The Online Photographer

Dumb Rookie Mistake

Have you ever done something dumb?

You remember the other day in the "Old Dreams" post that I bought that Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/2 SLII lens in the rare Contax (C/Y) mount? Well, I blew it. It came, but it immediately became apparent to me that the lens was fogged, so I quickly contacted the seller requesting to return it.

But check out what I missed in the description:

The seller replied to me saying, in effect, "hey, I told you"...and with complete justification. He did. I just missed it.

Damn! Dumb rookie mistake. He also said "Looks Mint"—emphasis mine—not "Mint." And it did look brand new in the photos, with pristine boxes. As indeed it looks in person.

I should know better—I've bought and sold more than 400 items on eBay since it opened for business in 1995. I was so excited to get an alert (after a wait) for the lens in Contax mount that I just clicked on it. I wasn't as careful as I usually am.

Wish I had not done that! Now I have to find a repair shop that will disassemble the lens and clean it. The total cost will no doubt be more than just waiting for a clean one. But now I'm stuck.

You can't step in the same river twice
This is a good time to say something I don't think gets emphasized enough: there's work involved in getting all your stuff set up to work. When you find something you like and that works for you, there's a lot of benefit in sticking to it.

I used to read a lot about audio. I recall one writer who recounted all the work he had done years ago to set up a system he was happy with. It consisted of tube equipment and electrostatic speakers and a turntable with a moving-magnet cartridge, and he described the sound as being "like a warm, wet kiss." Once he got everything matched and calibrated, he decided he was done. He listened to it for a few years. Then he got bored, and dove into the upgrade cycle again to make the system more "accurate." So the old system got dismantled and replaced piece by piece. But, years later, he realized he'd never been quite as happy with any of the subsequent evolution of his systems as he had been with that first good one. He spoke about it wistfully (and sure, his feelings might indeed have been inflected with nostalgia) but he said that from time to time he would wish, yet again, that he had just stuck with that system, the first one he got really right.

I've had to rotate equipment photo constantly, but that's because I write about equipment, so I don't have the luxury of keeping things. But over the years there have been multiple occasions when I've tried to re-buy stuff that I had sold off and regretted selling.

More often than not, those efforts fail.

They fail for a number of reasons—partly it's because the world changes, companies go out of business, what's new becomes old, your tastes change, etc. But they also fail because equipment isn't actually interchangeable. You can understand this in one way by reading Roger Cicala, who will make you aware of sample variation. Sometimes one lens that looks new is fine and another one that looks new has internal fog.

But sometimes it's more inscrutable than that—it's because you "click" (no pun intended) with a certain set of equipment, and learn it, and groove into its feel and its ways, such that when you leave it behind and then try to reproduce it years later it just doesn't feel the same. You've changed, it's changed, the replacement is subtly different than the old thing you bonded with because it's old and yours was new back then...whatever.

And sometimes, like now, it's just because there's a certain amount of difficulty getting set up with serviceable stuff that works. It can take time and effort, and involve frustrations.

To use my Rolleiflex 6008AF, I've had two of my Rollei 6000-series batteries rebuilt with new, tested NiMH cells, and I've procured a new charger that will charge the new cells to capacity. That involved a certain amount of research, discussion with vendors, and expense. It's not automatic, like just going to eBay and buying an old battery. (That's difficult too: because the battery housings are no longer made, they're in demand from 6000-series owners, and cost a fair amount even thought they might not even be working very well, or at all).

My point is that it just takes some doing to get rolling, to get your mojo working, and there's some sense in honoring and respecting the effort and expense of that, and not casually throwing it away later just for the sake of change, or just because you miss shopping.

That's all. Just something to think about. It made me feel a little less stupid to write about it. Signed, your humble[d] dumb-ass Ed.,

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.

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John Willard: "The enemy of good is better."

Useful Pandemic Links

A few useful pandemic links:

• Here's the Johns Hopkins map of the Worldwide progress of the illness (number of confirmed cases, number of deaths, number of people who have recovered). (Start on the FAQ page at the link and then click the link at the top—that seems to be the most reliable way to get to the most recent update of the map.) New York City (!? They're breaking it out from the USA) has jumped onto the deaths list just in the past couple of days.
• For U.S. citizens, Kaiser Health News has a page with a county-by-county tally of the number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds, total countywide population, population over 60 by number and percentage, and number of citizens over 60 per ICU bed. The search bar is kinda tough to find (well, I didn't see it at first): it's at the top of the table, under where it says "ICU Beds, by County." For example, my county has 25,083 people, 6,750 of whom are over 60 (incl. Yr. Hmbl. Ed.), and 0 ICU beds.
• Mayo Clinic page that explains Donald Trump's personality disorder type.
• Fox Business page listing restrictions state-by-state (updated regularly).
• What kind of organism is this virus? Viruses are incredibly primitive lifeforms. It is "little more than a packet of genetic material surrounded by a spiky protein shell one-thousandth the width of an eyelash, and it leads such a zombielike existence that it’s barely considered a living organism." It's somewhere "between chemistry and biology," said Gary Whittaker, a Cornell University professor of virology, in the article. "It's switching between alive and not alive."
• Regarding the stock market crash, Julia is sick and is awaiting the results of her COVID-19 test, so she is quarantined away from husband Philip and their baby, who are also sheltering in place. But Philip goes lo-fi this week to explain the implications to ordinary investors of the bear market, on PBS's personal finance vlog "Two Cents."
• Simplified basic model of how viral epidemics come to an end. A development most devoutly to be wished and anticipated!

Know of another useful informational link from a page that's likely to be trustworthy? Send it to me personally by email, with the title "Possible CV19 Link," and please include some identifying verbiage in the body of the email so it doesn't get routed to spam. Please don't send more than one link URL in your email. Please don't add links in the comments, but you can provide enough identifying information (source, title) so other readers can Google for themselves if they want to.

Really, please don't put links in the comments right now*. Thanks.

Mike

*I do my best to vet links in comments so as not to unwittingly publish something objectionable. But it takes a lot of time. I worked on catching up with comments all day yesterday until 10:30 last night, a process that was slowed greatly by checking all the links. I'd rather spend less time doing that and more time writing!

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.

Please help TOP keep on keeping on

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Featured Comments from:

Jim Arthur: "If you have never worked remotely before you may want to check out the 'SANS Security Awareness Work-from-Home Deployment Kit' for data security awareness info on how to stay secure at home. Their 'Securely Working From Home Factsheet' on the above mentioned page is worth a read. The cyber-criminals of the world are always lurking and waiting for a new opportunity. SANS stands for SysAdmin, Audit, Network and Security. Wikipedia says, 'The SANS Institute sponsors the Internet Storm Center, an internet monitoring system staffed by a global community of security practitioners, and the SANS Reading Room, a research archive of information security policy and research documents. SANS is one of the founding organizations of the Center for Internet Security.'"

V.I. Voltz: "The characteristics of life are growth, metabolism and reproduction. Viruses do not have metabolism, they need a host cell's metabolism to power and organise their reproduction. Technically they are self reproducing but not alive. Confusing."

Sweet Sight

eBay photo by John Titterington

I have to say, I am just delighted to be able to focus manual cameras again. I can even focus this old beastie, which came out the year I graduated from high school. (This model is popular with young film-camera fans, I hear.)

The way it went was something like this—first I strangely began to drift toward rangefinder cameras, blaming SLR focusing screens for my subtly increasing troubles detecting focus, before becoming aware that the problem was with my eye. Then, having to hunt down diopters of increasing strength, or buy only cameras that had built-in diopter correction—I ended up needing a little more than –2, call it –2 1/4. I had to give up my beautiful Agfa Super Isolette because I was unwilling to desecrate it by gluing a –2 diopter lens over the viewfinder. Finally, switching to left-eyed focusing and viewing on cameras, which is one big reason I liked the Panasonic GX8 so much—there are not many better cameras for the left-eyed out there. 

Then, my partial cornea replacement and lens implant last June 4th. And now—drumroll!—I can focus old manual-everything cameras easily again with no correction on either my eye or the finder!

Bliss. Blessing. The best! And lucky. I never imagined this would happen. So pleased.

That is all. Just couldn't resist sharing.

Mike
(Thanks to JT)

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.

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Earl Dunbar: "This makes me very happy."

RP Sagner: "Congrats! I've gotten bored with digital photography over the last couple years and have gone back to the OM-2 for a lot of my shooting. It's really rewarding."

Len Metcalf: "These stunning Olympus cameras is where I learnt. Not my first camera but the ones I cut my teeth on, so as to speak. I had the same one and two OM-1’s. And some gorgeous lenses to match. I so loved them. It’s nostalgia that leads me to still love the brand and stick with them and their digital counterparts. I loved the focusing screen that came standard. I dislike the split image type that is popular in their contemporaries. Am sitting here with some pangs of jealousy. Enjoy."

The Big Game the Morning After (OT)

Turns out my assumptions were out of date. I watched the big game online in perfect quality at the broadcaster's website with no issues.

Pretty exciting game.

I have to say I wasn't overly impressed with either team, though. Kansas City lost the battle of the line on both sides of the ball, and I'm not sure the much-ballyhooed Patrick Mahomes made a very convincing MVP. For a lot of the game (although it was probably because the pocket kept getting very small very fast), I thought he performed a skillful impression of an inexperienced QB having an off day. Several times, as Joe Buck mentioned, he appeared to not even have a clear idea of what he was trying to do. The KC offense took on a faintly slapstick aura now and then—several times a player with the ball had an easy first down right in front of him and failed to simply keep running or keep running in the right direction. And you know that play KC kept calling where the QB hesitated, then handed the ball to the running back standing next to him, who then ran straight down the middle? Anthony Anderson's real-life mom from the T-Mobile commercial could have told you that wasn't going to work. I don't know what it's called, but I'll bet that play was old when Andy Reid coached his first game.

But the Chiefs came through in dramatic fashion when it mattered, storming back from a double-digit deficit in the final eight minutes, and that is what counts. Exciting to watch. It's very satisfying when a smaller-market team wins a big championship—it's a triumph of grit, gumption, and "everything coming together" over the big-market money that usually manages to dominate these contests. (Just as an aside, that's another remarkable thing about what is historically the best NFL team, the Green Bay Packers*, who lost this year in the NFC Championship Game—the semifinals, for those of you not from here. They're located in the smallest media market of any NFL, NBA or MLB team, yet they have so many more NFL championships (13) over the longest span of time—81 years—that no other team comes close.)

Through the looking-glass
I watch so little TV that my occasional visits tend to be startling...even a bit shocking. While I enjoyed the game, the viewing experience as a whole once again made me glad of my decision to cut TV culture out of my life. What a wretched mess it is artistically, morally, and stylistically. Full of stylized violence and empty eroticism, ominous music, bathos, fantasy, threat-posturing, posing, greed, and histrionics. (Should I tell you how I really feel?) How do people get inured to it? You get the feeling that if it could possibly be contrived to be any more mannered, frenetic, bombastic, slick, and shallow, it would be. Particularly poignant and regrettable to me were all the shiny expensive ads for wretched junk food and horrible junk drinks—the kind of stuff that is slowly killing a lot of us.

...But step slowly away from that soapbox, Bub (I said to myself).  :-)

Anyway, congratulations to Chiefs fans, and all Missourians. It must be fun to be in Missouri (yeah, Kansas too**) today!

Mike

*Or is my fan loyalty showing? Nah, I'm completely objective about the Packers!  ;-) 

**Again, for those of you not from this country or who know nothing about (American) football, the Kansas City Chiefs hail from Kansas City, Missouri.

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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Featured Comments from:

Andre Moreau: "Most of Québec was watching that Superbowl game, as local boy, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, number 76 for the Chiefs, was playing. By the way, he's the first ever medical doctor to play at the Superbowl."

Jack: "Mike, I’m sorry the Packers didn’t make the big party. Had they won, you could have gotten to wear another ring even bigger than the one you wore in this photo."

Mike replies: That was a fun day! Good memory.

Lindsay Bach: "It probably comes as little surprise that, depending on the source, the average American watches between three to five hours of television per day. As a person who has largely shunned TV for nearly 50 years, on the rare occasions I do watch television I am always stunned at the incessant wash of crass culture and consumerism viewers willingly submit to. Twenty-five years ago when I taught high school English, I used to sometimes tell my students that I didn't watch TV, just for their reaction. I remember one kid said incredulously, 'you don't watch TV?—you must be really bored all the time.' I responded that I was really never bored (the truth) given all there was to do in the absence of TV."

Speed: "On my very occasional visits to televised sports I am amazed at the technology that is now applied for our benefit—especially the Skycam...Skycam is a computer-controlled, stabilized, cable-suspended camera system. The system is maneuvered through three dimensions in the open space over a playing area of a stadium or arena by computer-controlled cable-drive system. It is responsible for bringing video-game-like camera angles to television sports coverage. The camera package weighs less than 14 kilograms (31 lbs.) and can travel at 13 meters a second (29 mph). Invented by Garrett Brown (also the inventor of the Steadicam). Following kickoff returns up (down?) the field is a thing of sports and technological beauty."

Jon Porter: "I believe Missouri's team was named for the Kansas City Chief, Santa Fe's posh Chicago-Kansas City train. So it might be more appropriate for fans to dress as engineers and conductors instead of Indians. The Green Bay Packers took their name from original sponsor the Indian Packing Company, a meat-canning firm. So while the Packers name has sometimes been the butt of jokes, it's not as bad as an early cross-state rival, the Beloit Fairies."

Mike replies: Not too sure about the train connection. Where'd you hear that? The team was originally called the Dallas Texans, and the Chiefs website says the name was changed to "Chiefs" when it moved to Kansas City in 1963 "partly" in honor of H. Roe Bartle, the mayor of Kansas City, who was instrumental in convincing the Texans to move to Kansas City. Bartle's nickname, which he got in connection with his role in local Boy Scouts organizations, was "Chief." That's all the website says about the name as far as I can find.

Lamar Hunt, owner of the Texans/Chiefs, is acknowledged to be the founder of the American Football League. He was later instrumental in the merger of the two leagues, and he was the one who named the Super Bowl—getting the idea from the Super Ball, a popular toy in the 1960s.

Greg Heins adds: "Speaking of Lamar Hunt, there's a photo connection (of course!). He was one of three brothers who took their family oil billions and cornered the market in silver in late 1979, driving the price through the roof. Guess what? Lots of silver in film and paper (what photographers used at that time). The price of those went up substantially. The scheme ultimately failed, silver came back down, and the brothers finally declared bankruptcy, which as you can see didn't cramp their lives a bit. Although silver came down, film and paper did not; funny how that happens."

Doctor My Eyes

It's official...as confirmed at my latest appointment yesterday, my new eye has improved to 20/20!

Still has a bit of astigmatism, which can be corrected with glasses.

My other eye has gotten a little worse and will need the same treatment (partial cornea transplant, new lens implant) in a year or two.

What a wondrous time we live in, when failing eyesight due to aging can be corrected with technology and surgery. I've also been impressed by the degree to which my brain merges the information from both eyes and creates an image (a mental image?) that is better than the "raw" data from either eye alone. Tracking this experience—large changes in my eyesight followed by slower adaptation by my brain—has been a fascinating object lesson in just how much we "see" with our brains as well as with our eyes. In a way I feel lucky to have experienced this.

Very much looking forward to getting my new, updated computer glasses, corrected for 20 inches, to make the time I spend in front of the monitor more pleasant. I get a bit of eyestrain now, with the no-longer-correct glasses.

I try to spread the word when I can...if you ever need this kind of eye surgery, don't fear it. We're naturally protective of our eyes, and the thought of having our eyes poked with needles and cut with blades is horrifying. But it's really not bad at all—my surgery was quite bearable. The whole experience was a bit arduous but nothing truly taxing.

...And now this result. I'm very happy!

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.

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

Alan Whiting: "As an astronomer, I've done some research into visual observations (which are still surprisingly useful to the science). I've concluded that there is no such thing as raw visual data: even the simplest observation (such as the brightness of a star) is heavily processed before you, the observer, see it. For a scientist, this can be annoying. This cartoon might be of interest."

Mike replies: That might be the best ongoing "cartoon" strip on the planet right now.

Fantastic First Day: Print Sale Update, the Morning After

I have splendiferous and terrific news to report. Day One of our current sale [SALE ENDED and link removed 12 noon Pacific Time 12/6/19] could not have gone better—it got off to the best start of any sale we've ever done. I have to tell you, these print offers are truly fun when they take off like this. It's wonderful, and very exciting. I cannot thank everyone enough! (I had to go through this post and edit out a whole bunch of exclamation points.) One truly loyal reader ordered nine, and there have been many orders for more than one print. "Black Friday" lived up to its name here at TOP World Headquarters—it has made my year! (Sorry, there's another one. Never write when you're happy, it makes you sound like an idiot.) I can't wait to see how we've done at the 24-hour mark. 

As you can guess, Ctein got hammered—he worked for fifteen hours straight with only small breaks before exhaustion set in. Just before he turned in, however, he emailed me to report that everyone who ordered by his bedtime late last night has been sent an acknowledgement, and he processed all but the last two dozen orders that came in yesterday. Those will be processed first thing today, in order, before he begins on the orders that await him this morning from overnight. He follows a rock star schedule, staying up late and sleeping late, and he's on the West Coast, so he's not up yet. If you're expecting a response from him, don't worry.

This sale is already a great success and we haven't even hit the one-day mark yet. Remember, it continues until next Friday, and there are plenty of prints left. Thanks again, truly.

Mike

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

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Tree Update

Mike, What happened with the tree(s)? I swore to the heavens that if you were saved, I would buy that new lens I'd been holding off on. Hope all is well there. Rick

A brief update on the wind and the trees...the "wind storm" turned out to be what might more accurately termed "a windy night." Nothing here got pulled out of the wet ground by the wind. I lost a branch off one of the towering spruces in the front yard, not a big deal, and, halfway up the hill, a big tree snapped in half 30 or 40 feet above the ground. There's maybe a thirty-foot section lying on the ground near its base, including half of its foliage. Many big branches broke into bits with the force of its fall.

Unfortunately, I can't exactly cooperate with Rick's attempt to rationalize his lens purchase. (Good try, though, Rick.) Apparently the tree broke where the trunk splits into two main branches, and only one came down—the other one, a substantial log, is nearly detached but still hanging in the canopy. It's tough to get a picture of it but I think you can get the idea from this:

That branch you can see is probably 10–12 inches in diameter at its thickest point. Obviously this is jeopardizing anyone or anything that walks beneath it, so I assume I am going to have to figure out what to do about it. Fortunately it's in the middle of a steep hillside where almost no humans or large animals ever walk, but still, it's a hazard. George Fisher is coming this Winter to take down my late and lamented ash tree, done in this past twelvemonth by the emerald borer beetles and the birds that feed on their larvae, so I shall ask him his opinion.

The tree must have rotted at the crotch between the two main branches, is my guess.

A friend I play pool with had a tree come down and crush a corner of one of his two garages and poke holes in its roof. He's waiting for a visit from the insurance adjuster. The big log that fell on my hillside—the one that reached the ground—is fine where it is, so there it shall abide, sheltering small critters and creepy and crawly things.

The giant leaning tree was unfazed by the wind.

Such is life in the woods* in the Finger Lakes!

Mike

*My favorite book, Thoreau's Walden, is subtitled "...Or, Life in the Woods."

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

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Frank Gorga: "You got off easy! I live in the woods of southwestern New Hampshire, at the end of a dirt road (i.e., only one way in or out). Yesterday morning, a tree came down across the road about a half mile from the house taking down the power lines. We were without power for eighteen hours and 'stuck' at the house as well. (When the problem only affects five houses, you are way down the list in terms of priority.) Actually we walked about a mile and a half to a neighbor's for dinner and then back home, so we weren't really stuck, just our vehicles. Ahh...life in the NH woods: it's all good, even without power, except that I couldn't read TOP yesterday!"

Mark Sampson: "That hanging branch in your picture is known as a 'widowmaker' to loggers and other woods people, for obvious reasons."

?

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

The new cameras:

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

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

Without naming real examples, posit these scenarios: 

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

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

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

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

So:

?

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

Look at you!

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

Almost forgot the: ?

;-)

Mike

*

[Photo by Stephen Coyne, used with permission]

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

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

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

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Appetite for Work

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Terry Letton)

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

Sarge is back! Yay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Sarge)

UPDATE from Sarge 7/25:

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

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

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

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

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

Another Day, Another Sixty-Seven Cents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

*Sorry.

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Update: Wendell's Golf Story (OT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Wendell Webb

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

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

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

Grateful thanks again, Wendell, wherever you are.

Mike

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

Made my day!  :-)

 

 

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Translating Three Million Words to Photography [REVISED]

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Translate Three Million Words to Photography?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to C.R.)

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Bill Poole: "Fabulous Intensive Learning Method."

Mike replies: I got that.   ;-)

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

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

Ten Iconic Photographs: No. 4

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

-

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

Access

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

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

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

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

—Originally published in 2006

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

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

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

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

(Live Update—Saturday)

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

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

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

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

Mike

Something Else

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

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

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

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

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

Clarence H. White, about 1920

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

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

That's all I got for today...

Mike
(Thanks to Inaki Arbelaiz)

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

Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderly, 1958

Something Else!!!! by Ornette Coleman, 1958

Something Else by the Kinks, 1967

Something Else by Tech N9ne, 2013

Something Else by the Cranberries, 2017

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

(Not) everything must fade away

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

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

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

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

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

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

Followups and Updates: The Eloquence of Coincidence (OT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You need GEAR, of course:

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

Want to help?

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

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

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

Follow-Up: Ronnie's 1,000th

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

Fun.

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

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

Mike

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

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Follow-Up (Kirk Tuck)

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to KT)

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

Here’s the situation

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

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

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