The Online Photographer

A Visit from B&H Photo

Mike and Izzy

A nice thing—my rep from B&H Photo, Izzy Flamm, actually made a trip out from NYC to see me yesterday. I've always had good contacts at B&H—Itzhak (Isaac) Buchinger, then Menashe Wodinsky, and lately Izzy. Izzy lives in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, which Wikipedia calls "a hub of Orthodox Judaism." More than half of Lakewood's ~100,000 residents are Orthodox. Izzy commutes two hours to New York City each way. He rather liked my commute, which consists of a) coming downstairs and b) moseying out to the porch.

We had a great visit, and we are cooking up a number of ideas for ways of working together. I'll keep you posted going forward.

I think Izzy enjoyed his brief trip to our area. (My town has 5,000 people, and they're building a new building across from the B&H Superstore in Midtown that will house more people than that.) All the same, it was very kind of him to come all this way to meet me. Thanks Izzy.

Mike

P.S. I have one more post for today, a "Random Excellence," but I'm awaiting permission to post the picture. My hopes are fading at this point, but who knows, maybe I'll get lucky before the end of the day.

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rube39: "Gotta love a New Yorker in a Cubs cap!"

Tex Andrews: "You know, I'm not that surprised. There was a time when B&H rocked that gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC thing, but in my dealings with them for the past decade they have been unfailingly polite, helpful, dare I say it, even gentle, in their dealings with me. Henry Posner has done a great outreach job over at that infamous site (in the midst of a family tragedy a year or so back, at that...). I feel like B&H has decided to be...good. I liked that they seem to have expanded their religious holidays as well, in a way that makes me think that take their faith seriously, as opposed to what I'm seeing from some others. I was sad to hear about their labor issues out in Brooklyn because it seemed so out of character with what I have been experiencing."

Mike replies: B&H's warehouses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as the one in Bushwick have been closed, and fulfillment has moved to a newer, larger facility in Florence Township, New Jersey, just south of Trenton. From what the news reported, all the warehouse workers from the Brooklyn facilities were offered jobs at the new facility. The old Navy Yard warehouse, with no further connection to B&H that I'm aware of, is reportedly being converted to movie and television studios.

By the way, in case you're curious, "B&H" stands for "Blimie and Herman," the first names of the man who owns B&H Photo, Herman Schreiber, and his wife. Herman (Izzy used a nickname that sounded like "Heshy" but I don't know if that's the correct spelling) is still living and still comes in to work.

Chip McDaniel: "I've been dealing with B&H for over 30 years now by phone and Internet and in both the old 17th Street store and the new one. Even when they were doing 'gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC thing' that Tex Andrews refers to above, they were always fair and transparent about which were USA goods and which were gray market. I once had a shipment of an expensive lens go missing, and they shipped another the day of my phone call, even though the courier service showed delivery of the package to my home. In my experience this is typical of B&H and actually of 'gruff' New Yorkers in general, who, when asked for directions or other help, go out of their way to be helpful. Also, B&H's prices were always great, and they still are. I'm glad that you are a click through for them and wish you a fruitful future collaboration."

Mike replies: My favorite gruff-to-the-point-of-rude NYC story: I was walking from Columbia University to Penn Station with a suitcase once (not realizing quite how far it was), and about ten blocks north of Penn Station on 7th Avenue, after walking for quite a long time, I saw two policemen standing on the sidewalk casually talking to each other. I approached them and said, "Excuse me, officers, can you tell me where Penn Station is?" Both cops abruptly fell silent and looked me up and down from head to toe, as if they were completely affronted that I had dared to interrupt their conversation. Finally one of them cocked his head to the south and said, in a thick New York accent and a scathing tone of voice, "It's right down the f---ing street!" He then turned his back on me and they resumed talking. I had to try hard not to laugh.

Happy Fourth

TOP is takin' a coupla days off for the firecracker holiday. Gone fishin', back Friday.

I'd admit that I'm one of those weirdos who think we in the USA have been better off if we'd just stuck it out as part of Great Britain. The only thing about that is, if we had stayed together as one country, you know full well that what is now the United Kingdom would have rebelled by now and gone back to being independent. The only likely difference is that we probably wouldn't have burned down Buckingham Palace in the process. We'd have let those soccer hooligans go peacefully.

:-)

But enough with the thought experiments, it's a holiday! Have a nice one, if you're celebrating. Let's be safe out there.

Mike

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Oh Deer

Close call last night! Driving home from a gathering, a doe leapt the guardrail in front of me and sprinted into the path of the car. At 60 miles per hour I slammed into full ABS mode and took extreme evasive action, using all of the opposite lane (no oncoming traffic, fortunately) and going into a four-wheel skid first in one direction in the other—and then neatly recovered. I essentially drove around where the deer was about to be, at sixty miles an hour.

I felt pretty proud of myself afterward. I didn't panic, I reacted instantly, the car performed well, and I performed well. I didn't touch the deer, which was fairly amazing considering she leapt directly into the car's path and left very little room to maneuver.

I've learned to be alert for deer on the road at dusk and twilight.

And you know what I was thinking? That the image of the deer suspended in midair above the guardrail in the light of the brights over the right front fender of the car was a picture. It looked really neat. I can see it right now in my mind's eye.

Mike

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Bill McFadden: "Nice job driving. My uncle who was encyclopedic about 'the outdoors' taught me that where there is one deer, there will almost always be more following. His lesson paid off one night on my way from Wilkes-Barre to Elmira. I slowed for a deer crossing ahead and the impatient driver who passed me hit the second deer at 60 mph. That picture is still in my neural archives 65 years later."

Nick Van Zanten: "In Michigan, it's always a good idea to drive with a doe permit handy, that way, if you were careful you can eat her. Odds are pretty good (one in 80) that you will collide with one. I got mine a couple of years ago, but the guys in the truck behind me had the doe tag. Sheesh! I got the $1,500 body shop bill."

Mike replies: I don't want a body shop bill, and bully for the dudes in the pickup, but, speaking just for myself, tick-infested roadkill does not appeal as dinner!  :-)

Steve Rosenblum: "I'm very glad that you and the deer ended up unhurt. However, despite your pride in your reactions and response, what you did was unwise. According to law enforcement and natural resources folks, swerving to avoid hitting a deer is much more dangerous than hitting the deer if you can't stop in time. If you swerve the chances that you will lose control of your car and hit a tree, another car, or end up upside down in a ditch are higher than if you hit the deer and stay in your lane. If you Google 'What to do if you're about to hit a deer with your car' you will find numerous postings from official sources supporting this approach.

"A relative of mine was driving home at dusk from fishing on the Madison River in Montana when an elk jumped up on the road in front of his car and he did what you did. He ended up swerving off the road, rolling down an embankment, and hanging by his seatbelt upside down in his (now completely totaled) rental car. Fortunately, outside of having to extract some pieces of shattered windshield glass from his skin he was OK. He doesn't do that anymore."

Mike replies: Thanks for the information, but—well, it was a reaction, not a thoughtful, considered strategy. And being who I am, I'm also thinking about the deer, not just myself, and I doubt I can relearn that. At least not on the gut-reaction level.

However, thinking back on it, I think I applied pressure to the brakes incrementally (though quickly), because my long-ago driver's training was to not slam on the brakes because of the risk of going into a skid. So one thing I'm going to do is practice panic stops a few times. The local speed limit is 55 MPH, even on winding, hilly two-lane roads, and most people drive 60–65 MPH or even faster. I usually set the cruise control for roughly 62 or 63 MPH. Driving that speed, when no one's in sight, I'm going to practice slamming on the brakes a few times. I need to retrain myself to let ABS keep me from skidding and stop the car as quickly as possible.

And by the way, last night the wildlife I encountered was a fox kit that was checking out some roadkill on the centerline. I saw the reflections of his eyes from far away, and was driving slowly by the time I came up on him.

Jim A.: "This is one of the few concerns I have when riding my beloved motorcycle. Even though I live in a state where this sort of accident is a rarity, I always keep an eye peeled. Here are some interesting insurance stats on the likelihood of collision with deer for each state."

Our Thoughts on Memorial Day (OT)

In the formerly United States at least, it's Memorial Day, the day on which we remember those who died in our country's wars in active service. It used to be May 30th; now it's the last Monday in May, which is today. 

Traditionally, it's also considered to be the unofficial beginning of Summer in the U.S. Today's a genuinely hot day here, and the boats are on the lake, the trees are fully leafed out, and the robin in nest #1 has hatched her first brood. Cold April is a distant memory already.

On this day I try to remember that no one (or very few people, at least) wanted to give his or her life for their country. What they wanted to do was serve, then come home and grow old. Some of them didn't even want to serve, but got conscripted into it. Not only can they not speak for themselves, but no one can speak for them, either—this is what offends me about all the treacly, sentimental pap we tend to get bombarded with on days like this. Safe, live personages putting words into the mouths of the dead.

...Not the words I'd put there either. Personally, if I had realized I was about to lose the whole world and everything in it at age 19 in the hell of the Argonne Forest or the muck of Midway Atoll, I'd feel pretty ripped off. Who would choose to "pay the ultimate sacrifice"? Some live, some die, and who gets to survive and who must perish is a grim lottery, one that is mostly a matter of chance.

Along those lines, we can also be thankful that relatively few soldiers have died in recent decades, compared to costlier wars. Although that makes no difference at all to the men and women who were lost. Or their suffering families, who should also be in our thoughts today.

But here's the important thing: the war dead were called to serve, they answered, and then they paid the price. All honor to them. It's worth remembering that before the Battle of Midway, to name just one example, the U.S. mainland was distinctly threatened by the Japanese fleet; after Midway, that threat had effectively evaporated.

Whatever your opinions of war and service, we should save a few moments between beers, barbecue, family and fireworks today to contemplate the war dead.

It's their day, not ours.

Mike

ADDENDUM American wartime military casualties by war:

• American Revolutionary War 4,435
• War of 1812 2,260
• Mexican War 13,283
• American Civil War (estimated) 750,000
• Spanish American War 2,446
• World War I: 116,516
• World War II: 405,399
• Korea 36,576
• Vietnam 58,200
• Gulf War 382
• Iraq and Afghanistan 6,831

[Source: Historical Statistics of the United States (Millennial Edition), quoted by Samuelson, Robert J., in "The horror and honor of the Civil War on Memorial Day," Newsweek magazine, May 25, 2014. Samuelson gives the figure for Iraq and Afghanistan at 6,809 as of May 2014, so I looked to Wikipedia for an updated figure.

Further investigation indicates that most of these figures are total military deaths from all causes rather than direct combat casualties alone. The 750,000 figure for the American Civil War appears to come from a study by historian J. David Hacker published in Civil War History Volume 57 No. 4, December 2011. An article about the study in BBC News magazine (online) describes it as "a paper that used demographic methods and sophisticated statistical software to study newly digitised US census records from 1850 to 1880."  —Ed.]

P.S. As I mentioned in the previous post, please be mindful of our Comment Guidelines. The brief version at the top is easy and quick to read. Thanks!

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Mike Plews: "Memorial Day is a tough holiday for me to process. I'm a veteran, Army Security Agency from '67 to '71 but never got close to Vietnam. My father was in from 1923 to 1955 and saw a lot of combat in the 4th Armored Division in Europe. He is buried in the military cemetery in San Diego.

"My only remaining uncle was an 18-year-old POW in the Battle of the Bulge.

"Last September I had the pleasure of getting a little pissed with my cousin's husband who flew Dust Off in Vietnam.

"We just buried a old friend who suffered the kind of cascading organ collapse associated with Agent Orange exposure. His family found military bits and pieces all over his condo and asked me to come over and explain their significance. They told in interesting story. He had been a specialist in the 11th Armored Cavalry. He had a Combat Infantryman's Badge and three Bronze Stars. He never spoke of this to us. We all knew he had bad case of PTSD but he never went to the VA about it. He was a high school teacher and still in the closet and perhaps he feared being outed. We'll never know now.

"I am sharing this not to brag up my family history. It is to let you know where I am coming from.

"I believe the best Memorial Day address yet was given by Lieutenant General Lucien Truscott in 1945 at a military cemetery in Sicily. No full record of his actual remarks remains, only fragments as it was not written down. Truscott stepped up, waited for silence, turned his back on the crowd to face the dead and apologized."

Open Mike: The Death of Newspapers (and of the Paper 'Shutterbug')

Politico magazine (online!) has a short-but-good article about the death of newspapers, using The Denver Post as a case in point. It's written from a sympathetic but realistic point of view.

The problem as I see it is not that old media is dying, but that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater—in this case meaning that we lose the culture, ethical norms, and practical production methodologies of the content of the news...the structures that have been put in place over decades, even centuries, to insure a good semblance of impartiality, fairness, accuracy, and a bright-line separation between reporting and opinion. We also lose the hard-won structures of fair payment for honest work. The Internet might be more convenient, more easily tailored to suit, more on-demand, and cheaper, but there are few similar safeguards in place yet. All that we're losing—all that hard-won, well-evolved culture that goes along with the medium—we're going to have to learn all over again. Alas.

Then again, corporatism had already gone a long way toward corrupting old media anyway, so maybe it's a wash. That's the fault of the failure of anti-trust legislation and laws.

Meanwhile, in our little corner of the firmament, Shutterbug magazine has announced that it will cease to publish a paper version. Fair enough—will anyone really shed a tear? The online version seems to be doing fine. It seems to be just a logical progression, not emblematic of anything. Just a sign of the times.

However, I've always regretted the fact that modern human beings give so much primacy so absolutely to capitalistic filters. With product categories, there are usually a few survivors that honor the best of the bygone past—consider for instance that you can still buy, brand new, a film Leica. That's as it should be, sez me...a throwback, yes, but it's a throwback that honors the best of the past.

But that's life
I've always had the idea that LIFE magazine should have been institutionalized somehow. Imagine a picture magazine that arrived into the households of every American every week, telling selected stories in still photographs of all aspects of American life, news, and culture. Yes, we can get a good analogue of the same thing online if we go looking for it. The difference is that a magazine freezes the images into final form, the editing plays a major part in shaping the stories, and—most importantly—having one such publication "set aside" in that way would provide shared common experience across the culture. That's what would have made it valuable...it could have been a shared context to provide a basis for discussion and understanding.

You can buy this new, which is cool.

I guess the only way such a thing could happen is if the government were to subsidize it, and that can't happen in the United States (although it does with NPR and public television). Certainly not now.

Hopefully, a few large English-speaking newspapers will make the transition to online versions, as seems to be happening. I subscibe to the essential New York Times (others choose The Wall Street Journal) and The Guardian.

The idea of a subsidized picture magazine is an impractical, impossible idea and I acknowledge and accept that. But that doesn't stop me from wishing it had somehow come to pass. Sometimes, culture provides triumphs—things that are valuable above and beyond their grubby, quotidian bottom lines. It's too bad that so many of those things have to be swept away simply because the business climate or the underlying technology, inevitably, changes.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the not always off-topic Editorial page of TOP. When the moon and the stars align, it appears on Wednesdays.

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Lee Rust: "When I went to journalism school in the early 1970s it was all about who-what-when-where-why, and how to be a responsible gatekeeper for the inner sanctum of public news and information. The operating principal was that a well-informed citizenry could make rational decisions if they were presented with a professionally moderated and curated data set.

"Underlying everything was the explicit assumption of a civic responsibility that was rigorously held separate from the base demands of commercial advertising profitability and subscriber revenue.

"If in fact that journalistic ideal was ever actually achieved in the romantically idealistic past, there is absolutely no doubt that it has been thoroughly discarded in this cruelly cynical Internet era.

"These days, all ad-based media function as some form of entertainment or another and the only rule is the rigid numbers game of eyeballs and ears. You get 'em and you're golden, you lose 'em and you're toast. It's that simple. For subscription-supported media the world is somewhat less harsh, but the steadily rising number of competitors continually dilutes the potential base of support for any one outlet.

"Holdout exceptions might be news outlets like The Washington Post or others that are owned and operated by exceedingly wealthy and/or obsessively dedicated individuals or organizations...but these are by definition a dwindling minority. [See also John Camp's comment on this point, in the Comments section. —Ed.]

"Meanwhile the cost of production is ever increasing, especially if physical materials like paper have to be processed and distributed. We will say goodbye to the physical editions of just about everything, especially for specialized audiences like Shutterbug, and hard-copy periodicals will be strictly luxury items.

"Now, the virtual gatekeepers are Facebook, YouTube, Google and all their derivatives and imitators. The robot algorithm that generates the Google News page is driven strictly by what people actually choose, rather than by what they might need.

"Barring the failure of the technological infrastructure due to calamity or catabolic collapse, we are living in a new normal and will each have to make a special place for ourselves within it. That's why some of us are here in front of our personal devices reading theonlinephotographer.typepad.com instead of shutterbug.com."

JohnMFlores: "About that cool Janus motorcycle...I considered riding one cross country in 2016 because the style evoked an earlier era. But as you know, I ended up following George A. Wyman's trip with the electric Zero instead. On Memorial Day, Richard Worsham, a co-founder of Janus Motorcycles, will begin his own trip across the country from San Francisco to New York City astride one of his own. Read more here."

Wednesday Open Mike: Remember Moms

Great gift idea for Mother's Day: B&H has the Apple 9.7" iPad (2017, 32GB, wi-fi only, gold) on sale for only $269. Your Mom is worth it.

I love my iPad.

I have five Apple devices. Of those, by far the worst is the one I have to use most of the day every single day, the 2012 Mac Mini that I use as my work computer. It overheats and crashes frequently and it's not all that powerful when I'm doing things in Photoshop. Why Apple can't make me a competent basic computer in a smallish (but not overly small) box, that doesn't @!#%#$ overheat, is one of those problems that's annoying chiefly because it shouldn't be a problem at all.

The phone (mine's an iPhone 7+) is my favorite "thing" ever, large or small, tech or mechanical or art-object—favorite all-time. Well, actually I liked the 6+ a little better because the button was real, but "same difference" as we said when I was a kid.

I'm writing my book on a 21" iMac that I like a lot (it's not connected to the Cloud and has almost nothing on it), and then I have an older MacBook Air laptop that I don't use except when I'm traveling. Which means, I hardly ever use it.

The device that I need the least is the one I'm most attached to: my iPad.

When I first got it, I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Now it's like Linus's blanket: I take it to bed with me every night, and it's what's in front of me when I eat alone. I use it mainly to watch videos, movies, and snooker (snooker's my no. 1 spectator sport), and I read books on it. It migrates around the house.

It's fantastic to look at pictures on. It's just the right size to hold in your hands, and the Retina screen shows off digital images nearly ideally. I like looking at pictures on it.

You've probably already gotten your Mom a present. Just thought I'd add a suggestion.

Alternately, try flowers!

Mike

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

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Ernie Van Veen: "The boys and I bought an iPad mini for my wife got Mother's Day five years ago. She's never been a fangirl of tech stuff, but she was, as we say in Australia, 'chuffed' when she got it. She uses it every day for everything from Facebook, to news, blogs, email, and reading, and she takes it in her handbag everywhere we go because it's her first choice for photography. Lately she's been complaining about the limited storage space...I think it may be time for a new one."

Eolake: "I couldn’t agree more about the iPad. Love of my life since the first one. Tip: make a search on Amazon for Tablet Grip. There are many different kinds, and when you hold a tablet in your hand, it makes a big difference. (There are some for phones too.)"

james wilson: "I keep my mini cool with Macs Fan Control. It is a great little app that increases the fan speed in response to processor. I batch process hundreds of images at a time and the fan goes faster and faster to maintain a normal temp. I love my little Mini, no problems."

Mike replies: Thanks. This seems to be working well. It's not clear what the best settings are or what the target temperatures should be, but I was able to get the case cooled down quite a bit and the CPU temps down from 210°F to about 180°F. Hopefully that will help with the crashes, but of course it could be something entirely different causing those.

The Sad Fall from Grace of Nicholas Nixon

My friends and I have been following this story for several weeks. The news is that renowned American photographer Nicholas Nixon has been removed from his teaching position at MassArt for inappropriate and unacceptable conduct. All parties are tight-lipped as the lawyers presumably circle in the skies above.

Although not exactly the Terry Richardson of art photography, The Boston Globe reported yesterday that Nick Nixon had long been accustomed to "going too far" as the headline of yesterday's article suggests. "It felt like the conversation always led back to sex," one student said. After Nixon asked students to analyze pictures of his own penis, Robin Myers, a 2012 graduate of MassArt, told the Globe, "Artists are always pushing boundaries between provocative and inappropriate, and then that line gets crossed and it becomes very clear. The penis photo incident was where that line became very clear for me."

I met Nick Nixon only once, when I was a student and he was at the beginning of his fame; he's ten years or so older than I am. He came to the Corcoran to give a talk. I was impressed with the matchless virtuosity of his then-new style of close, candid photography using an 8x10 view camera and a wide-angle lens, and the idea that was impressed on me most strongly at the time was that he had initially determined to change his technical style every year...until, that is, he alighted on the right one, which he has stayed with ever since. I even owned a few of his prints for a while, thanks to cameramaker Keith Canham, although I was too poor to be able to keep them. (My Sally Mann prints I could keep, because she wrote letters on the back of them and folded them up to put them in the envelope!)

In fairness to Nick, no students brought complaints against him. The investigation was pursued by the newspaper. At the same time, it seems undeniable that his behavior was inexcusable. As the Globe article reports, "...some of Nixon’s alleged behavior astounded Lorie Novak, a professor of photography & imaging [sic] at New York University. 'To ask undergraduate students in your class to pose nude for you is unacceptable, and from my point of view one of the very definitions of sexual harassment,' Novak said. 'The student is powerless.'"

Agreed, full stop. Still, a sad story and a precipitous fall from grace for someone who had been one of the leading lights of American art photography over most of my adult lifetime.

The article is entitled "Sex, power, and photography. At MassArt, how far is too far?" and it was written by Kay Lazar and Malcolm Gay.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad and others)

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Sad? Sure. I met Nixon briefly about ten years ago at a small talk/dinner. He seemed rather quiet, modest but secure. Seemed like a rather nerdy academic-type. I never connected well with much of his work with the exception of his Brown Sisters project (which I keep running into) and some of his Boston cityscapes. (His horror stories of making those from windy rooftops with a huge view camera were more memorable than the images.) Honestly, if the BG report is true, and it certainly seems to be well-checked, what the hell was Nixon thinking? I have never taught an academic class but his excuse about helping to get students out of their boundaries is just plain bull. I'm confident I could conjure at least a dozen better strategies for accomplishing that goal with students. I guess we just never really know what's in someone's mind or, worse, what some people will do when they have power over others.

"Just this morning I was reading the most recent recap of architect Richard Meier's antics which also went on for decades. A lifetime of some remarkable work largely becomes anonymous because this guy, like Nixon, couldn't control his urges. Frankly I have no sympathy for these men and their creepy peers; they can live in hell for the rest of their lives. I had to keep it in check when I was in control of many people in a bigger business. Hopefully we're turning a corner on people not tolerating various sexual and emotional abuses in their work places, although human nature never changes."

John Camp: "I have a hard time getting too upset about this level of 'transgression.' You gotta grow up sometime, might as well be in college. You don't like what the professor suggests, tell him to stick it. In the current climate, he'll get the idea, especially since tenure, or the prospect of tenure, is the Holy Grail in 21st Century academia.

"I'm not sure, exactly, why colleges hire serious artists to teach. There seems to be to be an essential conflict there—transgression has been a byword for artistic endeavor at least since the Renaissance, and sex was usually the major vehicle for that transgression. In a major reversal from the later 20th century, colleges now seem to be taking a much more protective attitude toward students and their delicate psyches. If you wish to protect them, why would you hire somebody whose stock-in-trade is transgression? I mean, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Helmut Newton, Jan Saudek, Ruth Bernhard, Man Ray, Edward Weston...you wouldn't want any of those perverts influencing your snowflake."

Happy Easter

Fra Angelico, Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb, 1440–2,
at the Museum of San Marco

I tried to write a combination April Fools / Easter post, but, fortunately, my head exploded. If it hadn't, I would have offended all sorts of people, only vaguely even knowing what I was doing.

The big news today is that Thom Hogan is abandoning Nikon and switching to Sony. I think a bunny made him do it....

Because, would that really be so foolish?  ;-)

Speaking of Sony, the 55mm Zeiss lens arrived here, but the A7III, not yet.

Did you know you can hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir online at BYU-TV.com? What a treat. I heard President Nelson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recite "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide":

Abide with me; ’tis eventide.
The day is past and gone;
The shadows of the evening fall;
The night is coming on.
Within my heart a welcome guest,
Within my home abide.

O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.

Abide with me; ’tis eventide.
Thy walk today with me
Has made my heart within me burn,
As I communed with thee.
Thy earnest words have filled my soul
And kept me near thy side.

O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.

Abide with me; ’tis eventide,
And lone will be the night
If I cannot commune with thee
Nor find in thee my light.
The darkness of the world, I fear,
Would in my home abide.

O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, ’tis eventide.

It's a hymn that was written during the American Civil War, with music by Harrison Millard and lyrics by M. Lowrie Hofford. Certainly given gravitas by the grievous suffering and loss of that war, which claimed more American lives than all of America's other wars combined. (When we turn on each other, things can be dire indeed.)

It's a glorious day here. Snowflakes this morning (!), and it's chilly, but sunny and Spring-like.

Personally, many of my relatives are at the home of Stan and Teresa Noyszewski in Chicago today, and I dearly wish I was with them.

Happy Easter to all!

Mike
(Thanks to David B. Elesh)

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The Forces of the Fall

The lower branches of the fallen oak. Some of the
broken sections are twelve inches in diameter.

I'm still experiencing significant aftereffects of the storm—power was off for 30 hours and it's been restored, but unfortunately several circuits in my house are dead, including my entire office (and that whole end of the downstairs). I assume this has something to do with the handoff between the backup generator and the power from NYSEG (pronounced "nice egg," our local power utility), but I haven't yet been able to get through to anybody who can help. 

So I'm breaking my rules and writing from the book computer, upstairs. Hopefully just for today!

They had a lot of snow in Britain and Ireland too, I hear.

Out and about
Yesterday and the day before were days to be prized here—dramatically gorgeous—and I did what was, for me, a lot of shooting. I went out several times.

Two things I noticed to mention. For one, I actually filled up a whole card. "Ran out of film."

Many of you probably do this regularly, and have long ago worked out protocols for making sure you have extra cards in reserve and handy. But I habitually shoot sparingly, normally of static subjects, so I ordinarily spend a lot more time thinking and looking than I do actually shooting, and it's been so long since I've filled up a whole card that I can't even remember the last time. So on my third jaunt out of the house...whoops. No more card space. It's also been a long time since I left the house with anything more than one clean card in the camera—I just so seldom need it. 

I think this was because, much to my surprise, I found myself shooting action. I don't usually do much of that. I'm guessing those of you who shoot action are used to shooting a lot of exposures. Or at least a lot more than I usually do. 

Something and something else
And that brings me to my second observation, which is that whenever I go out meaning to shoot something, I almost always end up shooting something else. I first learned this when I spent a year shooting with a view camera long ago (I'm not naturally a large format guy, as I wrote about years ago). Frustrated with my tendency to shoot carefully pictorial compositions, once I just swung the camera around and took a picture of what was behind me. Then I started doing that whenever I set up the camera, and found that the "behind my back" picture was better about one out of five times.

This teaches an important lesson, at least for me, which is that whenever you go out to shoot, you can find something. It just might not be what you think it's going to be. It certainly wasn't for me yesterday. (More about that later.)

That thought was expressed to me by the great Ralph Gibson when I interviewed him many years ago. Paraphrasing, he told me something like this: I've been doing this for so long, and I'm good enough at it, that whenever I head out with the camera I know I'll come back with something.

Or actually, it teaches two important lessons: the second is that while you're shooting one thing, remember to stay alert and alive to every other possibility, everything else around you. Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.

Documenting is different
Anyway: fun day, out an about with the X-T2. Shooting is fun and it cures all the other ills associated with the hobby of photography. 

I did some more documenting of my downed tree, too, which is an ~80-foot oak (I paced it off), about three or four feet in diameter at the base. It came up by the roots because the ground is so soft now. It was a violent event: the fall snapped many living branches, some of them eight or ten inches in diameter, raggedly in half; the corpse of the tree in the yard is a jumble of broken wood and tells a vivid tale of the forces of the fall.

I'll have some more pictures of that, too, when I get back up to speed. Documenting the felled tree, knowing it won't be there long, reminded me of another of my beliefs, which is that shooting in a documentary mode—just for information, to show the reality of a scene to someone else in a photograph—is to us photographers like scales and finger exercises are to a pianist. It keeps you in practice and cleans up your mind, clearing away all your arty and pictorial and compositional quirks and pretensions. We should all do that every now and then just to keep us healthy, even if only as an exercise. (As I think I once said, photography isn't about photography, it's about the world.)

I don't have my usual footer macro up here to add to the bottom of this post, so I'll just sign off and leave it at that. More anon. March has been quite the month so far.

Mike

[UPDATE: Got the power to the office restored about 1:30 thanks to troubleshooting help from the generator people. All is well. —MJ]

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Bryce Lee: "Running out of space on an SD card is interesting. Normally those of us who were raised in the era of 20- (later 24-) and 36-exposure rolls of film learned early on to be small 'c' conservative when deciding upon exactly what we want to photograph. I still function in film mode when out doing my photography, regardless of the capacity of the inserted SD card. An old habit difficult to break."

Stan B.: "'I don't care so much anymore about "good photography." I am gathering evidence for history.' —Gilles Peress."

Joseph Reid: "One of the best yard-care/exercise experiences I had while owning a house in Upstate NY was having a sick tree felled professionally and the trunk cut into two or three long sections. Then I took over and made firewood out of them using wedges, sledgehammer and axe. I could only do a bit at a time and it took several weekends. But it was great, exhausting stress relief. Splitting those trunk sections was a primal experience."

Joe: "Re 'Even when you know where the pictures are you never know where the pictures are.' Oh my, yes. So true. And that principle brought me to a habit that I've developed: When I'm shooting a subject, of course I always reach a point where I'm finished. I've covered all the angles, I know I've got the good shot in the camera, I've done what I came for. I'm tired, it's in the can, and I'm eager to go home and dump the images onto the computer. But for the past few years I've made it a habit to stop and take a one-minute break to walk through the location, looking up and down and behind and inside, thinking: what else is here? What did I miss? Isn't there one more shot I can take home? I swear, 50% of the time I'll frame a shot that hadn't occurred to me before, and 50% of those times my favorite shot will come from that last idea."

Mike replies: That comment says the same thing my post did but much better. Lovely.

Ann: "About 20 years ago, we lost a 30-foot oak. No storm, no soft ground. I was just sitting at home reading a magazine one night, and it fell over with a huge crash. Rotten at the base of the trunk. The interesting part was that we had just the week before finished building a six-foot-tall cedar fence. The tree fell on a section of that beautiful, sturdy, brand new fence. The posts on either side of where the tree fell were intact and standing up straight. The section that the tree hit, however...shattered. Not a single piece of wood left in between those fence posts that was longer than six inches. That falling tree was a powerful force."

It's Valentine's Day

Lillian Gish in a still from the D.W. Griffith short film
The Mothering Heart, 1913. "She is tender hearted, demonstrated by
her appreciation of the flowers and the rescuing of a puppy." (Wikipedia)

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone! 

[Forgetful males, this is your reminder: it's today. Don't go home empty-handed. Especially, don't go home not knowing what day it is. That way lies trubba. Ye have been alerted!]

An inventive (and really quite odd) V-Day promotion fished from my inbox.

Hope you have a serene and loving day, with nary a harsh word spoken or thought betwixt sweeties of any description.

Domestic harmony and peace to you, brothers and sisters—

Mike

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Michael Mejia: "Thanks, Mike; we're all in this together!"

Photographers Like Light

...And Daylight Saving (not "savings") Time begins only one more month from now, on March 11th! Yay, I say.

Early risers might not like that, but only a quarter of us, roughly, are "larks" who are early to bed and early to rise. For those of us who sleep a little later, additional daylight later in the day is a plus without an offsetting disadvantage.

Sunset is already an hour later than it was at its earliest on and around December 8th of last year. The dark days of Winter are lifting in the Northern hemisphere. Spring, although far from here, is coming.

I like this time of year. It feels...hopeful, somehow.

Mike

P.S. Wikipedia relates the preposterous fact that DST was first proposed by a single fellow, an entomologist from New Zealand who wanted more daylight hours in the evenings to collect insects. Its first major proponent in England wanted more light in the evening to play golf. I'm not making that up. The reason for its adoption in the U.S. is more pedestrian and practical...it saves energy (or at least it did then), and, although it certainly existed earlier, it got firmly established here in the 1970s following the energy crisis of that decade.

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David B: "And then there is Arizona which stays on Mountain Standard Time (MST) year round—except for the Navajo Nation which uses MST and MDT. The downside of year-round MST in Arizona is that sunrise occurs around 5:15 a.m. in the summer. The blue and golden hour come much too early in the morning! Evenings are okay...."

Bill Tyler: "Speed's comment about the complexities of time for computers is well taken. Here's a link to just a little of the tech info. As one example of the evils of DST, consider the poor innocent who tries to compute the duration of some task. He/she reads the clock at the beginning and end of the task, and subtracts the two times, right? Well, what if DST transitioned in the middle. The task might have taken an hour less than the computation, or the computed value might even be negative! There are numerous examples in the computer literature of serious errors that came about because of flawed assumptions about time.

"Not DST related, but time related, is the rare occurrence that happened in the year 2000. Years divisible by four are leap years, except if they fall on a century year such as 1900, except if they fall on a century year divisible by 400 such as 2000. So we had a leap year not for the usual reason, but for a reason two steps removed from the usual one. And then there are leap seconds...."

Phil: "In 1954 I was in the Army in Indianapolis. The Met was performing at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, so a friend and I decided to drive down for the 8 p.m. performance. When we got there, we found we were two hours early, because Bloomington was CDT...one hour for different zone and one hour because we were on DST and Bloomington was on standard time. It was a four-hour opera, so we didn't start home until about 2 a.m. our time, with a two hour drive ahead of us."

Patrick Dodds: "Can. Worms. Opened."

Clayton: "Someone said that DST helped them discover a way to avoid cold feet while sleeping. They cut a bit off the top of the blanket and sewed it onto the bottom."

Well, What Do You Know (OT)

That was truly the most entertaining Super Bowl in a very long time, maybe ever.

Not the best-played game; how do two teams get that far without either one of them having defenses? It defies conventional wisdom, as well as logic. Still, it made for great entertainment.

The underdog won, the play of the evening was a super-slick trick that came off neat as you please, and the champs went down setting records as they went. Can't beat that.

Now, the NFC East doesn't have Philly to kick around any more, Dick Vermeil has finally been avenged (he took the Eagles to their first Superbowl and lost, for those who don't remember or never knew), and the city of Philadelphia actually has sports heroes who aren't fictional. Previously, the city's greatest sports triumph was a movie character named "Rocky," lovingly commemorated in the city's most famous sports-related public statue. (In the movie, Rocky trains on the steps of the Museum and has a triumphal moment alone at the top when he realizes that yes, he can do it.)

Philly fans went kinda crazy afterward—as usually happens in cities where they're not sure they'll ever get to celebrate again. If Boston had won, there would have been a hundred people dressed in cozy mufflers in Harvard Square sipping hot cocoa and high-fiving each other.

I hope you Philly photographers got out and exercised your cameras' awesome high-ISO capabilities. When the Redskins won—back in the quaint bygone era of telephones tethered to the wall, film cameras, and liberal democracy—I will admit that I failed miserably to get one good picture of the night-of celebrations.

I have to say that for someone who doesn't own a television (I watched the game online), an abrupt three-hour-plus immersion into television culture was as much a shock to the system as a "polar bear" jump into the waters of a freezing lake. The strange fantastical flurry of bombast, jingoism and marketing manipulation was relentless and exhausting. As far as the commercials were concerned, Dodge got added to my list of "never patronize no matter what" companies for their misappropriation of Dr. King. But not because it was breathtakingly cynical—that's common enough—only because it was breathtakingly clueless. In a sea of tastelessness, it's truly tough to rise above the waves, but Dodge sure did it. Anyway, it's not significant—Dodge was already on my Never Patronize No Matter What list, on account of the fact that I once owned a Dodge.

By this time next year, we will all be asking each other, "who won last year, again?" But it was great fun. The Great Annual American Hooligan Holiday came off in high style.

Mike

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Henry Heerschap: "My first new car was a '78 Dodge Omni, perhaps one of the ten or so worst cars ever made in the US. It had a similar effect on my future buying habits. One of my kids got given a PT Cruiser by my dad and I had similar thoughts, though I really liked the interior layout of that car. Anyway, we've been Mopar-free ever since. Anyway, when I saw the MLK Ram ad, I sat there with my jaw dropping several inches. I suspect some heads are rolling this morning."

Mike replies: One can hope.

My Dodge experience was a Neon Sport, which was a fun and fast car when it was new. However, after six months it was two years old, and by the time three years had gone by it was 15 years old. There are good reasons why you almost never see a Neon (1995–2005) on the road today—they aged in dog years.

Sal Santamaura: "For anyone who finds this entire subject utterly uninteresting, watch the video of last evening's (February 2, 2018) Jeopardy! game. I'd fit right in with those three contestants.  :-)  "

Mike replies: That's hilarious. Like Jaywalking for bookish types. Thanks for the link. (By the way, I knew all five answers.)

psu (partial comment): "I think the lesson of the last three Patriots Superbowls is how thin the margins are between a win and a loss and how densely those margins are populated with luck."

Bob Cook: "It's not often that I agree with you about things social, but your comments on the Dodge commercial are pointedly accurate."

Mike replies: It's good to have someone who doesn't agree with me agree with me.

Stephen F Faust: "Re 'I hope you Philly photographers got out and exercised your cameras' awesome high-ISO capabilities': Yep, and the celebrations were a street photographer's paradise!"

Dave Jenkins: "I didn't watch the game, (although I was pulling for the Patriots) so didn't see the commercial. Sounds as if it was in pretty poor taste. I will, however, speak up on behalf of Dodge automobiles. I'm sorry yours did not serve you well, but we have had terrific service from ours. In 2003, we bought a Grand Caravan which my wife drove until 2008. At that time, we bought a 2007 Grand Caravan for her to drive and I inherited the older one. Last year I sold it with 245,000 miles on the odometer and still running great, because we had bought a Chrysler Town & Country for my wife. So I'm now driving the 2007, which currently registers 207,000 miles and which I plan to drive for several more years. These Dodges have been wonderful cars for us, and we don't baby them."

John Camp: "The thing about the Dodge advertisement was that you started out being only moderately embarrassed, but your embarrassment deepened the longer it went on.... But I looked at it again this morning and found nothing objectionable about the images, and if you close your eyes and only listen to the words, no problem there, either. I think it was the idea of using the speech to make a buck that did the damage."

Mike replies: Perhaps "The issue is not so much who owns King's intellectual property but the uses to which it is put. The estate sometimes seems more inclined to go for the commercial main chance than to get King's words and thoughts disseminated in an appropriate context."

The words are by a writer named Michael Hiltzik, in an article on the LA Times website called "That Dodge trucks Super Bowl ad shows it's time to loosen the King family's grip on MLK's legacy," a web page so occluded and confused with ads—including one for a competing brand of pickup truck—that I had trouble reading the article.

The article notes that the Ram truck ad "...was seen as a landmark in crassness. That was true not least because in the speech excerpted for the ad, a 1968 sermon entitled "The Drum Major Instinct," King spends some considerable time excoriating the advertiser-driven quest for material acquisitions, including cars."

(From the sermon, via kingcenter.org)

Mark Roberts: "Someone's re-edited that Dodge commercial using a different portion of that same MLK speech. The effect is profound."

Steve Jacob: "An old friend of mine has worked as a marketing and branding consultant for several major companies over the years. She defines the habit of swamping consumers with ads as 'dead-horse marketing.' For many brands, dead-horse marketing is counter-productive. Consumers frequently boycott brands that interrupt movies, games, YouTube, or other passive pastimes. Many brands haven't got the message yet. When they do, it will be the end of commercial TV. Unfortunately, it also means more sport will only be available live on pay-per-view or subscription."

anthony reczek: "I watched (as much for the commercials as anything and for the first time this season), and made it through the first half. I had a different response to the Dodge Ram ad—it was wonderful to hear Dr. King's voice and words, like a breath of fresh air in the ad wasteland. The ad itself would have been much more effective if the creators weren't so ham-handed in trying to connect it to their product; a five-second photo and voiceover 'brought to you by...' at the very end would have sufficed. Full disclosure: probably will never buy a Dodge Ram truck (also don't eat Doritos, or drink Pepsi or Bud Light etc., etc.)."

Mike replies: You know, you're absolutely right. A simple "brought to you by" approach would have ennobled the company and earned gratefulness from hearers. It would also have opened King's spoken words up to multiple interpretations for different groups of people—specifically relating to the kneeling protests by black players earlier in the season. People would probably be praising Dodge on the morning after if its agency had taken that approach.

Good on you for imagining that.

The Death of Martin Luther King (OT)

I wish Martin Luther King Jr. mattered more right now. I'm not saying he's been marginalized, but we seem to see him now from a great distance, as if from far off in the gauzy clouds, or as if he's entered the realm of legend, like the murdered dragon-slayer Siegfried in the Song of the Nibelungs.

I'm going to take a little bit of a risk here. Many people out on the wild 'n' wooly tubes of the Internets don't know it, but it's illegal to quote more than a few paragraphs of someone else's work. So those people you see reposting whole articles on forums "for the convenience of others," or whatever, are actually breaking the law. This maybe skirts the edge of what's permissible. But I'd like to share with you a few teaser paragraphs written by one of my favorite writers, Louis Menand [below, left], in an article titled "Been There: The Presidential Election of 1968":

In close elections, such as those of 1960, 1968, and 1976, the vote is essentially the equivalent of flipping a coin. If the voting had happened a week earlier or a week later or on a rainy day, the outcome might have been reversed. But we interpret the result as if it reflected the national intention, a collective decision by the people to rally behind R., and repudiate D. Even when the winner receives fewer votes than the loser, as in 2000 and 2016, we talk about the national mood and direction almost entirely in terms of the winning candidate, and as though the person more voters preferred had vanished, his or her position barely worth reporting on.

Millions more Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than voted for Donald Trump, but the Trump voter is now the protagonist of the national narrative. People talk about how Americans want to roll back globalization—even though most Americans who voted appear to want no such thing. The United States is one of the few democracies that does not have a coalition government, and a winner-take-all electoral system breeds a winner-take-all punditry.

Later in the same article he continues:

People who write and argue about politics are ideologues. They hold a coherent set of positions that they identify as liberal or conservative (or some variation, like libertarian or leftist). But, to millions of voters, those terms mean almost nothing. These voters do not think in ideological terms, and their positions on the issues are often inconsistent and lacking in coherence. Given the option, they will sometimes identify as moderates or centrists, but that tells us very little about how they will vote.

The fact that voters are often responding to nonideological cues helps to explain the volatility of the electorate.

1968, as is often repeated, was a pivotal year in American history; whole books have been written about it, including ones by Mark Kurlansky and Charles Kaiser. It was the year of the My Lai massacre, the year the Beatles' White Album came out, the year Bobby Kennedy was killed, the year American cities burned in widespread rioting, the year the movie Planet of the Apes was released, the year Yale University went coed, the year Richard Nixon became President.

Menand's article argues that "Politically, the most important event in the United States in 1968 was...the assassination, on April 4th, of Martin Luther King."

Puts MLK back into context, on MLK Day. Good article. Reading it is a good way to remind ourselves of the remaining relevance of Martin Luther King.

It was in The New Yorker, the issue of Jan. 8, 2018; published online as "Lessons from the Election of 1968."

Mike

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B.J.: "On M.L. King day, I do not think one can do better than read M.L. King himself. I recommend 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.' It is easily found on the web with a Google search."

Ray Hunter: "A Louis Menand reference on The Online Photographer! It doesn't get any better than this! As a long-time fan of Menand's writing (and The Online Photographer), I find his considered opinions concerning the American culture thoughtful, even wise, sometimes very witty, and always beautifully-written. I also would recommend his American Studies and The Metaphysical Club to individuals who enjoy good writing that concerns American history. Thanks!!"

Ned Bunnell: "One of my favorite MLK quotes..."

Chuck Albertson: "I can see Menand's point about MLK's murder being the most significant political event of 1968, but my clear recollection of that year is of an endless series of equally Bad Things that hit like bowling balls rolling off the roof. Except for Apollo 8 and the Stones' release of 'Beggars Banquet,' but they were both at the end of the year.

"Given his theme, I was a little surprised he left off the late Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President 1968, which was a great behind-the-scenes look at Nixon's television campaign (overseen by Roger Ailes!), where the rubber of his law 'n' order pitch, among others, met the road. The book's publication was met with about the same reaction that Fire and Fury has been today."

Mani Sitaraman: "Without getting too far away from the topic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth noting that 1968 was a pivotal year, not just in American political and cultural history, but in many countries around the world. General strikes and student activism in France, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the year the Cultural revolution in China really picked up steam, the emergence of Maoist rebels in India; the whole world seemed to be going up in flames.

"The French have a term for the socially activist young people of that time: Soixtant Huitard, literally, 'Sixty-Eighter.'

"An excellent broad-survey history of that year is Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968 by Robert Daniels, published by Harvard University Press."

Happy New Year!

...From our house to your house. May 2018 be as kind as possible to you and your loved ones!

[Note: For various reasons, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. did not do a lick of work over the weekend and finds he is in need of a couple of mental health days. I feel good, but exhausted. So I'm going to be indulgent and (this post aside) take the next couple of days off. I hope you don't mind too much. TOP will return on Thursday to inaugurate programming for 2018.]

It's as cold as billy bejeezus here, and you know who doesn't mind at all?

...This young gentleman, who drags me out of the house and into the frigid air regularly to serve as his fetch lackey. I stand and freeze my booties and patootie off, while he gambols in the snow and occasionally brings the ball back to me to scrape the ice off of and fling yet again. Lulu, who is wearing her stylish doggie overcoat indoors and out, morning, noon, and especially night, in addition to the heater on the porch, lasts about eight minutes outdoors before she starts hopping and holding her paws in the air. Not Butters, no sir. He can go and go. Apparently, 1°F (–17°C) is not yet into his discomfort range. And 13°F (–10.5°C)...well, he hardly feels it. He's annoyed with me that I keep needing to go inside after a mere fifteen minutes.

As for me, I need a new coat. For someone who loves to shop for the things I love, I am wretched at shopping for clothing; I have actually bought two Winter coats since I've had my current one, and both attempts were expensive duds. The first was a bulky North Face that was so big I could hardly fit into the car while wearing it, and it wasn't even warm—when a cold wind blew I could feel air on my arms! I gave that one to charity (sorry, cold-armed recipient, but it's-a not-a my fault), and North Face quickly got added to the list of brands I will never buy again. The second was an orange mail order down jacket that was just a little too small for me, but close enough so I thought it might work, and I didn't return it in time. I ended up giving that one to my brother, who claims to be six feet tall, but who my other brother and I are quick to claim is actually 5 feet, 11 and 15/16ths inches tall. That's what we say to annoy him, anyway. But he got my last new jacket. Fits him perfectly.

So now I have to go jacket shopping again, and I am dreading it. But I've had my current Winter coat for something like 25 years, and despite yeoman service it has lost a fair amount of loft and a great deal of warmth through the years. But the chances my shopping will be ineffectual are two out of three.

I have given up trying to capture the glory of moonrise over my ridge in back. Either my skills are not sufficient to find out if my patience is deficient, or my patience is not sufficient to find out if my skills are deficient. But this may give you an inadequate idea of the visuals to augment the description. The full moon was just glorious on the snow last night. The air is crispy clear, and the moon is bright and vivid, and the light and shadows on the snow is magical. I'm not one to give names to houses, but if I were to name this one I might call it Moon Ridge. Except maybe that sounds like a Wiccan housing development, I don't know.

Here is a second, unfortunately not better, image of the moon just peeking halfway over the ridgetop. I think I would have to learn how to do "real" dual-image HDR if I wanted to do this competently, and I haven't had time to learn much in Photoshop yet—I've only been using it since 1993. That's barely time to get to know the basics when you've got my computer skills.

Well, anyway, I guess you'll have to take my word for it. It's just been beautiful here at night, under the moonlight. 2018 is off to a fine start if you ask me.

Hope it is for you too. If you have a recommendation for a warm winter coat please let me know. (No, I cannot afford Canada Goose!)

Mike

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Bahi: "You and me both. I had catch-up plans for the holidays but got almost nothing done. Last night, I ran a long-overdue OS upgrade and cleaned up my desktop, which was looking a little messier that usual—a total of two work-related accomplishments in a week or more. But sometimes, you just need a break. Happy New Year!"

Mike replies: That's it exactly. "Sometimes, you just need a break." I feel fine, I just need a little time to do nothing! Of course I worked on my book most of today....

Merry Christmas! &c.

My little writer's haven in the Finger Lakes, built 1880,
restored 2012. I work on the front porch.

As I do every year about this time, I'll be shuttering TOP for a few days in observance of Christmas. I hope all of you Jewish readers had a lovely Hanukkah, and I wish all of you Christians (and secular Christmas celebrants) a wonderful holiday—not forgetting our friends who celebrate other holidays around this time of year. Special mention for those of you who will find yourselves alone. I hope you have a good, peaceful, restful day on the 25th as well.

Be good to yourselves and be good to others, my friends. Goodwill to all, in the spirit of the season. See you a few days hence.

Mike

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Brendon: "Merry Christmas to you too Mike. Enjoy the break and thanks for all you do for us enthusiasts out here in Internet-land. Certainly different here in terms of the weather in Western Oz, ha ha. Just got back from (Preston) beach with a nice tan for my efforts. Fish weren't biting though, darn it."

Roger Bradbury: "Just the photo for Xmas on a photographer's blog; we can imagine you waiting in the cold as the ambient light level fell until it was just right, then taking the photo and going back in the warm. Happy Christmas, Mike."

Mike replies: Actually quite the opposite! I'm afraid it wasn't intentional at all. I was trudging back from a nice visit with my neighbors Les and Joyce, a way I don't often come, and it afforded me a view of the house I don't often see, so I whipped out the iPhone and made a couple of quick snaps. The only photo-dawg aspect of it was that I had to do quite a bit of work to get the tree of lights to look like it actually looks—digital, or at least the digital I can afford, doesn't do at all well with those tiny LEDs, for some reason rendering them as tiny and mostly white dots—it misses the glow the eye sees, as well as most of the color. So the tree has had some Photoshoppery applied to bring out the color, and then some more to hide the artifacts of the changes. The result is quite accurate to the visual impression of the actual scene, in my judgment, but it's not quite what the iPhone's camera gave me.

I did go out the next day with the X-T2 when the ambient light was just right, with some lights on in the house, and tried to recreate the shot, but some of the snow had melted, the light was different, and what I got when I was trying harder weren't pictures, just snapshots. The X-T2 didn't do any better with the tiny LEDs, either.

I got a wonderfully illustrated e-missive from Michael McCaskey yesterday, of pictures he took in Ethiopia, and he mentioned that he's going to be getting an iPhone X to learn to use its camera. He suggested I try some serious posts about photographing with an iPhone in 2018, and I think I'll take his advice on that. Meanwhile this Christmas picture has joined my Finger Lakes iPhone portfolio, which I thought I was finished with.

Thanks to everyone for the holiday greetings, and right back at ya! Ho ho.

O Happy Bachelor (and a B&H Dilemma)

It's a lovely morning here in the Finger Lakes. A vast pearly cloudbank overhead with a band of blue sky showing in the West made for an otherworldly light as the sun was coming up behind the ridge. A dusting of blown snow made patterns on the road.

Being a SSG (sadly single guy), I've hired a Mennonite housekeeper to come in twice a month to help with the chores. She's eighteen years old and very pretty and, moreover, happy (why are all Mennonites so well-adjusted? Do they know something we don't?), and she works for peanuts by city standards—it's very affordable. She keeps right at it, works straight through, never takes a break, so I never have to worry whether she's slacking off. And she's better than I am at every aspect of housekeeping, so it's not like trying to oversee how she's doing anything would help. I just leave her be, and she does her thing.

Then after she departs I spend about a day discovering everything she did and being happy about it. It's like a series of little gifts. Not only is all the laundry done, but everything is folded—even my socks! The dust bunnies under the bed have vanished. Then I notice that a few things are a little out of place in the refrigerator and...omigod, she cleaned out the entire thing! The putrifying kale in the special vegetable drawer my brother calls "The Rotter" is gone, the little pool of brown liquid it was sitting in vanquished. The interior of the fridge is spotless. All the floors have been mopped, the bed is crisply made, and she even washes the outsides of the windows. Amazing. I don't know how she gets it all done in four hours. TOP World HQ is burnished and gleaming, glowing with good order. O happy bachelor.

And then another nice surprise...as a thank-you for being an affiliate, B&H has sent me a Holiday gift certificate. Nice. Did you know you could give B&H Gift Certificates to the photographers you know? You can send it by email or snailmail for any amount, and include a message. Perfect for those of us who tend to be, uh, a little late with the Christmas shopping. Or, better yet, for someone close to you who might be. "You know, honey...." (Amazon has gift cards too, of course.)

Free next-day shipping for hundreds of items at B&H Photo ends soon, too.

So here's my dilemma: I have to spend the $250...can't stash it in the bank it like a good little Ed.

Darn.  :-)

If you had to spend $250 at B&H Photo—forced to—what would you buy? You can of course add more cash to that if you want to...for example, it means I could buy a 27mm pancake for my Fuji for $149 ($399 minus $250) or a 128 GB iPad for $169 ($419 minus $250). But if it makes me spend too much more, then at some point it enters into the realm of a net loss, so I don't want to be thinking, "Oh, great, now I can buy a Fuji GFX 50S for only $6,249.95!"

And I know what the first wise guy is going to say..."You could spend your $250 Gift Certificate to buy me a $250 Gift Certificate!" But of course I can't do that for everybody. Wish I could, wish I could.

And by the way, as I always do, TOP will be on hiatus for several days over Christmas, starting Saturday.

The Day is only days away,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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 Levingston: "I just had to deal with a similar dilemma. The charge card I use the most surprised me with a "points" bonus worth several hundred bucks. And their points can be used effortlessly on Amazon just like real money. So, going through your link of course, that Panasonic 42.5mm lens that I've been eyeing for a year or so is now on its way to my house."

Mike replies: Oooh, yummy. You didn't say which one, but I love both those lenses.

Ken Tanaka: "'It's a lovely morning here in the Finger Lakes. A vast pearly cloudbank overhead with a band of blue sky showing in the West made for an otherworldly light as the sun was coming up behind the ridge. A dusting of blown snow made patterns on the road.' Well I don't think you need any more camera gear. You seem quite able to depict rich landscape scenes with your fingers."

Mike replies: No...I don't need any more camera gear...but...but....

Aaron: "I bought that 27mm pancake a couple years ago when it was on sale, mostly on impulse. It's probably my most-used lens these days. It makes the X-T2 (and X-T1 before that) very comfortable to have around my neck. The camera, with lens, sits between my arm and hip very nicely. Bringing just a camera, no bag, is nice for short outings."

Cool Stuff and More Cool Stuff

Peter Turnley, Ground Zero, New York, September 12, 2001

• First of all, I just added three new inclusions (eight new photographs) to the previous "Baker's Dozen: Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses" post. Do not miss!

• Second, as he did last year, my friend (and yours) Peter Turnley is having a holiday print sale of full-sized 16x20" prints in both black-and-white and color. This is not an official "TOP Sale," but Peter will make a contribution to TOP if you hit the "referred by" menu at the bottom of the sale page:

The selection is mighty and the prices very nice: note especially the three-print deal of $1,000 for three prints, as this is the lowest price Peter has ever sold his full-sized 16x20-inch prints for. These are exactly the same prints that sell for $1,400 to $2,000 (for one, not three) in brick-and-mortar galleries the rest of the year.

Even if you don't buy one, you can exercise your delectation skills by looking over the 18 pictures and deciding which ones you like the best. They're good to see.

• Cyber Monday this year beat Black Friday for sales, and was both the biggest online shopping day ever and also the biggest sales day Amazon ever had, adding up to a significant slice of the holiday sales pie. I'm scared to look at how I did, so I haven't checked yet (if I didn't do okay, I don't want to know. I know I'm getting the tar beat out of me by video review sites).

In any event, B&H Photo has some marvelous "Cyber Week" sales still going on. Here are some links to some outstanding deals:

Sony page

Nikon page

Canon page

In case you haven't noticed, the Bigs would really like to sell you a camera or lens this year. The competition is cutthroat and the prices are...well, just cut.

Consider for instance that at the Sony page, you can get the original Sony A7 for only $798 (!), the A7II for only $1,298, and the A6500 for only $1,198. Look around at the pages at those links. Now's a good time to pull the trigger if the timing is right for you.

Peter Turnley, Paris, 1991

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Eli Burakian: "Simple question with probably no correct answer: how do I know, or attempt to determine, if a specific fine art print is a good investment, financially speaking? Are there specific rules of thumb or generalizations that would aid in choosing? I never buy prints that I don't love, but beyond my limited understanding of photography in the art world, I'm pretty clueless about what factors go into determining financial value to specific artworks and artists."

Mike replies: The clear best advice is, don't—that is, don't buy fine art prints as investments. Buy what you love (as you said you do), and limit your spending to what you can comfortably afford. Art isn't a safe investment until you get to the level of silly money, and sometimes not even then. With those conditions met, it can be a highly rewarding investment if you find something you love that keeps "giving" whenever you look at it, something you'll really enjoy living with.

Remember that all art is essentially tulip bulbs (cf. chapter 3 of Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, "The Tulipomania").

If you really want to buy photographs as financial investments (I know several people who do), start by building a relationship with a professional gallerist who can advise you. They will ordinarily spend more time and take more trouble with you if you spend a fair amount of money with them. I believe one of my acquaintances spends well into six figures annually (just my guess), and quite plausibly seven, on photographs as investments, so he naturally has good relationships with the gallerists he buys from.

David Boyce adds: "To Eli Burakian: Mike has covered lots of the bases, but one thing to add to the buy what you like thing, buy what you love, not like. Things that you know that regardless of the value you will keep them, be entranced and entertained. And buy in depth, several works by the same artist, not one here and there by different artists. If you want work that is going to grow, or at least hold its value look for work that is 'controversial' or 'difficult.' Works that divide opinions. Those are the ones that might grow in value. And I say might. I'm an artist and my wife and I collect. But we are different to a lot of buyers; we kind of hope stuff we own doesn't become too valuable as then there is the temptation to sell it. That would cause lots of emotional pain."

Mike: One of my favorite stories is one my art teacher told. He had an opportunity to buy a watercolor from Andrew Wyeth's very first show...for $25. He almost pulled the trigger, got cold feet, and passed. Over the years, he watched the price of the very picture he wanted to buy rise to $250, then to $2,500, then $25,000, and finally to $250,000. He said he was filled with regret and remorse at ever step—but largely because as the price rose, he became increasingly aware that he would never again have any chance to own it. But then the painting rose in price to $2.5 million, and he said at that point, he no longer regretted not buying it. I asked him why, and he said, "because I would have had to sell it if it were that valuable. It would be too expensive to keep in the house. And I loved it. If I had bought it, I know I would have wanted to keep it."

The Old Flog Turns Twelve

The Online Photographer, which you are reading at this moment, is 12 years old today*. The very first post went up on November 28th, 2005. At that time, blogs were the very latest hip, hoppin', happenin' cool thang—and my ambition was to try to keep one going for one whole year. It was a preposterous notion, and I had every expectation of failure: I was a dilettante, and (as I used to say) "constancy was my worst thing." I couldn't do anything once a day, not even the dishes. What were the chances I could write a blog post every day?

But I was dead broke, and had no prospects, having just been turned down for a job editing a twice-a-month in-house newsletter for an independent hospital, for barely enough money to keep me and my then-12-year-old son alive. They said I was "overqualified," which, while true—I could have done that job working only on the weekends—was a bitter, bitter pill. I think Wisconsin Electric turned our power off three times that Summer.

I had always wanted to write books, and I still cart a bushel full of book ideas lovingly around in my head, where they shall probably still be when I shuffle off to Buffalo. As a countervalence to that, though (have I said this before?), Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, considered his detective tales to be fluff, pining to become a "serious" writer. He even tried to kill Holmes off, but was forced by public clamor to bring the sleuth back to life again. Short take: Doyle had found his rare good thing, a gig that many writers would kill Moriarty for, but he didn't even appreciate it. I've seen the same thing many times in a number of different fields over the years. So maybe I don't get to write books. But I get to write, and I have readers, yo. Be happy where you hunker. Life happens at home.

This is post number 7,714, and if you arbitrarily assign 500 words per post including things like replies to comments and the like (this one's 350 so far), then I've written 3,857,000 words on TOP since 2005. That's the equivalent of 38 full-length novels, by word count at least. Steven King has written 107. Then again, Anna Sewell wrote only one. It is called Black Beauty. Conceived to encourage the ethical treatment of horses but beloved as a children's book, it was published in 1877 and its invalid author lived on long enough to see the early glimmering of its success. It has never been out of print and to date has sold some 50 million copies worldwide.

Am I digressing again? I am, I am. Better get back to building that Baker's Dozen post. Seven done and six to go. But happy b'day, old flog.

Mike
(Thanks to all of my readers then to now)

*And fast becoming a difficult adolescent.

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Dean Forbes: "Happy Birthday to us (it's mine today, too)!"

Richard Skoonberg: "Congratulations, Mike. Your blog is the hippest, coolest, and most sublime blog on this here Internet. I am very grateful you have stuck it out for 12 years. I didn't know that about Arthur Conan Doyle, but the same was true for Rod Serling of 'Twilight Zone' fame. He never thought much of his writing for television; he longed for fame on Broadway as a playwright. Congrats, again, for a remarkable milestone!"

Edward Taylor: "I feel a little like it's my birthday too. I followed you here from a different website, and I have read every post and every comment on your blog since the beginning. I have even written a few articles for your blog. The Online Photographer was a long shot that worked! Or, maybe not such a long shot since you are so good at what you do. It's been a great run and it's not over! Congratulations Mike!"

Baker's Dozen: Young Photographers (Call for Work)

Good mornin'.

First of all, it's "Cyber Monday" today. It's the day when you're supposed to buy something through the links of your favorite website to help keep them in business (hint, hint) (wink).

I get remunerated for the number of things I sell through my links as well as for their dollar amount, so even if someone (a hypothetical person) were to order a few things of negligible cost they would still be helping out. I'm just mentioning this theoretically—I'm not entirely sure, but I think the terms of service of my various affiliations specify that I can't actually urge you to use my links. I'm just reporting about Cyber Monday here. Here's a list of those affiliates:

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But in case you do, thank you! Of course, I'm just as grateful if you ordered anything through my links during the rest of the year, but I'm trying to go along with the program here. I don't know what I'm doing. It's really hard to make a living on the Web.

It's going to take me longer than eight hours to compile the "Baker's Dozen: Leica Lenses" post, so please look for it tomorrow instead of today. I didn't want to start until I had all the entries in, and they were still arriving as of late last night. 

Next up
To paraphrase Monty Python, and now for something completely noncommercial. For our next Baker's Dozen, we'll be featuring younger photographers. TOP's audience skews old (they have more in common with me—you know, like polymathic sagacity and dashing good looks), but I know you're out there! And I'm sure you more mature photographers know younger ones you can clue in about the call for work.

I was going to ask for only teenagers and kids to submit work, but I decided that would be pushing my luck (extra points if you're still a teenager or younger, though). So we'll arbitrarily set the dividing line at your 30th birthday—if you're 29 or younger* on the deadline, you can submit. The deadline will be Thursday, December 14th.

Regular readers might remember this one by my son Xander (short for Alexander). He's 24, and has been shooting his rock-climbing buddies and other sad and scary things with my old Sony A900. 

The specs are the same—send the picture(s) in an email, saved in sRGB and 800 pixels wide. The subject line must be

bakersdozenyounger

...Just like that, or I won't find your entry when I search for it in the email stack. Tell me your name, where you reside, and any details about the pictures you care to; keep the verbiage shortish if you would be so kind, as I am swamped with words...happily, but still**.

On to "Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses" tomorrow—it is gonna be great.

Mike

ADDENDUM: Peter Marquis-Kyle brought up an interesting wrinkle—this is a call for work from photographers who are young now. But Peter suggested we do a call for pictures people of any age took when they were young. It's a great idea, and I'll do that in the future. But not this time 'round.

*In honor of Jack Weinberg, below, who coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30" during the free speech protests at UC Berkeley***. The phrase, which was picked up by a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and radiated outward from there, "became one of the most memorable expressions of the turbulent 1960s era" according to the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Jack Weinberg. Courtesy Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley Archives.

Jack Weinberg is now 77.

**I know I should take my own advice. I've been writing too "long" lately.

***I hope you noticed that this is an old-guy reference about youth. ("Amused myself, and that's half the battle." —Craig Ferguson)

Original contents copyright 2017 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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It's Today

It's actually Black Friday today. Hard to believe....

Here is our link to B&H Photo's Black Friday deals and

Our link to Amazon's Black Friday deals. Because it's today.

I had a great Thanksgiving yesterday, thanks to Leslie and Kat. (I have to say, I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday.) Use our links and poke around at B&H and Amazon today. But get outside, too. Have a nice one!

Mike

ADDENDUM: Izzy Flamm tells me these are among the most popular deals so far today at B&H Photo:

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV DSLR camera (body only) with Watson battery: final price $3,199; savings $609; free accessories valued at $130.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II DSLR camera (body only) with Watson battery: final price $1,699; savings $509; free accessories valued at $130.90.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II DSLR camera with EF 24–105mm ƒ/4L IS II USM lens and Watson battery: final price $2,599; savings $709; free accessories valued at 130.90.

[Ed. note: I am uncertain as to whether the above deals include the pictured Canon battery grip, and I couldn't get confirmation before B&H closed today. I'll try to get this clarified later. The Nikon links below do include the Nikon battery grip. I assume the Canons do as well but the listings are unclear. P.S. Please do not e-trample other shoppers in the frenzied struggle to claim these deals.]

Nikon D750 DSLR camera with 24–120mm lens with Watson battery and Nikon battery grip: final price $1,996.95; savings $1,429; free accessories worth $119.89.

Nikon D750 DSLR Camera (body only) with Watson battery and Nikon battery grip: final price $1,496.95; savings $829; free accessories worth $119.89.

Apple 15.4" MacBook Pro with touch bar (late 2016, space gray, 2.6 GHz i7, 256GB SSD): final price $1,799; savings $600.

Apple 15.4" MacBook Pro with touch bar: (late 2016, space gray, 2.7 GHz i7, 512GB SSD); final price $2,099; savings $700.

Apple 13.3" MacBook Pro (late 2016, space gray): final price $1,149, savings $350.

Apple 13.3" MacBook Air (mid 2017, silver): final price $849, savings $150.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 SM-N950U 64GB smartphone (unlocked, midnight black): final price $799.95; savings $170.

Moto Z Play XT1635-02 32GB smartphone (unlocked, lunar gray): final price $299; savings $150; free accessories worth $34.95.

Zhiyun-Tech Crane v2 3-axis handheld gimbal stabilizer: final price $479; savings $170.

Original contents copyright 2017 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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