The Online Photographer

Coda: On 'Approach'

One thing to take away from the Simone Bossi article is that it's valuable to be sensitive to your own personal or idiosyncratic approach to the work of photographing. Even if you don't agree with Bossi's own approach—and why would you, necessarily? You're not him—it's a worthwhile thing both to think about and to work out for yourself. Which is why I added a few comments about my own experiments in approaching some of these problems.

Gradually or quickly, most photographers work out the specifics of their approach, and most won't be successful unless they take into account their own skills, talents, aptitudes, desires and intentions as they do so. What works for one person might not work for another. What's interesting about the Bossi interview is that it shows him taking an unconventional approach to the problem of photographing architecture, one that goes against some of the more common shared assumptions of the present moment. I was interested, for instance, that he analogizes knowing a building to knowing a person, and that he's noticed that he spends the most time deciding on the first shot, because in his mind and feelings he organizes his first acquaintance with an unfamiliar building similarly to the process of acquainting with a stranger.

I might point out that the 20 or 30 shots he says he takes on an assignment isn't necessarily that little; Walker Evans, while working for the Farm Security Administration, could spend a full day's work exposing six sheets of film. When I worked for Jim Sherwood, he told me that one of his first employers, who was a crusty old guy when Jim was young, would leave the studio to cover a news event and take with him, again, only six sheets of film.

When I young, I did some deliberate work exploring that aspect of approach. I did one exercise where I went photographing taking only one sheet of film with me. It was quite interesting having to decide against "spending" my one shot on various possibilities or opportunities—the demonstrations quickly became one of, how do I personally go about knowing when I'm faced with something I really don't want to miss? (That experiment ended early because it was just too much of a pain.) On another occasion I forced myself to shoot six rolls of 35mm film (for me that was 210 exposures, a lot for me at the time) in one two-hour period. I didn't enjoy the process and I didn't get much out of it. At the time I had a friend who was studying with John Gossage at Maryland, and John, who shot heavily, made process requirements of his students, requiring that they, too, shoot heavily. I was maybe a little too attached to contrarianism at the time, but I ended up reacting against that a little.

I do remember that I always quit photographing when I had at least half a roll of film left. I never wanted to be stuck at the end of the day not being able to take a picture. Just in case I happened across something really good. (This was referred to back in my day as "in case you see Elvis riding a unicorn getting out of a flying saucer" or something along those lines. Elvis had died by that time, but "Elvis sightings" were still a staple meme of tabloid culture. Which struck me as hilarious because, at the peak of the "Elvis sightings," there were 200 professional Elvis impersonators in the U.S.A. But, humans being humans, no one ever put two and two together.)

For me the pace of shooting and the balance between visually exploring and understanding on the one hand and shooting on the other was eventually also wrapped up in the pace of the process I used. I shot 35mm B&W film and developed it myself (rolled it into the cassettes myself too), and in one developing session—I always developed film standing at the kitchen counter next to the sink—I could easily handle three rolls, which for me was one tank's worth. I developed film at the frequency of anything from once a day to once a week, with perhaps once every two or three days as an average. So that was a determinant in the pace of my shooting as well. I didn't want to shoot so much that it overwhelmed my ability to comfortably keep up with the processing.

Digital photographers don't have this built-in brake against overshooting, although that might depend on their own process. For instance, if you're disciplined about your Lightroom procedure as you begin your editing and evaluation, it might interact with and affect your shooting frequency to some degree.

Sadly, I never became nearly as disciplined or as intentional with digital as I was with film. For one thing, I was older, and more jaded and less ambitious, by the time digital came along. For another, I had a hard time taking digital seriously for a long time. (Too long.) The legacy of that attitude, I'm afraid, continues to afflict me, even if the attitude itself is gone.

Also, I became a teacher and writer rather than a photographer. Of course I still photograph, as I have always done, since I was a child, but shifts in one's career focus also probably can't help but affect our working methods. The shift was not entirely up to me, by the way: I got attention and reward for my writing, but I didn't get attention and reward for my photography. Career choices are definitely a mix of our own goals and ambitions with what works for us in the world and what puts bread on our plates and in our pockets. If people had made a fuss over my photographs and paid me for prints, but ignored my writing and never paid me for that, then I'm sure my career "choices" would have veered in a different direction.

But to get back to the subject, in short, I'll say this: I don't think you have to agree with the working methodologies to get insights out of hearing about other photographers' working methodologies.

That's it. That's enough to say.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Michael Cytrynowicz: "Your Process comments resonate with me, and so do Bossi's. I nearly stopped using digital cameras, except for my iPhone, which I use for taking references (of place, etc.). I have been shooting B&W 35mm film for about a year, now (after a protracted study) focusing on Ilford FP4+ developed in XTOL, trying to go out one or twice a week, shooting a roll each time, and trying to keep a balanced pace between shooting, developing, scanning, ingesting into Lightroom, editing in Photoshop, and printing to matte papers with my Epson P800. I've never been happier, and I definitely don't miss the days of taking hundreds of digital shots. Emphasis on taking shots versus making images. I now use a spotmeter, stop and try to see as much as I can, take my time. And, I've been—Horror!—focusing on a very small range of subjects—trees and bushes. Yeah, Curly's 'One Thing.' In part after reading, years ago, an article you wrote on the German couple's water tower photography. And yes, I try to use good, but not expensive lenses, and my Konica FT-1 and Olympus OM-4 cameras. I feel a burden has lifted, and I don't watch YouTube videos about the latest, heaviest, most megapixelled, anymore. But yeah, process is setting me free."

Colin: "One possible brake against over-shooting? Hard drive space! I have one computer, a 2017 MacBook Pro with 1TB of storage. I had to split my Lightroom catalogue in two a few years ago and I still hate the separation. This limit forces me to at least be pretty severe in editing and deleting and I think does make me think a bit more thoughtful when out photographing."

 

Sunday Support Group: Yflcbi! (OT)

I'm typing this on my new keyboard in Dvorak (I love typing the word "keyboard" in Dvorak), so this is probably going to be short. Only touch-typing could make a MOFW* out of me!

On Tuesday it will be one month, and I have to admit it's not going well. Despite a lot of practice, I'm only typing at about 20 WPM with 95% accuracy when I'm copying and about half that speed, with more errors, when I'm composing, probably because I don't practice the latter as much. Continually switching keyboards and layouts ("Yflcbi" is "Typing" when typed in Dvorak on a U.S. keyboard, by the way) is probably not helping.

I've converted the keycaps of my Kinesis to Dvorak
layout markings. This is the left-hand keywell.

But I made a commitment, so I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet.

I truly feel that most of my difficulty is really "just me" as they say. I'm uncoördinated both mentally and in terms of manual dexterity. In short I suspect I have an unusually low aptitude for this. Not debilitatingly low, but below the average or normal range.

However, I believe that typing, like reading, falls into the class of skills that "most anyone can master" if they work at it hard enough and long enough. Some people just have to work harder and longer is all. And might never reach an exceptional level. I'll doubtless never be a speed demon or a champion typist. But competence doesn't require talent in this case, is my guess...just work, and perseverance.

By the way, if anyone out there is contemplating learning Dvorak (now there's a small subset of TOP readers!), I recommend starting with learn.dvorak.nl and not typingclub.com. I believe the latter created some problems for me. I would explain, but it would take too long to type!

I'll report on this experiment again at the two-month mark. For now, I'm not giving up. As Tom Duffy said, "Much of success in life comes from endurance and not much more. As important as thinking is, I'd make the case that after defining a goal, it's often more productive to simply endure." Maybe I'll go type that ten times!

Anyway, I've modified my ambitions: rather than give this experiment two months, I'm going to give it three. At this point my guess is that it might take all of that.

Mike

P.S. This is interesting...key frequency heatmaps for the most common keyboard layouts. The biggest mistake in Dvorak is the "L" position if you ask me.

*All right, all right, I'll type it out: man of few words.

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Michael J. Perini: "I would think that switching between the two types of keyboards has got to add a considerable degree of difficulty—but whatever happens the process is probably building a few brain cells and that has to be good."

Joseph Reid: "If this is something you really want to learn, maybe give it more than three months. I took two semesters of typing in high school, and it was the single most useful course I took in those four years. But think of that—an hour a day, September through December and January through May. It takes some real time, not a few weeks."

JimH: "Personally, I think you are making a mistake, Mike. Trying to do the same thing two very different ways is only going to confuse the connections you already have in your brain. After you started this thread, I decided to try an ergonomic keyboard. It took only a few minutes trying to use it to see how it confused me—slowed me down—and less than 30 minutes to see my typing was getting worse. Back in the box and off to return to you-know-who.

"My philosophy is don't waste time trying to do something you are not good at. I never could throw or catch a football, dribble or hit a basket, so I didn't. But I could heel-and-toe and drift a car intuitively, and I did a nice snap-roll in airplanes. And, as I demonstrate right now, I type fast enough to put thoughts down as I compose, so I'm not wasting time trying to do it differently. To add a camera analogy, after years of using Oly Micro 4/3 cameras up to the Pen F, which I found so trying to use I didn't use it much at all, I bought an old OM-D EM-10 and found it and my brain clicked. Wish I had done that years ago...."

Moose: "'I am feeling a bit like Don Quixote.' —Mike Johnston, Tuesday, 24 September 2013. 'But I made a commitment, so I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet.'

"I can imagine various less-than-ideal outcomes from this experiment. Assuming the goal is to become more productive in creating content, not becoming proficient at two different typing systems as a goal in itself, I can't imagine an outcome that is superior to simply learning to touch-type on QWERTY. I also find it difficult to understand how reassessment of commitment to a course of action that has no impact on anyone else, in light of what is learned along the way, is somehow bad. In fact, it strikes me as rather sensible."

Mike replies: Dvorak was a solution, not a complication. My sense after some experimentation was that on QWERTY, my old and new ways of typing would become hopelessly confused and I'd get mired in the confusion. But that's just me; others would doubtless have a very different experience.

By the way, I slowly but successfully moderated all these comments and put up the Edwin Land post using the new keyboard!

Kye Wood: "If you make your living typing code (as an example) or as a writer (I'm looking at you Mike)—then the extra productivity that you eventually get from Dvorak makes it one of the best investments you can make in yourself. To quote my daughter when she was 16, 'suck it up, princess.' Aren't teenagers a joy?

"For me (former code monkey), I couldn't go Dvorak—because Thinkpads keys were uniquely shaped, so you couldn't rearrange them. Dang and dang again. Cursed be my Thinkpad propensities says I."

Susan Eilenberg: "The Kinesis Advantage keyboard has been my steady love since some time in the 1990s. I've been using the Dvorak layout on it for nearly as long. I had no particular need to learn Dvorak—the fabulous Kinesis had already eliminated all my wrist pain—but I imagined one idle summer day that the layout would be fun to learn and a defensible way to put off beginning an essay that had me intimidated; and I believed I would be back to my old typing speeds within a month of beginning to learn it. That did not happen. I was slow and clumsy for nearly a year, and frantic, too, because learning Dvorak pushed QWERTY out of my memory. I don't now regret knowing it, but that year was painful."

Mike replies: I'm glad to read your thoughts about it. I feel very strangely about the whole enterprise—I'm nowhere near mastery but somehow I think I know just how it's going to be once I get there. My slow progress has not dimmed my desire to reach the goal.

Dave: "Mike, Something to look at during your 'off-time'—whenever that may be. Basic Typing Lessons from 1944—Part 1 (4:45 to the end.) (Typewriter pr0n from 3:40 to 4:30.) This old typing training film from WWII is still applicable to today's typing. Good posture in a good chair, hitting the keys correctly (not the very tips of the fingers), etc. Notice how she pushes the keys down, rather than hitting them from above. Less wasted effort and you keep your fingers on 'home row.' Notice also the L.C. Smith typewriter, before it became Smith-Corona. If she can type that fast without jamming the keys, you can get up to your old 'hunt and peck' speed on an electronic keyboard.

"Good luck. We're all counting on you.  :>)  (I don't know how you can keep Dvorak and standard keyboard layouts separate in your mind.)"

Mike replies: Thanks, that was actually very helpful. Especially her recommendation to hit every key like you will when you are trained but to take a pause between keystrokes, then increase speed by shortening the pauses. That instantly changed the way I practice, and it actually increased my speed right away, too! Our Navy was all business in 1944.

No Cold Water

I'll just point out, following yesterday's discussion, that it has been my observation, over many years, that any time you start talking about aperture, in any context, the discussion eventually devolves into squabbling about the science and the math. It virtually never fails. But one thing I will toss out there is not to forget about the degree of precision in the device, which is a wild card we don't know. Yes, ƒ/1.2 might not be exactly one-third or exactly one-half of a stop different than ƒ/1.4, which itself might not be exactly ƒ/1.4. But your particular camera might not be setting ƒ/1.2 as the maker intended when it's set to ƒ/1.2, either.

It doesn't really matter—the general points still stand.

Here is the accepted f-stop scale for camera lenses, in third stops, with whole stops in bold red:

0.7, 0.8., 0.9, 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8, 2, 2.2, 2.5, 2.8, 3.2, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5, 5.6, 6.3, 7.1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 29, 32, 36, 40, 45, 51, 57, 64, 72, 80, 90

You'll notice it's only an approximate geometric sequence. And f-number is a dimensionless number that already takes into account the size of the entrance pupil. Each whole stop represents an approximate doubling or a halving of the amount of light.

Anyway, photography is just not that precise such that the picayune differences are worth arguing about. First of all, exposure is a judgement call—ask ten people to adjust overall exposure in any picture with sliders and you'll get seven different renderings, perhaps with two or three quite far off from each other. Secondly, the differences we're talking about represent relatively minor corrections in software. They also represented relatively minor corrections in the darkroom. Whether you are in the Third-Stop camp or on Team Half-Stop with regard to ƒ/1.2 lenses, the differences are slight and easy to compensate for.

Michael Fewster wrote: "Once upon a time in film days, superfast lenses had a point. High ISO speeds meant ISO 800. Even more relevant was the need for fast lenses to nail accurate manual focus. As cameras with internal light meters closed down apertures, manual focus became difficult. I think it was Minolta that first came up with focus at full aperture and then auto stop down to the required aperture when exposing. The brighter the viewfinder, the easier it was to manually fast focus. There was real street cred in having a fast lens on the front of your SLR. I don't see the point of such lenses on DSLRs."

An utterly unnecessary lens might be useful to calibrate your sense of optical perfection

I would defend fast-lens fans more than that—if people like their fast lenses, far be it from me to splash any cold water on their happiness. (I have plenty of my own enthusiasms and tastes.) I sympathized with what Zed said, that he bought his ƒ/1.2 lens "in part for the prestige of owning just one such utterly unnecessary lens." You go, bro—I get that. And of course maximum aperture is only one feature of any lens. It's the whole lens one has to look at. I'd say, if you like fast lenses, go for it, and if you don't, don't worry about it. All I'll add is that personally, just for my own self, I'd prefer it if the Fuji 56mm had the specs of the Viltrox 56mm, and the Viltrox had the specs of the Fuji. Moderation in all things.

Back at the ranch, ever the empiricist, I got out the Fuji 56mm ƒ/1.2 yesterday, and set the camera to square, and went out photographing. I even discovered that my X-H1 has eye-recognition focus, just like a Sony! I did not know that.

(I also did not know that I could set my Mac to Dvorak with the simple click of a toolbar button. But that's a different subject. Off to typing practice now. Enjoy your Saturday! All best from the beautiful Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, where it will be 55°F today and I will be walking on the hill come evening).

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

James Bullard: "The f-numbers are a ratio of the diameter of the opening relative to the focal length of the lens. An ƒ/2 opening is ½ the focal length, ƒ/4 is ¼ the focal length, etc. The actual amount of light varies because the focal length is measured from the optical center of the lens, the point where the light crosses and inverts the image landing on the focal plane, and that point moves outward as the lens is focused on anything closer than infinity. So yes, it is approximate.

"FWIW, the optical part of photography is entirely based on math. It is not something to squabble about; math is math. You understand it or you don't. Since the advent of TTL metering it is less necessary to understand that math of optics/light but IMO still helpful.

"The perspective of an old guy who learned on all-manual cameras when you had to understand how it worked.  :-)  "

Steve Renwick: "Re 'But one thing I will toss out there is not to forget about the degree of precision in the device, which is a wild card we don't know.' Well sure. I have here two identical camera bodies with two identical lenses which when set to the same identical apertures and shutter speeds yield exposures that differ by about 2/3 of a stop. Or maybe it's 5/6 of a stop. So, y'know, stuff happens."

Andrew J.: "Anybody interested in a thorough explanation of relative apertures should read the excellent article 'f-number' by Wikipedia. Is ƒ/1.2 half a stop or a third of a stop faster than ƒ/1.4 is purely academic for me as I don't own such a lens and thus can't comment on the true subject of this post."

Bruce Alan Greene: "Motion picture lenses are marked in T stops, for the light actually transmitted rather than the mathematical stop. Even then...they are generally only accurate to ± 1/3 stop, except...at the widest aperture."

[Bruce is a cinematographer. —Ed.]

Road Trip!

Road trip today...I'm off to Rochester to retrieve my computer. It was fixed by Apple under warranty. I'm also dropping off two of my old computers at Mac Ave to get them reconditioned for resale. It's going to be a long day.

But I've got a little amusement to pass along. Thanks to brian in a comment to the "Quixotic" post, I learned about a site called TypeLit.io that allows you to retype a famous novel as typing practice. So I put in my first hour and a half this morning. 

Guess what novel I've started to retype?

Don Quixote, of course. As the Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson says, made myself laugh and that's half the battle.

Mike

Gear o' The Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Jeff: "You might listen to a bit of Dvořák in the background." 

Mike replies: Great comment! And a good thing I wasn't drinking tea when I first read it.

mictter: "'En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme....' because you are typing it from the Spanish original, aren't you?

Mike replies: Ha, no, the John Ormsby translation from the 1880s.

Patrick Perez: "Hunter S. Thompson claimed he used to type out The Great Gatsby every year so he could know what it was like to write a perfect novel (or classic, or whatever term he ascribed to it)."

The Mother... Logic Board

After spending nearly three hours in the car getting to the Apple store yesterday, I had to leave my computer with them. I don't get it back until Thursday. So I'm doing what I can on my upstairs computer (the one I bought in 2018 to use to write books—alas, my steely determination to write a book in 2018 was a failure). There's nothing on this computer, and I mean nothing. No passwords, no links, no bookmarks, no mail archive, and so on. 

The lure of new cameras
While at the Apple Store I played with an iPhone 12. I actually wrote to Apple's PR department when the iPhone 12 came out asking for a phone to review, but my request was either lost or ignored. So yesterday I took some sample pictures with the iPhone 12 Pro Max (Max Pro?) and emailed the pictures to myself. On arriving home, there was nuthin'. Shoulda figured they'd have some sort of filter in place to prevent people like me from sending content from store demo units to the outside world.

Sigh. 

The part of the exercise that amused me? The two pictures I took were of Chris, the Genius (that's not sarcasm, it's what Apple calls its in-store technical advisors) at the widest and narrowest of the three focal lengths. The reason it made me chuckle is because this is just the latest in a very long line of a generic type of shot I've been taking all my life: the Camera Store Counter Person Portrait. I go to a store, diddle around with a new camera I can't afford, and snap a few test pictures around the store, usually including one or two of the salesperson who's helping me. I've probably taken fifty such pictures over my lifetime and it could be twice that many.

I don't have some I'd really want, though. One would be old Mr. Baker of Baker's Camera on Tenley Hill in D.C. way back in the early '80s. That was a wonderful place—an old-style hole-in-the-wall photo store crammed with gear and materiel of every description, presided over by an ancient wizened gnome and his friendly wife who seemed to be taking care of him more than she was taking care of the customers. He had stuff for sale that he wouldn't actually sell! He liked his stuff. He was a swell guy, of a type that I always enjoyed. I wish I had pictures of some of the guys at Penn Camera in downtown D.C. too. I should have documented my life better!

It's similar to that other venerable genre, the Photo-Friend-Across-the-Lunch-Table shot. I have many of those slumbering in remote corners of the archives as well. 

"Camera store countermen" would have made a nice idea for a project, actually. Of course I never would have thought of such a thing.

Anyway, sorry I can't show you the pictures. But the portrait of the Genius taken with the latest smartphone camera in the store just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Mike

UPDATE: The Apple Store just called to say the "logic board" of my computer is fried and needs to be replaced, and they don't have the part. There will be an unspecified wait. In the meantime, I've retrieved from my hazy memory the fact that this indeed happened once before...with my beloved Powerbook 160. It needed a new "motherboard." (Same thing?) On the good side, it was put completely right and lived a long life thereafter.

In fact I think I still have it somewhere–I kept it because Phil Davis's Plotter/Matcher program would run on it and wouldn't run on newer OS's. That was one heck of an interesting program, but it never got the attention it deserved, and now even fewer people care about matching film+developer and paper characteristic curves the quick and easy way.

Gear o' The Week:

I'm going to get a review unit of the Fuji GFX 50R as soon as the weather gets nice. Believe it or not what really appeals to me about it are the simplified controls. It has all the features I like and not many I don't like.

The above link is a portal to take you from TOP to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo, which also sells the GFX 50R:

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Moose: "The only mother board failure I've experienced had wonderfully propitious timing. I had built up a new desktop machine, installed the OS and was migrating various 'stuff' across, when the old one just stopped working. It was soon obvious that the MB was not working. I didn't try to determine how/why. I just thanked my lucky stars, installed the old boot drive as a data drive on the new machine temporarily, until I had transferred everything. Luck was a lady.... Report from the other side of the Divide."

Olybacker: "I wish I had taken shots of all the photo store fronts in London (UK) during the 1970s and 1980s as well as the people serving inside. They have mostly all gone now."

Donald Zochert: "Not having your computer for a while may be an opportunity."

Kirk Tuck (Safety director for VSL): "Pen and Paper. I have a small notebook that was specially designed to be a password book. It's tabbed. It's small. It's available on Amazon for about nine bucks. I write my passwords in there. Then, when lightning and meteors and volcanos strike I can still log on with any device. Again, pen or pencil, paper. $9. Fault tolerant to the max. Will even survive an EMP attack by a hostile power. But then you might not have much left to log into....

"If you are ultra paranoid and live near a bank you could keep your book in a safe deposit box. If you aren't all of the above just stick it on a random bookshelf. Burglars rarely, if ever, steal books. Just sayin'."

Kenneth Wajda: "Here's a wonderful post by John Dersham with his photos of Camera Shops. And I recently started a Camera Shop hangout on FB."

Small Update (OT)

If you've been following along...

...I love the new-old pool table and the pool shed. The whole project worked out much better than I expected. The space is very comfortable, peaceful and quiet, and fully large enough for the nine-foot table. The table is better than I expected, too—it still has its original Monarch cushions from the mid-'60s (they made them right back then), the slates are superb, and it's eminently playable. The best table I've ever played on, actually. (I had never played on a Gold Crown before I tried this one out at the seller's house. I like it even better than the Diamond I had.) There are no problems anywhere on the table, no spots where it rolls off or dead places on the rails or anything like that.

I've played way too much these past ten days, but we've gotten into a great rhythm—as I shoot, Butters trots around keeping his ball from me, putting it down and then snatching it up if I go for it. Every now and then he'll present it to me, and I put the cue down and fling the ball out the door. He gives urgent chase and comes trotting happily back inside, and we start the whole process over again. He loves it. Inside the house, he's always sitting there looking at me expectantly, wanting to go out.

I'm slowly getting back into stroke. I do drills in the morning and just shoot balls in the afternoon and evening. Usually I'll stay out ten to twenty minutes every couple of hours, then come back inside to work. In the evening I'll spend an hour or two out there. The table is demanding but I like that, because it's a challenge and it gives me a better opportunity to work. Eventually I'll post a video. Can't wait till COVID's over and I can have friends over to play.

It's still pretty lonely. But that's these times. We all just have to get through it. And I have nothing to complain about.

But all is well. It took a lot of work but the result was worth it. I'm glad I did it. Everything worked out great.

Now then, that's enough of that.

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Peter Lindbergh On Fashion Photography, with text in English, French, and German. Original coffee table version or small 40th Anniversary version, take your pick. Both are hardcovers. The links above will whisk you away to Amazon.

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

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

Peter: "I’m delighted for you Mike. Made my day to read this. I can imagine the joy it will bring when you can entertain. Soon."

Alan: "Have you played darts? I think a dart board might go very well with that pool table. Love the whole setup. I wish I had one just like it."

Mike replies: I did play darts for a spell in college. I lived on the top floor of an old dorm. Across the hall from me was one of the largest dorm rooms on campus, with a large living room and a bunk room for four guys. (401 Middle Fayerweather if there are any Dartmouth alums hanging about.) We had a dartboard in the living room there. But it's never been my thing, really, and I'm inclined to keep the pool shed single-purpose as far as activities are concerned. I've scrapped my plan to keep my books there, as I now realize bookcases would crowd the table. I'm still planning photos for the walls, but that's a project that will begin in Summer at the earliest.

Nikhil Ramkarran: "I’m so happy you’ve finally got your game on. Been reading your (OT) pool posts for so many years. Enjoy, Mike." 

Bandbox: "Pool tables, politics, and inequality. Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid, and that's probably why I don't read TOP as often as I used to. But the drone piece was good, so I keep coming back from time to time."

Michael Ryan: "I have zero interest in pool and less interest in building cabins. But for some reason have been eagerly following every update on this wonderful addition you have added to your life. Very much looking forward to your video. Have you thought about doing a Zoom call live pool game with some of your followers? It might also help with the loneliness."

The Actual Best 35mm f/1.4 on the Market

Tamron SP 35mm ƒ/1.4 Di USD
for Canon and Nikon DSLRs

We heard from Roger Cicala of Lensrentals, who I mentioned in the "Having It All" post:

"I have not tested the Sony 35mm GM and it does seem superb; I look forward to doing so. In the meantime, however, I've gone on record: the highest resolving 35mm lens is neither the Canon or Nikon flagship, nor is it the Leica. The humble Tamron 35mm ƒ/1.4 SP is the highest resolving, just a hair better than the Sigma 35mm ƒ/1.2 Art. That's what the Sony will have to compete against."

Woo-hoo. Fight! Bring it on.

My ego is still smarting just a bit from not acknowledging that the new Sony is in fact lighter than all its current competitors (including the Tamron, which costs a mere $899). Bad blogger. So maybe I'm just being defensive, but I'll still stand by what I wrote, while acknowledging that I might be being cantankerous.

"Light, compact" 35mm ƒ/1.4 full-frame
mirrorless lens: 524g

"Big, heavy" 35mm ƒ/1.4 full-frame
mirrorless lens: 307g

The funny thing about the lens in this second picture is that the original Aspherical, when it first came out, was considered big and heavy because it was so much more so than the Leica 35mm Summiluxes that had preceded it!

The latest Leica 35mm Summilux is larger still. But, as you see at that second link, quite a bit smaller and more compact than the Sony. (If there's something a little wonky with that link, it's not my fault.)

Of course you might cry out that this is not a fair comparison because the Sony is an AF lens! The Sony is an AF lens! Well, I don't have a lot of lenses here to compare so beggars can't be choosers. I'll counter by pointing out that the Leica lens is not made of polycarbonate; the only plastic bit on it is the focusing tab.

Am I being argumentative about this? Well then I am. In any event, trust me: if lensmakers were really competing to see who could make the smallest and lightest lenses, the new Sony, nice as it is, wouldn't be in the hunt.

And what's wrong with large, heavy lenses? Nothing, if you prefer them; nothing, if you don't mind them; nothing, if you need to put up with them to get the results you want.

For me I guess the consideration comes down to this: If I'm going to carry a prime that's as bulky and weighty as a zoom, then I might as well carry the zoom. 

Know it and love it
Roger's "highest resolving" is not how I'd pick a lens, no offense to the Tamron King o' the Hill. Don't care much for that. Christer Almqvist wrote in the Comments:

"Well OK, size and weight are important fact-sheet figures. And most modern pro and semi-pro lenses are so sharp you need a tripod to reap the full benefits. So for me the decisive question is: How does the lens balance with the camera and how does it fit my hands?"

That's a good criterion to use. I can get behind that.

Overall image quality is a good criterion too. But of course you're still left with the formidable task of determining what that means for you. There are lots of aspects of image quality; resolution is only one.

Being an avowed lens nut (something that is definitely not required in order to be a photographer), my criterion would go something like this: how well do you know it, and, do you love it?

Because all lenses yield their gifts. No matter how "good" or "bad" the lens, the pictures can be found that are tailor-made to the lens's properties. Photograph with any lens you love for long enough, and those gifts will be along. It's the way it seems to be.

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Peter Lindbergh On Fashion Photography, with text in English, French, and German. Original coffee table version or small 40th Anniversary version, take your pick. Both are hardcovers. The links above will spirit you away to Amazon.

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

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

Kirk Tuck: "I bought the hardback version of the Peter Lindbergh book and I'm really enjoying it. Seven pounds of photography for only $50 delivered. What a deal. The printing in the hardback is on very nice, especially thick paper and it's a delight. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

"35mm focal length? Meh."

Roger Cicala: "You know the best thing about TOP? It's possible to come here, stir the pot a bit, and not hear what a horrid photographer I am.  :-)  (Full disclosure, even I say I'm a mediocre photographer, so it doesn't hurt my feelings.) I totally agree with everything said above, but I did want to toss those third-party lenses into the discussion because I find them shockingly good for the price. I don't think they're actually better lenses than the new Sony or Leicas, but they're worth consideration. To be clear, I haven't tested the Sony or Leicas yet (not enough copies). Plus, because I have the attention span of a squirrel I've been all into field curvature the last couple of months and not doing MTF testing at all. But I will probably bake myself a crow pie when I get around to it. Sony's done some amazing lenses lately and Leica, they always do amazing lenses."

Jack: "Regarding size of lenses. I still recall my reaction when I moved from an Olympus Zuiko manual focus lens to the Canon EOS autofocus lenses. Geez they were huge in comparison and still are. Now, an APS-C lens solution is the compromise allowing smaller lenses that still have AF. The size tax on full frame lenses is significant. Sure the body can be compact, but not the lenses. And the latest sensors have allowed APS-C to achieve professional quality. You mentioned wanting lens-body balance. I want a great viewfinder. The real key now is high quality EVF in mirrorless APS-C versus crappy optical finders in DSLR APS-C cameras. Your friends at Fuji have figured it out."

John Camp: "The bottom line for us non-avowed lens nuts is that you're better off with an ƒ/1.8, almost whatever your brand. (I equivocate there because I'm not going to do the research to prove it, but I believe it to be true.) The ƒ/1.8s will be shorter, lighter and cheaper, and the differences between lenses of equivalent quality will be so subtle that you could only see it in test shots. If you're walking around with a camera, the differences would be on how well you can handle a camera, not on how fast the lens is. This is particularly true in this age of high-ISO sensors combined with auto-ISO programming. I didn't bother to research the other brands on prices, either, but would note that the excellent Nikkor Z 35mm ƒ/1.8S can be had new from B&H for $850. It is 3.4 inches long and weighs 13 ounces. The ƒ/1.4 Sony you're writing about is .8 inches longer and weighs five and a half ounces more, and—the big number—costs $550 more. For what? For undetectable differences in bokeh? For 2/3 of a stop in speed?

"I do understand the attraction of highest precision, most-capable machinery, but do think that it really has to be understood as part of a system. Heavier, more awkward machinery of ultimate quality is not necessarily better than lighter, more easily handleable machinery of almost undetectably lesser quality."

Michael: "My top criterion in selecting a lens is do I like the resultant prints. Come to think of it, that’s my second and third criteria as well."

Quote o' the Day: John Schmidt (OT)(Update)

"People ask me if I have groupies. Oh, I've got 'em. They're all sixty-year-old men with chili stains on their shirts, but I've got 'em."

—Pool player John Schmidt, the Roger Maris of pool, who in 2019 broke Willie Mosconi's longstanding record from 1954 for the highest run of all time in straight pool

Thought that was funny. That's pool for you.

Speaking of pool, the carpet/rug is in:

It's a remnant of commercial carpet but it has variegated greens and browns and is quite handsome. And according to Billy the carpet guy "wears like iron."

And this doesn't look like much, but we (the seller and I) successfully dismantled half the pool table yesterday and got it moved here!

To me it's a sight for sore eyes.

What a Christmas!

Mike

UPDATE the day after Christmas:

The rest of the table successfully moved! All thanks to clan Gordon, from whom I was lucky enough to buy this.

That's the frame leaning up against the wall, and the lined slates stacked behind Butters. Now I wait for the mechanic to arrive to set it all up.

P.S. If you're not a pool fan but you're feeling deprived of sports and would like to watch something new over the holidays, here's a choice pool match, newly uploaded. It's a fun one. Between Ko Pin-Yi of Taiwan (ROC) and Jayson Shaw of Scotland. Avoid reading any comments before you watch it.

...And by the way, my pool teacher is sitting behind the McDermott sign in this video—the older gentleman with the jacket and bright pool-themed tie.

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

Book of interest this week:

The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St Clair
(clicking on the links above takes you to Amazon)

From The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)

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

Malcolm Leader: "Since I live fairly remotely and my wife has no interest in pool, I practice a lot by myself. I put in a nice sound system and I find playing and listening make for a very relaxing experience. Talk to the installer about things like re-leveling. It really isn't that hard and you really only need to do it about a month after setting that table on the carpet and then about once a year. If you notice straight shots going awry, time to re-level. I keep a pristine four-foot level nearby. Have fun!"

Mike replies: It's the same for me. I suspect it's like what some people do when they "vegg out" in front of the TV or get lost in video games—"contented distraction," we might call it. It's a way to turn my mind off and relax.

And the experience is just as good when it's shared—when I play with friends.

Eating for Health: 1-Year Progress Report

[Bloviation alert: This is a long one; 4,000 words and then some. You have been advised. —Mike the Author/Ed.]

-

'Kay, today's the day. It's been exactly one year since I began my diet experiment, so here's yer helpful friendly one-year progress report. I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist; this is just an account of my own experience, my own journey.

To briefly review, last December 19th, one year ago today, I started time-restricted eating (TRE) and a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet. TRE means you only eat during a defined "window" of time every day. WFPB means you aim to get at least 80% of your calories from unprocessed or minimally processed plants. Actually I slowly transitioned to a Dr. Greger / nutritionfacts.org diet, which might more accurately be called a "FAM" diet, meaning "food as medicine."

Two Comments

I got a bit inundated with comments to the previous post (275 so far*, including the Featured ones) and a lot of them are not all that quick for me to parse because they mention more than two cameras. But enough with my griping already!

Anyway, as I sometimes do, I fell down on the job and got behind on the comments to a few of the posts prior to that. Everything's posted now, but here's the problem—visitors don't look at older posts. After a post has been up for 3–5 days, it's only getting a small fraction of the views it got when it was fresh. And people who've already read it often don't go back later to read it again. What this means is that if a great comment comes in six days after the post is published, there's little point in adding to the post as a Featured Comment because no one will see it.

Then when I'm responsible for burying comments in this way, I feel ashamed. Bad Mike!

Long story short, here are two comments I thought you'd like to see. I should have added them as Featured Comments to the respective posts, but too late now.

The first is from Chap Achen, who responded to the post "Electric Trains and the Electric Flash Lamp" with a picture. I wrote that "the center of the train-loving generation in America is males who were 10 in 1950, when electric trains were the number-one Christmas wish for boys."

Chap replied, "I am one of the boys you talked about (76 years old) and I looked forward to every Christmas morning when new items were added to the layout. I still have boxes of train items and accessories that my wife asks me to dispense with but alas not to be. Here is a photograph of my Grandfather and me on Christmas morning 1948."

This is the perfect illustration for my little aside about the toy train generation (which I learned about when I worked for Kalmbach Publishing), right? But it doesn't do much good to add new items to yesterday's newspaper. I didn't want Chap's lovely old family picture of himself and his grandfather to get lost. (As an aside, don't forget to take and print pictures like this. It might sound superficial to say, but the documentation of our lives and the lives of those we love is one of the great joys of photography. I can imagine what the above picture means to Chap now.)

Tributes
The other comment I neglected to post soon enough came from our friend Ken Tanaka in response to the post "Random Excellence: John and Yoko by Lilo Raymond." Ken is a patron of the arts (although he never blows his own horn in that respect), has been a loyal reader of TOP for many years, has written posts for us, recently self-published a book of his fine city scenes that I've perused and enjoyed several times now, and has been the featured artist in a TOP Print Offer (the print hangs at the top of my stairs). He was responding to Marcelo Guarini's picture in Marcelo's own Featured Comment. Here's the picture again, his homage to John Lennon:

Marcelo Guarini, We Miss You John

"Lilo Raymond's apparently casual moment image of John and Yoko is really lovely," Ken writes. "But Marcelo Guarini's 'We Miss You John' is magnificently clever and potentially iconic. Wow. Love it. (Can I buy a print?)

"Since most of your readers are fellow boomers who have their own Beatles/Lennon stories I'll keep mine short. I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia to teach a three-day class on December 8, 1980. The weather was raw and I really didn't want to be there. I was looking forward to the coming weekend when my first wife and I were buying our first good stereo system. As I was slobbering over the gear lit in my hotel room that evening, the news bulletin struck me like a bolt of lightning. I was distraught. I was angry. I still am. Fast-forward to the evening of December 8, 2009. I was in New York on museum business and was attending a cocktail party at an apartment across the street from Central Park. I was admiring our host's art collection when I glanced out the window and noticed a candlelight gathering across the street in the park. Another bolt of lightning struck as I realized I was seeing a Lennon memorial in Strawberry Field. I couldn't help tearing-up for a moment. I wanted to join them...but couldn't. I am not really a big pop-music fan. But the Beatles were the most important musical group of my life. And they still are.

"Thanks for posting the photos."

Mike
(Thanks to Chap and Ken and all our commenters)

*The record for the most comments for one post is 701.

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

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

Progress

The walls are primed and painted and the light got installed.

Can't say it's going fast, but it's progress.

Mike

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

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

D Glos: "The open trusswork ceiling with gray paint looks great. It opens up the space vertically, and fools the eye into believing it is larger. Crown moulding at the top of the drywall would finish the wall space nicely, and could be paired with picture rail moulding for your gallery aspirations. Nice to hang artwork without poking holes in the freshly finished walls. Makes moving things around, or up and down, easy too."

Mike replies: It will get crown molding but plain white 1x4, not picture rail. And the windows will be trimmed (door too of course) if/when I can find someone with a table saw. I really don't want to buy a table saw just to rip nine pieces of wood!

Andrew: "I haven't kept track of your plans for the ceiling or the advice consensus. But the white walls with the grey joists, etc. look fantastic. Don't change them!"

Mike replies: Thanks. The walls are a Sherwin-Williams color called "Creamy," really just a warmish off-white. During this project, I discovered I like painting over primer. The walls soaked up a lot of primer, but the color went on so smoothly and covered so nicely that I was able to paint the whole room in one go. I used two gallons of primer but, of the color, only one gallon and just a splash from a second gallon. Anybody need one and 9/10ths gallons of "Creamy"?

Dachshund! (OT)

I'm driving to Buffalo today to pick up that pool table light. I'm starting to think I'm just deliberately making this project more difficult than it has to be. It's starting to feel like there will never be a pool table in this shed. It's not like it has to be difficult; but the pool table I want costs $5,000 and another $2,000 for delivery and installation once all is said and done. It's as decisively and emphatically out of reach as that medium-format Fuji. I'm trying to do everything on a budget which greatly complicates the project.

My mother had a dachshund once whose name was Wolfgang. Wolfgang was not an ordinary dog—he was a miniature long-hair silver-dapple dachshund (meaning his coat was black and brown and silvery gray) who had one brown eye and one blue eye. He thought he was Napoleon—he would get in the faces of Great Danes and German Shepherds and bark furiously until the big dogs backed down. To paraphrase Thea Berg, other dogs had bigger sticks but Wolfie swung his harder. Anyway Wolfgang would drive us crazy by barking whenever his ball got stuck under the radiator. He'd whine and whimper and "dig" furiously trying to get the ball out. Finally it occurred to me to wonder why his ball always seemed to get stuck under the same spot, so I followed him around one day. He went here and there, nosed the ball away from him and chased it, settled down to gnaw on it for a while—and then he trotted over to the radiator, set the ball down, and deliberately rolled it with his nose to where he couldn't get it. Then he promptly began worrying it, barking, scratching, and whining. Funny!

Maybe that's me. Who drives four hours in the car to get a pool table light? I'm not even going to save any money on it when all is said and done. Anyway, here's the Wolfgang aspect of today's mission: we're setting out for a two-hour-plus drive West without knowing whether the light is going to fit inside the car. Why do I do stuff like this to myself?

Happy about a heater
Here's the latest on the shed: The drywall is all done and looks fantastic. The walls are going to be the spiffiest feature of the room, as befits their status as the basis for the photography exhibit. The electrical got finished up yesterday too—all the outlets got dug out of the plaster, spacers installed for depth, and the new covers on (I don't know what the damned things are called and maybe there isn't even a name for them—the plates that surround switches and outlets on the wall). The eight-foot baseboard heating unit was installed—with two coats of paint behind and underneath it—and the thermostat went in. You've never seen a guy happier about a heater. I love it.

So—progress. Hopefully, the next thing you'll see is a photograph of the undamaged pool table light, hung on a fan box and emanating photons. Baby steps. Wish me luck.

Mike

UPDATE later that same day.... The mission went splendidly and without a hitch. My friend Eric consented to use his truck (thanks Eric), a humongous vehicle with a 5-liter V8 that can accommodate a large riding mower, and anyway the pool table light would have fit in my car. It took us only four hours, plus a few minutes for stops, and it was great to have company along the way. The pool table light exceeds my expectations—it's really very nice and the quality is excellent. The seller said it cost $540 new, and I paid her asking price of $150. Next step will be to get it installed. Then I'll suck it up and motivate myself to begin the painting.

But right now ah'm tarred, as they say in the South. 

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

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

Robert Roaldi: "I've driven farther for good cheese and cappuccino. What you're doing make total sense. Are we going to get a post about the different kinds of billiard balls they make? I assume that as with everything else, there are all kinds of choices."

Mike replies: Your wish is my command. I'll put it on the list.

Patrick Dodds: "Re 'Anyway, here's the Wolfgang aspect of today's mission: we're setting out for a two-hour-plus drive West without knowing whether the light is going to fit inside the car. Why do I do stuff like this to myself?' This made me laugh harder than anything I've ever read here before. Thank you. Worthy of James Thurber himself."

Kefyn Moss: "The cover around a light switch is called an escutcheon plate."
Tom Burke: "In the UK the front of an electrical socket is known as the face plate."
Ben Rosengart: "They're called switch plates."
Malcolm Leader (partial comment): "They're simply called coverplates."

Mike replies: You see the problem!

Steve Rosenblum: "Jeez, I go for long drives just to get out of the house during the pandemic and I have no other goal in mind!"

Mike replies: ...In your new Tesla! I might go on long drives too...

My favorite story about aimless drives comes from a book in a series called "Witness" by Lee Friedlander about his and Maria's friend the sculptor Raoul Hague, who made giant abstract wooden sculptures out of sections of large trees. Seems Raoul would head off on a journey but get distracted by curiosity and aesthetic promise at every turn and crossroad, and he would simply follow whatever path looked more promising in terms of things to see. In so doing he would get hopelessly lost and couldn't find his way back home. In his later years this problem was solved by his friends who made a rule that whenever Raoul went driving someone else had to go along. It was this second person's responsibility to navigate and keep track of where in the heck they were, so they stood a chance of finding their way back. All in the era long before GPS, of course.

'Heat It With Matchsticks'

Back to the Gallery build...

The painter did the ceiling yesterday. Took about an hour to spray it a flat gray called "Software" (must be a sweet job, "paint color namer.")

But there was a problem. Three hours later, the paint was still wet.

The reason? Shed's too tight. You put two gallons' worth of moisture into the air and after it loads the air with humidity it's got nowhere to go. The insides of the windows were wet with condensation.

And it was too cold in there, too. By then it was 38°F (3.3°C) outside and inside.

So I drove up to Tractor Supply and bought two ceramic space heaters (because one just seemed like it would be too weak). It was dark by that time. Put them inside the shed and turned both up to high, and went inside for an online meeting.

It was two hours before I got back outside, and guess what the temperature was inside the shed by then?

EIGHTY. 80°F! That's 26.7°C. After only two hours with two space heaters on! Man, Tyler the insulation guy was hardly joking when he said I'd be able to heat with matchsticks. Oh, and the air was much less humid by then and the paint was drying nicely. 

Drywall is next
To leave it overnight, I turned one of the space heaters off entirely. Here's a snap of the little $13 space heater that remained on, so you can see what we're talking about:

More to the point, here are the settings I left it on overnight:

And in the morning, with an outside temperature of 36°F and after a whole night in the 30's, with only that one little space heater for heat, the temperature in the shed was a comfortable 65°F (18.3°C).

Pretty dramatic, don't you think? At this point, I'm thinking the eight-foot baseboard unit we have planned might be overkill.

By the way, when they build whole houses this airtight and well insulated, they have to install air-exchange ventilating systems. Here's a link to a long video explaining one such unit (a Zehnder) in detail, in case you happen to be curious. With a single-room shed, air exchange will happen naturally with opening and closing of the single door to the outside, perhaps with a little help from the fan in the air conditioner. I'm going to have to keep an eye on it, though. This little building is as airtight as a bottle with a cork in it.

Anyway, the drywallers are in there now, my pool-team friend Charlie and his brother and their father. I'm inside staying out of their way.

I put the wires for the stereo in the wall right before they got here, so they can get covered up by the drywall.

That's the update for today, but check out the nifty pool table light I scored on Craigslist (seller's photo):

Handsome, eh? My friend Eric (the ceiling painter) and I have to drive to Buffalo to get it next week (it's a little too big for my back seat). I was going to build my own pool light, but when I saw this one I decided to go for it. It wasn't expensive. The owners just moved, and don't need it any more.

Mike

UPDATE Wednesday evening:

This picture shows you three significant things—the drywall up and taped; the two wire "tails" coming out of the wall where the stereo speakers will be; and, out the window, my other shed...which is what gives me that darned nickname...(see below...).

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

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

Paul Martini, Bluff, Utah:

Christer Almqvist: "Be careful. The humidity is still in there. What was on the walls and on the on the inside of the windows when the indoors temperature was low is still inside the shed, only it is in the air and not on the walls when the air temperature is higher. Warm air can hold much more humidity than cold air. You can get the humidity out by letting (dry) cold air in and warm (wet) air out just by opening the door. Still better is two openings on opposite walls. (Called durchlüfteten in German, and is one of the methods to keep COVID out of the house). Do not keep door/window open longer than it takes to change the air. Do not let the walls get cold. And read up on absolute and relative humidity. Get a hygrometer. Avoid condensating humidity at all cost; the long term negative effect is not to be taken lightly. Healthwise, and financially."

Rob Spring: "Unless you ventilate the moisture will not leave. Warm air holds much more water vapor than cold so all you did by heating up the room was to drive the water from liquid to vapor. Be sure to crack some windows and try to induce a way for the moist air to exit the building. If you don't move that moisture out you will be in a situation where the vapor pressure in the building is significantly higher than outside. The moisture will find every crack and gap in your insulation system and believe me there are some. I have inspected many foam insulation installations like yours with an infrared camera and I have never found one that did not require quite a bit of touch up. There is no free lunch with energy. Super insulate with no air flow and moisture levels will rise. A dehumidifier may be your best option."

Mike replies: I'm all over it. This was in the barn, left over from my days in Waukesha, where the basement flooded two or three times a year.

Dan S: "So here’s a little secret about electric heaters: They are all the same. Regardless of the shape or size, their BTU output is limited by your home electrical system. There are numerous YouTube videos that explain this, but suffice it to say, it’s not the size that matters."

Mike replies: Well I'll be darned. I had actually noticed that, that every space heater in the store seemed to be 1,500 watts. (Link above in Dan's comment added by me.)

Zack S: "Did you include air conditioning in the build? Did not see that mentioned in your posts about your saga."

Mike replies: Yes, it'll get a small window air conditioner next Spring. There's a separate 20-amp circuit from the breaker panel.

Akhil Lal (via email): "Read with much interest your ongoing story re your new shed.

"Just curious, did you gave any thought to the possible outgassing of organic vapour from the closed cell foam insulation and its  long term health effects?"

Mike replies: It's difficult to research. Almost all the available data on safety is centered around application and the dangers during and immediately after application; SDS's (Safety Data Sheets) on some (not all) the constituent chemicals (and little on the two components after they're mixed); and cases of improper installation (which can be a nightmare—imagine having large swaths of your home slathered in glue and then finding out it's toxic and needs to be removed. There are cases where improper or inept application essentially ruins existing homes). 

Data about the safety of properly applied, good-quality spray foam insulation after it's in place is not easy to find. I've reached out to the EPA and to a green building specialist company for further links. We'll see what comes from that. 

The green building specialist claims on its website that over 85,000 materials and chemicals are using in building, overall, and that only 5–10% of them have been adequately studied for occupant safety after they're installed. 

...And If You Want to See State-of-the-Art...

Speaking of insulation, air seal is an important aspect of insulation (how can a house be efficient if air leaks in and out?), but if the house is really tight then it needs managed ventilation like an air-exchange system.

If you want to see something really cool, check out the following video. And get a load of his ventilation room! Awesome. This Baczek-designed passive house provides all its own power and enough electricity for the electric car. No energy costs, and net negative energy consumption.

Very interesting. Incidentally, that's my kind of luxury: If I had enough money to have my way, I'd rather have that house than a big sprawling show-off house that's inefficient and squanders lots of energy. (Not criticizing anyone for their choices, just talking about what appeals to me.)

Mike

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Closed-Cell Polyurethane Spray Foam (OT)

This is so off-topic. Sorry.

But it's quite interesting. After watching the insulation go into my shed on Friday I read up on closed-cell spray foam insulation and watched a few videos. It's pretty fascinating stuff—at the high end of insulation materials for performance, but also for cost.

To begin with, it's very good insulation, coming in at at R7 or R8 per inch. It also expands to fit the cavity it's sprayed into such that it becomes a very good air seal. It's good at keeping out insects and rodents. It's fire-resistant, although not as good in that respect as Rockwool (formerly known as Roxul); it won't fuel a fire, but it will burn in a fire. Although it will age—the trapped gases near the surface will gradually be replaced with air and the R-value will drift downward slightly—after a couple of years it stabilizes and the R-value won't change further.

Its most interesting property is that it's remarkably tough, and grabs on to whatever it's sprayed on like glue. Actually, it essentially is glue—it's somewhat similar in composition to polyurethane glues such as Gorilla Glue. So it can increase the shear strength of a structure like my shed by up to 300%. In fact they use it in the American South to help hurricane-proof houses, and one builder online recommends spraying it on the underside of staircases just to keep the staircase build nice and tight. I asked the electrician what they do when there's a wire failure in a wire embedded in the foam. He said it's not something they see.

Lighting
We put a quad outlet on every wall, plus there's a GFI (ground-fault circuit interrupter) outlet next to the breaker panel per code, plus there's a double outlet on a separate circuit for the future window air conditioner. So there are 20 outlets in the room. That's got to be more than enough.

I wanted to say a little more about the plan of simply painting the unfinished ceiling dark gray. You might think this would be ugly and intrusive, but I'm not sure it will be. Think of what kind of lighting the room is getting—there is no general lighting except for the windows during daylight hours. There are two light circuits. The pool table light (I'm going to build my own) hangs at about eye level and brightly illuminates the table surface below it. So when it's the only light being used, especially at night, the table will be brightly lit and nothing else will be. The ceiling will more or less disappear, as it does in many pool halls. (See for example Ernie Barnes' painting "Pool Hall.") The other lighting circuit will be for the track lighting, which will also be directional, aimed at the photographs and artifacts on the walls. I don't know how it will work out—I'll have to see it—but it's quite probable that when I'm using one lighting circuit I won't be using the other—depending on who's visiting, we'll either be playing pool or looking at photographs, not both at once. As with the pool table light, the track lights will direct your attention to the finished walls and the dark ceiling will not be in your field of view or much in your consciousness. You also see this in many galleries, where all the focus is on the walls and pipes and ducts on a ceiling will be painted black or dark gray and will recede for most people.

Here's the color scheme for the interior (approximate, given the vagaries of color reproduction over the Internet):

Ceiling, floor, walls

Seating
There are going to be five bookcases, two 4.5-footers and three 6.5-footers, each with two shelves, for a total of 57 running feet of shelving. That won't hold all my books, but it will improve the situation from the severely limited shelving available in the house. I could fit a bit more if everything were made custom, but it's easier for Andrew to build multiples of a standard design, and smaller units will be more easily repurposed to different spaces in the future. Whether for me or for someone else.

As far as seating goes, I'm planning on having four seats, one in each corner (the geometry of a cue to a rectangular table in a rectangular room means there's more room available in the corners). At the door end there will be two bar stools without backs, and at the other end will be two nicer bar chairs with backs. That's because there will mostly be only one or two people playing. Now, when there are two people playing pool, you'd think you only need one chair, because at all times one person will be playing and the other will be watching. While that's true, most players like a place to put their stuff—to keep their other cues, set down their drink, put their coat in Wintertime, whatever. So I think it's more hospitable to have two seats, with a couple of extras for when four people are playing.

Is that enough about the shed for a while? I've been designing the bookcases, but you might recall Andrew's "Current Lead Time" clock in the post about the spice rack—I've got to get in line.  :-)

Mike

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Richard Parkin: "How can building a photo gallery be off topic?  :-)  "

MikeR: "I'd say that you're having some fun with this. Enjoy!"

Brian Stewart: "It contains photos, therefore it's on-topic."

robert e: "I have to admit, I rarely even notice ceilings, unless they're remarkably pretty or remarkably ugly. Even if you end up changing your mind, a coat of gray paint will have been a very low-cost detour. This project is going quickly!"

Mike replies: There's been a lot of waiting in between bouts of activity, but it's going quickly (and well) in recent days, yeah. I feel grateful.

marty knapp: "Very nice choice of colors and thinking about the dark ceiling re; the focus on the pool table and or the gallery walls. Personally, I favor dark walls for my gallery as when you turn on the lighting the prints are not glared out by a bright background. We used to call that non-image light in photography and have taken great lengths to shield it from our lenses with lens hoods. That Pewter Green you are using for the floor would be excellent for the walls.... Just my two cents. Best of luck on this great project. (I'm envious!)"

Mike replies: I hear you Marty, and I know Ansel preferred middle-gray (Zone V) for walls; he felt a white mat against as middle-gray background made the tones in the photographs look nicest. But there will be all sorts of things on these walls, not just B&W photos, and it's a multi-purpose room, not a single-purpose gallery. But I do get what you're saying and I don't disagree. I just don't want the whole room to feel small and dark.

John Krumm (partial comment): "I take it they sprayed under the shed as well? Or is that insulated a different way?"

Mike replies: Yes, the underside of the shed got spray foam insulation at the builder's, before delivery.

Update, Friday 7:30 a.m.

The insulators are here. This is going to be interesting—I don't know much about polyurethane spray foam insulation and have never used it before. All the trades in this area seem to have a high opinion of it, and I keep hearing good things about the outfit doing the application. Everyone tells me it will make the shed "very tight" (I must have heard those words eight times from various people) and a number of people have told me it will improve the structural integrity of the shed. One guy even said I won't have any trouble with insects if I use spray foam. I asked the guy who's doing the application, Tyler, what he thought about the baseboard heating idea, and he said "you'll be able to heat this space with a match" and "you'll be playing pool in your bare feet."

Okay, bring it on. 

Other fun facts? It takes half an hour to 45 minutes to heat the foam material and prep the line for spraying, but once he gets going Tyler estimates it will take him only an hour to an hour and half to spray the whole interior of the shed. And the foam sets so fast you can touch it within ten seconds and paint it after only 15 minutes.

The retailer's friend
An administrative note: Black Friday on TOP is not starting until—this is quirky, I know—the day after Thanksgiving. Although I have put a link to B&H at the bottom of recent posts. On the actual Black Friday I'd like to post a few gift ideas based on cool things I've bought on the recommendation of readers over the years and really like.

I'd like to solicit ideas for that...is there anything you've bought on Amazon or B&H that you particularly like and would recommend highly to your fellow readers? Only if you've used it yourself and genuinely like it. It can be anything, doesn't have to be photo-related.

On Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday) I hope to post a few notes about the uses of gratitude. It's a biggie in the practical "spiritual toolkit" and very useful in increasing contentment with life.

I still haven't decided whether to have turkey on Thanksgiving!

Bck outside with the trusty X-H1 to see how they've masked off everything in the shed interior. I'm using the 14mm and ISO 1600 but will use the 35mm to take a few shots of Tyler doing the actual spraying.

It's fun but also a little harrowing to have stuff built. The pool shed, I imagine, is probably 10%—maybe only 5%—of the stress and worry of building a house, something I've never done, but I imagine it gives me at least a taste of what being the client in a home build must be like. Fun and exciting, and certainly interesting, but also a little stressful. As with most such things, I'll probably know exactly how I should have gone about this by the time it's all done!

Mike

UPDATE 11:30 a.m. All done! I'm going to save the pictures for when I do the wrap-up on the shed, but I'm pleased with the work. The insulation is very tough and very airtight. I think I made the right decision here, even though it's more expensive.

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Updates

I'm working on a GX9 article, and it looks like it's going to be a while. For your diversion and amusement in the meantime, a few updates:

• Regarding the sale (or whatever it is) of Olympus, DPReview has published an interesting article covering dire predictions for the Japanese camera industry as a whole from Nikkei Asian Review Deputy Editor Masamichi Hoshi. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the same website, Canon is characterized as believing that "sooner or later the market will settle down and consist solely of users that are particular about imaging." Meanwhile, is it just me, or do a hefty number of recent DPReview posts seem to be about Olympus products?

• Regarding our post about to destruction of Central Camera in Chicago, which I feel a tiny bit sheepish for emphasizing in these pages, it bears mentioning that most Americans probably don't have a very balanced view of what's really been going on in the extensive fallout following the killing of George Floyd. Right-sympathizing media were beating the drum about widespread rioting, emphasizing the tearing down of statues including those of Founders, whereas left-sympathizing media reported mainly peaceful demonstrations with occasional isolated outbreaks of opportunistic looting and vandalism, and the pulling down and/or graffiti'ing of, for the most part, Confederate statues. Thus, many Americans might have somewhat different impressions of what actually went on, usually accompanied with different sets of feelings about it. I tend to see/read/hear The New York Times, The Washington Post (I subscribe to both), Politico, The Atlantic (ditto), CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The Guardian, and The New Yorker (ditto again), so you can diagram approximately where I fall on the AllSides Media Bias Chart. Anyway, here's a story about the return of Central Camera, courtesy of Ken Tanaka and several other readers. No clue where the Tribune falls on the spectrum.

• As an update my various dieting posts, I had to run an encouraging errand a few mornings ago. I drove up to the Windmill, a local craft fair and farmer's market that's only open on Saturdays, to search out the nice blonde German lady who is...into leather. That is, she has a booth where she sells leather goods. I bought a new real-leather belt from her for $42 last summer. I wanted to get her to put some more holes in! I had gotten down to the last hole—on the skinny side, I mean—and my pants were still falling down. Plus, the end of the belt was flapping around because it's too long now. She punched three new holes and chopped four inches off the end of the belt and now it fits fine again. I'd better not gain that weight back again, or I'm going to be out $42.

Back to work I git.

Mike

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Yoram: "Bravo Mike for your diet results and keeping healthy life ! As a skinny guy (sorry, it's genetics) I really understand about that end-belt-flapping issue  :-)  ."

Dan Khong: "The Media Bias Chart is helpful especially for folks living outside the USA. We are mostly quite blurry about such matters.

"Now at least we know where the news are leaning towards, can tell apart the right hand from the left, and the rear cap from the front cap. Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Except that the Media Bias Chart is only relative to the spectrum in the US. The "Left" US media outlets are not very lefty compared to Europe. Bill Clinton would have had to run as a conservative in probably half the countries in Europe, and France would scoff at the idea that the NYT is leftist in any sense. Case in point: I'm a "leftist" in the US, and I would come nowhere near qualifying as such in any country except one in which the Center is over on the left side! I'm a dyed-in-the-wool middle-o'-the-road Centrist in any sensible context.

So keep the context in mind.

Robert Roaldi: "I remember an old cold war era joke. A town in Siberia wrote to the Kremlin complaining about hard times. The Kremlin replied, 'Tighten belts,' to which the town replied, 'Send belts.'"

My Attempt at the 'Artist's Statement' Exercise

Please note that with the "Artist's Statement" suggestion, I'm only proposing it as an exercise. You don't need to critique the whole genre or develop an ideological position about artists' statements in particular or the art world in general in order to benefit from it. Just write a short paragraph that provides a positive description of who you are as a photographer and what you care about.

Consider it a paragraph-long introduction to you...for people who don't know you. I'll quote a sentence from Steve Caddy's Featured Comment to the "Catch Fire" post: "The statement is a stab at helping to shed a little light to help orient the viewer."

And yes, write it in the third person. That's the genre. Go along.  :-)

Civil War generals
I actually took my own advice and tried the exercise yesterday evening. I'm not suggesting you share yours, because perhaps such exercises work better if they don't have to be displayed to the world and opened up to criticism. But I'll share my attempt just as an example, as a topic for discussion, and also because...well, it surprised me what I came up with! Honestly, I had no notion of where I was going to go with it when I sat down to write.

I started with "Mike Johnston is interested in..." and look what came out:

Mike Johnston is interested in portraiture and portraits of all types, especially informal, candid, and environmental portraits. This interest first showed itself at age six when he vandalized his parents’ collection of old National Geographic magazines by cutting out portraits of all the U.S. Presidents to make a "collection," a transgression for which his parents, generously, decided not to punish him. As an older child he became a great aficionado of the Civil War and decorated the walls of his bedroom with portraits of Civil War Generals and other historical personages. Books of Civil War photographs functioned as his introduction to the medium of photography, though not consciously. His first published photograph, taken at age 16 or so, was a portrait of a French restaurant owner and her chef in Holiday magazine, in an article written by his father. His first "show," in the dining room of the prep school he attended, consisted almost entirely of casual portraits of faculty members and fellow students. When he worked as a photographer for hire in the '80s and '90s he was mostly commissioned to do portraits. He most enjoyed making portraits of kids and young people, often with their parents or other family members. More flexibly, the concept of "portrait" can often be detected lurking behind other photographs of his, from family snapshots, to pictures of cars or dogs, to depictions of interior spaces or even trees or found objects.

Hmm. Well, apparently my first thought, when my mind is a blank, is that I'm a portrait photographer. I don't think it would have occurred to me to describe myself that way if someone just casually asked me.

I'm going to have to think about this. Was that just an easy way to go when I needed to come up with a sample "artist's statement" for publication here? I don't do portraits any more, largely because no one really needs them any more, at least at my level. People take selfies now.

But when I think back, there might be something to this. Portraits were the only specific thing I ever marketed as a pro. Generally I advertised myself as a lower-level jobber photographer who would do any sort of work, and I mostly got "any sort of work," but whenever I "asked" for the sort of work I actually wanted, it was portraiture.

I earned the most money from portraiture. I charged $675 for a sitting back in D.C. And that was more money then than it is now.

...And I got it, too, which is a crucial point! It doesn't matter what you ask for your services; what matters is whether someone pays it.

I photographed some famous people—at least, famous in the context of D.C.'s prevailing political culture back then. Including a U.S. Supreme Court judge, and a television talk show host.

It also seems to have been the only area in which artistic creativity on the one hand and commercial ambition on the other intersected for me—I developed several distinct styles I liked, and devised at least one specialty—the "engagement portrait," by which I meant a casual portrait of a couple just before their marriage. (I didn't like photographing weddings, but I liked the challenge of making pictures of couples that hopefully showed a little bit about how they felt about each other.)

Genius idea
And when I sat down to write, I was thinking of a particular long-ago circumstance. When I first got into photography, I took a job moonlighting at a framing shop so I could learn how to frame my own work. There I met a co-worker named Judy, who would idly talk about how she was going to open her own frame shop one day. At the time, I dismissed it as daydream-talk—Judy was not a hard worker as an employee. But Judy was made of sterner stuff than I thought—she did indeed open a frame shop, only a block away from where I lived in Georgetown. And it prospered, too.

At the time, I'd been having a peculiar problem. I had purchased a display advertisement—offering portraits—in the Yellow Pages (the commercial phone book, if anyone is too young to remember). And the ad drew customers. But I soon realized that I had little idea what these customers envisioned from the word "portrait." Which wouldn't have been a problem, except that everybody did seem to have something in mind! Everybody had their own conception of what a portrait was, yet few of them could put it into words. So what would happen is that I'd make a portrait, and they'd be dissatisfied because it didn't match their expectations, their preconceived idea about what they assumed I was going to do.

To counteract this, I asked Judy if I could put up some of my favorite portraits in her Georgetown shop, and she agreed. I only hung "personal work"—the kind of artistic portrait I most preferred to do, in my chosen style. My deal with her was that I'd send prospects to her shop to look at my work (it was my marketing portfolio, you might say), and, in return, I'd drop off the finished product at her shop and instruct my clients to pick it up there. Which would of course be a perfect opportunity for them to go ahead and get it framed, giving her a sale. I think she even agreed to give me a small percentage of the profit.

Examples of what my customers would pick up at the frame shop. Fiber-base prints, dry mounted and matted, in plastic bags. Not coincidentally, ready for framing.

I thought this was a genius arrangement. Along with all its other advantages, I really did want my clients to frame my work, the better to protect it for posterity.

And it worked great, as long as it lasted. Prospective clients saw exactly the kind of portrait I most wanted to do. Not only did they want me to do the same sort of thing for them, but sometimes they could tell me which specific picture they liked best and why. Compared to what happened with the Yellow Pages ad, it was night and day. I went from getting clients who had mystery expectations they couldn't communicate to me, to getting clients who wanted precisely what I could most easily provide.

Unfortunately, I had a traumatic life-event not long after, which triggered a relapse of my alcoholism, so the portrait enterprise fizzled. But it was the closest I ever came to being able to do exactly what I wanted to do and get paid for it.

I guess the next thing to think about is whether any of this should have any implications for the future. I'll go ponder that....

Mike

ADDENDUM: Finally identified the comment that inspired the "Catch Fire" artist statement post. I think I might be the one who lost it—I think I added it to the "Access" post as a Featured Comment but then got my wires crossed in publishing it and it got lost. Anyway, it was from Dave Jenkins and this is what Dave said:

Sometime after my book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era was published in 1996 and became an instant best-seller, I received a letter from the well-known art photographer Maria von Matteson, who proposed arranging a joint exhibit with her and the great Florida Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher. The show never happened, but one thing that Maria said to me stuck: she said 'You need to write an artist's statement that defines you.' So I did, and this is what I came up with. 'My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.' As a commercial, architectural, and occasional wedding photographer, I've done a lot of things that don't fit within that statement. Yet, for the past 22 years I've known who I am as a photographer and have sought to work as much as possible within that vein, including magazine articles and my most recent book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.

I wrote about this on my blog A Life in Photography.

Thanks to Dave and my apologies to him (and, er, to everyone) for misplacing his comment in the first place.

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Keith: "Now I'm seriously thinking of having a go at an artist's statement. Not that I'll publish it anywhere. Before I read your blog on the topic, I thought such things were an act of artistic pretension; a demonstration one could do 'artist talk.' Now I see it should be more an act of definition, of helping the viewer understand what they're about to see."

Followup (Sorry!)

I apologize for continuing on this subject, the one from yesterday. Sometimes I get in a groove and it becomes a rut.

Basically, I'm uncomfortable arguing from suppositions. I find that even a lot of objectivist statements about sound quality have, couched within them, some purely faith-based premise. ("To conduct a double-blind test, we hung an acoustically invisible curtain between the speakers and the listeners, and in our test we found...." Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up there, hoss. Acoustically invisible? Who says it is? How did you arrive at that? How did you test it? What, does Igor say, "yes Boss, that sounds the same"? An "acoustically invisible" curtain is a faith-based premise if you ask me, sitting right there out in the open. It renders questionable every conclusion that depends on it.

But if I shoot each such statement down, it would only be from from the baseline my own suppositions, which might be partially faith-based too, and we end up with nothing but argumentation.

My old speakers from 2012 are up from the basement and
seeing daylight for the first time in five years.

Here's the best I can do. I'm setting up a sort-of new system in my bedroom, which happens to be the largest room in my house except for the combined kitchen/dining room. Once I get it set up and get familiar with it (assuming it sounds any good at all, which is still up in the air), just for fun I'll try a few different speaker wires and tell you what I think I hear. That'll be the best I can do; I get uncomfortable making claims about things I'm not familiar with. If/when I do write about that, you'll know all the parameters yourself so you can accept my conclusions, or accept them with provisos, or reject them, as you deem appropriate.

That's all on this subject from me for now. Back to common ground!

Mike

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JG: "Just because some sonic differences can't be measured/quantified using today's technology doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist or their effects are not potentially audible to careful listeners. Remember that science (and by extension, the measurements and experimental evidence it relies upon) always trails behind nature and never runs ahead of it. That the sonic signature of an audio cable cannot be explained by measurements made today doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or the reasons why it exists will not be adequately and accurately explained by other and/or better measurements made tomorrow. Or that someone who claims to hear the sound of a cable today, in advance of measurements and a scientific explanation confirming its existence, is delusional. Mind you, this is not to say that some—perhaps even many?—of the claims made by some cable designers for their products aren't out-and-out bunk or the performance of their cables justifies the high prices being asked for them."

Mike replies: I don't recall the story of IM, but wasn't that a relevant example JG?

Stephen Scharf: "Here's my advice, having been in this 'hobby'/avocation for some time now:

"Don't fall prey to the whole 'Double-Blind/ABX testing' thang promoted by 'objectivists.'

"It's a pit of snakes and it will prove to be a waste of time and possibly, depending one's orientation and sensibilties, a source of exasperation.

"As professional scientist, I'm all for data and measurements. Hell, I'm probably the only guy that has conducted a statistically valid Design of Experiments to effectively incorporate my REL sub into my 2-channel system.

"With respect to audio, all the great audio designers I know of (Nelson Pass, the late Bill Z Johnson of AR, Mssrs. Conrad and Johnson of Conrad-Johnson, Jurgen Ries of MBL, Caelin Gabriel of Shunyata Research, etc) use measurements during the design and engineering process, but conduct the 'refinement and optimization' of their products by conducting subjective listening tests.

"Personally, I use measurement and data analysis to provide direction for my own system. but 'data and measurements' are only a start; you have to listen to complete the task to putting together a system that creates an engaging and beguiling listening experience. Measurements alone will not get you there.

"Here is what is reality: different materials, different metals, wires, power cables, signal cables, DACs, and yes, even Ethernet cables...sound different.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Why do Vishay metal-film resistors sound notably better than carbon comp, or god forbid, sand-cast resitors? They all measure the same.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Why do Ediswan, GE/JAN, or Amperex Bugle Boy 6922s sound completely different? They all measure exactly the same. However, they sound virtually nothing like each other.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"In some forums, when I've posted reviews of different cables, DACs, and some other products, I always get the line, 'Prove it by conducting a double-blind test.'

"I counter with, 'Show me a statistically valid DBX test with Alpha set to 0.05 and Beta set to 0.10 that fails to reject the Null Hypothesis.'

"And you know what I hear back from the 'objectivists'? Crickets.

"The bottom line is: Different gear, components, metals, materials, tubes, binding posts, tonearms, step-up transformers, etc, etc. sound different.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Reductionist scientist can't explain many things we know to be true: Why our dogs or cats are waiting for us when we come home, or the sensation of being stared at, to provide just two examples.

"The best scientists in the world can't unify General Relativity and Quantum Physics, fer crissakes. Hell, they can't even solve 'the measurement problem.'

"So, here's my advice: Don't worry about it and don't fall prey to it. Your job is simple: just go with what creates an engaging and beguiling listening experience for you. You will be happy and content.

"With respect to different speaker wires...sure. But, my recommendation would be to 'rent in' a Shunyata Delta NR v2 C15 power cable from The Cable Company, and power your amp, integrated, whatever is your main amplification component, with it. Power cables have a bigger impact than speaker cables. Trust me on this.

"Have fun!

"PS—Nice speakers, BTW."

Mike replies: It made no effing sense to me that power cables should affect anything. It doesn't seem logical. But then, that's based on my it's-a-sunfish conception of how electrical circuits work. If I hadn't heard it to the extent that I couldn't deny it, I never would have believed it.

Here's a short couple of forum posts by Caelin Gabriel, who you mentioned. For anyone who understands engineer-speak. Which does not include me.

Neil the Wheel: "Mike...photography please?"

Mike replies: Gotta catch up with all the comments first. For something nobody want to talk about, people sure want to talk about this.

Trevor Johnson: "I have been following this fascinating series of discussions as one who not only listens to music, but also has a track record of recording for commercial release (classical). Although my A77 is a few feet from me, my current setup uses a new Sound Devices digital recorder and microphones from AKG, Rode etc. Good quality, oxygen-free balanced mic connectors with Neutrik connectors.

"Professional recorders/mixers/engineers have solved the speaker cable/amplifier/speaker issue by moving almost exclusively to active speakers, (active speakers contain their own power amplifiers, usually one for each speaker in the cabinet). The signal is provided by a balanced cable from the preamplifier/monitor controller/mixer, etc. Generally, rercordings are made using 24bit, because that gives you the extra dynamic range to record cleanly up to –12dB below 0dB. Exceeding a 96Khz sample rate has no advantages, but can cause problems of its own. A well recorded and mastered 16/44.1 CD is excellent. Can I tell the difference between my original 24/96 recording and the final 16/44.1 CD? Yes, my mastered CD is better. Incidentally, in the past I also had vinyl LPs mastered and released. In those instances, the original recordings were inevitably better!

"All I can say is that it is all rather fun but the chances of a consensus are highly unlikely. I belong to neither camp: measured performance is interesting, but my hearing/brain always has the final say."

Ulf A: "I think engineers oftentimes miss the point when they try to measure sound quality (or image quality for that matter). It is not obvious that accuracy is the goal. It can be, but it is not for me. I would choose lively, entertaining sound over accurate reproduction any day. As for what that is, I suppose everyone is different. This does not however mean that measurements are useless. It is just that the unit of measurement should match the consumer‘s reason for using a product. Only when this is defined clearly, and the construct validity is tested, so that it is clear that what is measured is what was intended do measurements make sense. Otherwise you can have the most sophisticated testing for something that nobody cares about.

"Also, I don't think testing needs to be blind. If I enjoy listening to beautiful speakers from a brand I like, it's part of the experience. It doesn't make sense to discount some dimensions of the experience just because they aren't based in function. Some people think you're a sucker if you pay for non-functional benefits. I'm not one of them."

A Print is an Occasion

Just thought I'd mention—the reason I aspired to make videos for the Print Crit is not because I have any interest in videos per se. I just thought it would be a good way to get across a central fact of art, even on this small scale: which is that an encounter with an expressive artwork has the potential to be an occasion. Most people—in general, I mean, not TOP readers particularly—see art as something that's static, inert, and unchanging. It just sits there, according to that view, stored in a museum or wherever it is, ready to be accessed any time, and then it's done and the viewer passes by.  I don't see it that way really. I mean it can be. But it also has at least the potential to be an event in the viewer's life. An encounter with an artwork—a confrontation with it, you could almost call it—is dynamic. It contains not only the moment that it happens but everything that the viewer as a person brings to it. It depends on everything that pertains when the encounter happens—everything the creator puts into it and everything that influences the viewer at that moment—their history and psychology, their mood, their preferences and prejudices, what they know or think they know about what they're seeing—the list is as long as your arm.

When someone sends me a print to look at, it is in a deep sense a gift. They're sharing something they created with me. The act is very simple but has the potential to be meaningful as well. My feelings about the print might evolve over time—usually days, but sometimes longer—but the encounter, opening it and seeing it for the first time, reacting to however it makes me feel—that's part of the evaluation. Even if if doesn't last. True, I can try to get that across in words, and I'd probably do okay. I'll probably just write the first few of these.

But I sense that something more casual and at the same time more authentic might work better. Hence the interest in a modest few minutes in video format. It's not because I'm interested in the craft of video making (which I do know is a true skill, requiring talent, knowledge, and dedication), or because I want to make money or attract new viewers or whatever else. Those would be collateral issues. Mainly I just thought it might be a better way to get across the essential transaction here: the occasion of the gifting, you might say, and my response—and only then the more considered reaction that evolves over a little more time.

I'm struggling to express myself, you perceive, but I hope you can get from this what I'm trying to say.

Mike

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

Mark: "Although I was familiar with the photograph Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen, seeing the actual print at Toledo Museum of Art was a mesmerizing experience...the photo appeared to be three dimensional...I had to look and look again to see if the effect was still there. It was. Yes, for me...looking at a print can be an event...an occasion.... I have seen other prints at Toledo where the silver just seemed to flow across the paper...rich blacks...smooth fluid transitions. But with Gloria, Steichen captured something really special. The Swanson print...it was amazing. As a final comment...I find it interesting how feeling about prints can change over time...what seemed interesting a year or two ago...no longer holds my attention...but with some...the magic is still there."

Geoff Wittig: "Yes! This is exactly right. A work of art is not just an inert object. I'm not a full-on post-modern Foucault/Derrida believer accepting the notion that viewers help create the work of art with their presence. But a huge part of the art experience is what we bring to the work.

"A personal example has to do with painting. Buffalo's Albright-Knox museum owns one of George Inness's greatest landscape paintings, 'The Coming Storm.' The first time I laid eyes on it I was gob-smacked but didn't really know why it hit me with such force. Since that time I have spent about seven years learning to paint, and have become reasonably competent at landscapes. Now when I visit this painting the experience is much richer. I can appreciate the brilliant paint handling that turned linseed oil and pigment into violent storm-clouds, the incredibly subtle and deft management of value and color temperature that creates a compelling illusion of deep space.

"A meaningful work of art can actually change your life. I had that experience when I saw a large 24x36" print of one of Jim Brandenburg's beautiful photographs. I wanted to make at least one large print that had the same impact. After 20 years I have a handful that I'm happy with, and it's still a joyful process working toward the next one."