers. To be sure, the images look pretty good. But, it appears that he just generates hundreds of images using AI and then picks the best one and massages it in Photoshop. Whatever it is, it is not photography. The closest thing it comes to is hyper-realistic art, and I honestly find that kind of thing to be amazing but boring. It doesn't tell me anything beyond that the artist can depict something that could be mistaken for a photo of a real object. So, for me it also isn't art."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'Photography is moving farther and farther away from the era in which the aim was to accurately report what was in front of the camera...', not really, Mike. It’s true that the goals of photography’s technology and basic craft skills have always been oriented toward greater fidelity—truth, if you will. But photography’s practice and applications have incorporated deception virtually from the first hour. Throughout the summer of 2019 I worked on inspecting and cataloging a large collection of wonderful daguerreotypes for a museum. I was shocked, shocked, at how many had been manipulated pre- or post-capture in some way. The most common post-mod I saw was hand-painting of details, such as gold buttons or flowers. Hand-tinting came next, especially in post-mortem portraits, to make the subjects appear to be sleeping.

"Moving forward, so much of the most admired imagery of the 20th century was heavily manipulated. Skilled darkroom techs could multi-print almost anything into images.

"And, excuse me, but you call black-and-white photography 'truth'? Certainly that not truth in any real terms of healthy human vision.

"Photography as a medium at its best moments has always been a means of expression rather than documentation. Dodging, burning, color-grading, cloning, etc., all devoted to present thoughts and ideas rather than facts.

"Still, I do share your future shock at the apparent widening intrusion of artificially-generated images. It seems like such a brazen lie. But, again, I must point out that this is also not new. A great deal of the product 'photography' that appears to be from a camera is, in fact, from 3D modeling and compositing systems. That includes furniture, clothing, household products, cars, architecture, and even food!

"Re 'Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true,' you quoted a terrific line by Peter O’Toole from My Favorite Year, above: 'I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!' I will similarly offer a movie quote to suggest guidance toward future harmony with photography. In the 1957 film The Bachelor Party, Don Murray’s character picks up Carolyn Jone’s character at a party. When he tries to make a pass at her she stops him and demands, 'Tell me you love me. You don’t have to mean it but I have to hear it.'"

Darlene: "Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. What is in front of the camera is not always beautiful or 'true' regarding what the photographer decides to frame in or keep out.

"AI will find its place alongside the technology of its day. Some of what we may call 'fake' or created out of thin air and technology will come and go just as innovations do and eventually become normal or expected by the majority.

"One benefit of changing technologies is the admiration for lost crafts. So let's keep the craft of photography alive and become part-time photography Luddites. Today I will run some 4x5 through my pinhole camera, which some photographers may scratch their heads over because the images will be soft due to the pinhole lens (or lack of, however one may look at it). I like soft sometimes. I like sharp sometimes. And I still enjoy shooting film and hand processing.

"I could never be a total photographer Luddite, as commercial photography paved my path to a successful career. I started with Photoshop when it first appeared. The funny thing is, a lot of non-Photoshop users would refer to Photoshop like it was AI, and some still do.

"They say people become old when they start complaining about the changing times in a cynical way. I choose not to be like that. Instead, I reach into my freezer for some film and feel grateful there is always a small stash waiting for me.

"Maybe positive therapy for photographers who may experience depression or anxiety over AI could be to have their favorite 35mm film camera in hand and keep a small stash of B&W film in their freezer, and some Rodinal, or whatever long-lasting developer they choose, in the cupboard. Then, when they feel their inners getting all twisted up, they can open the freezer for some cooling down and rummage into the cupboard to smell the developer while fondling a real camera in their hands.

"Does it matter how an image was created? If a photographer were paid to do a shoot but did not do as the contract specified, that would matter. If a photographer publicly lies about how they created an image, that should matter. But in the practice of creativity, the sky is the limit. How you get where you seek to go is your business."

Thanks to all, whether featured here or not.

[posted by] Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

MIKE EATS CROW (Several Off-Topic Updates and Commentaries)

An undated picture of Katharine White. Photographer unknown.

Mess and sludge: It's fantastic to be back to normal. After a couple of weeks of sleeping well again, I'm feeling hugely better. My heart issues, which I guess were pretty serious, or potentially so, have all but gone away. I'm sleeping through the night most nights, and I've bounced back amazingly: normal energy is something you don't know you've lost until you get it back. Over the months (years?) that I was being affected by these issues, I was chronically sleep- and oxygen-deprived, which made me run-down and lethargic, and it was affecting everything in my life. I not only feel much better suddenly, I even look healthier in the mirror. Day by day, I'm back to chipping away at the mess and sludge created by neglect when I was "down." It's going to take me a while to get everything set right again, but I'm on the way and making progress.

Dropping in on a whim: The great open secret of all spiritual programs and systems that is that trying to help someone other than ourselves is actually a sure path to our own happiness. It's always been right there out in the open, but it always has also been, and  still is, widely ignored—so strenously ignored it seems like the advice itself must be invisible. As a friend put it once, "I'm really not all that important, but I think about myself all day long." In this time when we're seeing untreated narcissism all around us, when bad actors of every sort are elbowing themselves forward through the crowd to claim undeserved attention and unearned reward, the more moral path is simply to turn our focus away from ourselves and offer it gently to others. Anyway I've been looking for a way to contribute to my local community; and yesterday I signed up to be a literacy volunteer. I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I guess we'll see.

It all happened sidewise: I got an email outlining the stern penalties that would result if I didn't get my car inspected; so I took the car to get inspected; and the inspection station told me my tires would not pass; so I took the car in to have the snow tires put on, because they're newer. Not that we're getting any snow. Anyway, I had an hour and a half to kill, and Literacy Volunteers of Ontario and Yates (local county names) was four or five doors down from the tire shop. I dropped in on a whim, and talked away the whole hour and a half with a guy my age named Phil, who lost three fingers in a lawnmower accident when he was three. He lives in this area with his wife because they find that "people take care of each other here." Before I knew it I had volunteered. By such small sideways steps do our lives follow their winding paths.

Serendipity: I meant to go to a local restaurant alone the other day and found I had left my phone at home, which meant I would have nothing to read as I ate. There is a rather mysterious organization across the street that gives away bread, and I think clothes too, and I had a vague idea that they sometimes put used books out on the sidewalk that you can take for free. So I went in, and they indeed had two bookshelves full of books to give away. One was Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White. It collects twenty articles Katharine wrote about gardening for The New Yorker. Gardening as a topic is foreign to me—I can't keep a plant alive when I try—but, as I well knew, Katharine Sergeant Angell White was the legendary Fiction Editor of The New Yorker from 1925 to 1960, about whom William Shawn said, "More than any other editor except [founding Editor-in-Chief] Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course." She was married to E.B. ("Andy") White, the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, who is one of my writer-heroes. I figured the book would have an introduction by Andy White. And sure enough.

I can't resist sharing a sample:

Writing, for her, was an agonizing ordeal. Writing is hard work for almost everyone: for Katharine it was particularly hard, because she was by temperament and profession an editor, not a writer. (The exception was when she wrote letters. Her letters—to friends, relatives, contributors—flowed naturally from her in a clear and steady stream, a warm current of affection, concern, and eagerness to get through to the mind of the recipient. Letters were easy. How I envied her!) But when she sat down to compose a magazine piece on gardening, faced with all the strictures and disciplines of formal composition and suffering the uneasiness that goes with critical expression in the public print—this was something else again. Gone was the clear and steady stream. Katharine's act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare—the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw. Occasionally, I ribbed her about the pain she inflicted on herself. "Just go ahead and write," I said. "Edit it afterwards—there's plenty of time." My advice never had an effect on her; she fought herself with vigor and conviction from the first sentence to the last, drawing blood the whole way.

A tiny nugget of gold, of the sort which often pass by when reading E.B. White. The woman in the storefront said of the book, "that one has been here quite a long time." The book was free, so I donated five dollars to their cause.

Readings: As long as we are so far off topic, here are a few more essays I've come across recently. If you like movies, Molly Ringwald wrote a personal history called "Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard" that is vivid and charming. And if you've ever had an intimate but non-romantic relationship with someone of the sex you're attracted to at your workplace, you'll enjoy "The Bizarre Relationship of a 'Work-Wife' and a 'Work-Husband'" by Stephanie H. Murray. The former from The New Yorker, the latter from The Atlantic.

Eating crow: According to Wikipedia, "eating crow" means being humiliated by being proven wrong after having taken a strong position. Evidently crows don't make good eating, something rural Americans of a century and a half ago might have known firsthand but that we don't know any more, in the same way most of us don't know which plants in the local forest are edible. Supposedly the idiom "eating crow" comes from an 1850 short story, but I haven't been able to find the story. On the matter of compression socks—there's the alternative term I didn't know—I could not have been more wrong. I bought some Wellow socks at the suggestion of James Weekes. And they're great. They've already solved or helped with several long-term problems. Swelling, varicose veins, and my persistent problem with cold feet have all gotten markedly better in just this short amount of time. Plus, they're very comfortable. My only problem with compression socks now is that I didn't try them years ago.

Very little could be further from the topic of photography than this, but, still, I'm glad when I bring these subjects up: I always learn things I profit from. I hope you do, too.

Cheers,

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Terry Letton: "The story about Katherine’s writing reminded me of my own struggles with writing. In my day it seems like English teachers were not interested in teaching us a useful skill like writing but imparting some supposedly god-given rules about alphabet manipulation. Of course thes 'rules' are nothing but social conventions subject to arbitrary change as society changes. I finally learned to write when I realized that writing is simply talking with a pencil. Clarity of thought is what’s important, not obscure parts of speech."

Surprise

Well, my "Bar of Soap" picture is actually getting a lot of attention, which surprises me. It made Flickr's Explore feature, and has gotten 4,564 views, 80 faves, and 12 comments so far.

You can't really be too modest about your own work when it gets attention, because it either comes across as humble bragging or as a backhand insult to the people who are complimenting you. So, I guess I'm great and my work is brilliant. (Turns red in face, tugs on collar.)

Way back in the aughts, I was up very early one morning and was writing a brief post about the weather—there had been an overnight snowstorm. To illustrate the post, I took a picture across the street, while standing at the front door in my bathrobe and slippers. I didn't think a thing of it, but I don't think I've ever earned more money from one photograph, ever. "Bar of Soap" is...well, just a bar of soap. But I guess people like it. I'm happy about that.

Another point about that post: several people commented that they wouldn't want to take on an OC/OL/OY as their New Years resolution. That surprised me too. I wasn't suggesting anyone should. You should come up with your own thing. Isn't that...obvious? See, there I go again, insulting people. Sorry. But...yeah, you do you. If your resolution is to use as many different cameras as possible in 2023, I'm good with that. I'm not suggesting that everyone should do what I want to do. Unless it's what they want to do too.

"Bar of Soap" does illustrate one very important photographic principle. Get out and work, and occasionally the magic will happen. It's really not a bad idea to get the camera out every day and do something with it. Photography is funny that way. Sometimes when you're minding the door the good ones sneak in through the window.

I'll finish up comments soon. It's 11:38 as I write this and I haven't had breakfast yet. I got a little carried away on that car thing. Which happens. And then Butters needed to go out. Never enough time, never enough time.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Mike Lougee: "Mike, readers may enjoy seeing your '06 photo, 'Wisconsin No. 7' (both because you mentioned it here and because it's now Winter in the Northern Hemisphere)."

Mike replies: Here 'tis:

The print looked much better than the JPEG.

Dan Khong: "Are you putting that bar of soap on eBay? You can never tell how much people will bid for it."

Mike replies: Funny!

Update

Norton has informed me that it will "whitelist" my site within 48 hours and that I will receive confirmation via phone...and those of you who have gotten warnings will stop getting them. I'll let you know. Sorry again for any inconvenience.

—Mike with IT hat on. I still don't know anything, I just have the hat.

Mono(chrome) Mania Update

 

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.

B&H Photo

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

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

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."

Good Sleep (COVID Update)

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.

B&H Photo

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

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

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."

The Progress of the Great fp Monochrome Safari

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.

B&H Photo

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

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

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."

One of Us in One Way!

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?

ADDENDUM (Blog Note)

(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 documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

These book links are a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

More on Those $6,000 and $7,000 Cameras

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.

Link to B&H

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.

Coming Up! (Update)

Thanks to everyone for all your submissions. I initially thought this one might be one of those things where people are "over it" and not interested, but not at all—I got a large number of submissions. Many will not make the final 13, but I enjoyed so many of them just the same. A lot of camera "portraits" came along with a personal story about the camera or what it means to the sender, and so many of those were good to read. I can relate, of course.

I've been working all weekend, but...not on TOP. But I am going to get to the Baker's Dozen later today and I hope to have it up as early as tomorrow. I think this one will be easy; almost no matter what I pick it will be fun.

[UPDATE Monday 3:30: I've gotten it down to 28 finalists, so it's going well. Lots of cool stuff left out, but that's the game. —Ed.]

[UPDATE no. 2, 10:30 p.m.: All selections made, pictures loaded and labeled. I'll add the captions tomorrow, and post.]

[UPDATE no. 3, 11:30 a.m. Tuesday: It's up! That took a solid day of work. I'm not as fast as I used to be.]

Mike

 

Books of Lincoln Photographs (Followup)

"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.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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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Three Followups to 'Camera Roll'

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.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

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: Fact Check

["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:

1. I had my work fact-checked for the first time in eons, by the New Yorker. The process uncovered only minor problems, but the "catches" improved the piece. It made me think of the rigor I apply to the pieces I post here, and wonder if I do a good enough job.
2. In the "We Are Who We Are" post the other day, I used Woody Allen as an example of an artist I felt ambivalent about on moral grounds, and mentioned that a movie that had been a great favorite when I was young (Annie Hall) was one that I hadn't rewatched because of it.
3. I made a factual error in that post, saying that Allen "took up with his adopted daughter."
4. Several readers more informed than I am on the topic soon corrected me, in the Comments and privately. Soon-Yi Previn is André Previn's adopted daughter, not Woody Allen's. (Fact-check fail.)
5. One reader led me to an essay by Moses Farrow, one of Allen's actual adopted children.
6. While I can't necessarily take all of Moses Farrow's claims at face value, his testimony makes it apparent that the accusations against Allen were a product of serious feuding within a deeply divided and dysfunctional broken family, in which context "truth" might not even be a particularly useful concept—it's more like a churning maelstrom of competing claims, needs, feelings, resentments, anger, interpretations, allegiances, efforts at control, and psychological states. Truth becomes mixed with falsehoods like two kinds of colored water and can't be separated out again. Each party has his or her own "truth," all of which interact in shifting ways. For example, evidently Moses "switched sides" at some point.
7. So I decided to provisionally accept that I don't know the truth, and...
8. I watched Annie Hall again last night, first time in this millennium.
9. And it was like renewing an acquaintance with an old friend. A poignant experience. A TOP reader, in the comments to a long-ago post called "Ten Best B&W Films (and then some)," pointed out that most of anyone's favorite movies will be movies from his or her adolescence and early young adulthood, a time when we're still learning about the world, our minds are more impressionable, and our emotions are more out front and come into play more easily. I accept that. Annie Hall is one of my favorites, probably because I saw it when I was young. It holds up, though. I still think it's brilliant. And I was just in contact (because of the New Yorker article) with an ex-girlfriend (the woman in the staring-out-to-sea photograph) for the first time in years, so the subject of the movie—the arc of a love affair (more about that phrase below)—resonated all the more.

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.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

We Are Who We Are

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 documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma. This is his exploration of his home territories, and it's great.

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Today at B&H Photo

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

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."

What to Do, That Is the Question

[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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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:

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."

On Resolutions: A Coda

After writing dyspeptically-slash-humorously about the futility of resolutions yesterday, I felt chastened when I looked up and revisited my actual resolutions from last January. Here's what I wrote then:

"Real resolutions are behavioral and spiritual.

"One of the reasons I started TOP more than 15 years ago is that I wanted there to be a little oasis where at least gratuitous negative energy was kept mostly at bay. Where casual and needless snark and scorn and casual provocation wither from lack of nourishment. By and large we do pretty darn well, you and I. But there is certainly no shortage of negative energy out there in the world.

"So my resolution for this year is to work on improving tolerance. Although this is at root basically a spiritual goal, there are many concrete ways I can work on it. One, for me, will be to be as mindful as I can be of negative energy—not only to recognize when others are dumping it on me—and work on tolerating them when they do—but to be more aware of the situations in which I am tempted or led to dump it on the heads of others."

That seems like a pretty good New Year's resolution, actually, as resolutions go, and shame on me for forgetting I wrote it.

However, on the good side, I've actually done a pretty good job of following through on that idea this past year. I'm learning to look out for and recognize those occasions when my attitude or behavior is distorted by fear, anger, self-pity, resentment, manipulation of others, casting blame, or other negative emotions or habits, and to take steps to correct my thinking. Just as those negative emotions can become habits, looking out for them and recognizing them when they appear can also become habitual, so working on changing those negative impulses and mental habits quickly becomes satisfying and rewarding.

So if any part of my post yesterday seemed cynical or morose, please forgive me!

Kind regards,
Mike