The Online Photographer

?

It took me four days to write yesterday's essay—a number of drafts—and it didn't improve my brand or further the site's mission. A whole satchelful of new cameras were introduced as I was a-beaverin', and manufacturing some breathlessness about that would have drawn more eyes. And been less work.

The new cameras:

Sony A6100 (a simplified A6400, $748)
Sony A6600 (with IBIS and a much larger battery, $1,398)
Panasonic Lumix DC-S1H (optimized for video, $3,997.99)
Canon EOS M6 II (has the 90D's 32.5 MP sensor, $849)
Canon 90D (latest in a long line of traditional APS-C DSLRs, $1,199)

But getting back to yesterday. The whole question of who makes the art and which political group's "experience" they are said to represent is unfortunately absolutely irrelevant in my opinion. Maybe we wish that weren't so. First of all, individuals don't automatically represent groups. Second, let me ask a few more questions which, although currently of little or less interest, actually cut far deeper: does it matter what kind of person an artist is? Does it matter who caused or commissioned the art? Does it matter what toll it took on the artist or his friends or family? Does it matter if any of this aligns with your values and to what degree?

Without naming real examples, posit these scenarios: 

• A ruthless egotistical ruler who caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own country's citizens commissions an architectural monument. The monument is designed by a master sculptor who considers the commission a golden opportunity, and the building of it is carried out lovingly by artisans who are tremendously fulfilled by the work. In later generations, the monument is visited and admired by millions of tourists.

• One poet is a luminously spiritual and highly moral individual who is beloved by all who know him personally, but his poetry is wooden, superficial, labored, and earthbound. Another poet is a drunken, selfish lout who beats on and cheats on his wife and leaves his luckless children psychologically damaged even after he himself is safely six feet deep. But he seemed to churn out verbal felicities without effort and his best-known poem is so famous it's known even to people who don't read poetry and in some cases to people who don't even read.

• A corporation instigates a famous series of artistic grants tying them to its own name. The grants give many struggling artists a foothold in the creative life and sees them through critical early periods in their careers, in some cases enabling them to make art their career, and many of them are grateful for the help and in later years give public thanks to the program. It later comes to light that the program was initially a deliberate, cynical attempt at PR, and the corporation, among its many activities, exploited the weak and the poor, circumvented laws, and deliberately cheated the government because it knew that the fines for doing so, although huge, would be less than the profits it gained by cheating.

• A movie director is, to put it in shorthand, deeply creepy. But the best of his movies plumb the depths of human psychology and remain memorable decades after they were made not despite, but because of the director-auteur's tangle of neuroses, phobias, obsessions, and problematic, disordered personal relationships.

So:

?

Really, if you insist that the politics behind art, artists, or institutions be impeccable by current standards as well as by your own positions, especially if you get super-fastidious about it, you're going to be sh*t out of luck most of the time, insulated and isolated from most of the experiences you might otherwise have had with art. Art, like life, is messy, and artistic creation throughout history is often connected to power structures in ways that we might find uncomfortable if we were fully aware of the backstories. Often, artists work when and where they can because they want to work, and, as a viewer, your experience of art is not guided in any meaningful way by...well, the meaning of it, or should I say the meta-meaning of it. The art is its own thing. I've been looking at art all my life, and I've learned not to care too much if the painting was made to become a tipped-in plate in a children's book or a paeon to the glory of the Medicis or if its creator was in such agonies that he cut off his ear. I'll still go into the Frick despite, well, Frick. The art is the art. You cast a cold eye.*

Look at you!

And since I'm asking questions, the biggest question: is the Sony A6600 really "new" in any meaningful sense, or it is merely another reheat in a string of updates to a well-established (let's not say old) design? Should a photography website and its readers really get all excited about it? Or is it entirely a shopping thing for those who are distracted by their addiction to shopping, and otherwise not of compelling interest.**

Almost forgot the: ?

;-)

Mike

*

[Photo by Stephen Coyne, used with permission]

**Gotta make sure this post gets at least a few comments.

P.S. To bookend yesterday's, today's post title is the shortest in TOP's entire history.

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Steve Biro: "I sold my A6000 and A6300 a few months ago. I've been waiting to see what Sony came up with next for APS-C. Sure, the A6600 has the latest autofocus abilities from the A6400, in-body image stabilization from the A6500 and the bigger Z battery from the full-frame A7 series. But, with the exception of that battery, the A6600 is essentially an A6500 with a firmware update. For $1,400 body-only. It's a pretty cynical offering by Sony, in my humble opinion. And it seems to have left most of the faithful somewhat wanting. I'm sure the idea is to guarantee interest in the next Sony APS-C camera— which will no doubt be unveiled in six months. My response: I'm selling all of my APS-C E-Mount lenses and not looking back."

Matthew O'Brien: "I have been waiting for a Sony crop camera with the larger battery, since the larger battery became available for the A7 series...so I am keen. Next, wait for real world reviews (but not expecting any surprises) and then Santa Claus. I suspect at some stage it will replace my old A7 camera (which was a major disappointment) and be a sister and backup to my A7RIII, plus useful if I want to use the 100–400mm lens. I am delighted with the news..... (And really happy with my A7RIII. I am not interested in the A7RIV...but understand why it is in the lineup. 42MB in most cases is too big for me."

John: (partial comment): "Who cares about this crap? You wrote you spent four days writing that uninteresting work of garbage, why? Because you lost your train of thought regarding photography? Boring stuff IMO."

Chas (partial comment): "Coming to the previous column late, but let me say that a.) I think yesterday’s was extremely well written, i.e., the investment of time shows; and b.) both columns, yesterday and today, are absolutely worthwhile and, if I may be so bold, germane to the art of photography and to the exploration of art more generally and, therefore, columns for which I am thankful."

John Camp: "1.) Napoleon? 2.) Carl Sandburg/Ezra Pound? 3.) Purdue Pharmaceuticals/Sackler family? 4.) Roman Polanski? I liked both columns. The entire art world is a blizzard of BS, and talking about it a bit helps clear away some of it, at least in my own mind.

"As for the Sony. I keep telling people, Sony may make good/competent products, but they're all about the money, and always have been. About one nano-second after the cameras appear to be losing money or not making enough, they'll be ditched. In my humble opinion."

The Appetite for Work

[Editorial note: that "Angry Mob" post was a joke, just so everyone understands. However, it's going to take me a little longer to finish the "Baker's Dozen At the Museum" post. I'll continue to work on it over the weekend, I promise. —Mike the Ed.]

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I've learned a lot about photography from Carl Weese. He should write a book.

Carl's the one who first explained bokeh to me (bo-ke aji or "bokeh" being the visual quality or qualities of out-of-focus blur). He also said, in the '90s, that "digital is the coming-of-age of color; black and white was already perfect," or words to that effect, something I still believe is true.

When I wanted to start a portrait photography business in the early '90s—I liked doing portraits, and I was good at it—Carl's the one who made me think it through. He told me to work the numbers.

I took his advice. I worked 'em. Numbers flew every which way, densely covering sheets of paper.

When the dust cleared, it became clear that I would have to do three portrait sittings a day, five or six days a week, to make a reasonable living at it—and not only do the sittings and all the follow-up work, but find the customers in the first place. There isn't a magical supply of customers just because you want to do a certain kind of work. You've got to get out there and market yourself.

The question revealed was stark: I liked doing portraits, and I was good at it. But did I really like doing portraits that much?

The answer was no. I wouldn't mind doing three portraits a week. But three a day? Ew.

Paul Newman the...
Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to expertise" idea, from his book Outliers: The Story of Success, which we've discussed several times before, has come under scrutiny again as a new study either partially replicated or partially refuted the original 1993 study on which Gladwell based his theory (depending on which way you look at it). The upshot seems to be that lots of "deliberate practice" is essential to mastery in most fields involving "talent," but that other factors matter too. Which is sort of a ho-hum conclusion, since it's about what you would expect.

To me, though, the key is something else. Only people who have talent, aptitude, or affection for a certain skill are likely to be motivated to practice it to the degree that mastery requires.

Think of something you really enjoy doing. Now try to imagine how much could you actually do it.

For example, some people really love hitting the links and playing golf on a beautiful Summer's day. They look forward to it all Winter. Even so, 18 holes a few times a week is enough for all but the most avid diehards. Amateur golfers often think professionals live the life of Riley—they get to play all day, every day! Not so fast, li'l tiger. If you're a golfer, ask yourself this: would you really enjoy practicing golf for between five and ten hours every day like a professional, seldom taking more than a few days off in a year? Really? Those guys grind to a degree you probably can't comprehend. As an amateur, if you retired rich to a balmy clime with a house at the fringe of a course, would you have the drive (no pun intended) to play a round every single day—and then practice for a couple of hours every evening on the range and the putting green as well?

I'm not a golfer. Pool's my game. I love it. I watch a lot of it, and look forward to the occasions every week when I get to play. But an hour of practice a couple of times a week is plenty for me. After that, I've had it. (My buddies think even that much is cheating.) Could I practice my break for five hours straight like five-time U.S. Open 9-ball Champion Shane Van Boening does, and then do the same thing again the next day and the day after that and the day after that? I think I'd sooner whack myself over the head repeatedly with a house cue.

Many times in my life I've come across people who are gung-ho to master something or other (not just photography). They're extremely determined, and at first they're very focused and work very hard. But as time goes on, their interest fades, and that focus dissipates. The truth is revealed: they just don't have the appetite for working that hard, that long, on that thing.

No amount of determination helps. You can keep it up for a while, but you can't fake the interest and appetite necessary to work on something obsessively.

Actor Paul Newman was introduced to racing while filming the 1972 movie Winning, about auto racing, for which he and Robert Wagner attended the Bob Bondurant Racing School. For Wagner, that was that. But not for Newman. For Newman, it was just the beginning. His friends initially thought he had gotten temporarily distracted by race-car driving—it was a dalliance, a lark. But the truth turned out to be that he found the thing he really liked to do. Acting quickly took second place. "I had a great deal of fun filming ['Winning'] but I never really had a chance to stretch my legs out and find out what I could do in a car," Newman told writer John Oreovicz in 2004. "It actually took me three years of rearranging my schedule before I could find time to get my license and everything. After that, I never did a film between April and September or October. [Racing] was all I did."

My brother Scott had a high-school buddy who was the same way. Jimmy-James Rollins started out as a terrible banjo player—when he and Scott were teenagers I used to dread being forced to listen when he came to the house and got his banjo out. But he loved banjo, and he loved to practice, and he practiced and practiced, and he got better and better and better. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Eventually he toured Europe with a bluegrass band, among many other accomplishments on the scene.

Which came first for Jimmy-James, the 10,000-hours cart or the I-love-banjo horse?

You can work this premise backwards, too. In my favorite essay about writing, "The Getaway Car," the novelist Ann Patchett points out that most people who say they pine to be novelists either cannot or will not write for one hour a day for thirty days without a break. So the question becomes, what exactly is it that you can practice endlessly and have it make you happier rather than driving you crazy? That's the thing you should do.

That's the real key to the whole "10,000 hours" idea, if you ask me. You have to find the thing you enjoy enough such that deliberate practice doesn't seem like a chore, but is more of a pleasure. Don't pick the thing first and then get all determined to practice it until you master it. Just find the thing you enjoy doing enough that you could do it for hours and hours every day and not get tired of it.

That's how I realized photography was for me. I'd start working in the darkroom at eight or nine in the evening and then, after I knocked off, I'd be totally surprised that it was getting light out and I had worked all night long.

The key isn't the hours per se. The key is having enough appetite for something that you can put the hours in.

Off he goes
Carl's a good writer, and no doubt he could write that book summarizing his many insights into photography. But he'd probably rather load all his view cameras into the car and set out on another of his epic journeys in search of pictures. That's what he really likes to do.

Mike
(Thanks to Terry Letton)

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Film Years / Digital Years: How It Stacks Up So Far

Sarge is back! Yay.

Here's his scatter chart of the readers so far who were able to reply with the number of years they shot film and digital:

Sarge writes: "This is a preliminary scatterplot of the Film vs. Digital shooting years of TOP readers who responded to the post. The chart is narrow to fit into the Comments column. I'll update this chart once the comments to this post are closed, hopefully with more space to work on (800px wide?). A lot of venerable photo dawgs here in this first cut. I hope more TOP readers who are 'digital natives' will also comment.  —Sarge

"P.S. Been building my house since 2017 during which time I was off the grid. Glad to be back."

Mike replies: Very glad to have you back, Sarge, and congratulations on your housebuilding project. I was thinking of you while moderating the comments to the Film Years / Digital Years post, lamenting the fact that I had not seen you around in a while and wondering what you might do with the data. Very good to hear from you.

And yes, 800 pixels wide for the final version is fine—you can send it to me by email.

What say ye, readers—if you haven't posted your numbers yet (assuming you have clear numbers, and I know some people don't), please do! And don't be shy if you have few years with film. We're not prejudiced here, honest.

Mike
(Thanks to Sarge)

UPDATE from Sarge 7/25:

Hi Mike, Just a quick update. Here's the scatterplot of 257 TOP readers' respective film and digital years. These are the readers who commented to your original post and this one, as of today.

The blue dots represent unique film and digital years pairing (coordinates). The red dots represent "coordinates" common to two readers, the yellow dots, three.

The chart is only 472px wide which is sufficient for dots without labels. Obviously, once labelled with readers'names, it will be a squeeze even at 800px wide. But I'll find a way.  :-)  "

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Duffy Knox: "No real film experience; I started in digital in 1998, so 21 years digital."

Q: "The original question had me confused because I assumed that there had to be a hard demarcation between the film years and the digital years (looking back, I see that was more my interpretation than something explicitly stated). As I still shoot both (film for my own purposes, digital when others want to see the results), I wasn't sure how to answer. But now that some have talked about overlap, things are clearer. So, for me: Fabulous Intensive Learning Method: 20, up to the present, not including many years of only casual shooting. Devices Inviting Gear Iterations To Attenuate Limitations: 15 (2004–present)."

Another Day, Another Sixty-Seven Cents

At just past noon yesterday, Saturday, my day off, here's what I had done during the day up to that point:

• Shared a riddle I got from a nine-year-old;
• Stroked a blind Basset;
• Bought a bag of fresh-picked mixed salad greens and a bag of freshly-hulled fresh peas;
• Happened to hear the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones on the radio in the car, like nothing at all has changed in fifty years;
• Made a Packers joke to a retired player for the New England Patriots, who did not think I was amusing in the least;
• Contributed to an Alzheimer's organization;
• In different places, met the wives of not one but two Mennonite men I happen to know, both of whom I have heard about for several years but had never met before; and
• Had a conversation about diet with an intelligent itinerant peddler of elixirs named Candace, from whom I bought a bottle of Turmeric Tonic. It's made up the road in Geneva by an outfit called Finger Lakes Harvest. But really, anything called a "tonic" that's not hair tonic or tonic water ought to be sold out of the back of a Conestoga wagon.

All that was due to the fact that on Saturday mornings in the Summer I make a circuit to the farmer's market in Penn Yan and then to The Windmill. I love the Finger Lakes....

However, all that was then trumped* by an email I got yesterday afternoon from PayPal:

...Gave me a big grin. Just like old times! (That follows up from this post, in case you haven't been reading along.)

I heard from Wendell. After years of good health, he tells me he's suffered a series of health setbacks, but he's adjusting and getting along. He ended on a light note by telling me this mini-story. "I have a friend of over 60 years who's a songwriter and performer from Savannah, Georgia," he said. "He’s had a bunch of health issues over recent years and when we check in with each other over the phone our opening topic is naturally our lists of ailments. The last time I called him I immediately asked him how he was doing and his reply was, 'you know, I feel much better since I’ve given up all hope.' I get a chuckle out of that every time I think of it."

I got another chuckle too. According to H&R Block in its report on my return last year, I pay 33% of my income in taxes, so instead of saying "another day, another dollar," I like to say "another day, another 67 cents." (You know, like old guys say things only they think are funny.) By coincidence, after the PayPal fees were subtracted from Wendell's dollar, exactly 67¢ was left over. Made me laugh.

And so it goes. It's another glorious day here, so I'm going outside to cut some grass.

Mike

*Sorry.

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Update: Wendell's Golf Story (OT)

I managed to find Wendell Webb's original golf story that he sent me 16 or 18 years ago. My recounting of it from memory the other day wasn't too bad, but I got many details wrong. Here's the real version, from the horse's mouth so to speak. This is from Wendell:

I was just thinking about your golf story and thought I would tell you a short story about my short-lived golf career.

In the late '70s I was stationed in Turkey for 18 months. Unfortunately, I was there when the US cut off military aid to Turkey, and the Turkish government got a little bent out of shape about it. They took over all the bases in the country (a political, not a military move) and completely shut down our operation. As a result, most of us had no job to go to and plenty of free time on our hands.

The base was small and didn't have a lot of recreational facilities, but it did have a nine-hole golf course. Each hole had two tee positions so you could play 18 holes. I had played golf maybe two or three times before, but a friend of mine and I  decided that we would play 18 holes every day for the remainder of our stay, regardless of weather or any other circumstance. We ended up playing every day for about three months, and then about three times a week after that.

I am, or was, a pretty good athlete, but for some reason, I could not play golf well. I couldn't control my drive, and my fairway shots were very unpredictable. I was shooting in the 120s even after the first month or so of playing every day.

We had a golf clubhouse, which was a shack that had a few chairs and tables, where they sold beer and Cokes and potato chips when they had them. All the golfers would hang around there and brag about their latest round of 74 or 90 or 84, etc., and when I was forced to give my score of 123 or whatever I got the appropriate laughs.

I decided to do something about the embarrassment...for all future rounds, I decided to play until I reached 90 or so strokes and then walk off the course. Fourteenth hole, 10th hole, it didn't matter. Then I could truthfully say that my score was 90 or 93 or whatever. That worked great. Now, all I had to do was try to increase the number of holes that I played. That seemed to really take the pressure off me. My playing partner thought it was hysterical, and never told anyone.

Finally, I had an opportunity to play with one of the better golfers on base, a colonel who was the base comptroller before we got kicked out. He agreed to observe my game and give me some pointers. He was not going to give me any instruction as we played, but at the clubhouse after the round was finished.

After the round, as we were sitting there having our drinks, he told me, with a perfectly straight face, that I should completely lay off the game for two or three weeks...and then never go back to it.

—Wendell Webb

Funny. The golf swing is a profoundly unnatural motion, and "Sometimes you just can't do / What your body isn't meant to," in the words of an old Mountain Goats song.

I tried to contact Wendell but he is no longer at his former email address. As I mentioned the other day, in the mid-2000s I got the bright idea of asking readers of my old column "The Sunday Morning Photographer" to voluntarily contribute $1 a week. The column was being published on eight websites, and our best guesstimate was that it was being seen by 60,000 to 80,000 people a week. Yet I wasn't getting a dime for it from anyone. I figured a couple of hundred readers might shoot me a buck for every article if I asked.

Wendell was the only one who did. Now there's Patreon for those who like to contribute (and thanks to all of you who do—you're very kind), but for a couple of years there was only Wendell, who faithfully sent a dollar by PayPal every time one of my columns appeared—my first, and for a considerable time my only, online supporter. I used to tell him that he might not be one in a million, but that he was one in sixty thousand.

Grateful thanks again, Wendell, wherever you are.

Mike

UPDATE Saturday July 13th: This came in an email from PayPal early this afternoon:

Made my day!  :-)

 

 

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Translating Three Million Words to Photography [REVISED]

[Ed. Note: I think I made a misstep yesterday—I published that post "half baked." This is a retry! Allow me to walk back the lower half of yesterday's post and write a new ending. The first paragraphs are the same; the new section starts with "My gut feeling...."  —Mike the Ed.]

-

Regarding Saul Bellow's advice that if you want to be a writer you need to write three million words, C.R. Marshall asked:

"Three million words...I wonder what that works out to in photographs. Anyone have any thoughts? (And don't give me the 'picture is worth a thousand words' calculations. That is information content, not learning content.)"

He didn't ask me specifically, so I hope he doesn't mind if I take to the bully pulpit and proffer my own answer.

The benefit of jogging (or walking) is best measured by the time you spend at it, not the distances you cover. In a similar way, I've always thought that effort at learning and becoming fluent at photography should be measured not in numbers of images, but in the amount of time—and the amount of attentiveness—you spend learning and practicing it. Because everyone shoots very differently, and really, in this day and age it's trivial to shoot huge numbers of images, barely even looking at them either when you take them or when you download them or when you review them or when you store them away. And how much good does that really do? It's become easier than ever to spin your wheels. What does it matter if you spend four hours spraying-and-praying a thousand "captures" you never even look at carefully, versus spending the same four hours looking carefully through the viewfinder and studying compositions and working your way around a few different subjects, but only actually taking 30 exposures? I might even argue that the latter could be better practice that you could learn more from. If it's mindfulness that counts, mindless shooting doesn't do you much good. Just shooting for numbers is a suspect concept.

The other aspect of looking at it from a time rather than numbers perspective is that you can incorporate a lot more types of learning into the evaluation. Let's say, for instance, that you want to do portraits. I'd argue that time spent looking at books of portrait paintings, time spent exploring the visual effects of different focal lengths, time spend researching how a specific photographer you admire lights his subjects, and time spent learning how to set your subject at ease and get the expressions you want from them are all just as important as making the actual pictures. Although of course I would never say that making the actual pictures isn't important too.

My gut feeling, however, is that far too many photographers these days have fallen into the trap of claiming accomplishment, involvement, and even prestige in terms of pure numbers. You run across many boasts in many places along the lines of "I shot my kid's soccer game yesterday and took 1,800 images" or "I returned from our vacation with what Lightroom tells me is 9,000 files" and so forth. The unstated contention in the background is that "only serious photographers shoot as much as I do."

I think this is a mistake. The only reason to shoot a lot is if that's what allows you to get better pictures.

So should people judge their acquisition of fluency in photography based on some gigantic number of captures made, equivalent to Saul Bellow's three million words for a writer? Personally I don't think so. It's too easy to amass large numbers of nearly random "captures" (a famous photojournalist I know calls it "camera-pointing") without improving all the other things you can learn.

My point here is just that I think time spent is a better measure of involvement than numbers of images made.

And Bellow's point, I guess, is simply that it takes more practice than you might think before you achieve real fluency.

Mike

[Is that better? Thanks to the commenters from yesterday's "first try."]

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MikeR: "Yes. We returned from a trip to Italy in 2012 with about 10,000 pictures taken. What a pain in the butt! Sure, there were a few worth printing and showing, and sure, they evoke pleasant memories, but I wish I had practiced some restraint. It takes a lot of time to go through the glut, and not enough time on any individual one to learn anything."

robert e: "Re 'And Bellow's point, I guess, is simply that it takes more practice than you might think before you achieve real fluency.' Right. I hope it's obvious that Bellow pulled a ballpark number off the top of his head just to put a concrete point (or maybe a novel spin) on the boringly simple and boringly true advice he was actually giving: Practice. Learn. Repeat. The number is important only as an entree to discussing what's really important.

"A complication, though: It seems to me that with photography (as with writing) there are at least three distinct realms of learning required: the vision, the medium, and the tools. With writing, the tools are relatively straightforward. With photography, I think, not so much. We need to give each realm significant time. So far, so good. But how to balance that time, and coordinate the progress on three tracks? A lot can go wrong there, in my opinion."

Mike replies: Absolutely. The most basic thing that goes wrong is that people get distracted by shopping, and the distraction proves permanent.

Brian: "The money quote from a seminal paper: 'The maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.' K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. 'The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.' Psychological Review 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363–406."

William Lewis: "One of my favorite things to do with my digital camera is to set the aspect ratio to square, turn on B&W mode and then only allow myself 12 images. One roll of Plus-X 120 film is a nice discipline to attempt."

How Do You Translate Three Million Words to Photography?

Regarding Saul Bellow's advice that if you want to be a writer you need to write three million words, C.R. Marshall asked:

"Three million words...I wonder what that works out to in photographs. Anyone have any thoughts? (And don't give me the 'picture is worth a thousand words' calculations. That is information content, not learning content.)"

He didn't ask me specifically, so I hope he doesn't mind if I take to the bully pulpit and proffer my own answer.

The benefit of jogging (or walking) is best measured by the time you spend at it, not the distances you cover. In a similar way, I've always thought that effort at learning and becoming fluent at photography should be measured not in numbers of images, but in the amount of time—and the amount of attentiveness—you spend learning and practicing it. Because everyone shoots very differently, and really, in this day and age it's trivial to shoot huge numbers of images, barely even looking at them either when you take them or when you download them or when you review them or when you store them away. And how much good does that really do? It's become easier than ever to spin your wheels. What does it matter if you spend four hours spraying-and-praying a thousand "captures" you never even look at carefully, versus spending the same four hours looking carefully through the viewfinder and studying compositions and working your way around a few different subjects, but only actually taking 30 exposures? I might even argue that the latter could be better practice that you could learn more from. If it's mindfulness that counts, mindless shooting doesn't do you much good. Just shooting for numbers is a suspect concept.

The other aspect of looking at it from a time rather than numbers perspective is that you can incorporate a lot more types of learning into the evaluation. Let's say, for instance, that you want to do portraits. I'd argue that time spent looking at books of portrait paintings, time spent exploring the visual effects of different focal lengths, time spend researching how a specific photographer you admire lights his subjects, and time spent learning how to set your subject at ease and get the expressions you want from them are all just as important as making the actual pictures. Although of course I would never say that making the actual pictures isn't important too.

That number you wanted
My brother Scott rather colorfully says, when confronted with what he thinks is a made-up statistic, "you just pulled that number out of a monkey's butt." To name an actual number, my monkey-butt estimate would be that three million words would equal about 2,500 hours spent working on your photography. That's a year and a quarter of 40-hour work weeks, which seems about right. You could do that in anywhere from nine months (if you went full bore and slammed it hard for 70 hours a week) to maybe ten years (if you averaged roughly 40 minutes a day. That's a bit less than five hours a week, which seems reasonable even for someone with a family and a 9-to-5).

I'm basing that on a rough correlation to the amount of time it actually took me to get to three million words—about five to seven years, something like that—and how hard I worked at it during that time.

I've known of people who did 2,500 hours in less than a year. I also think that there are a lot of you in our audience who passed 2,500 hours long ago, just like I left three million words in the dust quite a ways back.

My eyes are buggin' me today, so I'm going to ramp it down.

If you have your own answer for C.R., though, I'll post comments.

Hope you Americans are enjoying your 4th of July weekend. The lakeshore is totally mobbed here in the beautiful Finger Lakes. Families, kids, and dogs everywhere. The lake road that passes by the porch where I work is a neverending parade.

Mike
(Thanks to C.R.)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Bill Poole: "Fabulous Intensive Learning Method."

Mike replies: I got that.   ;-)

Paul: "It is a lot harder to write three million meaningless words than to take three million meaningless pictures. I think writing a lot will more commonly lead people towards some self discovery, but it isn't too difficult to take a few million pictures of your cat."

Moose: "Carl Jung remarked about his clinical psychiatry practice that averages are useless when dealing with individuals. It there's a smoking gun in my late wife's long ago demise, it's the use of averages at Kaiser Permanente (at least back then) to control costs. People that young hardly ever get bowel cancer, so another set of tests isn't justified yet. And yet—dead, likely due to late diagnosis when we finally went outside their system. Who can possibly know where Saul Bellow falls on the distribution curve of number of words written before commercial success? Likewise, I don't see to what actual use an individual can put numbers like Gladwell's and Bellow's. There are undoubtedly at least a couple of writers of top calibre who only wrote a few thousand words before becoming successful. There are certainly others who have written tens, even hundreds of millions of words without success notable outside their immediate circle, or just themselves. I am not saying that practice, practice and more practice is not a good way to become proficient, only that there are not meaningful numbers to tell any individual how much. (Note that I'm being intentionally careful about what success might mean. The ideas are valid, however it may be defined.)"

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 4

[Note: Writer and editor Mike J. is doing well, making a slow recovery from a cornea transplant. For your amusement and edification in the meantime, brief discussions of ten remarkable photographs, counting down from number 10.]

-

Robert Capa, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of
Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

Access

One of the fundamental problems of photography not necessarily encountered by any other type of artist is the problem of access: to photograph something, you ordinarily have to be in proximity to it, or in a position to see it, or at least at the proper standpoint—and being there is not always easy or safe. The ultimate example of the exclusivity of access is probably pictures taken on the surface of the moon, but Danny Lyons' insider photographs of a motorcycle gang in The Bikeriders and Larry Clark's documentation of a violent drug subculture in Tulsa are good examples as well—and there are others, of course. (One of my own mentors in photography, the late Steve Szabo, once answered a student's question "What should I photograph?" by asking back, "What can you photograph?") Above every other genre of photography, however, war photography is the one which makes the most demands in return for access.

Robert Capa (left, in 1945) was born in Budapest, Hungary, and lived most of his life as a "citizen of the world." He was in a gully with a number of other Spanish militiamen when he took the picture variously known as "Falling Soldier," "Falling Loyalist Soldier," or "The Death of a Loyalist Soldier." (The true title is given above.) Remorselessly specific and yet as symbolic as a flag, surprisingly simple, undyingly powerful, it is an authentic picture of very nearly the exact instant of a man's death. Originally published in LIFE in 1937, it is also in Capa's book about the Spanish Civil War, Heart of Spain. It was not faked as has sometimes been claimed: forensic analysis suggests that the soldier, identified as Federico Borrell García, was already dead as he fell. (The author of the best currently available book on Capa, Richard Whelan, explains the research in depth in an excellent online article about the picture.)

At only 22, Capa was the age of most graduating college seniors when he took this. He lived one of those comet-like lives—bright, and brief, as well as vivid and romantic in the best mid-century movie-star tradition. He was hard-partying, handsome, invariably described as "dashing," a womanizer, a risk-taker—an outsized personality, much loved, eventually much missed. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he founded the international freelance agency Magnum Photos with their friend Chim (David Seymour), Capa cared little for careful organization or the veneer of art in his photographs. He sought immediacy and authenticity. The novelist John Steinbeck, who knew Capa well from their collaboration in Russia in 1947, said of him, "He could photograph thought...and capture worlds."

Having already photographed four wars, Capa professed to have given up war photography before he was killed, famously saying that war was like "an actress who is getting old—less and less photogenic, and more and more dangerous." He was in Japan for a Magnum exhibition in 1954 when LIFE called needing a photographer in Indochina. Once there, Capa left the column he was with to go up the road so he could photograph the advance. He stepped on a land mine. When he was reached moments later, his leg blown off and a gaping hole in his chest, he was still alive. He died clutching his camera, one of the very first of 135 photographers killed in the Viet Nam war. He was 39.

—Originally published in 2006

Could you please help TOP while Mike's recuperating? Spread the word about our "Iconic Photographs" countdown through social media and to other photo websites you frequent. Grateful thanks.

Original contents copyright 2006, 2019 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(Very sorry, but there are no comments this week—I’m not allowed to read or look at screen for more than a very short time.)

(Live Update—Saturday)

My surgery last Tuesday went fine. I had a common complication that was hard on me but won't interfere with my recovery. It did require an unscheduled emergency visit, but the surgeon and her assistants knew exactly what to do for it (they stuck me in the eye three times with a syringe and a tiny little needle to draw off excess gas from the "bubble"). I've progressed now to one whole hour "upright" for every hour down, which means my old friend Jim who has been keeping me company and helping out can return to his home in Vermont and I can resume caring for myself now. I won't know much else until Monday at the earliest. Except for the complication (of which there is only a "low chance" according to the handout), the whole procedure was relatively easy—the surgery isn't difficult or painful and everything I was worried about, I shouldn't have been. I do want to mention that the advice I got from many readers here was a big help.

Now comes the fun part—experiencing the return of my eyesight! It improved radically yesterday and has already returned to about what it was before the surgery. That's with a protective cover still over the eye like a contact lens, too. The surgeon says, "expect fluctuations in vision and comfort at this time. It is normal." I'm being a good, compliant patient.

My entire screen plus reading time is limited to a total of one hour per day now, including looking at the phone—enough time to write this. But I won't be back for real for a while. Hope you are enjoying the little tidbits that have been posting aut0matically all week. Those will continue. I'm looking forward to writing my next "lens review"—of perhaps the most important lens I've ever acquired, my intraocular implant or IOL! That post will be fun.

Oops, I've just turned into a pumpkin...got to get back to "positioning" (which really isn't so bad). Bye again for now.

Mike

Something Else

There aren't (m)any: Well, I feel a little better this morning...after doing some digging last night, it appears that there are no "histories of the digital transition," at least that I could find. So that makes me feel a little better about not having read one.

By "digital transition" I mean what I've defined before as the main period of the transition to digital imaging, from 1994 to 2011, with antecedents going back to the earliest glimmers of digital in the 1970s, and the extension of it (still dynamic, certainly) from 2011 to today. At best what we seem to have gotten so far are specialized chunks of that history, and updates in the form of afterthought-type chapters tacked on to earlier histories. But no author has really attempted the synthesis yet. Granted, it's a vast subject, and generally so ill-understood that even museums with trained curators haven't much more than the faintest idea how to cope with the cultural changes yet. (Some do try. For one thing, however, museums, like art dealers, deal in objects.)

Something Else: Speaking of recent dyspeptic meanderings and the state of photo history, here, in Spanish, is a brief article, which I'm told is controversial, in which none other than Sebastiao Salgado himself (surely among the top two or three dozen most eminent photographers alive) predicts the demise of photography in 20 to 30 years. I was only able to read the auto-translate version, so I can't go a lot farther into the subject. In auto-translate form (never dependable) the second paragraph supposedly reads, "...despite using a digital camera for a long time, the Brazilian photographer does not seem very convinced that the changes of recent years have been for the better. 'I do not believe that photography lives more than 20 or 30 years. We will move on to something else,' he assured during the delivery of the 'Personality Award' in Rio de Janeiro."

I know what he means. We at first (dully, perhaps?) believed that digital would just a further technological step forward, helping us do with greater freedom the things that were already established practice when it came along. By now, it's become quite clear that the changes are going to be much deeper than that. Truly, photography is in the process of becoming "something else" than it was in its first 155 years.

Dense irony: Reader robert e wrote: "Oh the irony! As we debate how easy photography has become, the most publicized photo of the day is one of the most difficult ever attempted."

Clarence H. White, about 1920

First photo teacher: I've mentioned Clarence Hudson White, founder of the first photo school in the USA, several times in recent weeks, and it turns out there's an excellent recent book out about him—it's called Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. It came out only a year and a half ago, in 2017. Its author, Anne McCauley, is David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. The photo of White above is by White's student Doris Ulmann, who was a most interesting photographer in her own right. She had a high-flying career as a society portraitist, but also went into Appalachia in a time when it was generally inaccessible to outsiders (cf. Catherine Marshall's congenial 1967 book Christy) to make portraits of what were then called "hillbillies"—in the same soft-focus, platinum-print style she used for the swells.

A companion book for Clarence White would be the 1996 Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography by the award-winning curator, museum manager, lecturer, writer, historian of photography and coordinator of publications Marianne Fulton, who has numerous outstanding books to her credit. The two little one-paragraph editorial reviews at the Amazon page, from Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, give a nice little thumbnail synopsis.

That's all I got for today...

Mike
(Thanks to Inaki Arbelaiz)

P.S. ...Well, maybe a little something else:

Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderly, 1958

Something Else!!!! by Ornette Coleman, 1958

Something Else by the Kinks, 1967

Something Else by Tech N9ne, 2013

Something Else by the Cranberries, 2017

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Mike Connealy: "Biographies of photographers can be a useful way to explore the history of photography. I have read a couple recently about photographers working in the '20s and '30s, which is the period of most interest to me. Larisa Dryansky's bio of Ilse Bing is particularly good in the way it places the photographer's work in the context of the time. Brassai's autobiographical Letters to My Parents is enormously entertaining."

John Custodio: "Check out this history of the digital transition—From Darkroom to Daylight by Harvey Wang."

psu: "Re Salgado's interview, as a Spanish speaker it seems to me that his main point is in the third paragraph, where he says that 'photography is coming to an end because what we see in the cell phone is not photography. A photograph has to materialize, you have to print it, you have to be able to touch it.' Sure. I guess. At some level I think this is nonsense though. But even if you believe it...it's not like you can't print phone pictures. It's just that the majority of people don't, just like the majority of people in the past did not make prints past the little 4x6 automatic color prints from the mini-lab. So what's different?"

Joseph Reid: "My Spanish is by no means perfect (or even especially good) but I agree with Luis Aribe's comment. The third paragraph spells out Salgado's point, which, I think, Mike has made on TOP, that a photograph is an object. A digital image is something else. I don't agree that photography will be dead in 20 or 30 years (barring the perfection and ubiquity of holographic imagery). When I first read about digital photography, circa 1991, I thought photography would be dead in 20 or 30 years. I figured that, because digital would make manipulation so easy, the culture would lose faith in the veracity of the image and the image would become obsolete as as a representation of reality. Now, clearly I was wrong and I no longer see that happening. I think there will still be a need far into the future to record events and objects faithfully for many different purposes. As an art form, photography may evolve as painting began to evolve while photography was young—to increasing levels of abstraction. That didn't kill representational painting but it probably made it a much smaller field.

"Which way photojournalism goes (and I classify Salgado as a photojournalist) is another matter. The personalization of all forms of journalism is trendy, and the democratization of journalism—crowdsourcing, 'citizen journalists' who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time with a smartphone—is having an effect on how news is presented (or may be a consequence of it, chicken vs. egg, I don't know). Examples are gonzo print journalism and the U.S. TV news industry's insistence on inserting presenters into the narrative. This affectation has spread to photojournalism and art (see D'Agata's work) and is what just about all individuals' social media accounts are about. So, I don't see photography dying in a few decades, but Salgado may certainly be correct about the aspect of photography that we call the print. Not that this makes me happy."

Followups and Updates: The Eloquence of Coincidence (OT)

• Yesterday's post made me realize that I am not giving my current food experiment a decent chance. I am cheating too much, so I don't get to find out if the WFPB plan actually makes you feel better. Thanks to John Gillooly for asking the question. I really need to redouble my commitment so that I get good data on it, with my statistically insignificant but personally very significant experimental sample of one.

One commenter said he eats nothing but meat and has never felt better. I should point out that it's really all about outcomes. "Keto" (ketosis) diets, under myriad guises, do make you lose weight. But the statistical outcomes are much worse—you greatly increase your chances of getting cancer or heart disease over the long run. As my brother says, life is like a roll of toilet paper—the closer you get to the end, the faster it runs out. The whole point of food-as-medicine, if you ask me, is not just living longer (though that too) but being healthier, more fit, and with fewer medical problems as you age.

Heart disease has been the leading killer of Americans since the great influenza epidemic of 1919 subsided. It's the leading killer of cardiologists, for Pete's sake. Kim Williams thinks that's because they keep up on cardiology papers but not nutrition papers. I have a friend who is slim and fit at age 94—he golfed less than his age last year, when he shot an 89. I'd rather be more like him than be morbidly obese and taking forty different medications and feeling awful all the time as my life runs down to, you know, the little cardboard tube.

• I tried to skewer the carmakers the other day for gouging their customers with overpriced options on cars expensive enough that they ought to  come from the factory loaded. So it was quite a coincidence that the newspaper this morning relayed the news that the two Boeing "Max" jets that went down in clear weather in recent months both lacked two safety features that Boeing provides on the model only as options.

A fun little story about coincidence. I do "believe" coincidences happen, of course—a great little essay that touches on it is Chapter 2 of Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The chapter is called "Entro, Evo, Info" (entropy, evolution, information). Recommended, although nobody but me would buy a book for one chapter.

Even so, coincidence can certainly be eloquent sometimes. The other night at a meeting of my 12-step program, the topic was prayer. A recurrent suggestion of our program is to get down on your knees and pray every morning, regardless of whether you believe in prayer or not. A member said that his girlfriend had challenged him a few days earlier about not saying his prayers. He defended himself by arguing with her that he didn't need to, but then, he said, "ever since then, the topic of prayer has been coming up again and again, and each time it does I somehow find myself on my knees." Then he said, "I suppose it's just coincidence."

At that, another member quipped, "no such thing as coincidence," and just as he spoke, the first person accidentally knocked his empty coffee mug to the floor, and the handle broke. I chair the meeting, and the broken mug was right in front of me, so I hopped to my feet and picked it up the mug and the piece of broken handle for the guy. As I headed to the kitchen (we meet in a Parish Hall) to throw it away, I noticed that not all of the handle was there. As I headed back to the meeting room, I ran into the guy who had broken the mug, who was heading for the wastebasket himself. He held up the second piece of the broken mug handle, saying, "see what I mean? I mention getting on my knees in prayer, and one second later I'm on my knees again, looking for this under the couch."

• Here's how to bake a potato properly. After I learned this I realized I had never really tasted a baked potato before.

You need GEAR, of course:

You'll need a great big honkin' two-tined fork (I use this barbecuing fork) and an accurate digital meat thermometer. Scrub a Russet potato with a vegetable brush under running water and remove any eyes if you care to. Blot dry with paper towel, then poke the bejeebers out of it with the fork—I jab it 16 times for 32 separate holes! Don't be shy—it makes all the difference, and I'm amused to admit that yes, I've run the test (once a reviewer...). Coat lightly with olive oil. Set it right on the oven rack uncovered. Don't wrap it in foil—that's how you get a steamed potato, not a baked one. Set the oven on convection if it has it. Bake for as long as you need to to get the internal temperature of the potato to no less than 210°F (99°C). This might take longer and require a higher temperature than usual cookbook recommendations. You just have to take it out of the oven and take its temperature until you get the time and oven temperature down pat.

Separate the potato from the skin right out of the oven
and the skin will stay crispy and delicious

Once done, with a table fork, immediately make a row of holes in the top of the potato lengthwise and push the ends together, and empty out the skin. By separating the skin right out of the oven you keep it nice and crispy/chewy; if you let the potato cool in its skin, the skin will steam and become soggy and much less pleasant to eat. Then let everything cool to close to room temperature. This converts some of the starch to indigestible starch (very good for the lower reaches of your gut) and reduces the potato's glycemic index* (sometimes called the "insulin hit" or "glycemic load") considerably. You can either eat it cool as I prefer, or reheat it in the microwave—once the starch converts to indigestible starch via cooling it doesn't convert back if reheated, which is why cold potatoes in things like summer salads are better for you than hot boiled potatoes. Eat with nothing on it save maybe a little table salt. No butter, no sour cream, no nothing.

A baked potato prepared this way will be moist, delicious, and flavorful all by itself, without a trace of the dryness, graininess or hardness that baked potatoes are notorious for. Eat the folded skin like a steak, cutting it into chunks with a steak knife. It's the best part.

Mike

*The Glycemic Index (GI) is a relative ranking of carbohydrate in foods according to how they affect blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates with a low GI value (55 or less) are more slowly digested, absorbed and metabolised and cause a lower and slower rise in blood glucose and, therefore insulin levels." (Source: University of Sydney)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Want to help?

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

Dave Van de Mark: "I am looking forward to trying a potato baked just as you have instructed and eating it 'plain' too. As a boy, I literally made a 'soup' of 1/2 butter and 1/2 potato inside the skin and wolfed it all down—yeoww, I still want to do that but wish to live another week.  :-) You made no mention of baking temp—is 350 to 375 a good range?"

Mike replies: The key is to get the center of the potato to 210°F. For me it's 425 degrees for 1:10, but ovens differ....

Follow-Up: Ronnie's 1,000th

This is a lot of fun even if you're the furthest thing from a fan. Doesn't everyone enjoy seeing moments of exceptional triumph in any sport or game? Ronnie managed to reach the magic 1,000 mark in the winning frame of Players tournament. For those of you who don't watch snooker, ordinarily the audience is not allowed to call out when the players are at the table. Far from the case at the end of this break, as you'll see!

Fun.

Fittingly, I'm off for my regular weekly date playing pool with my friends at the Moose Lodge. Back later with some non-gear-related photo posts, including what I did on my weekend off.

If you're wondering, what the players are talking about at the end of the break as the crowd cheers is that Ronnie accidentally sunk the cue ball on the last shot, which happened to cost him the high score of the tournament, for which there is a bonus prize. If he hadn't done that he would have had a 141. As it happens, his opponent, Neil Roberston of Australia, had the high break with 140. So the cue ball going in at the end took £5,000 out of Ronnie's pocket and put it into Neil's.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Follow-Up (Kirk Tuck)

I had a nice long talk with Kirk yesterday, and he sounds great and is doing fine. He's just got too much on his plate—his photography business is going great guns, necessitating huge amounts of travel; family obligations likewise; and there's just not enough time in the nooks and crannies left over to write. One myth I'll dispell—he is definitely not slowing down. The guy does more work in a week than I have the energy to do in the average month. He's 63 and keeps pace with guys half his age on arduous remote location shoots, for example.

And talk about a straight shooter. Just says it like it is, no worries either way, just serves it right up. Admirable.

He also promised me a 10,000-word camera review for TOP, when he can find the time (he was joking—he said that's what he starts with in order to end up with one that's 5,000 words), so we'll see if anything like that materializes. Knowing Kirk, though, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find it in my inbox....

Mike
(Thanks to KT)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Here’s the situation

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

Bruce Bordner: "He does have a point about what to write: photography is in a very awkward stage right now. The standard blog fodder has been equipment reviews and technical advice to the newbies. As you've said, the responses now are 'it's all good enough' and 'the AI in my phone does all that technical stuff.' You (like Kirk) have an advantage in being more focused on how to take the right picture and treat it properly. Show people how to have a 'good eye' and find the images around them that are worth sharing. Nobody involved will get rich, but maybe happy. I would like to know more about the photo tricks used by my Pixel 3 phone, and how to customize them to my 'look.' That's all we have to be individual. In a few years you may be writing instructions for training the AI in your new camera. I like automation if it works my way. And some people will still be looking for info on platinum printing...."

John W: "Love that man. Says what he means and means what he says...without being mean."

Heart Health and Lens Health

Thanks for all the kind responses, both in public and private, to my post yesterday. No, I'm not going to start posting detailed reviews of exercise machines (the only non-photographic thing I'm really in danger of doing that with is pool tables—I have strong opinions and tastes around that subject. But if I ever do that, and I very likely never will, it won't be here on TOP).

There are many things that keep me from walking in the Winter—cold is just one. Ice and the danger of falling is a biggie; guilt over not taking the dog (when I do, he makes it into a much less comfortable start-stop affair, but I feel really bad leaving him at home); darkness; and, well, bleakness and its effects on my soul. It can get grim around here in the Winter months. Not for nothing is it a Summer resort area.

There isn't a self-respecting mall within an hour of here, so mall walking is out.

I want a treadmill because I like to walk, and I know I like treadmills much more than I like using stair-steppers, elliptical machines, and spinning bikes. I know I'd use a treadmill much more if it were here and easy to jump on to. But I really don't have room for one. Also, I know from experience that I would enjoy using a well-built one but I wouldn't enjoy using a cheap, flimsy one. And of course the better built treadmills are, the bigger, heavier, and more expensive they are. Sigh.

In the Summer my favorite exercise is climbing Welker Hill. It's right here, and it's a workout—520 feet of elevation in about a mile and half. And it's truly gorgeous up there—I've had some transcendent walks on glorious Summer evenings. And now the doc says it's okay for me to do it. It might not be an everyday exercise, though, because the trip back down is very hard on the knees. Preserving the knees and hips is very important for continuing exercise in older age—in fact I'd say "pushing yourself" is for young people; "preserving yourself" should be the mantra for us older folk.

So I'm off to check out the local health clubs this afternoon—there are two in town. I have a bad track record (er, sorry!) with health clubs—for me they've basically been a "fat tax" in the past—an otherwise completely useless fee you pay for guilt about being overweight. But the doc says to work up to half an hour five times a week, and maybe I can actually get into a habit. I've got a good reason...heart health.

[UPDATE: We have two health clubs in town and yesterday I joined the first one I looked at. Bad shopping, but it's only $25 a month, which I understand is about par for the course but seems cheap to me, and it has a whole wall of very large, very sturdy commercial treadmill machines.

Chances of success? Maybe 30%—constancy is my worst thing. I only paid for one month. I'll post an update in a few months.

In the meantime, good luck with your own exercise program. I heartily recommend the New York Times Seven Minute Exercise, if you're fit enough for it, even though I can no longer do it myself because of my shoulders. Bear in mind that you can also customize the sequence as long as you get to the right muscle groups. The 7-Min. Workout actually made a big difference for me. You'll get results. —MJ]

Lens-related
Lest we get too remorselessly off-topic here, check out Kurt Munger's famous "Dirty Lens Article" if you don't know it already. Kurt's experiments mirror my own, which I carried out with an old Vivitar zoom in the early 1990s—destroying the lens in the process. Fungus is the one exception, because it advances, and it can be contagious to your other lenses. Do beware fungus. But otherwise, the takeaway is that you just don't need to worry about minor imperfections in or on your lenses. Bits of dust, blemishes or small scratches, coating on the outer elements flaking off—you just can't see it in pictures unless it gets really bad.

Remember: when evaluating lenses, look at the pictures, not at the lens. If the pictures look fine to you, then the lens is fine. Don't sweat small flaws you can see in or on the glass—as Kurt proves, and as I've proven to my own satisfaction, they really just don't matter. Only if something wayward or untoward shows up in your pictures have you got a problem.

Mike
(Thanks to Phil)

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Here’s the situation

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Robert Billings: "I am 68 and have been taking a daily walk with my dogs for the last 15 years. It is mostly flat terrain and is about one mile, or thirty minutes. My present companions are border collies that I inherited from my father. When my schedule allows, I coincide my walk with the sunrise. This morning it was 20 degrees and we walked into a strong north wind. I can't say I enjoyed it, but Sugar and Spike did. It took a while for them to learn to be city dogs (they were formerly farm dogs) but they figured it out. I let them sniff to their heart's content, mostly. They allow me to take the occasional picture of the same river, the Arkansas in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is a part of my life and I get great joy from it."

Joe's Version

Commenting on the two "Still Pond" images (above) in the "Editing Headaches" post, Joe Holmes wrote:

"That's a tough edit. I like each image for a different, simple reason. I like the round clump of trees in the upper left in the first image, and it's a shame to cut it off. But I like the foreground framing grass in the second image.

Composite image by Joe Holmes from files by Mike J.

"So here's what I would do, and, in fact, did with your two examples: In Photoshop, I brought both images together as layers in one file, manually lining them up and then using a mask to combine the two (which is easy in this case because the pond water disguises the line where they join). It took me less than three minutes. This results in an image that's not going to fit any stock frame or mat because the aspect ratio is now odd, but who cares? It combines the best of both originals.

"Now let me say that I'm not addressing your concern about editing, taking multiple shots, etc. That's a different issue, and my Photoshop solution would not work for most issues, like your wrestlers. But still."

Joe's version is better (in that it's likely to be more pleasing to more people) than either of my two alternatives. I confess I chose these shots because I thought they'd make good fodder for discussion, which they did, but I also confess I didn't anticipate this refinement—which also means I didn't see the possibility Joe saw. This neatly illustrates one of the ways in which the process of editing has changed conceptually. These days we can effortlessly construct digital images according to our desires (limited, as Joe mentions, by the opportunities afforded by the specifics of the images—and, I would add, by the skills of the post-processor person—this, for instance, is beyond my Photoshop skills), without leaving any telltales behind. It complicates the process, because editing is no longer a binary choice, a choice between "all yes" (warts and all) or "all no," between "print it!" and "rejected." Now we can say, in effect, "yes, if this is added or changed."

Where photography started for me conceptually was with the primacy of the lens image—what you saw on the groundglass of the view camera, for example. The integrity of the image cast by the lens was paramount. The print was just trying to "fix the shadow," i.e., provide a record or report of the lens image. Attempts to combine or blend different exposures were illegitimate on their face, although it was done throughout history here and there—the Baltimore pictorialist A. Aubrey Bodine used the same sky negative in different prints, for example. But in Joe's example above it's just a fix, a post-hoc creation of a more thoughtful composition than I managed to see at the scene in real time.  

Mike
(Thanks to Joe)

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Curt Gerston: "This topic creates some interesting conflicts in my brain. I think if I made an image from a composite like yours above, I'd have a hard time framing it on my wall...I would always look at it as inauthentic somehow. It would bother me. It wouldn't last long on that wall. I don't think I could give it as a gift, put it in a book etc. And yet, I think if it was a single image, but there was a can of Coke floating in the middle of that pond, I'd have no problem cloning it out. I can't explain why I draw that line, it's just a feeling I have about what's okay and what isn't for my own work.

"I have nothing against what Joe did, by the way...looks great, and if he or you are happy with it on your wall, all the better. It's really interesting to see where people land on image manipulation. As I point out to my students, photography isn't truth, but I think we all try to express some kind of truth in our art. What feels true to us is personal."

Doug Thacker: "Re 'Where photography started for me conceptually was with the primacy of the lens image—what you saw on the groundglass of the view camera, for example. The integrity of the image cast by the lens was paramount.'

"The key words here are 'lens image' and 'integrity.' Photography, up until recently, at least, is about the capture of something from life, that something being the lens image. Having captured it, we may dodge here and burn there, but it remains an image cast at a given moment onto your recording substrate by the world at large. It was you, the photographer, who isolated this moment from the endless flow of time by fixing it as an image, you who chose the framing, deciding what to leave out and what to include, and you, lastly, who selected this particular image to show versus all those you don't show. Implicit in this image was its integrity: the viewer relied on the fact that you saw this moment and isolated it as a picture. This is what it meant to be a photographer, and what it meant to be the viewer of a photograph. The integrity of the image was, as you say, paramount, and pity the poor charlatan who was found to have violated it. (Case in point: Steve McCurry.)

"But now comes digital imaging, which is something altogether different. Here, the captured image is merely raw material, elements of which are combined with other raw material to create an image that the 'photographer' sees only in his mind's eye; the image capture is merely a preparatory step, with all the action taking place in so-called post production.

"This can only mean that photography as most of us understand it is dead, to put it bluntly, and those who still practice it in the former way are merely indulging an anachronism—one for which we must take them at their word, for what that's worth.

"'Photo-based illustration' might best describe where the technology has led us. That's not better or worse, necessarily, than what we call photography, but it's definitely not the same thing, and more akin to painting. Painting with light, in this case."

Mike replies: Okay, but then how do you and Curt feel about this?

It's a stitched pano made from five vertical shots of the view from my family's former lake house. Is what Joe did really any different, or do stitched panoramas also make you uneasy? By the way I'm just asking, not challenging.

Rob de Loe: "I too started with the 'primacy of the lens image.' I'm becoming less conservative about this as time goes by, but cautiously. For a recent project I finally broke down and used focus stacking because tilt and depth of field alone were not giving me the results I needed. I like the results, a lot, but it bothers me deep down that the final picture is not traceable back to a single exposure. It's not rational. But I feel like I've passed through a portal and can't go back. Is this what it feels like to become a 'made man' in the Mafia?  ;-)  That which I have done cannot be undone.

"Anyway, I predict that in a few years—once we've moved fully into the realm of computational photography—this whole conversation we like to have about 'how much manipulation is OK?' will seem ridiculously quaint!"

Joe Holmes: "Re '...a more thoughtful composition than I managed to see at the scene in real time.' Or than was possible with your lens and where you could stand. It may have been physically impossible to frame the image as in the composite. So there's another wrinkle in this discussion: creating a new image that was impossible to shoot in a single frame. That kind of compositing was being done long before digital photography, but now it can done so easily and quickly that we can perform these tricks routinely."

Mike replies: No, I can't claim I couldn't have gotten what you've created. I just liked the second of my two shots better when I was at the scene. It wasn't a matter of not being able to get something close to your composite in one shot, it was that that wasn't what I arrived at when I worked the scene. I checked, and I shot 11 pictures at the scene, all quite different, and I figured I'd gotten what I wanted with the second shot I presented here.

Here are two more of the rejects from the 11:

As you know there are an infinite number of pictures even within a very limited subject or scene. It's not like there's ever just one picture there and our job is just to find it.

Henning Wulff: "I'm definitely in two minds about this stuff.

"For many years I worked as an architectural/construction/commercial photographer. The final image and what it represented were all that mattered and had to suit the requirements of the client. I did all sorts of manipulations, editing and rephotographing as required (and as was possible with film and masking). When Photoshop came out, I did whole projects with version 0.72 or so, as I recall from numerous crashes. For nearly 10 years I was the best in my area and specialty, and made lots of money. Photoshop was just the digital perfection of what I had been doing for decades.

"For my personal photography, it's been more the opposite, with 'honesty' and 'integrity' throughout. It's in quotations because there really is very little true integrity and honesty in all of this, as so many artistic decisions override the integrity and honesty. However, I try to be true to the found image. Maybe that's why I shot most of my commercial stuff with SLR's and view cameras and most of my personal stuff with rangefinders. The 'seeing' is essentially different between the two camps.

"As for the panos; again, if I was shooting for work, stitched photos with massaging would have been ideal if available. As it was I shot Horizon 150's, possibly stitched and Roundshot 120's, because that was what was available, and then worked hard to 'fix' things after the negative was produced. Now for any intense personal purpose I still shoot those, even though the iPhone or even any digital stitched can get you panos with a lot less hassle, and you can always 'fix' things. The Horizon and Roundshot images I don't fix, and don't think about fixing while producing them.

"In the end, if you're doing it for money you have to produce the images your client likes. If you're doing it for yourself, that's the person you have to satisfy. There are no other rules.

"By the by, the 'aspect' intolerance thing is one area I'm gobsmacked about. The square format was invented so that cameras you couldn't turn on their side were usable. I've shot 17x6 vertical to square to 6 cm high and about 40cm horizontal on my Roundshot, and they're all reasonable formats. Different images need different formats. Shoot what makes sense. They're all good."

Rod S.: "Historically, a photograph has always meant a single exposure.

"That definition embodies a critical aspect of photography: That the photographer was right there at that spot and succeeded in overcoming the technical hurdles of making the exposure successfully, and did both in that moment.

"It's these momentary aspects of photography that makes photography special. And challenging. The photographer has had to capture the image in that moment. The photograph is painted with light, not painted with software. Consequently, it's 'accurate'—and widely acknowledged as such—in terms of the appearance of objects within the frame.

"It's these momentary aspects of photography that separates photography from, say, painting, or digital illustration, because those other art forms involve a lengthy process of creation or manipulation, and we intuitively understand that the appearances of objects in the image has changed.

"So Joe's composite pond image and Mike's stitched pano are not 'photographs.' Each image is a 'composite image.'

"Why is this unambiguous terminology resisted so much by some digital practitioners?

"Digital practitioners who continue using the word 'photograph' to describe their composite or manipulated images are trading on the public's regard for photographs (sadly, now damaged) as single images made in the moment, which reliably show how things looked at that moment."

Open Mike: Teavivre (Tea Update) (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears with iron discipline on Wednesdays. So is today Wednesday?! It is!

That's the story and I'm stickin' to it. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

-

Bao Jia Cun Organic tea garden in Zhe Jiang Province of China
where some of Teavivre's teas are sourced.

...And the adventure continues. So far I've tried about 25 different kinds of green tea.

I don't like green tea very well yet, but it's healthier than coffee. The caffeine dose in the coffee I like messes with my heart (I've had a-fib). I had to prove that to myself: stayed off coffee for a week or three, then had my usual mug. Sure enough, I could feel the effect. Not good.

So that's it for coffee for me. (I don't like the idea of decaf.) I was a daily coffee drinker for most of 45 years—even roasted my own beans for a few years, which was delightful, a real pleasure.

But life is change, and ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

First step with green tea was to get away from teabags. Processing and handling dried tea leaves results in a certain amount of dust, flakes and bits, and those are used in teabags where what you can't see doesn't hurt you. Tea dust over-extracts easily, resulting in bitterness and astringency (that sourish taste with a "dry" mouthfeel—the goal with tea brewing is to extract for as long as you can before tasting any astringency. This requires some experimentation; good suppliers give you a starting point, but don't let it end there. Experiment for yourself). I did find a few teabag teas I like. One was in a sampler from Stash Teas that, alas, I've never been able to find again, and another was Tazo Organic Pan-Fired Green.

But loose leaf tea is the way I'm going to go.

Second step was to work out a brewing method. I got that lovely Willow & Everett electric kettle with temperature presets which is a fantastic luxury—it works perfectly and is surprisingly accurate. It was a good purchase; I love it. So nice to be able to heat water to just the temperature I want. (The 205°F setting is perfect for pour-over coffee, too.) And it turned out that the little glass teakettle I bought has a large oversized strainer that happens to fit perfectly in the top of my old Shaker Village mug I've had since I was nine years old. The glass top of the teapot covers it nicely. So the pot itself was prematurely retired and I brew tea right in the mug—it makes about 15 ounces, which is two of the traditional American "large" cups of tea. (Our cups of tea are about 8 ounces; Asians tend to drink cups of 3.5–4 ounces.)

Brewing tea. (Here's that timer. It's weighted so it doesn't slip around.)

I've tried a number of sources such as Harney and Sons, Tea Source which Ctein likes, Teavivre, Têtê Tea (from the Himalayas in Nepal, which I think is cool), Clearview Tea Co. which is owned and run by the wife and daughter of a Canadian TOP reader, and several others.

I've settled on Teavivre as my chosen source, for four main reasons:

1. They offer free samples of your choice with your first order. Very nice. You can buy samples too, with enough tea for two American cups or four Asian cups. Good for exploring.
2. You can choose for your tea to be delivered in a tin. If you buy the smallest (3.5 oz.) amount of tea, the tin only costs a few extra bucks and will hold 6–12 ounces of tea. They're high-quality tins with double-seal tops. You only need a few for the favorite teas you'll keep in stock, but it's nice to be able to get these cheaply.
3. They offer a wide variety of teas, good if you want to experiment to find the ones you like best. (Têtê Tea by contrast offers only three, white, green, and black.)
4. They're based in Fujian province in China, which is where the people who own my favorite local sushi restaurant come from. Through that connection I know several people from Fujian province, and I've gotten interested in it and have learned some things about it. So I like that connection. Of course that's just me.

Many of the teas come direct from China when you order them (all the samples and tea in tins come from China, for example), so it takes 8–10 days. Teavivre does have a new American warehouse now, in Arizona, so certain teas in zip bags bags come from there and take less time to arrive.

I've found a few I like, but I won't mention which one I've settled on as my daily drink. It's got a flavor I love and is low in caffeine. My choice isn't a big secret or anything, but everyone should choose according to their own taste and everyone's taste will be different. I'm certainly no tea expert. (I don't even have a very acute sense of taste.)

Finally, I should mention in passing that I like the language on Teavivre's website. It reads like expressive English written (or translated?) by a Chinese person, which seems honest to me. I hope they don't change that. It's perfect just the way it is.  :-)

Mike

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TC: "The community college where I teach photography recently had a field trip for teachers, taking us out to a tea plantation in the mountains of Pinglin, Taiwan. There we not only listened to presentations on the tea-making process, we were able to pick and process some tea ourselves.

"It was very interesting, and gave me a renewed appreciation for tea even though I drink it every day."

Antonis R.: "Easy to see the underlying connection to TOP. Teavivre founder Angel Chen writes: 'My husband, Chris, also my partner, sometimes would laugh at me, Since all earnings are spent on more trips to further discover great tea. In return I would say: 'Why don't you talk about upgrading your camera?'"

David Evans: "That is a beautiful kettle, but I would be lost without a water level indicator. Also I'm amused at the claim that with a 1000-watt element 'your water boils in a fraction of the time compared to a normal kettle.' In the UK a normal kettle is 2000 to 3000 watts."

Mike replies: Yes, but I would assume that you in the UK know best when it comes to tea kettles!

Mani Sitaraman: "The Internet really is a fount of knowledge. Here's a detailed explanation that is a good follow-up read to David Evans' comment about electric kettles in Britain as compared to those in America, titled 'Why Kettles Boil Slowly in the US.'"

Mike replies: And here's an explanation of "fount of knowledge" vs. "font of knowledge."

Followups and Updates

A few notes this silent gray morning:

• TOP's big Fall Print Sale will start on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday. That's November 26th this year. Please do plan on stopping by to view the images—they're outstanding and I think you'll like them. This sale is very important (very) for the health and viability of this little website, and I hope you'll consider supporting it. Spread the word!

• If you've sent me an email and not received a response, I apologize. I'm hopelessly behind on email. I could spend eight hours a day answering email, no exaggeration. I do read them all, unless I miss one by mistake.

• There are going to be a lot of new comments posted soon (I'm 120 behind in the moderating this morning [UPDATE 6:22 p.m.: all caught up]). Check back at least to the Photoshop post to see some good new ones. Complicating this is that the moderation interface is still partly broken after TypePad's big maintenance more than a week ago, and still giving me trouble. It's slowing down my workflow, not critically, but significantly.

• I think some of you commenters resolved the "no card slot in new Mac Minis" issue for me. It's probably just that too few buyers used the feature, so it became a liability, not enticing to shoppers, thus no longer worth providing. But a longtime guiding principle of this blog, and of the magazine I edited before it, is that I/we want photographers to have what they need to do their work. Whatever that is. That's who, and what, I advocate for. Most photographers do still use SD cards, so the lack of a card slot on computers is inelegant and an inconvenience. And about Apple "hating" us: companies aren't actually people, U.S. law notwithstanding, and don't have feelings. In the post it was an (indulgent?) example of what Ruskin called "the pathetic fallacy," but it amused Yr. Hmbl. Scribe and that's always half the battle.

• I should have mentioned that I made a conscious decision not to use Apple Aperture (past the trial period) because of having been "twice burned" as they say. I'd been around long enough to watch Apple serially neglect and abandon software. Yes, I do understand why they stopped supporting ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. Yes, I'm still sullen about it. I wasn't going to put in the time mastering Aperture only to have it be neglected and abandoned. Turned out I was right, which is too bad. Companies, though not people, do have patterns, like people do.

• Of course Panasonic could make the little 20mm focus properly, O Ye of Little Faith, and no, it would not make the lens too big or heavy. Bigger and heavier than it is now, yes, but who needs it to be as small as it is now? The wee bairn feels like it's made of paper and weighs three ounces! Eighty-seven grams to be precise. They could go nuts and make it weigh 50% more and it would still be small and light and handy.

• The mindless Internet is currently on a "Micro 4/3 is dead" kick. Ignore that. Micro 4/3 is not dead. Let's wait and see how FFM (full frame mirrorless) actually fares before assuming the whole world is going that way, shall we? History is littered with Next Greatest Things that never took off and never caught on even though they were going to. 

• I'm still trying to switch to green tea from coffee, erasing the habit of 45 years, and a TOP reader, photographer Glenn Brown from Ontario, Canada, kindly sent me some samples from his wife's and daughter's tea company. Their tea is well labeled and the beautifully designed packaging includes a clear back on the bags so you can see what they tea looks like. Very nice. Check out Clearview Tea Company of Creemore, "a small hamlet north of Toronto." The Organic Lucky Dragon Hyson is mild and tasty. Thanks to Glenn, Rebecca, and Maggie.

Mike

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Tom Bell: "I was going to offer to send over some real tea from old Blighty to some importers at the docks in Boston...lovely Darjeeling or Broken Orange Pekoe. Then I just thought maybe not a good idea...too taxing.  😎  " 

HR: "There are now eight full-frame mounts: four mirrorless (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Panasonic/Leica) and four DSLR (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax). Did I leave anyone out? There is one Micro 4/3 mount. I suspect all eight of the FF mounts will not be around for many years."

That Was Nice

Well, that was nice. The previous piece got quite a bit of attention from around the Web (just like the old days, before advertising took over and made people reluctant to link to other sites), and traffic reached a four-month high point. I had to go back to June to find a day with more visitors than yesterday.

And I want to thank everyone for their reactions—I'll be sure in consider peoples' responses and additional information in the final chapter. (The post was about half the chapter. The other half is on aspect ratios, ideal formats, and proportion.)

But back to regular life! And thanks, everyone, for reading.

Mike

P.S. They're repaving the road down to the lake opposite my office, so my ability to sit here and work is going to be curtailed...I can't take the noise. I'll probably have to leave the house and go find refuge somewhere. Noise pollution is not the worst thing about modern life, but for me it's right up there. I live in a rural area and still the noise pollution is pretty bad.

P.P.S. Just wondering if more people have a "favorite rectangle" or "favorite aspect ratio"—? My impression is that most photographers adapt pretty easily to whatever they're shooting.

I started off shooting square (a Kodak Instamatic) and have done most of my shooting in my life with 2:3, but I think my favorite was 645. The actual image area of 645 is 56x41.5mm (it varies slightly on different cameras), or 1.35, which is very close to 4:3 (1.333...). But for some reason I don't think of Micro 4/3 as being similar to 645. Maybe I should start thinking of it as mini-645!

Examples of 645 by Patrick Cox.

Never found a 645 camera I really liked, though. It wasn't for lack of trying. The cameras were either too big and klunky (Bronica ETRSi) or the lenses were too slow (Fuji GS645s).

Ironically, during the only time in my life that I was shooting intensively with a 4x5, I masked the camera (physically, with a thin strip of steel) to give the same proportion as 5x7, which was my favorite rectangle at the time. This was probably because I had fallen in love with a brand new Deardorff 5x7 on display at the old Ferrante-Dege in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also gave me a nice clear strip on 4x5 negatives to write on and made handling the negatives easier.

Mostly, though, I shot 35mm and printed to the black film edge like H.C.-B. I'm a firm believer in composing to the viewfinder view—the idea that you can "crop later" just leads to confusion, inconsistency, and sloppy seeing. Your mileage may vary. Although, as I've noted before, the only time I shot intensively with a 6x6 camera (an Exakta 66 Mod. 2), I cropped almost everything to a 645 vertical. On that camera, I found some thin adhesive ruled lines at a graphics arts supplier and used them to mark the viewfinder.

Proportion has always been a big deal to me; I like getting things in just the right balance. I used to think this was artistically important, but maybe it was just fastidious.

Hmm, I really should start thinking of Micro 4/3 as "mini 645." It might make me like it more.  :-)

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beuler: "I always thought you did not care about aspect ratios since you never mentioned it as a factor when considering Micro 4/3. I am obsessive about aspect ratios, to the point that when cropping, I insist on maintaining the original aspect ratio. In my mind, cropping from to a different aspect ratio is a very radical step to be done on very rare occasions. To me the great advantage of 4:3 over 3:2 is that it looks appealing in portrait as well as landscape mode. I hate 3:2 in portrait mode—or would that be 2:3?"

Rob Campbell: "I loved shooting 6x6 on Haseselblad 500 cameras. I suppose that an early infatuation with LP covers had something to do with it; amazing art on those things. Trouble was, 10x12" papers took a chunk off the sides, but square on that paper format looked good, too. But this has me drifting dangerously off towards dreams of long-lost WSG D papers with magical glaze...."

Bill Mitchell: "My philosophy is that I'm not Cartier-Bresson, and that darned few photographs can't be improved by a little judicious cropping."

Josh Hawkins: "I've found I can adjust to most rectangles pretty well, but I tend to prefer 2:3, but that's what I learned on and have used for most of my life/career. The only format that's really stymied me is squares. Squares drive me up a wall. I just can't make them work. They're too static, stable, there is no natural dynamic for me to work off of. Every few years I try to work with them for a bit, and it always falls apart. I'll try again soon I'm sure."

Patrick Medd: "I've shot (and shoot) most ratios from APS-C to 4x5/8x10 but I think my favourite is the square, that is the one I find myself cropping the least. Hipstamatic and the 6x6 apps on the iPhone demonstrated to me that the square chimed with my way of seeing and I liked it so much I went out and bought a Hasselblad 501cm so I could shoot 6x6 film. I've never been fanatical about printing to the black lines, I've always felt that if a crop improves the picture then I'll crop. Having said that I greatly admire the work of photographers like HCB and James Ravilious who did follow that practice. I certainly have a sloppy way of seeing and perhaps my relaxed attitude to cropping is the cause. Maybe I should do a OCOLOY with the Hasselblad and print to the edge; I'll go away and think about it.  :-) "

The Answer to the Nikon Question

How do you correctly pronounce Nikon? Turns out that Eamon, who used to work for Nikon, knew the answer.

Quoth he:

Aaaargggghhhhh!! This "debate" drives me insane. There is no debate. It's settled. Zero room for disagreement. Nikon Corporation (that's Nikon Japan) officially and consciously blesses all regional pronunciations of their company name.

This is policy, agreed upon decades ago—likely in the 1950s—in some meeting room somewhere in Tokyo. Nee'kon is correct. Neye-kon is correct. Nick-on is correct. Many others are correct.

This was explained to me when I was a Nikon employee by the Executive Vice President of Nikon Inc. himself, in the flesh. I can still picture the conversation, 25 years later. And to anticipate the usual objections: Nikon Corp. is the ONLY, the SOLE, the UNITARY authority on this question. "Nikon" is not a natural word in the Japanese language. The company that is now Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku, K.K.) made it up. It's a brand name—like Kodak or Xerox. A neologism, and maybe even a portmanteau (that's debated). It was likely first conceived in the Latin alphabet, not in Kanji. Nikon Corp. gave birth to this name, and they own it. They get to make the rules about it. And their rule is clear: all regional pronunciations are equally correct. If you doubt this, just listen to their own regional advertising, produced by the company's various subsidiaries around the world. You'll hear several different, completely official, pronunciations. Oy. I feel better now.

Addendum: Of course, it goes without saying that however they pronounce it in Scotland is wrong.

It was news to me, so I learned something today as well. So now we all know, and it's official: all regional pronunciations of "Nikon" are correct! I like it.

And now we need a few Scottish readers to post videos of themselves saying "Nikon."

Mike
(Thanks to E.H.)

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dave Stewart: "Ma Naekon D700 disnae day video, ye ken...."

Ian: "Now all we have to do is figure out how to pronounce 'Eamon'...."

This Is How It Goes On a Blog

So this is how it goes on a blog. You do one off-topic post about some stray wacky topic like washing machines, which has utterly nothing to do with photography, and you expect to leave it at that, but you can't just leave it at that—because then people bring up interesting and different perspectives, and all of you learn more about it, and it turns out that, well, there's more to talk about. So then you do a second post about washing machines...and suddenly you're talking about appliances instead of photography. And new people who come to the site in the middle of the discussion think everyone here has lost their minds. Doesn't really matter if the subject is parrots or pool, it always seems to work the same way.

Well, we haven't entirely lost our minds. This will be the last post about appliances, and I am going to do my damnedest to relate it back to photography at the end.

Anyway, yesterday, Jim wrote:

Let's not forget that survivorship bias is a thing. Every appliance I have upgraded (fridge, washer/dryer, dishwasher, microwave, etc.) has always been because the old ones failed (even after extensive heroic repairs in some cases), and the new ones are significantly better in all ways.

Jim's got a point. My first house in Waukesha, which I bought in 2000, came with an ancient 1970s refrigerator that Xander and I used for a number of more years—maybe 12? I can't recall exactly. The thing sucked down electricity, it was loud, and it didn't do a very good job of preserving food, although I didn't realize that till it died. It had no interior light, because the bulb it needed had passed into history. Amusingly, when it finally came time to replace it, I was severely constrained in the models I could choose, because America had gotten fat between the 1970s and the 2010s: the space allotted for the fridge in my kitchen was too small for most then-current models of refrigerator. I had to buy one specifically made to be extra small to fit older kitchens.

The same thing had happened in the kitchen of my little walk-up studio apartment in Washington D.C., but a generation earlier. The kitchen had been built to house those little 1940s "iceboxes" that are about as tall as a person, so the landlord had plunked a then-current '80s fridge, which was too large to fit the space provided, into the dinette area, awkwardly.

Anyway, to replace our '70s fridge in Waukesha I bought a Samsung with two doors that was less fat, and less deep, than ordinary 2012 refrigerators. Even so, it was bigger than the old one and just barely fit.

But as Jim said, the new one was significantly better. And I mean significantly. I can't recall the technology, but old refrigerators evidently used air from the freezer to keep the refrigerator section cold, and the air was dry, which dried out the food and caused it to go bad sooner. By 2012 that problem had been identified and solved. I was accustomed to lettuce, even when wrapped, going bad within a week. To my amazement, the new fridge could keep the same kind of lettuce wrapped the same way fresh for up to three weeks. Food retained flavor better and didn't acquire that "frozen" taste that we used to accept as normal. And no more noise. And I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure the new one was much more energy efficient. The new fridge really did work much better than the old one. (It even had a working interior light—woo-hoo, luxury.)

Of course I don't agree with Jim that "the new ones are significantly better in all ways" (emphasis mine), because they don't last as long, and that's one way in which they're not better. Which was the point of yesterday's post.

The late great Phil D.
Some of you will remember Phil Davis, the photo-scientist who for years wrote erudite experimental articles about B&W film technique in Darkroom Techniques magazine, and who authored the book Beyond the Zone System (BTZS) and invented all of the BTZS techniques and equipment. Phil was a dear friend and a mentor for a number of years, until his final illness. He had been a pilot in WWII, and after the war bought a house and almost a hundred acres of land outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, his water heater failed and he decided to replace it. He said that the installers who put the new one in tried to sell him on an extended warranty that would cover him for ten years. As he told the story, he said, "Why would I need that? The water heater you're carrying out of here lasted for 55 years." He said the installer's eyes grew round and the man replied, "Oh, Sir! This new one is not going to last for 55 years. You'll be doing well if it lasts for 12. And 15 is all you can hope for. They really don't make them like your old one any more."

Planned obsolescence (a phrase generally agreed to have been coined by Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors but popularized by industrial designer Brooks Stevens, whose car museum in Milwaukee I used to visit as a kid and who I think my family knew), is probably the key area, the fulcrum point, if you will, where things that make good sense in terms of capitalist economics makes bad sense in terms of environmental consequences. It might be good business but it's ultimately a tragic concept.

A couple of decades ago, in one of my periodic "that's-it-I'm-never-doing-any-more-camera-reviews" spells, I resolved to pick one manual/metal/mechanical (MMM) SLR and use it for the rest of my life, keeping it maintained and in good fettle no matter the cost. I happily did the research, and settled on a Nikkormat FT3 as my "last SLR."

The problem was exactly as Jim says...the meter was just not as good as the then-current state-of-the-art (SotA), and neither was the viewfinder, which was smallish and on the dim side compared to the best current ones back then. It didn't really matter how well I maintained it. It just wasn't as good a camera as the best newer ones. (I still have the FT3, but it's a decoration on my front hall table.)

As an aside, I've often wondered what an "ideal" manual/metal/mechanical film SLR would look like. What usually happens economically is that the process of making things ever cheaper to produce while keeping them just barely good enough to sell results in products that are incredibly unpleasing. The old Nikon FM10 (made by Cosina and sold under various other names including Vivitar), a mostly plastic camera that worked fine but was distressingly low in quality, might have been the "terminal SLR" from a product efficiency standpoint. But what would a basic SLR look like if the opposite principle were applied—that is, if it were made as good as it could be based on everything we'd learned through the lifecycle of the product type? I've happily spec'd such an imaginary camera many times in my mind. (I call it the "Spotmatic III," to give you a taste.)

Of course, it's a good thing such a camera will never be made. Even if I got to design it myself, I'd hardly ever use it, if I'm honest.

But if a new SotA MMM SLR ever did come to exist, it would be better than any camera from back in the day, no doubt. The technology is just better now. We know more. And I'd be happy if modern digital interchangeable-lens cameras would all last for 15 or 20 years, but let's face it, they don't need to last longer than that. Because technology moves on, and gets better, and sooner or later you'd want to be part of that. Sooner or later you'd start pining to have the latest thing.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Sal Santamaura: "After reading this post and the comments, I felt regret for procrastinating a couple of years ago when we almost bought a Speed Queen set. Our 1993 Whirlpool pair is still going, although my wife doesn't like the mismatched washer timer knob I had to install recently to replace an original plastic one (no longer available) that cracked. Your dilemma sent me off to the YouTube world of washer videos. After spending several hours there, it seems what you're looking for, Mike, is a Maytag 575GW. Were I in your position right now, that's the one I'd buy."

Mike replies: Ever diligent, last night I plumped for Consumer Reports for a year and stayed up way too late sorting through their data. Naturally they like the very brand that's been giving me headaches—don't tell them I told you, but their take on front-loaders can be summed up as "LG is best."

However, they tend to evaluate washing machine performance as opposed to build quality, reliability, or longevity, and the upshot of their testing seems to be that front-loaders have lots of advantages, mainly:

• They agitate the clothes much better
• They use less water
• They're gentler on the clothes, and
• They spin the clothes much drier at the end of the cycle, meaning that drying times are shortened. Since dryers use lots of energy, less time in the dryer = energy savings.

This seems to be the rap against Speed Queens and commercial Maytags and other stout old-fashioned types. They last longer and break less but they don't clean as well and they're harder on clothes.