The Online Photographer

8/28/14 The Morning Coffee: Hanging Pictures

A Good Morning to you as you begin your day—

I moved the very first possession of ours into the new house last night—a framed photograph. I hung it on the wall in the kitchen. At least two more will go on the same wall.

The house has a lot of wall space, and I have a lot of framed pictures that have never been displayed properly. Of everything I'm looking forward to in the new house, that's probably #1—arranging and hanging the photographs on the walls.

Of necessity, I'll be going with the crowded-wall look rather than the more modernistic single-image-on-a-clean-field look. I have some nice things but it's a motley of this and that, my own work of various vintages and a number of the Print Offer prints, and some pictures by friends. I imagine it will be an ongoing project.

There are also several pictures waiting in the framing queue, including the panorama picture of our former lake from the Help TOP Move sale, and the Caponigro Father-Son diptych.

It's going to be fun. Hopefully the house will have the feel of a gallery when it's all up, with lots of good stuff for visitors to look at.

Hope you have a good Thursday. Mine will be busy.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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8/27/14 The Morning Coffee: Lost and Found Quotations

A good morning to you—

As I continue to sift and sort through vast drifts of paper with Linda the Organizer, I'm coming across thousands of things that I'd forgotten. For your delectation this morning, two quotations from among many I'd written down and then forgotten about, plucked from the heaps:

...Amateur work has its own special charm. Freed from the commercial necessities which fetter the professional, the amateur need have nothing but the principles of art for guidance. In this delicious liberty he may well be, and is, envied by those who must yield something to the whim of the buyer....

—Alexander Black, The Amateur Photographer, 1887

(Today we would write "he or she," of course. We forgive Mr. Black.)

 

If it is practiced by a man [or woman!] of taste the photograph will have the appearance of art, but the photographer must intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.... Photography should register and give us documents.

—Henri Matisse

Hmmph. Painters.

I've finally got a hard date for moving day—the truck comes for the big pieces of furniture a week from today. I went over to the new house last night, and parked in the garage for the first time, and just wandered around with half the lights off trying to visualize where things are going to go. I have a few antiques from my grandparents' and great-grandparents' houses, and I’ve always tended to place them prominently in places I've lived, thinking visitors would like to see them. Or maybe trying to show off. But last night I just figured the hell with it, I’m the one who enjoys them, so I’m just going to put them in the bedroom. Where, turns out, they’re going to fit perfectly. One more problem solved.

Then I wandered around the new office space, clapping my hands and listening intently. Tracking slap echo, to help me find the best location for the stereo, which in turn will dictate the placement of the desk. I think it's going to be a nice space for sound—which is important, as sometimes I think writing is something I do so I can sit and listen to music all day. (Check out "Blackwater" by Rain Tree Crow for a sound-quality reference. I'd forgotten how good that recording is.)

Have a great Wednesday, wherever your Wednesday takes you.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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8/26/14 The Morning Coffee: Secret Weapon

Photo by Eric Vanden, used with permission. Mamiya C330f, 80mm wide open,
handheld 1/30th sec.

Good Morning to you.

Most photography now is in color, and most black-and-white is poorly done. The tones are wrong and out of balance, or blasted or blocked. (Scanned B&W film sometimes looks wrong to me. It's missing the paper curve.)

But here's a thought. Assuming the tones are done right, black-and-white can be a secret weapon for photographers. If you learn to see values rather than colors—it's not hard to learn—it's easier to get good photographs. B&W essentializes. Elementalizes. (Just made that word up.) Color is another dimension that has to be managed. It's hard to manage.

I'm glad I got to live through the end of the B&W era.

Most photography now is in color, but—it's harder on photographers. It's more difficult to do well. Like it or not, say what you will, but black-and-white is the photographer's friend—a secret advantage, a leg up.

Just a thought. Have a fine day today.

Mike

UPDATE: I was so tired when I wrote this at 2:30 in the morning that I literally couldn't force my eyes to stay open. Maybe I'll revisit the topic in a few months when I'm better rested.

The idea comes from an exchange in the voiceover to a Coen Brothers film, which I might have published in these pages before:

Billy-Bob Thornton: “...I always feel that black and white...black and white in a way looks more like real life than color does, even though real life is obviously in color.

One of the brothers: “Yeah, there’s something hyper-real about it.

BBT: “Exactly.”

CB: “Yeah you’re right.

[...]

BBT: “Somehow black and white it makes you feel like you’re in the story more, somehow...I don’t know....it creates such a mood.”

CB: “Yeah, who was it, was it Orson Welles? —Who said that black and white was the filmmaker’s friend?”

BBT: “It’s really true.”

—Billy-Bob Thornton and the Coen Brothers in the commentary track to “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

UPDATE #2: We heard from Eric Vanden, the photographer who took the picture illustrating this post: "The photograph was digitized with an Epson v600 flatbed photo scanner and then edited in Photoshop (mainly Levels but—unusually—for this picture, a bit of Curves...used because it was my first time with HC110 developer and the results were really different from my usual developers, D-76 and Xtol.)

"And concerning B&W and color...I just 'see' some images spontaneously in B&W and some others in color. Some images do need B&W; others need color to express the feeling you had at that moment you pressed the shutter. I draw in black-and-white as well and for me B&W is really a way of seeing things and telling stories."

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
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V. Roma: "I completely agree with the thought but, try as a might, I can't seem to do digital B&W. Converting a color digital file to B&W feels artificial to me somehow and prevents me from appreciating the photo in B&W. I have even tried to convert the photos to B&W during import but I still know that there is a color file hiding under there.

"It makes no sense, I realize. I have no trouble at all enjoying digital B&W photos from other photographers so it is not like I think there is anything wrong with digital B&W."

Mike replies: I completely sympathize. I overcome it from time to time (cf. the recent "doglegs" picture), but I suffer from exactly the same thing.

The poet Richard Hugo, who I heard lecture at Dartmouth, was talking about his flight to get there, and related a story. As he was getting settled into his seat he said, to the fellow passenger sitting next to him, "I hate flying." And the woman said, "Yes. It's not natural."

I think that's the problem with digital B&W. It's not that it can't be done well, it's that it's not natural to the medium. The way the medium of digital imaging has evolved. For better or for worse.

Joe Holmes: "Re 'Color is another dimension that has to be managed. It's hard to manage.' I know what you mean. I shot B&W—Tri-X 400 which I loaded into canisters from bulk rolls in my dad's darkroom—for my first ten or fifteen years. I would occasionally try shooting color, but I felt like I already had my hands full managing everything that was going on in making a good B&W frame. When everything eventually became more manageable, more internalized, when I spent less time consciously thinking about all those factors, I found I could devote a significant part of my brain to thinking about color, and I was gradually, eventually a convert. But color is an enormous additional factor. It's an awful lot to try to handle when you're first learning. For that reason alone, I recommend that beginners try to start with B&W for as long as they can hold out. (Of course it goes without saying that the right film, shot and printed well, is just plain gorgeous.)"

Stephen McCullough: "Re 'But here's a thought. Assuming the tones are done right, black-and-white can be a secret weapon for photographers. If you learn to see values rather than colors—it's not hard to learn—it's easier to get good photographs.' A promising premise. So, if someone wanted to learn, how would you recommend they do so?"

Mike replies: Here you go. (A surprising number of people have actually done what that article recommends, too—I hear from them regularly.) These days I would probably recommend researching a good, reliable lab and using XP2 Super. and go with Digital Silver Imaging for final prints during the year. Wouldn't be a cheap year, unfortunately.

Giovanni Maggiora: "Totally with you on this one, Mike. Color is incredibly difficult to master. When it works, it's amazing, especially when an image is condensed in one or two tonalities at most. Monochromatic color...McCurry knows color. Leiter painted with color. Haas did too. Harvey blinds you with color. But to us poor mortals, color is full of hidden traps. B&W however needs a totally different vision, and I have never understood the digital idea of shooting first and deciding color/B&W treatment later. The decision must happen before, simply beacuse your eye will seek different things in each case. Plus, a portfolio or project is much stronger if it's visually unified: mix and match rarely works...."

Mike replies: Agreed on all points. I should start a list of genuine masters of color photography, as opposed to great photographers who happen to work in color. It would be a short list, but a dazzling one.

Dave: "I sometimes wonder how things would be had colour photography been invented first."

Mike replies: You are witnessing it! Exactly that. With digital, color was (effectively) "invented first." You're seeing exactly how that goes...no need to wonder.

William Flowers: "Could you further clarify what you mean by 'right' and 'wrong' tones in B&W photography? If you mean by 'right' tones those that most closely resemble or represent the tonal values in a scene, then that seems to suggest that even B&W photography must be as literal or representational as possible, that there is something very close to 'right' and 'wrong' tonality that should be strived for in every photograph and by every photographer. Is there room in your view of 'right' and 'wrong' for a more subjective tonal range?"

Mike replies: Oh, absolutely. Lots of room. B&W allows for a far greater range of personal style and interpretation than color. A huge range of possibilities is effective if it fits what's demotically called the "vision" of the photographer.

It's always tough to give negative examples on a blog...it's like pointing to specific people as examples of ugliness. You're talking about a real person and it's insulting. To point to an example and say "this is bad," I would be insulting an actual photographer, and I'm very reluctant to do that, generally.

I do need to do an extensive, researched, well-presented post on this, but...not now. After the move is complete.

Dan Khong: "Black and white is the only way to bring out the soul in the subject. Flowers and birds are a different matter."

Mike replies: True, and actually nature photography was the first chink in the armor of my B&W prejudice, which used to be much deeper than it is now. A friend argued that nature photography needed to be in color because it was essential information, and on reflection I felt forced to agree.

And there was a good reason why an important early color photographer was Eliot Porter, who, when you think of it, did mainly flowers (natural details of all kinds actually) and was an avid bird photographer...I mean, this cannot be a gray gallinule:

 

Eliot Porter, Purple Gallinule, Everglades National Park, Florida, March 2, 1954

Georg M. Berrisch (partial comment): "I think some photos work in color, some in B&W, and some in both. For me, the advantage of digital is that I can make the choice once I have the shot (although in most instances I know at the time of taking the photo whether it will end up B&W or color). The exception is when I shoot the M Monchrome, which I do more and more often. Interestingly, when using the MM, with the exception of one occasion, I never wished I had the option to shoot color."

Mike replies: I suspect the latter point is because for some of us (not all, I know), we don't see color when shooting with a camera that doesn't see color. For me it's entirely a mental thing, and I have trouble not seeing in color when I know the camera is seeing in color.

It's funny, but my ability to "see how the camera (and lens) sees" used to be pretty clearly an advantage; with digital, though, it might not be, because anything's possible and what's important is what you want, not how the camera sees. So it becomes a matter of willpower—asserting your will on the result—rather than concordance and accommodation to the equipment and materials. I never liked asserting too much control. So my former advantage might be a liability.

(Just sorta thinking out loud here....)

8/25/14 The Morning Coffee: Houses as Art

A Good Morning to you—

A friend and loyal TOP reader also recently bought himself a house. It's an architectural creation so famous it has its own website—called "Boxhead," it was designed and built by Jim Burton of Carter + Burton Architecture and Interior Design.

The house is a lovely creation. Dramatic and beautiful. For me it brings up the question of how to live inside a work of art—a very interesting topic.

I’m actually feeling kind of glad that the kitchen and bathrooms in my new house were remodeled in 2004 without much thought to 1950s style—I think otherwise I might be tempted to begin curating the house as a Midcentury Modern museum, which as you can imagine could go through several iterations, from more approximate to more rigorously true to the period. I think I have the capacity, buried deep within me, to get pretty fanatical about something like that. I mean, you start off thinking that a faux-'50s style couch might look nice, and before you know it you’re researching specific colors of paint and getting rid of a bottle opener because the design didn’t exist until 1983.

(Model railroaders can be like that. One of them once told me about walking mile after mile of track in Kansas or Nebraska or some such until he found the overgrown foundation of an old station that he had modeled in his basement…and he was able to measure the exact angle the original had been relative to the track. Came home and changed the orientation of his model on his layout. He described being completely exultant about acquiring this prized bit of information. Come to think of it, I think that was Tony Koester, who's well known in model railroading circles and was a guy I liked a lot when I knew him.)

This restored mid-century modern Italian settee would be period-
appropriate for my new house. Easy, boy.

Boxhead's website still features Jim Burton's art collection—my friend plans to re-do the photos when he gets his own art on the walls. That goes under the heading of something else I have to look forward to.

Meanwhile, we're heading over to the new house this morning with Linda the organizer, tape measures in hand, to figure out what's going to fit where.

Hope you have a fine day, wherever in the world you're spending your Monday.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
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8/21/14 The Morning Coffee: Star Turns

A Good Morning to you—

Before we get to today's topic, a few updates from previous mornings: first, reader richardplondon (that would be Richard P. from London) restored balance and elegant symmetry to the Downton Abbey promo shot:

Well struck, man! Embrace the gaffe.

Second, my "doglegs" photo inspired reader Eric Brody to mention the photographer Martha Casanave, who did a beautiful monograph called Beware of Dog: You Might Fall In Love. (You can order a copy from the artist for $29.95). The work is in the same vein but much more deeply explored, and intensely elegant. See some of the pictures here.

So today I'm wondering about star turns—and feeling old. (I might have written about this already, or I might have just dreamed I did. It's getting harder and harder to distinguish between memories of reality and memories of dreams. I am kidding. Mostly.) What I mean are guest or backup appearances by musicians on other artists' songs and albums. My off-the-top-of-my-mind examples are mainly ancient. I set aside as ne plus ultra Mike Garson's astonishing, inspired, manic piano on David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane" (Garson is a large part of the reason I love that album, along with Brian Duffy's famous cover shot of course—the other large part being pure nostalgia for my boyhood), but Merry Clayton's transcendent vocal turn on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" is also a special and eternal amazement. I'm sorry to have to report that Merry was badly injured in an automobile accident in Los Angeles in June. She had just been featured in the well-reviewed 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom which had given a lift to her name recognition and her life. All the best wishes to her.

Another star turn I recall is Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo on Michael Jackson's "Beat It." A personal favorite for obvious reasons is Sonny Rollins' solo on the Stones' "Waiting on a Friend." (Re yesterday, he's one musician who could be successfully used to sell me laundry soap.) And yes, all these examples are older than the proverbial dirt, and prove that I am a fossil.

I guess I don't actually pay much attention to such things, although I like the idea of paying attention to such things.

Does anyone have any outstanding examples that are more recent? I'm sure to think of one or two in the middle of the night, but by then it will be too late for this post. (I am conjuring Bobby B.: appear, spirit, and speak!)

To finish on a photographic note, a "Random Excellence." This is by Kurt Edward Fishback, a prolific artist who works in many media including but not limited to photography, and has over the years quietly created a large and splendid body of work of portraits of artists, including many photographers. (I came across a young Michael Kenna, who were were talking about the other day, in Kurt's online gallery.) This is the fine abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn. I think it's a subtle and restrained portrait and pleasingly direct, and yet it has character, too.

Richard Diebenkorn by Kurt Edward Fishback

...And good tones.

Have a fine day today, wherever in the world you are.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

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

Jim Hughes: "If you're 'a fossil,' what the hell does that make me? Back in the dinosaur era, I published, in Camera 35, stories by and about Kurt Fishback's father Glen, who was the proprietor of the Glen Fishback School of Photography and built his early reputation (made his bones?) by winning photography contests—many, many photography contests."

Mike replies: You, Sir, are a treasure, that's what you are, and although treasures can be as aged as fossils, it's much better to be a treasure than a fossil. And yes, when I first happened across Kurt's site, "Fishback Photography," the first name that popped to my mind in association was "Glen," despite the fact that I for my own part published Kurt's work once.

Mark B: "Sorry to be equally ancient, but the most satisfying 'star turn' for me is actually related to the Merry Clayton mention. I'd say Clare Torry on Pink Floyd's 'Great Gig in the Sky' is a studio backup singer turning into the star of the song (and eventually getting her due as co-writer). Famous people backing up other famous people is less interesting to me...."

Luke: "The Downton Abbey Photoshop 'fix' almost made me snort my coffee out my nose."

8/20/14 The Morning Coffee: Music on the Radio

A Daisy BB gun. It fires tiny metal balls so weakly that you can see
their flight through the air and watch the arc of their trajectory
as gravity pulls them quickly to earth.

A Good Morning to you—

XM Radio got cut off in my car the other day—I'd forgotten to re-up—so no more jazz, temporarily. I was forced to listen to (shudder) FM. The horror, the horror.

Time was when this wasn't allowed, but now there are giant conglomerates that control thousands of radio stations. Everything on them is calculated and focus-group tested and computer-controlled, with anodyne disc jockeys (if there are any at all) providing canned commentary but having no programming input. Little on these corporate megalith stations is legitimately local. The result is as stultifying as you could imagine: most radio stations play their same 500 songs interminably, in predetermined percentages, to formula, with just a very few entering or falling off the playlist now and then as a sort of cypher for the creep of time. As with much of capitalist-corporatist culture, it all makes economic sense—for the owners—but culturally, intellectually, emotionally and artistically it's sterile, sad, cynical and debased. (Of course there are some decent stations on the dial too.)

And, as regular readers might know, my personal bête noire is "American irony"—of which there is just way too much—and it's just as ironic as can be that what started out as rebellion and self-expression and protest and counter-culture—"classic rock"—has long since been co-opted completely into the power structure and is now simply a sop, pablum for the ears, ubiquitous, toothless. They play it softly in supermarkets and use it to sell shoes. I'm almost forced to hate classic rock just on principle. (I don't, quite.)

At least there was a limit...and it's a funny one. Janis Joplin, Michael McClure, and Bob Neuwirth's song "Mercedes Benz" was actually used for a Mercedes-Benz commercial for a short time (talk about irony), but Mercedes pulled it when even they realized that the song was specifically and explicitly a lampoon of, and protest against, mindless consumerism and consumerist one-upsmanship. You gotta love that there's a limit to stupidity even if it's buried way, way down in the mix. 

/Soapbox.

(And please, no need to rise to the defense of capitalism. You know I haven't the slightest power against it and it doesn't need defending. It won. It rules. We know. Were I to let loose with my most immoderate screeds (of which this is not one, oh no) it would be like firing a Daisy BB gun at an Abrams M1 main battle tank.)

Have a positive day today, wherever in the world you find yourself.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? You can leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
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8/19/14 The Morning Coffee: Stylist's in Trubba!

John Camp sent me this. It's a promo shot for the popular show "Downton Abbey," which is set in the 1920s. At least a couple of people got into trouble for this photograph, though—the person whose job it is to make sure the set is clean, and the person who vetted the shot for release as a promo. I don't know what the former are called in television, but on photography sets the person is called the stylist. It's the stylist's job to make sure that everything's in order and everything and everyone looks nice once they're on set.

I had very limited interaction with professional stylists back when I was a photographer—I didn't fly quite that high, and neither did my studio-mates. (Stylists are expensive.) I did get into trouble a couple of times, though, for stuff the stylist would have been responsible for if there had been one.

When I did portraits I kept a mirror handy, and I asked people to bring a comb or a hairbrush with them, and then I'd just have them re-do their hair a couple of times during the shoot—my experience was that sometimes people just didn't like the way their hair looked, and it was better to have some variety in the proofs. Only once did I have someone spurn this advice—a young woman declared that she liked her hair to be dishevelled, and it was fine the way it was. I tried to rearrange a flyaway strand on her head but she shooed me away. I was nothing if not go-along-to-get-along, so I let her have it her way.

Of course—naturally—in that instance, that flyaway strand of hair did indeed bother her about the final proofs—and of course it was in every single shot (that was before the days of Photoshop, back when retouching was specialized, difficult, and expensive). I think she did buy a portrait, but she wasn't happy at all about her hair.

Stylists needed everywhere.

So I wonder, in the Downton Abbey promo shot, did the person who left the plastic water bottle on the mantel also get in trouble? Probably not.

Mike

UPDATE: The cast and crew of Downton Abbey had the perfect riposte for criticisms. (Thanks to Darr and others for this.) Very graceful save!

"Morning Coffee" is auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. For those who rise later, it will be there. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

TOP's links!

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

K4kafka: "In my experience working on movie and TV sets, no matter how many hours of 'down time' actors spend waiting in their dressing rooms, you can usually bet that they will bring some morsel of food or drinks to the set. And yes, on a big ad shot, someone with the responsibility to watch over such things (not always the photographer) should be reprimanded."

Gordon Lewis: "From the overall look of this photo and from previous experience on movie sets, my guess is that this was a "quick and dirty" shot on a set that had already been lit for video. The stylist or continuity/script supervisor might not even have known about it. More likely than not, it's the photographer who screwed up. If you were alert enough to notice flyaway strands of hair, you'd notice a stray water bottle, don't you think? Even then, it would have been easy enough for someone to digitally subtract the water bottle after the fact if they really wanted to."

Mike replies: ...Or if anyone had noticed it.

Bernd Reinhardt (partial comment): "The set photographer probably jumped in with the publicist for about one minute and took the picture between setups. Most of the time, the set photographer is expected to be so unobtrusive that he or she wouldn't give any direction to anybody on set."

Tom Kwas: "Have to laugh, saw this a few days ago and it tickled me, less of a problem in the days of easy Photoshop than it would've been back in the day of real film work and retouchers working with dye! I was one of those guys that got to work with high-end stylists over my career, and have to say, many of them would have never made this mistake, but also, the onus would have been on me, as the photographer. One reason I used to stand back and look over a complicated set before I started shooting...back in the olden days, of course."

Larry Shapiro: "In the 1980s I had the good fortune to take a color Polaroid workshop with Marie Cosindas. She worked with an 8x10 view camera and told the story about how she spent a morning setting up one of her classic still life pieces at a Boston museum. Any painting that needed to be moved had to be moved by union workers who of course at noon promptly took their required lunch break. After lunch Marie made the single 8x10 Polaroid image and started the process of taking down the setup when she realized that one of the workman had left a beer bottle in the scene. By then the light had changed and she had to re-shoot the next day. She was always asking us to check for the beer bottles in our compositions. It became a running joke through the workshop and many images were made intentionally with beer bottles in them."

8/18/14 Morning Coffee

Untitled (doglegs)

A good morning to you—

Quite an interesting day yesterday and not for any reason I could have foreseen, but having to do with whether people could see my shoe in the JPEG of the picture above where I intended the frame to be solid black. (You can't see it any more.) One thing that did occur to me was that although my monitor is calibrated, my eyes might not be—I've noticed in recent years that my dark tone discrimination when driving at night is getting worse and worse. Maybe some of you are seeing the shoe because you've got better eyes than I.

I did want to move on and talk about the "career" of a picture like the Doglegs shot after I've provisionally finished it. It's not out of the woods yet. My own photographs, in my view, have to age, like fine wine or cheese. When something's new, I almost always find it good to look at for a while—I'm pleased with myself and usually think what I've done is rather good.

But that's kneejerk. It's just patting myself on the back. And the passage of time puts paid to it, usually. With many of my pictures the sense of pride and pleasure just wane and wither away—until I wonder what I ever saw in the thing in the first place, or ever. So whether a picture really becomes a picture for me depends in part on its staying power—whether I still find it good to look at after some time has passed, and whether I still like it or remember it.

I'll tell you one thing I'm greatly looking forward to in my new office is getting back to printing again. I like making prints and I like looking at photographs as prints. It makes pictures much easier to live with in my view. The "sorting" process I'm talking about that happens after the picture is finished really happens best, most clearly, with prints.

Have a good day—

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Rats...

Sorry. I blew it.

I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning thinking, forgot the post!

Let me just acknowledge that I'm not in the swing of this yet. It takes me a while to groove regular habits. I need to figure out when I'm going to write the Morning Coffee posts—clearly, late in the evening is not the right time. Last night I just got really tired.

I would have tried to scramble this morning at 6:15, but, being honest, I can't. Writing fast under pressure is not my thing. I hate it. I need at least an hour or two free—even if I don't need to take that long, I need to know I have the time if I need it.

On the other hand, I think I'd really like to make "Morning Coffee" a regular thing this Fall, even after we get back to regular posting in September. The only thing I need to figure out is whether it should be five mornings a week or seven mornings a week. What would you like? That would be in addition to ordinary daily posts like I've been doing for going on nine years now.

Sorry about today. I'll do better tomorrow.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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The Morning Coffee 8/14/14

-

•     •     •

I took a flier today and wrote a post about my personal life, which I almost never do. Funny thing happened, though: each time I rewrote the post, it got shorter.

And shorter and shorter.

The result is there above the three dots. It actually got whittled down to not being there.

Because really, you don't want to read that sort of stuff here.

•     •     •

A few public service announcements:

• Nikonians is having a fundraiser.

• Brooks Jensen of LensWork has a new book out called Looking at Images.

• Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape has a new book out called Michael Reichmann: A Twenty Year Retrospective.

•     •     •

This was posted this morning at 3:30 a.m. Central Time, which according to reader Ed will coincide with mid-morning tea in England. This is for you, England; does it matter?

In further England news, I think I'm going. Plans have not firmed up yet. If I can do a meetup while I'm there, I'll give you as much warning as possible.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" was published at 3:30 a.m. Central Time today which is, hopefully, teatime in England. The feature is a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dave Perkin: "Of course it matters.

"In 'England' we do morning coffee, currently a rather fine Honduran, and afternoon tea, which is often a breakfast blend.

"We have the BBC without adverts, play records on Linn Sondeks and are sometimes polite to the point of indifference, especially toward visiting colonials.

"Furthermore, we have steering wheels on the right, as in correct, side of the vehicle; our road signs only rarely need three digits to mark distances, but never four; and we have dictionaries that offer proper English spellings.

"I would mention the beer but I suspect that will not feature in your visit bearing in mind that which we have wrested from the ocassional glimpses offered of your private life.

"In Cornwall, however, they do things fitty and usually dreckly but always better than the English would.

"If visiting it's as well to be aware.  :-) "

Mike replies: Sounds nice. I'd move there but for the wrong-way-round driving—I'm so absentminded I know for a certainty that it would be only a matter of time before I'd find myself careening serenely down the wrong side of a British expressway.

Andrew: "Well you're a little early for mid-morning tea, but you have timed this perfectly for my late-breakfast-at-desk pre-work reading. Not that I would have noticed if I hadn't started using netvibes yesterday."

Edie Howe: "So, how's the move coming along, Mike?"

Mike replies: Pretty smoothly, thanks, Edie. Closing is coming up, and I'm into my third 10-hour block with the organizer. Unfortunately my limit for rummaging through the detritus of my past (and psyche) is about two hours at a time, but yesterday we tackled the basement and filled half the dumpster—it's looking much emptier down there today, which is encouraging. Linda Palmer, the organizer, is wonderful, and really a huge help.

The Morning Coffee 8/12/14

Good morning from the Wilds of Waukesha!

I wonder how many of you are tuning in via feed reader? A reader named Michael yesterday wrote the following:

I am flummoxed by how few people—including the highly intelligent and good-looking denizens of TOP—use RSS feeds to keep track of what is going on at their favourite haunts.

I'd give up RSS before I gave up Google search, but that's about it. It's absolutely fundamental to my internet experience.

Netvibes has been my (free) homepage for at least the last ten years. It gives me summaries of the headlines for approximately 100 websites which I enjoy. A couple of times a day I can scan my themed tabs (e.g. Photography) to see which sites have recently updated content which potentially sounds interesting. I find it as handy for sites that update multiple times per day as I do for sites that update very infrequently; one example which springs to mind is I read Petteri Sulonen's review of the Sigma DP1 the day that he posted it, despite it coming 384 days after his previous post.

Unlike some RSS fans who use a Reeder, I simply use Netvibes as a launch pad, because I still like to visit the sites to consume the content in the environment in which they were intended to be seen (and in TOP's case to read the comments).

I can't recommend it (or quite likely any similar product) highly enough.

I should know a lot more about RSS feeds than I do. I find myself thinking as I read Michael's comment that maybe I should check it out just as a way of keeping up with other sites—in my role as a "content enjoyer," as much as a content provider.

This should be a fun day here. We are going to be working on filling up the dumpster...the less junk I can import into the new house, the happier I'll be, I figure.

Thanks to Michael for the quoted comment. Have a good morning.

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is published at 6:30 a.m. CT every morning except Saturday. It's a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

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The Morning Coffee 8/11/14

In 1962, a retrospective of the work of Ernst Haas was the first color photography exhibition held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A correspondent who's an accomplished photographer but prefers to remain anonymous (you've never heard his name here) said this to me a while back, about Haas:

"I have friends who knew him. In his latter days he suffered from a lack of work. One friend asked one of his graphic design clients why they didn't approach Haas for a project. The  reply was 'we didn't think he would work for someone as small as us.' When Haas heard about this he was astonished. He said 'I'll work for anyone. I'm having trouble with my bills and these people think I'm too good for them?' Something to that effect."

Lewis Hine, who is in all the history books (at least in America) said more or less the same. He desperately wanted to join the Farm Security Administration photographers but was turned down because it was thought he'd be too set in his own approach. Hine felt (very justifiably) that he'd paid his dues and could hold his own with the best of them. And he was serious when he said he'd work hard to give them whatever they wanted; he needed the work.

I got a taste of this when I was desperately searching for a job, any job, in the lean years before I started TOP. I needed a job that paid about $28k, and I got tantalizingly close to one that would have been perfect. But at the last minute, the HR person doing the hiring learned I'd earned twice that at my last corporate job, so she refused to hire me, saying I'd never be happy with their salary. This was after about the third time that WE Energies had cut off my electricity. That job—and its salary—would have been a godsend.

Of course, if I'd gotten that job, I never would have started The Online Photographer, so all's well that ends better.

I guess this is the flip side, though, of establishing your value and keeping your prices up—you might one day find you've inadvertently priced yourself beyond what you'd actually be willing to take!

Mike

"Morning Coffee" is published at 6:30 a.m. CT every morning except Saturday. It's a month-long experiment to give people something to check in with while I'm busy moving. This is not permanent. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Malcolm Leader: "On the other hand, there is the notion of perceived value. An example is given two identical bottles of wine and being told one is a $10 bottle and the other a $40 bottle, most tasters will say the higher priced wine is much better! I've been a self-employed engineer for almost 30 years. I keep raising my rates and the demand for my time has only gone up."

Mike replies: I had a small taste of that phenomenon too. I quit photography in late 1991 I think it was, feeling burned out. At the time I thought I was always one job from disaster; I never knew where my next job was coming from and I thought my existence was very tenuous. To my surprise, however, the phone kept ringing. It turned out I had developed some relationships with clients, and they liked me and wanted me. So I continued doing some work as a favor. In several cases people wouldn't take no for an answer, and in one memorable-for-me case even offered me twice my old rate to take a job! (I took it.) It was more or less an entire year before the phone actually stopped ringing—but then I left the area not long thereafter, so who knows? The point is that I actually had more stability than I thought I had, and that some clients at least thought I was fully worth my rate and even more. Wish I'd realized; I would have relaxed more. [g]

Dave Jenkins: "I think this has been (and is) true for a number of top photographers. In spite of inflation, I have not been able to raise my rates since 2000. And the best photographer in our mid-size market told me recently that he only gets about three days work a month."

Joe Holmes: "What Malcolm Leader says is true and strange. I've experienced it most acutely when I've been in the position of bidding on a job that I really didn't want to take, and so I'd bid a ridiculously high price, on the theory that, okay, here's a price so high that I'll be laughed out of the competition and I can go on with my easy life, but if it is accepted, I'll be happy to pocket the money in exchange for unpleasant work. And of course each time I've done that they've accepted my bid. You'd think I'd learn and just up my prices permanently but nothing is so simple."