The Online Photographer

Open Mike (Again): My New Watch (OT)

[This will be indulgent Writer Mike's LAST watch post for a while. Just in case you are not enjoying these. —Disciplined Editor Mike]

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I bought a watch. As you might have expected I would. (It's the best way to settle down these little—er, let's be nice to me and call them "enthusiasms"*—to which I intermittently fall prey. "Remember the Wista.")

Monday night I went to look at an Apple Watch (I saw the 40mm SE) at the local Verizon store. It's nice, and much easier to figure out than I feared. But I decided that really the last thing I need is another monthly bill**. [UPDATE: Carl tells me the Apple watch doesn’t incur an additional monthly expense unless you want it to have its own data plan. Otherwise it does all its tricks coordinated with your iPhone. If you’re in the house with WiFi the phone doesn’t even need to be near the watch. Away from WiFi it just needs to be within Bluetooth range. Sorry for the error. —Ed.] Then, yesterday morning, I spent several hours watching videos for alternative smartwatches. Interesting to come up to speed on those a bit, but they don't seem like my thing.

So, surfeited with looking at watches online, I decided I needed a dose of reality. I had to go to Canandaigua yesterday for another reason, so, was there a Seiko Authorized Dealer in Canandaigua? The Seiko website said yes: Crown Jewelry on Main Street.

No substitute for the real thing

It was just the place. I got waylaid on the way in by the many watches in the window, and there were many more inside, including a selection of estate watches. The young lady who helped me quickly decided I was asking questions that were too specific ("what is 10 bar in meters?"), so she went to get "the watch guy."

The watch guy turned out to be a man named Nick (right), who knows all about the stock, is a watch repairman and restorer, and owns 33 watches himself. He was wearing a Seiko dive watch on which he had replaced the stock flat crystal with a convex sapphire one. (I asked him to hold his watch up for this quick phone-snap portrait—made with his permission.) Turns out Nick is a photography enthusiast too—he does mostly macro work, mainly of watches as you might expect. We had an interesting conversation. He does know a whole lot. Not your average store clerk by a long shot.

In person
Seeing actual watches was instructive, too. (As it often is with cameras.) It turns out that I was wrong about the sizes: a 40mm case is not too big; it looks fine. Actually it does look a little more masculine and proportionate than the smaller, more traditional (for Seiko) 37mm case size.

I ended up buying a Seiko SNE031, which does have the smaller 37mm case. Nick says Seiko has been making a version of this model for some 50 years. There was a very similar but larger watch (the one just to the left of the red dot in the first picture), but it didn't display the weekday, which I decided I wanted. There was also a much better-looking watch that I was drawn to at first (just above the red dot), but the face was silvery and a little too close to the same tonal value as the hands once we got it out of the bright light, and I thought I might have trouble reading it in poor light.

Curiously, Monday night, looking at watches on the computer until I was bleary-eyed, I had picked out the Seiko SNE039 as being a candidate that had pretty much what I wanted. (It's an "Amazon's Choice," too.) Turns out that the watch I actually bought is the exact same thing except with a white face instead of black. I didn't even realize until I got home. Hey, at least I'm consistent. Seiko SNE032, Seiko SNE036, Seiko SNE047, and Seiko SNE042 are also all essentially the same watch as mine, just with different cosmetics.

The watch I bought is Solar—that is, driven by a quartz movement with a permanent battery that is recharged by light, an innovation first developed by Citizen.

On the plus side, the SNE031 "disappeared" on my wrist practically as soon as I put it on. Very comfortable. On the negative side, it's tough for me to read the day and date in poor light without my computer glasses on (my eyesight is 20/20 with glasses but worse without them).

With tax, my new watch cost only $1.22 more at Crown Jewelers than Amazon charges. Pretty great for a bricks-'n'-mortar store with a real live expert answering your questions. (He can answer your questions, too—yesterday he was shipping one of the fancier Seikos off to Utah. Call or email him if you want to buy a watch and tell him I sent you.)

So, then, why a watch? As an experiment. Many of you had good reasons for preferring a wristwatch, but I like to try things for myself. So I plan to wear this for a few months to see if I think there really is any advantage, for me, over using the iPhone as a pocket watch.

It'll at least be nostalgic; I wore a Seiko not dissimilar to this for years when I was younger. I enjoy nostalgia.

Experiment Part 2: I set it exactly to the second against the phone. Of course I'll have to reset it at the end of June, but then I'll be able to let it go three straight months without resetting. That should give me a bit of a read on its accuracy. I'll report back then. If I think of it.

Here's an interesting video about the accuracy of quartz movements.

More resources
In case you've been following along these past few days with interest, more tidbits for you: Here's a neat video about how quartz movements work. Explained by Steve Mould. (I wanted a quartz watch. Maybe it's because I was a kid when all the fuss over the Seiko Astron happened, but I find I gravitate to Seiko and I'm a fan of quartz movements. When I bought my first good watch, in Switzerland, at age 14, I bought a Seiko, and I was informed by the shop proprietor in no uncertain terms that it was not proper to buy a Japanese watch as a souvenir of Switzerland! But that was a year after the Astron and a Seiko was what I wanted.)

Another recommendation was supplied by Justin Ting and several other readers: "Confessions of a Watch Geek," a New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart. Finally, the two best books I've personally read about timekeeping are Revolution in Time by David S. Landes and, especially, Longitude by Dava Sobel, which deservedly won many awards. It's been a long time since I read either, but I remember really liking Longitude, the all-too-human story of the the first marine chronometer and its star-crossed inventor. Along with Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, one of the best books on tech I've read.

Oh, and the best watch in the world? Not one from the "holy trinity" of Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and Patek Philippe. It's a Citizen. That's right, a Citizen. And quartz. Check out the Citizen Eco-Drive Caliber 0100. "The most accurate watch anyone has ever produced, anywhere, ever" (Hodinkee)—accurate to well under two minutes over a human lifetime without external influence. (The best mechanical watches manage the same accuracy over the course of a month.)

Oh...and, right after I bought this, while Nick was still in the back adjusting the band and retrieving the box, I started thinking about what my next watch was going to be. Settle down, Mike.

It's a good thing I'm not rich. I'd just waste more money.   :-)

Mike

*I used to follow common parlance and call it "OCD"—humans love intensifiers—but then I read a book about OCD, which is a very serious disorder on a different level altogether than getting all hot about a new watch (or camera). Calling it "OCD" or "an obsession" is akin to a well-fed individual who hasn't stuffed his face in three hours saying "I'm starving"—something I've also stopped doing. ("You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." —Inigo Montoya.)

**Although it's a significant safety device for seniors who live, or spend time, alone—it can detect a fall and send out a distress signal. So I'll probably have one eventually. Consider Kristine Hinrichs' comment from yesterday:

"I have the Apple Watch for a variety of reasons (excuses for tech). However, the primary reason is the fall detection feature. I’m out alone before dawn almost every day, often along the Lake Michigan shore. I’m paranoid about falling and being alone where no one knows exactly where I am. If I fall, a voice asks if I’m OK. If I don’t respond in 60 seconds, 911 is called. I can also activate it manually. It gives me peace of mind—and keeps my friends and family from worrying. Get the watch."

Product o' the Week:

The Apple Watch Series 6. This is a portal to Amazon from TOP.

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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:

Mark Rouleau: "I too wear a Seiko solar. Supposedly runs for 10 months on two minutes of sunshine. Since I live in Rochester that seemed possible."

Mike replies:  :-)

Howard W. French: "The Seiko SNE039 (black face) is available for $99 on Amazon, which is a pretty dramatic discount if the only difference is cosmetic, i.e. the color scheme."

Mike replies: The prices fluctuate daily and it's a few dollars higher now, but you're basically right—and yes, it is the same watch as mine.

There's a bit more to the story. Quartz watches still account for 97% of the market, in volume, but a lot of the profit in the market now is in luxury mechanical watches, and the high-volume, low-cost makers are in a bit of a bind. As Nick put it to me, "mechanical watches used to be a niche market; now all watches are a niche market." (At least I think he used the word "niche"—maybe he said "specialty.") One of Seiko's huge strengths has long been in making very conservative, plain, but highly capable quartz wristwatches of almost incredibly high value—like that amazing solar watch for a mere ~$100, a triumph of modern technology and manufacturing.

But, and as Sir Mix-a-Lot said it's a very big but, Seiko doesn't really want to be in that segment of the market any more! It's trying to position itself as being more upmarket. So it has actually banished the Essentials line—where all the practical quartz watches reside—from its own main website. If you just go to Seiko's global website, you won't find it listed among its new "brands" categorizations. It still exists, but to get there, you might have to Google "Seiko Essentials." (It's still accessible on seikousa.com). Apparently Seiko would like you to think that its basic line is the 5 Sports automatic line of self-winding mechanical watches (also very high-value, but less accurate, less practical watches than their quartz counterparts). Although it does retain some quartz lineage in some of its flagship Grand Seiko brand watches, including in the groundbreaking new Spring Drive movement, it's passing strange that the progenitor of the quartz revolution is now quietly returning more and more to making mechanical watches.

So the SNE039 is a bit of a threatened species—probably not on the endangered list yet. But actually Seiko is not pushing its traditional strength any more.

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Seiko and Citizen watches are great products when you want to have appreciable quality and still some leftover lunch money. I read a lot of blogs about watches for a while (yeah, these temporary passions can happen for all sorts of things!), and once I mustered the courage to go to a Rolex store to try one, gape in amazement, and tell the clerk who couldn't give a crap about me that I would think about it. So I eventually got myself one of the Orange Monster watches from Seiko, because I wanted a mechanical movement, and I loved the design of dive watch. I took it diving twice, but now it's mostly my daily timepiece. Since it's mechanical, it's not the most accurate, but I check it regularly and adjust it using the noon signal on the radio. That's what I also do with my grandfather clock, formerly owned by my actual grandfather!"

Herman Krieger: "And, if you need a watch repairer:

Peter Wright: "Patek Philippe sends out a lavishly produced 'free' quarterly magazine to its owner list, so I get a copy every so often. The photography in it is excellent. It always includes good articles on fine art, exotic geographic locations, and of course Patek watches. It comes in the mail in a plain brown heavy duty, opaque plastic envelope, without any company logos or indicators whatsoever: just my name and address. I am sure the postman thinks I subscribe the to the worst imaginable pornography. I fear he may be right!"

Benjamin Marks: "Three things.

"First, congratulations! That Seiko is a great piece and I think/hope it is going to make you very happy.

"Second: Regarding accuracy: I remember a comment made by a watch guy on one of the forums to the effect that he changed watches every day and wound and set the mechanical watches when he put them on after a period of inactivity. In practice this meant that his watches only needed to be accurate over the 18 hours he was wearing them on a given day—a standard (say 15 seconds a day) that almost any watch from the last 30 years could meet.

"Third: watch makers are a crafty breed. There is a Seiko (massive, expensive thing) that talks by radio to an atomic clock several times a day and resets itself according to that standard. So it doesn't need to be accurate to several seconds per human life, because it is adjusting on the fly to a very accurate standard frequently. Clever, although I despair when I think of any situation in my own life that might need that level of precision. The thing is also solar powered, but looks like it weighs enough to leave one arm longer than the other."

Mike replies: Regarding your last point, there are actually two types. One is the so-called radio-controlled watch, which, between the hours of midnight and some very early hour of the morning, will reset itself according to the radio signal broadcast from the atomic clock of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. (There are other atomic clocks broadcasting elsewhere in the world.) One problem is that some devices won't receive the signal if you live too far away from Denver. As with  all radio reception devices, some are better at pulling in signal than others.

The other is simply a bluetooth watch, which checks in with your smartphone, which gets its time signal from GPS satellites and is generally accurate to 50 milliseconds or less. If you want to find out how accurate your computer or phone is—for those in the U.S.—go to time.gov and it will tell you both the Official U.S. Time and also how far off your device is. My Mac Mini is off by a whopping 152 milliseconds this morning—more than a tenth of a second!—but it's usually far less than that.

Naturally, watch aficionados feel that's cheating, somehow, and that a timepiece should keep track of time independently of other devices. I personally like it. Here's a really gorgeous radio or bluetooth watch that is made for the JDM (Japanese domestic market) but that you can actually buy from an exporter on Amazon, with all of Amazon's protections. It has its own app!

The Oceanus will be accurate right down to its limit of precision virtually all the time. So here's where we need Ctein—well, I do, anyway, maybe you don't. If you have a watch with a jump second hand—that is, a second hand that jumps from one index to the next rather than moving from one to the next smoothly (and we'll assume for the sake of argument that the jump is instantaneous, which obviously it can't be), how accurate can it be? My presumption is that it's exactly correct once a second, but that it can be off by as much as almost a second potentially added to the inaccuracy of the syncing device. That is, if your smartphone is off by 30 ms, then your watch could never be off by more than 1.2999 (9 repeating, however you write that) seconds. Then we would have to add in the watch's possible error in between synchronizations. But I'm definitely no physicist and mathematician. So I'd probably say a quartz watch with a jump second hand that syncs to a phone is probably "accurate to within a second." But that's its accuracy continually, since its rate of error isn't allowed to continue to accrue.

Curiously, re your comment "I despair when I think of any situation in my own life that might need that level of precision," actually our need for time precision in daily life is usually very loose indeed. One cultural norm that might be changing is that when you look at a clock with hands, you will customarily round to the nearest five-minute increment if you're telling someone else the time—sometimes even to the nearest half-hour. If it's 5:22 and someone asks "What time is it?", you might say "about twenty after" but you might also say "coming up on half-past." This could be changing as more and more young people never learn to use a clock with hands and are only familiar with digital readouts. If their phone says "10:13" and someone asks them the time, they'll say "ten-thirteen," not "about quarter after."

In fact, I seem to remember that a young person in our family once asked what "quarter to" meant when I used the expression....

Dori: "Solar Seikos are pretty neat. I went with a Seiko Prospex Padi Solar SNE435P1. I have automatic watches too, but it's nice not to worry about winding them, good in case of a swim (though mainly desk diver for me), and I don't have to worry so much about having something too expensive on my wrist potentially getting banged around. Something else that's a plus, really good luminescence so I don't have to bring out the brightness of the sun from the phone to just read the time at night."

hugh crawford: "You do know that Seiko was also a camera and shutter manufacturer right? Always wanted a Zenobiaflex just because, well, who wouldn’t want a Zenobiaflex?

"There, I fixed that pesky off-topic posting ratio for you."

Ernest Zarate: "I was an elementary school teacher for 30 years (now retired), having taught in a number of different schools and classrooms. All the rooms had a wall clock in them as a standard feature. Anytime I taught intermediate (5th/6th grade) I often covered up the clock with a sign that said: 'Time will pass. Will you?' No one on earth is more attuned to time than students (recess, lunch, dismissal). My goal was to engage the students in their learning enough to have them ask if they could simply keep working rather than leave.

"One room I was in for a few years had a delightfully frustrating wall clock that never told the correct time. It always displayed times that were hours ahead (or behind) the actual time. It would even change its wildly inaccurate time during the day, the hands spinning forward lazily or quickly until they would stop at some other random point. The solution ended up being a trip to IKEA to purchase a $10 wall clock, battery operated. One of many purchases out of my pocket during those three decades.

"Another school had all the classroom clocks tied to the main computer (a huge monolithic thing menacingly hanging on the staff room wall) I dubbed HAL 9000. The clocks would all gain time each week until it would be several minutes fast, making on-time students tardy—and making for unhappy parents. It was the VP’s job to reset the clocks (a mildly onerous, 24-hour process) when the complaints from everyone reached a level she determined as too much.

"I currently have a wristwatch after not having one for a couple decades. I went with the Apple Watch Series 6, as it synced smoothly with my phone and computer. It also has apps that tie to my Tesla and makes sending commands to the car easier than having to dig out my phone. It took a couple of weeks to get used to wearing a watch again, but now it feels pretty good. It does not incur any fees."

Mike Hess: "My grandfather owned a jewelry store in Northwest Minnesota for 39 years. He was trained as a watchmaker after WWII ended. He was a Seiko dealer. I have always had a soft spot for them. I especially love their 1960s designs. After he retired, he held onto all his watch parts and even had a large inventory of repairs that were never picked up. My uncle has his watchmaker's bench and tools. Plus, the pile of old watches belonging to others is there, too."

Followup: Why One Photographer Wanted a Watch

I had tremendous fun yesterday reading everyone's thoughts and comments about my little side-jaunt into watches. I thought as much. This website has the best, smartest, most experienced commenters. It's really flattering to me that you are reading this. Thank you!

A few more resources:

Here's a printable size guide for face sizes. One problem I have is that I don't like large clunky watches—they just don't feel good on my wrist. The feeling I get from them is similar to when you have a spider on you—get it off! And the fashion these days is distinctly for large watches. Of course it depends not just on preference but also on the size of your wrist. You can clip these out and put the cutout on your wrist to get a pretty good idea how a certain size watch will look on you. 

Here's a short, sweet introduction to the difference between quartz and automatic watches. Won't take up much of your time.

A very kind reader, a watch collector, is actually sending me a watch! Can't wait to see what he has in store for me.

Billionaire bling
If I were going to become a watch aficionado, I think I might be most interested in cheap watches...less than $200 maybe, with an absolute top limit of around $400. As Albert Smith points out, I'd be in good company—there are many pictures floating around the web of Bill Gates wearing one of these:

It's a Casio 200M Duro Analog, and you can have one too for a $50 bill...and get change back.

I don't know, though—isn't it pretty snobby to ape the superrich? Every time you checked the time, people would see you unleash the dazzle and go whoa, who do you think you are, Bill Gates?

Regarding servicing, Stephen Gilbert tells me he bought a Rolex explorer for $195 plus sales tax of 2% in 1969. When he had it serviced last Fall, the servicing cost $1,600, and Rolex insisted on replacing the hands and crystal—which they keep, so I hear, to prevent the old parts from being used to add patina to fakes.

Chris R contributed this quick little 4-minute video of a trashed Tissot being restored. Wonderful.

SmartMike
The watch I'm most seriously considering buying is an Apple Watch with a blood oxygen sensor. I suffer from sleep apnea, and the health-monitoring benefits of a smartwatch seem like they might be worth the cost in added life-complexity. Unfortunately I wouldn't know until well after I bought it.

The wristwatch I would most want, typically, doesn't exist. It would be a smartwatch with no smart features...just an always-on OLED screen with a classic watch face design in an elegant case that keeps perfect time and doesn't do anything else. A dumb smartwatch. It would never sell. I love digital analog displays, though—someday I'll have a car with one.

As always, as Michel Hardy-Vallée points out, XKCD has the correct perspective on all philosophical problems:

You need to check your messages?
And although lots of people had good reasons why they wear a watch, Michael Ryan provided a good reason why a photographer might want a watch:

"I bought a watch to keep track of time while shooting. If I'm on a job in an office and I have six hours to shoot 12 locations I have to watch (no pun intended) that I don't spend too much time at each location. I used to check the time on my phone but I became conscious that it might look like I was constantly checking my messages during the shoot. So I bought a nice Tissot for under 300 dollars. It looks stylish and it's so much easier and more graceful than pulling your phone out of your pocket."

That's valid. I can see that. Appearances are everything.

Finally, I realized, belatedly, that I do own a watch! It's this one:

Cute. Available on Amazon. Nice case and everything. I'd never wear it....

Mike

The following image is a link:

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:

Bill Tyler: "My guess is that if you do buy an iWatch, you'll be surprised at how useful it is. It's hard to describe convincingly, but I'm on my second iWatch, and my only complaint is that I'd like a longer battery life between charges."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'The watch I'm most seriously considering buying is an Apple Watch with a blood oxygen sensor. I suffer from sleep apnea, and the health-monitoring benefits of a smartwatch seem like they might be worth the cost in added life-complexity.'

I admit, shamefully, that I am something of a closet watch lover myself. On my desk I have a case with a dozen watches, all solar-powered (Seikos and Citizens mostly), basking near the window under their glass-topped case. I doubt I’ve worn any of them for over a year. Why? Because they’re utterly obsolete. Like film cameras they do one thing in one way and that’s it. But they are sure nice to look at. And I do rather lust for mechanics watches sometimes…but only had really a valuable one once, during my 'I'm a master of the universe' phase of life.

"For the past two years the Apple Watch has been my companion. Honestly, it’s been literally 'wonder'-ful, with each new generation introducing even more sophistication. Specifically to your interest in the Apple Watch’s pulse-oxygen facility, yup, it works…kinda. You should realize that it is a bit touchy and not nearly as consistently accurate as a plain ol’ fingertip pulse-ox meter. To quote one of my heroes, Elmer Fudd, 'You must be vewy, vewy, still!' for it to make a reading. And the readings will nearly always be lower than the true finger reading by a few points. But as long as you don’t take it too literally it’s good.

"The more valuable 'health' feature of the Apple Watch is the two-point ECG meter. Some years back I suffered from AFIB and lament that the watch’s ECG wasn’t yet available.

"There are many reasons to get a smart-watch, Mike, and hardly any reasons not to."

Jack Mac: "Your first watch post reminded me that I have several nice watches that I no longer wear and yes I am one of those people who check their pocket watch called the cell phone. So after reading at TOP that checking my cell phone for the time was intrusive, I strapped on one of those nice watches. It wasn’t until reading today’s post on watches that I remembered I had a watch on my wrist! I had automatically been checking the time on my iPhone."

Mike replies: Funny. Reminds me of my early days with the iPhone 4s (my first one) when I'd be out and see something and think, damn, wish I had a camera with me. It took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that, oh yeah, the iPhone is a camera too.

Tom Burke: "I went from automatic watches—a UK brand, Christopher Ward—to the Apple Watch. I’d wondered about an Apple Watch for a long, long time, but couldn’t convince myself. However the improvements in the Series 5 were enough, though I bought the cheapest version (aluminium) in my size.

"Twenty-one months or so on, I love it; wouldn’t be without it. My wife says I let it run my life; my view is that the watch curates it….

"Why did I switch? Well, I enjoyed wearing the two automatic watches I had, but it came time to get them serviced (!) and that was a bit of a hassle. Also, one of them had got pretty beat up and no longer looked as good. I looked at their current offerings and discovered that the latest version of the watch I owned now cost almost twice what I had paid for mine just six years earlier—they had found that their market would bear those increases (£350 to £700).

"Given that I am completely immersed in the Apple eco-system—Macs, iPads, iPhone, TV streaming box, AirPods—an Apple Watch was always going to fit in with my existing technology. I’m a happy user."

Speed: "This is reportedly the most watched (!) appraisal ever on Antiques Roadshow. Hold on...the appraisal that floored our guest, literally! See Peter Planes appraise a Rolex Oyster Cosmograph and documentation, ca. 1971, in Bonanzaville, Hour 1."

Mike replies: Wonderful, that. I think I've watched it about three times over the years. I think some of the crew actually thought he'd had a health event.

Christer Almqvist: "Sometime in the mid 1970s I sat at a table near the Volvo CEO (Gyllenhammar) in a Stockholm restaurant. He wore two watches, one on the left wrist and one on the right. That was his USP [unique selling proposition —Ed.] and well known by everybody in Sweden. My then girlfriend (now wife), a foreign national, asked me why he wore two watches. 'Local time and New York time,' I answered. Totally unimpressed, she commented: 'Can't he figure out New York time in his head with one watch showing local time?' Too many and too-expensive watches may backfire."

Ronnie A Nilsen: "Would have loved an Apple watch, but the battery life is not what I want. I have aa Garmin smart watch, that can do the same as the Apple watch (pulse, blood oxygen, GPS etc.) but can go a week between recharging. And the watch-face can be as simple or complicated as you want it. The Scanwatch from Withings might be what you want."

Woz Alexander: "I have the Withings Scanwatch, and as an ex-Apple Watch owner it's a breath of fresh air. It can do all the notifications if you want it to, but you can also just use it as a watch and let it do its health thing in the background. SPO2, ECG, Steps, Distance, Heartrate and sleep...and it lasts a month (-ish) on a charge. The Apple Watch only lasting a day is a massive downside, especially if you hope to do sleep monitoring as you don't have time to charge it. I also have a bunch of mechanical watches, but they don't get a look-in now I have the Scanwatch."

Al C.: "As a disciple from the school of he who dies with the most toys wins, I have throughout my life indulged and immersed my spare time in complex machines with ineffable qualities, from cars, to HiFis, to cameras, to—for a very short time—watches.

"For a year or so I studied the history of horology, the holy trinity of Vacheron, AP and Patek, and the lineage of the famous movements. In the process, I acquired a couple high-end watches with the most venerated movements (calibers), notably the 2003 and the 2120. I was on the verge of acquiring what seemed to me the grail watch—an equation of time with perpetual calendar—when it dawned on me that watches are a total waste of time. Unlike cars and HiFis and cameras which one can compare, tinker with and fuss over without end, a watch is an impenetrable, inert, passive device. All one can do is to gawk at it.

"Take the perpetual calendar complication. To appreciate its function, one has to wait for the singular moment which comes but once every four years. And even then, one has to stay awake through midnight of the 28th of February. Even so, all that is really needed to implement this complication is a bunch of cams.

"Or take that other cherished complication, the chronograph. To achieve that with the ultimate precision, one needs a column wheel to implement in effect a ridiculously crude state machine, and a vertical clutch. At least, it does need more than cams. I own one with the thinnest of such movements. But I have never used the chronograph function for any practical purpose, except once to time a parking meter. I got a ticket anyway, because I forgot to look at my watch until too late. It's useless, unlike the alarm app on my phone.

"The one watch I do not regret acquiring is a Tiffany-Patek minute-repeater pocket watch. The mechanism is indeed interesting and fascinating. The gong does sound wonderful. But what makes this special is that it belonged to Phillip Franklin, VP of the White Star Line, who famously—allegedly—pronounced the Titanic unsinkable."

John Hagen: "When I am with other people and look at my watch I am telling them I am simply paying attention to the time. If I look at a smartwatch or phone, I am signalling that I am not paying attention to the person in front of me."

Kristine Hinrichs: "I have the Apple Watch for a variety of reasons (excuses for tech). However, the primary reason is the fall detection feature. I’m out alone before dawn almost every day, often along the Lake Michigan shore. I’m paranoid about falling and being alone where no one knows exactly where I am. If I fall, a voice asks if I’m OK. If I don’t respond in 60 seconds, 911 is called. I can also activate it manually. It gives me peace of mind—and keeps my friends and family from worrying. Get the watch."

Kenneth Wajda: "I have a few Skagen (Danish) watches I picked up for $5 each at an estate sale. Like them a lot. Small and thin. You'd like them, Mike.

"Years ago, I was headed to Washington D.C. for a big annual photo shoot, and at the Denver airport realized I forgot my watch. I stopped in a newsstand store (candy, books, headrest pillows) and saw a display of $10 watches. I picked one, and it made the shoot much more enjoyable than if I had to rely on the phone. The remarkable thing is it had a face with a series of metallic circles and when I wore it, people everywhere commented on it. When I reached for the elevator button in the Senate building, 'Nice watch.' When I ordered at restaurants, 'Cool watch.' And it was. It was cheap but looked cool. It lasted about two years before it needed a battery and a band and I got a replacement watch instead. But it will always be the one I got the most comments on, hands down. All that for a tenner!"

Mike replies: Thus the category of "fashion watches," those made to be style statements. And nothing wrong with that.

Followup: The Burning Monk

I read once (in this rather scary little book) that as we age, we tend to get better at the things we were always good at and worse at the things we were always bad at. Accordingly, I'm getting even less organized as I age, if such a thing is possible. In any event, I somehow neglected to load the Featured Comments for the "Burning Monk" post...or rather I did, but then I managed to inadvertently default to an earlier version in the compositor (which happens from time to time, despite my efforts) and away they went again. They've been restored now (here's the post again).

Louis McCullagh sent a link:

"I visited the monk's monastery on the banks of the Perfume River. The car was there with details of The Burning Monk."

And Guy Tremblay sent a photo of the car, now on display as a relic.

Photo by Guy Tremblay

Thanks to Louis, Guy, and the other commenters.

Mike

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

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Followup

I think I found the place I mentioned Mark Brautigam before, the photographer who did the series "On Wisconsin" that I linked to the other day. It was in 2011, in a post called "A Few Examples of Naturalism in Photography." Some of the links in that post are broken now.

Do you actually read old posts on TOP? I often wonder how many people do.

Hope you're having a good Saturday.

Mike

Product of Interest this week:

As Porsche does with the 911, Fujifilm just keeps refining its perfect pocket camera and making it better and better. Also available from Amazon.

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Leicas Are Forever? (The Bohemians)

Followup from Scott Kirkpatrick: "I had some spare time yesterday and downloaded the Kindle edition of The Bohemians [the book I mentioned on Saturday —Ed.]

"Imogen and Ansel put in much more than cameo appearances. And I learned more backstory about Consuelo Kanaga than I had seen before. The story-telling is engaging and straightforward. It might be hard to disentangle actual history from plausible filling-in of the gaps.

"Of course, one technical failing helps to keep me from believing it all—'Dorrie' has put her Graflex in hock to survive, but is able to produce some portraits for the Camera Club, where she meets Imogen, Ansel, some wealthy future clients, and a business partner, by taking pictures with 'an old Leica,' in what seems to be about 1918. (The Leica I hit the market in 1925, but I guess Leicas are forever.)

"The book seems to be stimulated by the incongruous vision of the Transamerica Pyramid sitting on the site of the old Monkey Block, where numerous SF literary and arts figures once figured (e.g. Kenneth Rexroth, whose stuff I used to read in the '60s). And recent anti-immigrant incitement rooted back into the West Coast anti-Chinese hostility which became law in the 1920s. Senator Pharrel and his son, with a slight name change to satisfy the lawyers, are probably where the plot construction started. Finally, the mysterious Ah Yi, Lange's Chinese assistant, about whom almost nothing seems to be known, provides the link to what I agree are pretty much 'cameo' appearances. Kanaga provides a stock tough activist PJ character; Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams don't do much, although I'm surprised that the affinities that eventually led to Lange and Cunningham having an essentially merged family didn't show up during the time of this story. And I hadn't known how badly Adams suffered during the Spanish Flu pandemic. The book works hard to set up and tie up all of its plot wrinkles, but I found it affecting, except for the coda in Paris.

"If you care about Group f/64 and all that, and if you are as disgusted by current political themes as I am, it is worth reading. But not to learn about photography—more to imagine that these known photographers absorbed and lived through all that. It formed them. What are today's equivalents doing to us?"

Scott

Product of Interest this week:

As Porsche does with the 911, Fujifilm just keeps refining its perfect pocket camera and making it better and better. Also available from Amazon.

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Joel F Bartlett: "I was not impressed by The Bohemians. Its description of her on her arrival to San Francisco, I would describe as 'ditzy.' She was not. She did not arrive in San Francisco by herself, nor was she robbed on the Ferry and saved by society ladies. She arrived with her friend Fronsie, they were robbed, but they quickly got back on their feet by their own wits. If you want a novel that is much truer to the historical record, may I suggest Learning to See by Elise Hooper. And even better, the biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon. She was a fascinating woman and I hope your introduction to her is not The Bohemians."

Mark Sampson: "I'm currently reading Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, written by Linda Gordon...a highly-praised biography published in 2009. It's well-researched, thorough, and quite readable. So I can't imagine being interested in any author's fantasia about what it was like back then...sorry. Lange, Adams, Cunningham, et al. were clear-eyed realists, dealing directly with the subjects in front of their lenses, and they (and their contributions) deserve the same respect that they showed their subjects. There's a quote from someone to the effect of 'The contemplation of things as they are is a far nobler pursuit than a whole harvest of invention.' I've butchered that quote but I think the meaning comes through...."

[Ed. note: The quote appears to be from the English philosopher Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, 1561–1626, a leading figure in early scientific methodology: "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention." (Source: NYT)

Links to books mentioned in the above comments: Learning to See by Elise Hooper (fiction); Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon (biography).

A weakness of the web is that there isn't an authoritative database of quotations that have been sourced and fact-checked. We are at the mercy of what amounts to casual hearsay, wherein a quotation and its source might be repeated uncritically until it's difficult to untangle good sources from bad. Snopes does verify some common quotation memes, such as this one, but only in their course of its regular work, which is fact-checking rumors and widespread claims.] [UPDATE: Quote Investigator is a good  and useful site as well. Thanks to Mike S. for the reminder.]

Fujifilm GFX System Post UPDATE

As an update to the previous post:

Some readers didn't like my off-the-cuff "max format" term in the previous post, as a term for sensor sizes above full-frame. I didn't really like it so much either. I was really just saying "something like that," not necessarily that.

One reader even accused me of being a poor wordsmith, and, oww! I proud wordsmithery.

So how about: "Super-FF"?

Super is the Latin preposition for "above," and super- as a prefix means above, more than normal, exceeding, beyond. Plus, it's extremely familiar to English speakers in that usage, and its meaning is immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the term "FF." Super-FF could simply be defined as "above and beyond full-frame." (Did someone even suggest this very thing?)

And remember that I'm talking about a marketing term, not a technical one. It'd be a parry to counter the thrust of FF in the fencing match of public perception.

And all it would have to mean is that it's bigger than full-frame, so you'd sidestep all the objections about how much bigger, and biggest, and all that.

In fact this is so obvious I'll bet some of the larger-than-FF camera manufacturers are already using the term, hmm?

They should put me in charge of all terminology. I'd have everything even more confused than it already is in no time.

Mike, who said he's not posting today

 

darlene: "After 30+ years of shooting professionally, people ask me what I currently shoot with, so I started slowly working on a page that will show the gear. The categories go like this: Large Format (Sinar, Linhof, Cambo) Medium Format (ALPA, Hasselblad, Mamiya) Small Format (Fujifilm, Nikon, Minolta) Most pro shooters I know refer to camera sizes as Large, Medium and Small. The lenses covering the formats make us distinguish things even further when need be. Currently I have three digital backs in-house; (2) 44x33 sensors and (1) 49x37 sensor and they are for my Medium format and Large format cameras. If I had a Fujifilm 50R (want one), it would fit into the medium format category. Why? Because of its real estate. I like the KISS principle!"

Kirk Tuck: "Why words? Why not numbers? Start with 35mm (full frame) as 1X and then everything bigger is whatever the size difference might be. Such as a 1.25X, 1.50X, 2X etc. And, in the other direction an APS-C would be a .5 and smaller sensors a .25 etc. I'm sure camera makers will eventually make an array of image sensors bigger than the current Fuji ones and it's a quick and easy way for people to understand the difference in sizes."

Luke: Here's another vote for the most simple and absolute and meaningful terminology: the diagonal measurement. No marketing BS at all, just the facts. Maybe add a 'D', like 55D for a 33x44. But BTY ["bigger than yours" —Ed.] is pretty sweet, too."

psu: "The obsession with format and sensor size, and the 35mm frame size in particular, in the context of digital cameras has always been puzzling to me. While sensor size matters in some ways with digital pictures the relationship between the size of the sensor and the 'image quality' of large prints (say) is by no means the direct and obvious sort of linear scale that we had with film because you are not optically enlarging anything to make the prints. Once you have a file with data in it the print quality is pre-determined by the quality of the data. In any case, I suggest 'small' and 'larger' as the nomenclature that matters. Or to be more direct, 'phone' and 'larger than you are likely to want to carry around most of the time.'  🙂 "

The Wrecking Crew (OT) (Music Notes)

I spent yesterday feasting on music and movies and articles about music, following up on all your suggestions and comments from the recent post about guitarists. The big discovery for me is Sylvain Luc, who was suggested by a reader signing himself Williiam.

And I've been learning all about The Wrecking Crew, a shifting group of 15 to 35 freewheeling first-call session musicians in L.A. in the 1960s and early '70s who played on literally hundreds of hits from the era. Just a few: The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man"; Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"; the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville"; the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations"; Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters"; Sonny and Cher's "The Beat Goes On" (for which Wrecking Crew stalwart Carol Kaye provided the famous bass line); and Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" ("the worst f------ song I've ever heard," Sinatra said when he first heard it, but it went straight to number one and stayed there for a whopping fifteen weeks). They played on records by Nat King Cole, the Carpenters, John Denver, Neil Diamond, and Ike and Tina Turner and dozens if not hundreds of others. Frothy now-forgotten number-one hits like The Association's "Windy," and "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe? That was them. They played on dozens of TV themes, too, from "Hawaii Five-O" to "Bonanza" to "Batman," and created innumerable commercial jingles.

Their names never appeared on the records because the recording industry didn't want the public to know that the bands weren't playing on their own records—and that so many of the same musicians were playing on all the records. The facade began to crack when one of the Monkees—I think it was Peter Tork—arrived at the studio with his guitar and was shocked to learn that the songs were already all finished except for the vocals, which was the only part the band members were expected to provide. The word started to get out—I actually remember where I was when I heard the rumor about the Monkees not even playing on their own records (on the school bus passing my friend Larry Dubin's house)—and the practice of having session aces replace band members on recordings started to decline.

One of the biggest reasons for the arrangement in the first place was efficiency. Wrecking Crew players could lay down a finished track in one to four hours whereas it might take the real band a similar number of days of studio time to accomplish the same task. Ironically, the huge and growing sales of records in the '60s made it more feasible to let bands play on their own records; paying for exorbitant amounts of studio time became feasible for big acts in the later years of the '60s and in fact became a bit of a status symbol. (The vinyl box of the recent deluxe 50th Anniversary release of Crosby Stills & Nash's Déjà Vu contains three disks of demos, outtakes and alternates from the sessions.) The Beatles famously allowed themselves unlimited amounts of studio time after they stopped touring.

The group got its moniker from the 1990 memoir of drummer Hal Blaine, who said that in the early days, the more straightlaced and formal studio musicians of an earlier time thought that the new young guys (and Carol!) who were willing to play rock 'n' roll, as well as improvise from charts instead of having everything written out, were going to "wreck" music.

If you're interested in pop music and you remember that era, the 2008 documentary The Wrecking Crew is fascinating. I found it on Amazon but it's available elsewhere too.

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Its built-in stabilization makes it a perfect match for the unstabilized A6xxx models, but it's good enough to be matched with Sony's best.

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AirDrop Problem?

No sooner do I venture a post about Apple's AirDrop than there's a spate of new articles on the web implying possible security breaches with the feature, such as this one from Mashable. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the competing claims, but I felt I should pass it along.

Mike

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BjörnH: "Nothing to really worry about. What can happen is that when you open the share menu on your phone, it will emit an encrypted (or close enough) version of your email address and phone number over Bluetooth. This is so the receiver can determine if you are a known contact. Problem is that it is almost trivial to guess the original data. This boils down to that your phone will leak this information to anyone close by, if the listener is inclined to reverse the 'encryption.'"

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.

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And here is a portal to...

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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.)

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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.

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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!

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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.