The Online Photographer

Understanding Viewfinders (from the Archives)

[A "reprint" of an article I wrote in the early 2000s for my late friend Michael at The Luminous-Landscape. Actually, based on the illustrations, this might have been published first at Photography in Malaysia. I think it was also published on Photo.net and Steve's Digicams, and perhaps fotopolis.pl (ably translated into Polish by Lukasz Kasperczyk) but I'm no longer sure. Some of the details and products are of course out of date, but much of the gist and pith should still be there.  —Ed.]

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Understanding Viewfinders

By Mike Johnston

The viewfinder is the single most important user interface on any camera. Throughout the history of cameras, the method of aiming the camera accurately and communicating its view to the operator is what has determined and defined most different basic camera types.

Yet the viewfinder is perhaps the single most fudged and botched aspect of today’s 35mm SLRs. With the exception of the Contax Aria of the late ’90s and the more recent Minolta Maxxum 7, virtually all entry-level to mid-range cameras skimp on the viewfinder. The worst offenders are cameras that are meant to be cheap (they have mirror-box prisms) or cameras that are meant to be small (which usually have poorer coverage).

For the Sake of Clarity

To be clear, let’s define a few terms about viewfinders, just in case you’re not entirely up to speed. (And if you aren’t, don’t feel bad. Most people aren’t. Why do you think the manufacturers are able to get away with such blatant skimping? An educated consumer is a dangerous consumer. Oh, did I say “dangerous”? I meant “demanding.” Or maybe “discriminating.” Undesirable, in any event.)

Viewfinder image: this is your view of the world through the camera, the little rectangle with black edges that shows you what part of the world the lens is looking at and whether it’s in focus or not.

A typical viewfinder. (Compliments of Photography in Malaysia)

Magnification: this refers to how big the viewfinder image appears to be in an absolute sense. Like a batting average, it’s usually expressed as some decimal fraction of one. 1X is the size that things appear to be when you look at them with your eye (a.k.a. “the naked eye”). Now, obviously, magnification also changes when you use different lens focal lengths — telephotos make things look bigger, wide-angles make things look smaller. So camera magnification is specified with a 50mm lens. Less often stated is that the lens must be set at infinity, because magnification also changes slightly depending on how close or far you focus the lens.

Let’s say a camera’s magnification is .75X. What this means is that your camera, with a 50mm lens on it, set at infinity, makes things appear to be three-quarters the size they look to be with your naked eye. .5X means half as big; .9X means nine-tenths as big. Better cameras have higher magnification. .88X is better than .67X. You’re getting this.

I hope it stands to reason that magnification also determines the apparent relative size of the viewfinder image rectangle. I once tried an interesting little experiment — with identical 50mm lenses on both, I held a Pentax ME Super (high magnification) to one eye and a Pentax ZX-5n (low magnification) to the other. The ZX-5n’s viewfinder image fit inside the ME Super’s with lots of room to spare.

Coverage: this compares what you can see in the viewfinder with what will be recorded on the film. It’s reported as a percentage. If you can see through the viewfinder half of what will be on the negative, that would be 50% coverage.

To further confound matters, coverage is sometimes reported as a linear measure and sometimes as an area measure. To simplify this, imagine a big square drawn on graph paper that has ten little squares per side. The linear measure is 10 x 10 little squares, and the area measure is 100 little squares. Now imagine that we’re going to draw a slightly smaller square inside the big one that’s smaller by one little square on each side. That square has eight little squares on each side. The linear coverage of the inside square is 80% of the larger one (8 instead of 10); the area coverage is 64% (8 x 8 instead of 10 x 10). You can see from this that when one camera manufacturer reports that its viewfinder has 92% coverage and another reports 95% coverage, you still can’t quite be sure how they compare, because one might be reporting linear coverage and the other area coverage. (And an educated consumer is a….)

Now, if you were no expert and just taking a stab at this, you’d probably guess that you would want to see in the viewfinder all of the picture you’re about to take. It stands to reason you don’t want to see half of it, or a tenth of it, so why wouldn’t you just want to see all of it? As with many things, however, it turns out that the uncomplicated answer is not the correct one. More about this later.

This diagram shows the light path in a typical 35mm SLR (Compliments of Photography in Malaysia)

Eyepiece: If you stick your finger out and touch the place you look into to see through the camera, you’re touching the eyepiece — it’s the little window on the back of the camera you put your eye up to. Add-on (as opposed to built-in) diopter correction lenses are usually incorporated into the eyepiece.

Eyepoint, also called eye relief: this refers to how far away from the eyepiece you can have your eye and still see the entire viewfinder image. Obviously, if you hold an SLR six inches from your face and look at the eyepiece, you can still see a portion of the image the camera is seeing. But you can only see a small portion of it, not the whole image out to the edges. As you move your eye in closer and closer, you see more and more of the viewfinder image, until you can see the whole thing at once. Eyepoint, usually specified in millimeters, is how close you need to get to see the whole viewfinder frame. “High eyepoint,” a term coined and popularized by Nikon, means you can hold you eye fairly far away from the eyepiece and still see the viewfinder. It’s useful for people who wear eyeglasses, since eyeglasses create a physical barrier between your eye and the eyepiece that keeps them a certain distance apart.

Prism: This is big funny-shaped (pentagonal) chunk of glass that forms the big “lump” at the top of an SLR and that “rectifies” the lens image — that makes it look right-side-up and right-way-round when you look through the eyepiece. This is usually a beautifully crafted piece of fine optical glass with silvered surfaces. Sometimes, to save weight, SLR makers use a hollow box made of inward-facing mirrored surfaces, called, appropriately enough, a mirror box (or a “roof mirror pentaprism” or various smokescreen proprietary names that not-so-helpfully obscure from the consumer what’s really going on).

Viewing screen, or just “screen”: This is the piece of plastic between an SLR’s mirror-box and prism, on which the lens’s aerial image is cast. Also sometimes referred to as ground glass, since that’s what screens used to be made of (and still are, on some view cameras). Think of a slide projector. When the projected image is in the air, you can’t see it; but when it hits the projection screen and reflects back at you, then you can see it. If the slide projection screen were semi-transparent, then you could get behind it instead of in front of it and still see the image through it. This is what a camera’s viewing screen does. The viewing screen is where the camera maker puts things like focusing aids (split-image circles and microprism collars, if you’re old enough to remember such things), grid lines, and the little marks that show you what the camera is autofocusing on. Better cameras may have “interchangeable screens,” meaning that you can take out the one with the split-image circle on it and put in one that has grid-lines on it, or whatever.

A cutaway view of the familiar 35mm SLR viewing system. You can clearly see the lens, the mirror, and the glass pentaprism. The screen is the flat piece just above the mirror; the eyepiece is the bit furthest to the right, where your eye peers into the whole thing.

Brightness: this should be self-evident. It refers to how bright or dim the viewing screen is. This isn’t measured, at least in camera tests, but rather reported subjectively: “the view screen was admirably bright,” “The screen was as dark as a cave,” etc.

Focusing “snap”, a.k.a. ground-glass coarseness: this not only can’t be measured objectively, it’s also usually not remarked upon in camera tests. Rather, it’s assumed that the brighter the screen is, the easier it is to focus. This is sometimes, but not always, true. More about this later.

Diopter correction: This changes the diopter of the viewing system, same way eyeglasses change the correction of the lens in your eye. The virtual image of the information displays in the viewfinder is about a yard away from your eye, so the diopter correction your eye needs to see an object clearly at about three feet is the same correction you need to see the camera viewfinder image clearly. Diopters can be in the eyepiece and screw or snap or slide on, or, in the better cameras, they can be built-in. Some manufacturers provide a combination of the two for greater effective range. Most viewfinders have a standard correction of -1, and should have correction available from at least -2 to +1. If you’re in doubt about what diopter you need, go to an expert — your optometrist — and ask!

Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum

Now, if you are a Good Amurricun, you are saying: give me everything. I want it all. I want an optical glass viewfinder with 1X magnification and 100% coverage that is as bright as life and easy to focus manually, that I can see with my eye an inch away from the eyepiece.

Oh, but you cannot have it all, friend. For two reasons. First of all, it turns out that some of these design parameters fight each other from an engineering standpoint. Secondly, if you are an average Amurricun, you want it all without having to pay for it. No such luck. Good viewfinders are e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e.

Roughly speaking, there is a trade-off between magnification and coverage. The higher the coverage, the lower the magnification. Ironically, magnification for 100% finders has to be made lower so that viewfinder information displays can fit in the finder and be within the user’s field of view. That’s why all the top pro SLRs have 100% coverage but only so-so magnification.

If you’ve been following along here, you’ve probably already realized that lower-magnification viewfinders, since they’re smaller, are going to easier to see with your eye further away from the eyepiece — i.e., higher eyepoint. So magnification and eye relief also oppose each other to some extent.

Similarly, “focusing snap” and viewfinder brightness don’t exactly go hand in hand. The super-bright screens are essentially bundles of very small fiberoptic cables, sliced crosswise, or miniature fresnel (flattened) simple lenses. While they transmit a ton of light, they can be very difficult to focus on. Everything looks pretty sharp; it’s not very obvious what’s in focus and what’s not. (The effect is worse with wide-angle lenses, which have more depth-of-field.) Old-fashioned ground-glass screens had better focusing snap the coarser the grind (surface texture) was. But, the coarser the surface, the dimmer the finder.

One reason bright screens are so widely used today is that many SLRs are now autofocus, and focus isn’t dependent on your eye, so focusing snap no longer matters. If you want to see what a really bright viewfinder looks like, take a gander through Minolta’s Maxxum 7 next time you’re in a camera store. It’s an example of a finder with very good brightness, but it doesn’t have very good focusing snap. The Maxxum 7’s magnification is excellent as well, at least by AF-camera standards. Although manual focusing with this finder may be tough, it’s an incredibly bright, contrasty, crisp and clean AF viewfinder. Frankly, compared to most cameras these days, the Maxxum 7 is a pleasure to shoot with because it’s such a pleasure to look at the world through. But I digress.

Examples

Here are some of the specs of some of the viewfinders being offered today in top-of-the-line cameras, and a few others thrown in for the sake of illustration. All of these except the N55 are glass-prism viewfinders. Specs are listed in this order: magnification, coverage, built-in diopter correction range, and eyepoint.

Minolta Maxxum 9:
.73X, 100%, -3 to +1, high-eyepoint (22mm)

Contax RTSIII:
.74X, 100%, -3 to +1, high-eyepoint (not specified)

Contax Aria:
.82X, 95%, none built-in, high-eyepoint (25mm)

Leica R9:
.75X, 96% vertical, 97% horizontal, high-eyepoint (not specified)

Canon EOS-1V:
.72X, 100%, -3 to +1, high-eyepoint (20mm)

Nikon F5:
.75X, 100%, built-in but not specified on website, high-eyepoint (20.5mm)

Pentax MZ-S:
.75X, 92%, -2.5 to +1.5, not high-eyepoint

Here’s an example of typical entry-level SLR viewfinder specs:

Nikon N55 (mirror-box prism, not optical glass):
.6X to .68X*, 89%, built-in but not specified on website, eyepoint 17mm

*Note: I’m afraid I have no idea what this could mean. I’ve never seen magnification given as a range before.

Finally, here’s an example of a great viewfinder from days gone by:

Olympus OM-4T:
0.84X, 97%, -3 to +1 (built-in), eyepoint not known.

Now take a look for a moment at the comparative specs for the two Contaxes, the RTSIII and Aria. Contax gives its users the best of both worlds: those who want 100% coverage can choose the RTSIII. With the Aria, which, like most Contaxes, has a particularly excellent viewfinder, the coverage goes down slightly to 95% (still very good), but the magnification goes up, to .82X. This, plus the Aria’s excellent “focusing snap,” makes manual focusing easy. Combined with the Aria’s outstanding eye relief (more than one inch, better than both the Nikon F5 and Canon EOS-1V!), it makes for a very good viewfinder indeed.

The Nikon N55, on the other hand, is an entry-level camera that exemplifies the poor viewfinders typical of today’s entry-level breed. (Of course it’s better than what it competes with: point-and-shoots, most of which have even worse finders.) The N55 has what one photographer referred to as a “Lincoln Tunnel” finder — meaning, it looks small and far away. You can’t see to focus manually. It doesn’t show you everything that will be on your negatives. It’s a pointing device. It sucks.

Dirty Little Secrets

Viewfinder coverage (see definition above) is perhaps the dirty little secret of today’s SLRs. The Nikon N55 is typical — it shows you, in the viewfinder, less than 90% of what you’re going to get on your film. Of course, this generally works out fine, because most people who use entry-level SLRs also use drugstore and supermarket film processing — which actually use less than 90% of the negative to make enlargements with!

This highly approximate system is self-correcting. It hides slop in many different places. First of all, since consumers never see the edges of the pictures recorded on the negative, they’ll never know that their consumer-grade lenses aren’t very good at the edges and corners. Since the camera’s viewfinder doesn’t begin to cover the whole area seen by the negative, it doesn’t matter if maybe the viewfinder image isn’t centered properly. Since the photofinisher is cutting off the edges of the pictures in enlarging, it doesn’t matter if his equipment is registered well, either. Finally, it covers slop in the actual picture-taking — because perhaps the most common failure of tyro shooters is that they don’t get close enough or frame tight enough. So, your camera and your processor “zoom in” a bit on your behalf. Everybody goes away happy.

Of course, all this has some disadvantages, too. It makes your lenses longer than they really are. Paid extra for a zoom that goes to 28mm on the wide end, did you? Thought you were shooting at 28mm? Not really — your photofinisher, like your viewfinder, has cropped it down to the angle of view of a 35mm lens. Thought you were using all the negative area available to you for the best quality enlargements? Think again — you’re using a patch out of the middle of your 35mm neg that’s barely bigger than APS size. And of course, precise framing is pretty much out of the question. Plunk your subjects in the middle of the frame like most rank snap shooters, and you probably won’t mind. Otherwise, you’ll mind.

One might reasonably ask, what’s the point of using an SLR at all if you still can’t see what the lens sees?

Ignorance Ain’t Bliss!

The main reason coverage is a dirty secret is that this is one camera specification that ordinary consumers simply aren’t aware of. One industry insider let it slip to me that most camera purchasers aren’t aware that their cheap SLRs have poor viewfinders simply because most camera purchasers have never seen a good one! Yeow.

One of the delightful little lies the industry just loves to tell is that “amateur cameras have 93% finders to correspond to the image area of a mounted slide.” I love this one. It makes perfect sense — until you stop to realize two inconvenient little facts. Fact one, less than 3% of film sold in North America is slide film. Fact two, if this is such an advantage, then why do all the top pro cameras have 100% finders — especially since pros are the ones who shoot the most slide film?

The whole situation, when you think about it, is ironic. As more and more people buy cameras by the spec sheet, features and specifications have become more and more important, and manufacturers have loaded down their cameras with features to try to make them sell. Yet when it comes to the most important interface on the camera, most consumers are still ignorant of what the specifications mean — with the predictable result that most cameras have considerably poorer viewfinders now than average SLRs had twenty-five years ago.

Recommendations

So let’s say you want to be an educated consumer when it comes to viewfinders, and try to pick through the consumer nightmare? (Oops, did I say “nightmare”? I meant “minefield.” Oh, no, I meant “wealth of choices.” That’s it.) What should you look for?

— Try to buy a camera with at least a 95% viewfinder. Even this modest standard is tough to meet these days, but they’re out there. 97% or 98% is better, but good luck.

— Don’t accept less than .8X magnification unless the coverage is higher than 95%. Never accept less than .7X in any case — and accept less than .75X only if you’re getting 100% coverage in return.

— See if you can find out what the eye relief is, in millimeters. If it’s less than about 15mm, pass.

— If you want to manually focus, make sure you can easily see what’s in focus and what’s not. Crank the focus back and forth — is it clear when an object is in focus and when it isn’t? This isn’t important if it’s an AF camera and you expect to use AF all the time.

— Look at the brightness and the contrast of the viewfinder image. Do you like it? Is it comfortable to look at? Is it uncluttered, so you can concentrate on what you’re looking at? Is the information provided likely to be helpful, or just distracting? (How anybody takes a decent picture with an EOS 3 is beyond me. I’d just sit there staring at the gee-whiz light show display in the finder all the time. As moronic features go, viewfinder features that directly obscure what you’re photographing are right up there.)

— Do some quick comparisons. Ask to see a top model of camera, switch the lens you’ve been trying out to the better camera, and compare. Can you see more from edge to edge? Is the image a lot brighter, and yet also more contrasty? Use the Contax Aria as a standard for focusing snap, the Minolta Maxxum 7 as a standard for AF finder brightness and contrast, and older manual cameras such as the Pentax ME-Super or MX as comparison standards for high magnification. Remember to compare the cameras with lenses of the same focal length on them. And don’t be dissuaded if the counterman or -woman doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Like consumers, some of them have never paid attention to viewfinders before. Persevere!

— Finally, don’t be afraid to make a personal, subjective appraisal. Remember, the viewfinder is the single most important user interface on the camera. The user is you; the viewfinder is what you must use to connect your subject with your photograph. If you enjoy looking at the world through the camera, you’ll very likely take more, and better, pictures. The viewfinder is important. You’re justified in treating it as such.

The manufacturers would just as soon keep you in the dark about the differences between good and bad viewfinders. But you can’t shoot well if you can’t see what you’re shooting, or if your camera is only giving you an approximate idea what you’ll get on film. Know your viewfinder!

— Mike Johnston

Mike Johnston graduated in 1985 from the Photography Department of the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., where his photographic mentor was the late Steven Lee Szabo. Initially a photo teacher who taught at all levels, from children to the elderly, he worked as a professional photographer for seven years in Washington as a member of the Paul Kennedy Studio. In photo magazines he was East Coast Editor of Camera & Darkroom magazine and later Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques magazine. He wrote more than 250 regular columns (published variously in five different languages) for a number of publications and websites including the British Black & White Photography magazine and the late Michael Reichmann’s The Luminous-Landscape website. He now writes, edits, and maintains The Online Photographer website.

Book o' the Week

Annie Leibovitz. At long last, the unlimited trade edition of the humongous, limited Sumo edition by Taschen. Mind you, it's still a huge book—15.4 inches high, 556 pages, and almost 13 pounds. And the price! (But that's nothing—the Sumo weighed 57 pounds and cost $7,500.) This is the closest ordinary folks (with ordinary shelves) will get to the ultimate Annie. It will be released on Friday, and can be pre-ordered now.

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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

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

Stephen S.: "Magnification of the N55 viewfinder is given as a range because it changes with the diopter adjustment.

"Fun fact: the Olympus OM-1 viewfinder with 97% coverage and the Olympus OM-10 viewfinder with 93% coverage use the exact same pentaprism, but the OM-10 uses a black mask that covers more of the edges. This allows factory workers to be a bit sloppy when installing the prism—it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned, saving them time, and therefore money.

"Sony did the same thing years later, going from the 100% coverage A900 to the cheaper A850 with 98% coverage. Sometimes the cheaper camera cuts corners in assembly precision, not in the physical design of components."

Mike replies: Arthur Kramer, lens guru of the old Modern Photography magazine, used to say (back in the '70s) that the reason Leica lenses cost more was because they threw more of them away. That is, their standards for being in specification were higher than others'.

Bob Johnston [no relation —Ed.]: "I had a look at the Fuji XH-2S. The one thing that impressed me was the viewfinder. I have yet to read any review which mentions it apart from quoting the spec. Only focus tracking, video etc.—yawn. Well, at least Fuji put one thing into their camera that might appeal to a photographer!"

David Mantripp: "I have a strong impression that it was the original publication of this article which turned me on to the importance of a good viewfinder, which has been a major factor for me in choosing cameras ever since. It may also have been responsible for my never-fulfilled desire for a Dynax 7 (as well call them here). Probably the best viewfinder I’ve ever used is that from the Linhof 612, but the VF was about the only good thing about that camera. Anyway thanks for the trip down Nostalgia Avenue. None of us is getting any younger…."

Friday's Journey Through the Past

Double entendre here. Not only are we visiting a long-ago post from August 2009, but the post itself is a reminiscence, about the first "good" camera I ever used. It was long ago in my life, but the camera, a Zeiss, was old even then.

"The 'Use Me' Appeal of Cameras," it's called.

Sadly, that Zeiss was stolen, as the post will relate, although it was entirely my fault. I still dream of losing cameras, to this day. I wonder, do thieves still steal cameras? I don't think they're popular targets like they once were, but I don't know, not being a thief.

Mike

(TOP doesn't post on Saturdays any more—even famous bloggers have to do housework—but Mike will return on Sunday with exotic tales of his time off.)

Thursday's Journey Through the Past

I always think I have to link to long posts. But here's a short one.

"Oil Shots," from April of 2008.

I haven't done this in a month of Sundays. That's a pity. It just means I don't put myself in shooting situations very often any more.

My father used to call these "B-clicks," because he didn't like to waste film on them. He'd set his mechanical Konicas on "B" and pretend to take pictures with no film in the camera. But that made me antsy; I was too superstitious. I was convinced I'd see a fantastic picture go by and I wouldn't have gotten it. Fate is a trickster in my world.

But however you do it, it works. You get into the flow and after a while you don't feel self-conscious or shy any more. You're just "in it." It's a nice feeling.

Mike

(Mike is on vacation this week. But the week is almost over.)

Wednesday Journey Through the Past

Today, we delve into a curious area...commentary on the vast number of photographs taken of the same thing:

"'Most Tourists Take Pictures from the Same Spot,'" from February 2011.

These composite pictures are intellectually but not visually interesting. They meld together hundreds of publicly-available photographs of standard scenes taken from more or less the same place. It's curious too that we (Ctein too) immediately got into the issue of copyright...because of course we identify with the photographers whose photographs have been used without their knowledge. Of course, no one could prove that their picture was one of the ones used in the composites. How would you possibly know?

Then again, if you release a photo into the world, you never know what's going to happen to it—I miss the stories from that era of photographs posted online showing up in weird places, do you remember that? It was sort of a low-level meme at the time. Like Justin Watt's Incredible Encounter, which I also posted about that same month and year. The weird thing about that one was not so much that his photo was used, although that's pretty unlikely, but that he encountered and identified it.

Mike

(Mike is on hiatus this week. One reader said, "one week is not enough," but I'm not sure I've taken more than a week off since George W. Bush was President. Comes with the territory.)

Tuesday's Journey Through the Past

Cameras! Cameras! Cameras! I thought you could do with a memento mori of the vanished past. Most old reviews hold little interest for the present, but this is the no. 1 most-viewed post in TOP's storied history:

"Sony vs. Nikon vs. Canon," from December 2008.

It received a whopping 73,000 pageviews, the all-time one-day record for TOP. I have no way of guessing how many people came to look at it after the day it was published—or in subsequent days—but traffic was stout the day after, too. Blogs are not as popular now—videos have taken over. Cameras are not as popular now either, come to think. And of course the cameras in this post are historical as well...although you may recall one or the other of them fondly. Digital cameras were a "frontier market" then, wild and woolly as they say, and DSLRs were coming into their own at the time. Everyone and his uncle—and his brother, and his uncle's brother and his brother's uncle—wanted to know what to buy. Those were the days?

I rather think these are the days, but you know what I mean.

Mike

(Mike is on holiday, like Monsieur Hulot. He will return anon, refreshed and revived. I hope I am keeping up with the comments, but, as I write this on Friday, present me cannot know what future me is doing.)

Monday's Journey Through the Past

Mike has skulked off on holiday, as our British friends call it. It being Summer and all. But a long-forgotten post has turned up when you least expected it:

"The Case of the Purloined Prints" by Jim Hughes, January 2014

In which a puzzling mystery is described. But not solved; because that's the way life is sometimes—although it would never do for fiction, which truth is stranger than. On the other hand, all's well or well enough in the end, as you shall see.

Mike

(Mike is on vacation this week, recreating. Seeing his son and sundry others. Comments may be left, and that's all right.)

Sunday's Journey Through the Past

While Yr. Hmbl. Ed. has stolen away for vacation, hoping no one will notice, a post from days of Yore has bubbled to the fore:

"Qualities and Properties" from September 2007

The post is about two things we don't really think about any more: noise, and printers—but it makes some interesting points along the way. The crux to me is in the two paragraphs above the subhead "A book about food." Unlike some other frequent commenters from that era, Robert Roaldi is still around here.

I wish I was paying more attention to what we were paying attention to in 1994–2015 or so. It would be nice to have a clearer map about what we cared about and when. I really don't think very many people care much about noise any more...it's completely demystified now. We don't see much of it, and we know exactly what to do about when we do see it. But it was a big deal back then.

Mike

(Mike is on vacation this week. He will be still be posting comments—but not Featured ones, as that is too similar to work, which is what he is trying to avoid.)

Eschew Cliché

The urge to make clichés stems from a desire to make pictures that look like everybody else's pictures. Why would anybody want to do this? Personally I think it's because it relieves us from having to rely only on our own judgment when evaluating what we've done. Photographers, far more than other kinds of artists, are perpetually insecure about whether what they've done is going to be accepted as good. I also think photographers like clichés because, at an early stage of our development, it's a way of demonstrating competence and accomplishment. You can tell you're in this stage because the phrases "that looks like a professional took it!" and "it looks like a postcard!" are construed as compliments, and make us swell up with pride. (Later, of course, those kinds of comments become insults.)

So what's a photographic cliché? As with pornography, you're supposed to know it when you see it. I suppose we might define it as "conventional subjects shown in a conventional way." That this leaves each of us to define "conventional" for ourselves is probably a good thing.

Conventions, of course, change. In the style known as "pictorialism"—largely defined through the journal Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz, who later grew bored by it—it was conventional, for some reason I never understood, to include a large glass globe in many pictures (guild secret? Masonic talisman? Esoteric symbology? Beats me). During the Eisenhower years, it was conventional that pictures be robust, cheerful, forward-looking, even heroic (which fortunately didn't hamper the ebullient Eisie, one of the great photographers of those days). Lately, convention can be found on tony art-gallery walls, where "photographers" no other photographers have heard of display fey, fatuous, flat, fuzzy, foreboding photos of nothing, interchangeably.

If you're smiling at that, don't get cocky. Amateurs are even worse. What informs the taste of amateurs who pursue clichés is their idea of the taste of others. Not the actual taste of others, mind you, but just the photographer's best attempts at second-guessing.

Be confident, baby
That's no way to live. As with many things, photography is often about self-confidence. The point is not so much to learn what other people like—that's ultimately a fool's errand—but to learn what you like. Only by identifying your own concerns and becoming comfortable with your own taste will you stand a chance of developing an organic style, or signature, or way of seeing, that is neither imitative ("designed to be like something else, but usually inferior to the original") or derivative.

Photo by Lee Friedlander

I think this is why rebellious and nonconformist teenagers often make the best photography students. They don't want to conform. They don't work to please.

We each are stuck with using our own taste as the foundation for what's good or bad, because the taste of others is so varied and unpredictable. If I found one person who loved one particular picture of yours and and gushed about it on and on, praising it to the skies, and another person who hated it and pronounced it worthless, what would that teach you? If you learn your own taste and cultivate self-confidence, you can be secure in the face of either reaction.

When you know with a quiet but solid confidence that you truly like one of your pictures and you're not shaken in the least when someone says, "What the hell is the point of that?" or "I hate that!," you're there.

Go for it. Dare to be different; be yourself. Eschew cliché.

-

A version of this post was first published in 2003! (Jeez. Time flies.) I found it when I was poking around in the archives for the previous post. In the meantime, I found this. It's a page from a 1937 issue of U.S. Camera. Pretty funny that it starts with the same mysterious glass globes I mentioned. Notice which of M.F. Agha's clichés are no longer popular or would be politically incorrect today.

Wikipedia says Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha was a "Russian-born Turkish designer, art director, and pioneer of modern American publishing" who was "instrumental in...delivering the full force of European avant garde experimentation to the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden, the Condé Nast publishing company's flagship magazines in the United States."

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

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

Roger Bradbury: "Typical subjects at the first camera club I joined, over 40 years ago: 1.) Windmills. 2.) Sunsets. 3.) Swans. 4.) Any combination of the above. So when I entered an almost abstract photo of a top corner of my bedroom, with two different coloured walls, the top of a coloured door and frame and a white triangle of ceiling, I was laughed at. I grew disillusioned with the club from that point. At least I'd tried something different. But I do remember it. Not that I'm still holding a grudge or anything....  :-)  "

Kenneth Tanaka: "I agree with your general suggestion to strive to make distinctive images. But I’d prefer to place emphasis on what to do, rather than to avoid clichés (which have a habit of changing over time anyway).

"Re 'The urge to make clichés stems from a desire to make pictures that look like everybody else's pictures.' No, I don’t agree. Or at least I don’t feel that the sentence accurately covers the observation. Photography is fundamentally a craft. Technology has automated most of its ickiest aspects, but it still requires learnin’. 'Making pictures that look like' pictures that you admire is a landmark in that process for many, perhaps most, people. So I’d encourage newbies to make many such pictures and study them, whether the person is 17 or 75. Once you’re able to intentionally make that trite image of the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge you’ve achieved competence with the gadget. Now for the fun part.

"Which leads to understanding why people make photos at all. Generally not for art. Not for recognition. And generally not for compensation. They make pictures to commemorate and, increasingly, to communicate. So as soon as someone mastered the basics or controlling their camera I would encourage them to concentrate of using it to communicate. Don’t be self-conscious about being cliché. Forget silly amateur photo 'composition' rules (that weren’t made for photography or art or the 20th or 21st centuries at all). Pay attention to what you’re putting in that frame, and where you’re putting it. Everything in the frame matters. Forget 'pretty.' Does it communicate what you want to say or depict? Does it record what you want to remember in, say, years to come? That’s the main purpose for using a camera for most of us.

"If some of your photos turn out to look very similar to many others you’ve seen…so what? As long as you created the image purposefully, who really gives a damn?"

Mike replies: I like your comments, as usual, and would only suggest that our differences hinge on one thing: you're considering "eschew cliché" as it represents a restriction, a limitation, a rule that one has to abide by; whereas, when I wrote that piece, I considered it might be a liberation, which might be freeing for some people. It's been my observation that people really do have a tendency to restrict their picture-taking to subjects that they've already seen as pictures by others.

Brian Cormack: "When I was in high school back in the 1990s, the school had a literary magazine that also included photography. My junior year I submitted a few pictures taken around town, including a few at the biggest tourist attraction here (called 'The Old Mill'). I joined the staff of the literary magazine my senior year and was surprised to see that the advisor adamantly refused to ever print any pictures of The Old Mill, since they received so many submissions of it every year. They even had a wall of photos in the office filled with all the pictures of the Mill that had been submitted over the years. I looked closely and found the one I had submitted the year before. I think about that every time I go out to that Mill to take pictures. It is a photogenic little spot, at least!"

Mike replies: That's great. The editor might have suggested an "Old Mill Issue," jam-packed with nothing but pictures of the Old Mill. Just as a joke. She could have included an open invitation to submit more pictures of the Old Mill for the next Old Mill Issue, which would be announced as being definitely scheduled for, say, a date 30 years in the future.  :-)

My predecessor at the magazine I edited hated pictures of kids, and refused to print pictures of children unless he couldn't help it.

Ten Years Ago!

A post we published ten years ago yesterday:

Fuji Goes on the Attack

Shigetaka Komori, Fuji CEO, has announced that Fuji will enter the mirrorless interchangeable-lens market by next Spring (2012) with a line of products that will share the "Fujifilm X" nomenclature with its recent fixed-lens cameras the X100 and X10.

Komori-san says that the sensor quality of Fujifilm X mirrorless will exceed that of current full-frame sensors, although its sensor size will likely be smaller than 24x36mm. The claim reminded me of something...I have a hazy memory of someone with knowledge of the industry telling me long ago that an official of Canon said that Fuji is the only company Canon is scared of—not Panasonic, not Sony, not Nikon—because of Fuji's expertise with sensors. (I might not have that right, so please don't quote me.)

Fuji also confirmed that demand for the X100 has far exceeded expectations. More than 70,000 have sold in six months, and the total is expected to top 100,000 by year's end.

Note: About that anecdote, I did have it right. I was being circumspect because the source had given me permission to quote him but asked me to please camouflage his identity as best I could. He has since passed away, but I'll leave it alone.

Shigetaka Komori retired at CEO of Fuji last Summer. He certainly presided over a wonderful renaissance at that company.

Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs.

Mike

(Thanks to Lex Stewart and Richard Man for corrections)

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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

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

Albert Smith: "Well, I was one of the 70,000 that bought the original X100, literally the day it hit the shelf of my local camera store (now, sadly, gone). The images of that Leica look alike in the many photo magazines (now sadly gone too) had me salivating after jumping to digital and relegating my M6 to a shelf. I'm glad that I allowed Fujifilm some growing pains because if that original X100 were my impression of the brand, it would have been my last Fuji. They certainly have evolved, and today a Fuji camera is in my hand 99% of the time. It's great to see a mission statement actually be realized also to the letter."

Zave Shapiro: "I'm old enough to remember when people who sold things were familiar with products, their own and competitors. Today we have product managers who claim expertise in 'marketing' and 'product positioning.' I remember fondly when I was offered Good, Better, Best rather than today's 'I can sell you features. How much money do you have?' I just bought a new car so I'm disgusted, of course. The great thing about phone cameras is the return to Good, Better, Best. If Fuji, CaNyKon, etc can hang on I'm sure the MBAs will foul up the phones. We'll have seven Apple phones within $22 all distinguished by feature set (software), and the customers will need classes."

How Should You Frame a Photograph? (Thursday)

This week I've been featuring some older posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These have appeared at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning.

We covered the titular topic in 2013 with three articles, which you can access with this one link and a little cleverness. Following the theme of the week just passed, the post contains a shot of two—well, one and a half—of my own pictures, medium format darkroom prints in this case.

By the way, I think the critics are actually right...I don't publish very many of my own pictures. As I went looking for them, they seemed to be hiding. Here's one more for good measure.

I'll be back soon. Thanks for being patient.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

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Old Snapshot (Wednesday)

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is on a break this week, so I thought we'd post some "oldies" that you might not have seen before. This week I'll feature posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These will appear at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning. Hope it tides you over adequately! (But I also hope you miss the real me, at least a little.)

One thing we sometimes hear on the internet is that our taste has simply been informed by what we're used to. I want to give myself more credit than that of course, but I can't actually argue with it too much. Here's a case in point, where I processed a digital picture and didn't realize until I was three-quarters through that I was making it look like an old Kodacolor snapshot printed by the local pharmacy.

I have a favor to ask: Since I'll be moderating comments on my phone, would you please help me out by making comments brief and not including any links? Just for a short time. Thanks much. I'll be back at the end of this week.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

The link above is a portal to Amazon. TOP is also affiliated with:

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

( No "Featured Comments" this week. To see all the comments, please click on the "Comments" link below.)

How to Read a Photographic Book

[Note: Mike J. recently had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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I fell into a habit many years ago that I think has served me especially well. Like the importance of a print-viewing area where you can comfortably display workprints to look at in a leisurely fashion, it's one of those major secrets that hides in plain sight—something many people might do as a matter of course but very few actually do.

What is it? Simply a method of paying attention to books of photographs. A quality and a level of attention similar to what you might devote to reading a printed book of text.

What problem does it solve? A big one, actually. It's called "closure." Closure is what happens when you're having a conversation with another person and you decide you understand what they're saying, so you stop listening and start thinking about what you're going to say. More generally, closure is what happens when you think you understand something well enough, and don't think you need to understand it any better—so you stop trying. You close down.

Unfortunately, photographs are among the things we reach closure on the fastest of anything. We primates are visually-dominant in terms of the sense we favor, and these days we're utterly bombarded with images—on some television commercials (adverts, for your Brits), the bombardment can come at the rate of five per second. Advertising photographs, which are often designed to be slick but simplistic—the better to be immediately appealing—are designed to be "gotten" quickly and easily. And of course many images don't deserve extended attention. All of this conspires to encourage our habits of early, often instant, closure. Like it or not, we can hardly help approaching pictures that way: scanning, appraising, closing down, moving on. We spend all day dismissing things.

Here's how I reverse that. When you get a monograph (a book primarily of plates—i.e., of pictures) that you want to "read"—that you really want to digest—first, page through it as you normally might. On that run-through, note where the bits to read are located. Then read whatever those things are—the essay, a preface, an afterward, whatever.

Then wait.

Wait a few hours until that evening, or wait a day or two. Set aside some time. Make sure you're feeling relaxed, rested, and that you're in a comfortable chair, in a place with decent lighting. Try to see that you won't be disturbed. Put music on if you want to, or not if you don't. And get an egg timer.

Right, an egg timer. Something that counts off three minutes. (Preferably one that doesn't make any distracting noise, although a low reminder at the end of the three minutes might help.) Five minutes works too. What you do is to use the egg timer to help you spend time looking at each picture (or "spread" of two pages). During that time, let your eyes stay on the picture. Your mind can wander if you want, but keep looking at the picture. After the time is up, turn the page.

Keep at this just as you'd read a novel—for as long as you want to, or until you get tired of it. If you haven't "finished" the book, mark your place and come back to it later, and resume where you left off. After you've "read" a book like this, try coming back to it later, after a few days or a week or two, and either page through it again slowly or "read" it again.

While you're "reading" the book, don't think you need to be formulating language about it, or thinking large, "front-brain" thoughts. The eye and the brain are constantly working together to dismiss images—glancing, gathering in the gist, registering the information, appraising, moving on. Just keep your eyes on the pictures. Let your mind go wherever it wants to. Looking is enough.

And look at all the pictures. Don't be judgmental. Part of what the exercise does is to relieve you of your appraising, judgmental mode of approach—gets you over the idea of "I like this one, I'll linger here—nope, don't care for this, move on, move on!" If the photographer liked the picture well enough to put it in her book, maybe you should just take it in like all the rest of them.

If you'll just try this with one or two books, I think you'll be surprised how well it works. All it does it to enforce a different "pace" with images than the one you're used to all day every day. It just slows you down and lets you notice more. I find it helps me to "get" what photographers are up to in their work.

I'll bet it can open your eyes, too.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2007

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

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Past Blasts: Leicabashing

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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I don't like bashing. Meaning, reflexive, unreflective comments against groups of people—whether it's people who dress a certain way, women, people with non-majority sexual preferences, racial or ethnic groups, rednecks, professions (lawyer jokes, anyone?), or whatever...the list goes on.

Bashing is often a habit, done without thinking. America-bashing is a leitmotif that crops up sometimes. I'm the first to admit that there's a lot wrong with America, but that's no excuse for implying that all the ignorance, evil, cupidity, and cant in the world starts and ends here.

Everyone's a bigot about something.

One thing you'll almost never see here (because I stomp the embers before they burst into flames) is Leica-bashing, which is so reflexive in some quarters it should be made into one word: Leicabashing. There's at least one forum-which-must-not-be-named where, apparently, learning Leicabashing clichés is one of the entry requirements.

There's one hoary old cliché I particularly dislike. If you think about it, saying that only rich dentists buy Leicas is offensive to three different groups: photographers who use Leicas (by implying that their tool of choice is just a pretentious bauble); the people at Leica (for implying that they're just producing Veblen goods for the carriage trade and don't care about photography); and rich dentists (for implying that they can't be as serious about their photography as anyone else).

If you're in the habit of bashing something, take a moment the next time you're feeling thoughtful and consider moderating your habit. And that's the nicest way I can think of to say that. Because of course I wouldn't want to be seen bashing...bashers. (Ahem.)

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2014

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

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Past Blasts: The Legendary 1839 Susse Frères

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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[Originally posted May 2, 2007:] On Saturday, May 26th, the Vienna auction house WestLicht will auction what will very likely become the world's most valuable camera. For most of photography's history, the oldest commercially produced cameras were thought to be those manufactured by Daguerre's brother-in-law Alphonse Giroux, of which some ten survive. But behind the Giroux was a mystery: it was known that a sliding-box Daguerreotype camera had been advertised by a Paris firm called Susse Frères a mere ten days before the first announcement of the Giroux. No examples were known, and for many years it was doubted that any had ever existed.

Until, that is, one turned up recently in Germany. The camera to be auctioned by WestLicht is essentially an "attic find." "It was originally owned by Prof. Max Seddig (1877–1963)," reads the auction description, "who was the director of the Institute of Applied Physics in Frankfurt am Main and, among other things, godfather to the founding of the Josef Schneider Optical Works in Kreuznach. Seddig gave the camera to his assistant, Günter Haase, as a present. The latter was later Professor at the Department of Scientific Photography at the University of Frankfurt and, from 1970 on, occupied the Chair for Scientific Photography at the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Günter Haase died on February 20th 2006 at the age of 88 and left the camera to his son, Prof. Wolfgang Haase.

"Numerous experts attest that it is very likely the oldest commercially-produced camera in the world." [UPDATE 2019: Not sure of this, but I believe I recall that Todd Gustavson at the George Eastman Museum told me that the Eastman has a camera that is older.]

Previously, the world's most valuable camera was believed to be the surviving Ur-Leica of Oskar Barnack, owned by Leica AG, of Solms, Germany, although it has never been sold. Opening bid for the legendary Susse Frères will be 100,000 Euros, and the selling price is believed likely to exceed 1 million Euros.

[Follow-up posted on May 28, 2007:]

First Camera Makes $775,000: Mike O'Donoghue writes to tell us that "the Susse Frères black softwood box (1839) went for 480,000€ Saturday at the Westlicht auction here in Vienna. That makes 576,000€ [about $775,000 or £390,400] with fees."

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2007

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

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Past Blasts: 'The Differences Between Premium Lenses Are Subtle'

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

-

Marketing lenses is a little like marketing beer. Image—pun not intended—is everything.

Independent research shows that most beer drinkers buy the brands they do because of what they believe other people will think of them. Thus, advertising and brand identity become extremely important. The differences between brands of beer are often subtle, and depend less on a greater degree of quality than simply that, well, they're different. Connoisseurs of good beer do exist, who can discern the differences between good brands fairly easily; however, they often prefer brands that the average consumer never hears of. For the non-connoisseur, as long as the beer he's chosen is acceptably fashionable and doesn't taste downright bad, he or she could actually care less which brand is actually "best."

The connisseurship of camera lenses is somewhat similar. Many photographers just want to take pictures, and they don't particularly care which brand of lens they use—so long as their friends don't scorn them for their choice, and they aren't actually confronted with evidence of poor quality in their work. Others, however, switch from one lens to another in a fanatical pursuit of the absolute latest and best, when in fact they wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between the results in a double blind test. Value and practicality, on one hand, and snob appeal on the other, certainly have a great deal of influence over what people buy and use. Reputation, and the perception of quality, is perhaps more important to most consumers than actual performance. Let's face it: Among good manufacturers, the differences between premium lenses are subtle. Most lenses are adequately good these days, in the same way the most beers taste pretty much the same. Despite this, people have strong loyalties and prejudices about the matter and will swear by one marque while needlessly denigrating others.

—MJ, from the article "Top Optics," Camera &
Darkroom magazine, March 1992, p. 62

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Past Blasts: The Fall of Kodak

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

-

Rochester, New York: There is a sense of both trauma and tragedy that lingers in the air here. Eastman Kodak Company was a proud American achievement—a brand of huge prestige, and a vastly profitable company that was a blue-chip success for well over a century, something few businesses of any kind ever achieve. (Imagine Apple still being around 88 years from now and you'll get a sense of this. Kodak is 15 years older than Ford Motor Company.) It long outlived its founder, George Eastman, who, depressed by severe chronic pain from a degenerative condition and with no hope of getting better, took his own life in 1932. That's something not many companies based on innovations and ideas achieve either. It not very long ago employed 60,000 people in Rochester, spanning generations.

Kodak was well prepared for the end of film—it had the start point and the end point accurately predicted on the graph. It just expected the decline in between to be gradual. It wasn't. It was much more abrupt—things went along better than expected for a while, and then the graph line fell off a cliff. (To give you an idea, in a recent DPReview interview, Toru Takahashi of Fujifilm said that demand for its film products today is less than 1% of what it was in 2000.) Kodak was prepared to adapt. Just not that fast.

The bigger the company, the more in danger it is from disruption. The jumble of severe disruption resulting from the nosedive of the demand for film and the carnage it caused within Kodak was harsh and shocking to those whose lives were entwined with the company and its work, and for the city it helped to both build and define. From a distance it's just the Darwinism of big business; from up close there are human lives and emotions deeply involved. Rochesterians had to witness the proud old "Great Yellow Father" go down like a stricken ocean liner hit by a torpedo.

A box of 35mm Plus-X, the film I shot when I started out

Curiously, a little yellow film box, modest as can be, embodies one of the great consumer products of all time—the result of decades of intensive scientific research, tremendous manufacturing know-how, matchless expertise in quality control, and tens of billions of dollars of R&D—yet the film in the box cost less to produce than the packaging around it! The profit margin from film sales was ungodly high, decade after decade. In digital, by contrast, everywhere Kodak looked it had to ask, "...but where will the money come from?"

The last Kodak pro digital camera was the Professional DCS Pro SLR/c of 2004, built by Sigma with a Canon mount. Fewer than 2,000 people work for Kodak today, and the majority of the old Kodak Park is rented out to other tenants. Kodak's Professional Camera Division never turned a profit.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2016

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Past Blasts: brad

[Note: For your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while I'm away.

This one was a comment, one of my favorites. I had mentioned a book I like, the late Kent Reno's Ground Time. Kent was a pilot who photographed during his layovers. He was also a reader of my magazine articles and sent me a copy of his book as a gift. I thought his style was similar to that of John Loengard, the famous LIFE magazine editor and photographer.

The post was called "B&W Tonality Part II: Examples," from April of 2017.

By chance, one of our readers, who signed himself only as "brad," was a friend of Kent's, and told this story about him. What the drunk lady screams when she grabs him by the lapels makes me laugh every time I read it. —Ed.]

"Kent Reno was a very cool customer. Picture Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff. Kent had been a Flight Safety Officer in the Air Force, and was an excellent pilot. He was DC-8 Captain and had thousands of hours flying for Trans International Airlines out of Oakland, California. When I saw Kent, he might mention something about one of his flights. He had a great sense of humor. His delivery was almost emotionless, like he was just recounting a humdrum event.

"So, Kent says, telling me of a flight from Europe to the States: 'We were out a few hours and a flight attendant came into the cabin. She said a women in seat 17F is causing quite a commotion. She's handing out large amounts of cash to the other passengers. She's up and down the aisle giving out money.'

"Kent said the crew was always playing little jokes on each other, so he smiles at the attendant and says, 'nice one!' Then the attendant showed him a fistful of large bills saying, 'She says this is for us.' Kent answered, 'I'd better go back and talk to her.'

"So, he takes the cash and goes back to her seat. He said she was well dressed but looked a bit ruffled and had been drinking. He sat in an empty seat next to her and introduced himself. Returning the cash, he said, 'we can't accept gifts. It's company policy.' The woman just looked at him and was quiet for a bit, then grabbed him by his coat and began screaming, 'who's flying the plane? Who's flying the plane?!?'

"He told the women the co-pilot was a very good pilot and that the aircraft was in good hands. He got her calmed down and they landed safely.

"He figured the women had some illicit cash in her carry-on, and had gotten through screening at the departure airport (this was the 1990s) but then, en route, she figured Customs in New York would find the money and she'd be in trouble. So she decided to give it away rather than be detained in New York."

(Thanks to brad)

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

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Past Blasts: Sequencing a Portfolio

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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First thing to keep in mind is that, although I'm an "expert" on the subject, there is no such thing as an expert on the subject. I'll base this advice on general principles and six years' experience as chief editor of a photo magazine, seven as a working pro and published critic, and three as a teacher; but there are no rules, and you should feel free to take, leave, or modify anything that follows to suit yourself.

When you begin the task of putting a portfolio together, the first thing to remember is that, if you're reading this, you're not dead. That is, you're not constructing a posthumous retrospective on yourself, meant to lovingly present everything you ever touched and every idea your brain ever entertained. Put another way, please feel encouraged to leave things out. If you mainly shoot Kodachrome slides but experimented with photograms for six months in 1983, don't feel you have to make a portfolio based on 17 Kodachromes and one photogram. They don't go together. A portfolio needs to be composed of things that do go together. Keep it appropriate; keep it cohesive. If it means you need to leave out that one great photogram, do so.

Where to start
The first step is to gather your work together insofar as that's possible, and sift through it, aiming to answer one question—what kind of photographer are you? You might be able to do this by yourself. It helps if you try to imagine yourself looking at your own work through someone else's eyes. Imagine you're a future historian coming across all these pictures, someone who's asking the question, who was this person? What was he or she up to? See where you end up.

Or, you might enlist someone else to help. The problem there is, the person you get to help you might not be any more objective than you are. For example, if you mainly shoot buildings, and you ask a people photographer to help you analyze your work, he or she might pick out the few people pictures you've done. I've found that, rather than ask people to help you choose actual pictures, it works better if you ask them to help you analyze what you seem best at...in their judgment

Don't think this is an admission of weakness. I know a professional with 30 years of experience who recently adopted a new specialty after a friend convinced her it was what she had really been best at all along.

Limits are useful. If you can identify a main stream or thread in your work, you're lucky. This can be anything you want it to be—pictures taken with your Leica and a certain film; pictures taken of your family in all sorts of techniques; pictures that have a certain feeling; a certain approach to color. Don't feel constricted by "subject matter" exclusively when trying to come up with an analysis of your artistic concerns and directions.

(A converse of this is that subject matter alone is not enough to make two pictures go together. We can easily come up with examples of pairs of pictures of the exact same subject matter that don't have the same feel at all.)

If you're doing this for the first time, you're likely to run into one major problem, which is that, in whatever thread or theme you've identified as being your main concern, you haven't got enough really strong work in that vein that hangs together. This may mean that you aren't ready to do a portfolio; more likely, it means you should try to put together a more modest portfolio that's more limited in scope and ambition.

Two methods
But let's assume you've been a photographer for a while and you've got lots of work. How do you proceed? There are two main strategies that work for me and for the people I've advised. One you might call the "Build around the hits" method, the other the "Culling" method.

In the Culling method, you'd first put together a working set of all the pictures you've ever made that you like or that you think are good—slides or black-and-white prints or whatever. Throw in everything you think is a good solid "maybe." This grouping should be several hundred at least, and possibly more. Once this group exists (again, you have to put it in real form, not just ideas, memories, and selections in your head), the process is basically a slow culling-out of the weaker work. Take a few weeks to get it down to a hundred, then take your time picking the absolutely best 40, and then wait a couple of months and select 24 from the 40 to print as a portfolio.

In the culling method, you can get other peoples' input. You don't need to let them actually eliminate pictures; just ask them to pull out the pictures they like less well. Take their input as suggestions.

Probably the supreme example of the culling method I know of was done by Christopher Bailey, a NYC photographer who has never gotten any recognition but is an outstanding artist. Chris would make tiny "matchbox" portfolios of images no more than 2x3 inches in size, in small, handmade boxes about the size of a deck of cards. Then, as he made the rounds in the art world and at parties and bars and so forth, whenever he got into a discussion about photography with someone of artistic sensibilities and they concluded by saying, "I'd love to see your portfolio sometime," he'd answer, "I've got it right here—want to see?"

The upshot is that Chris got literally hundreds of people to look through his work. And he'd simply watch their faces as they looked at each picture. Gradually, he got a sense for the pictures that people responded to most consistently. Sometimes the consensus surprised him—he found that people passed right by some of his own favorites, and did respond to certain pictures he hadn't really noticed. But let me tell you, when he had finally put together one portfolio of all the pictures that people most consistently reacted to, it was really a stunner. It would make a great monograph book.

I like this, but I'd need input from others before including it in a portfolio

In the Build-around method, you start from the other end—with the "hits," the special, spectacular shots that you just really love and that you know are among the best things you've done—the shots you just can't bear to think of leaving out of a portfolio of your best work. That might be only three, seven, or however many shots. Then, you study that group and take your cues from those pictures, sorting through the rest of your work to find pictures that look good with those core pictures.

A portfolio doesn't all have to be equally strong; it can modulate, have a pace to it, like a movie or a book—it's okay to do things like start with active, dynamic pictures, put some quieter ones in the middle, and then end with a bang. If your goal is simply to show off and set out those "hits," you can usually build a whole portfolio around them that looks good and communicates effectively.

One thing you might learn from this process so far is that you simply don't have enough to work with. Maybe you just haven't had a clear enough idea what you're after when you're out shooting. Maybe you just don't shoot enough. Lots of people don't. Probably the most common weakness of all—a student epidemic disease—is putting together a portfolio from too small and weak a base of raw material.

The other major pitfall is having too literal an idea of what it means for two pictures to work together. A major flaw and failing of many serious portfolios—especially in the art world—is thinking you have to have a dozen or two dozen pictures that are essentially different versions of the same thing in order for them to be presented together. If you're doing portraits, you don't need to have the same backdrop and the same lighting for every damn picture in order for the portfolio to work—the opposite is more likely the case. If two pictures are too similar, your responsibility is to choose between them rather than include them both. Many "art photography" portfolios are just multiple versions of the same picture. This is as much a failure of editing as it is a triumph of it!

Dissonance
Here's where I'd like to introduce the idea of consistent dissonance. It's basically this: things can be as disparate as you want, as long as everything has more or less the same degree of separation from everything else. Let me make the case using a simple, mechanical example. Let's say you're going to crop your prints. And, in every single case, you crop to a different rectangle. That works, because the proportion of the pictures are all different. But then let's say that out of 17 pictures, you present 16 that have the same 35mm aspect ratio of 2 to 3, and one that's square. Well, the square picture sticks out, doesn't it? It doesn't fit the group. In the group where everything is different, the square would fit right in. In the latter case, you establish a base, an expectation, and then go against it: inconsistent dissonance.

It's the same way with very different pictures in a portfolio. If you decide that your work is all over the map, you can actually work with that—as long as you keep the dissonance between all the pictures more or less equal. I've seen strong portfolios built up from pictures that are all different genres, even that are all different techniques—and that can actually work.

But if your portfolio has one gum print, one platinum print, one lith print, and so forth on through all the alternative processes, you can't get away with including three similar cyanotypes of flowers. You can get away with using one of them, because that's consistent with the differences you're establishing. But not three.

The academic portfolio idea—the conceit of the "body of work" (which almost never is one, but that's another story)—is that there can be no dissonance at all from picture to picture—all the pictures have to be uniformly consistent with each other. That's nonsense. It just has to be proportional, consistent, aptly judged—well modulated.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from Y2K

[This was an early draft of the middle part of a three-part article about putting a portfolio together, which was either published in Black & White Photography magazine (UK) or Darkroom User (UK) magazine (I  don't recall). I've always meant to dust off the whole series and present it whole, expanding where needed, but it's one of many things I've never gotten around to.]

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

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
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(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)

Past Blasts: Heaven and Hell

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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Mike Goes to Heaven: I'm in a world where God isn't the only one who cares how things look. The angels, too, have a modicum of aesthetic sense, and have bothered to see to it that our surroundings are pleasant and interesting. (They do this by giving the task of architecture and design to those angels who actually have an aptitude for it, and preventing the wanton and haphazard destruction and industrial development of the landscape.)

Everywhere I look, I see pictures. To record one, I need only blink my eyes. A file of what I saw is provided for me that has the tonal scale of Kodak Tri-X but never gets grainy in the highlights, always has more than enough dynamic range, and always has more resolution than I need for the size of enlargement I choose. Later, deft and cunning assistant angels render my perfectly corrected file onto actual film for contact printing on real gelatin silver paper. I'm in heaven.

Mike Goes to Hell: Although I'm only allowed to use one camera, I'm always as heavily draped with equipment as the fellow at right. The camera I have to use hefts like a brick made of lead, and has a lens on it that's too long, zooms too much and too slowly, and always seems to be at the other end of its range from the end I want. The camera itself has some 400 knobs and buttons on it, and 38,000 discrete combinations of settings—but the connections between the buttons, dials, and switches randomly migrate, and are never the same. The camera is digital, and all the files have histograms that jam up against both ends of the scale, and too much saturation.

In hell, I see even more and better pictures than I saw in heaven—but I just barely miss almost all of them. It's something different every time: I have the camera set wrong, or the camera refuses to autofocus, or it refocuses just as I take the shot, or the viewfinder blacks out because the AEL button has spontaneously become the "B" setting.

The only things that will stay still for me, and that I can always get beautifully exposed, sharp pictures of, are flower blossoms and cats. If anything else turns out perfectly, my computer mistakenly deletes it, or runs a program that resaves it as a JPEG over and over.

And, of course, the Devil is my client. With every picture I present to him, no matter how hard I work on it to redress its shortcomings, he finds just enough wrong that he can justify not paying me...or paying expenses only. He promises to pay on a 30-day billing cycle, but actually it takes a random number of days greater than 2x30 before the check arrives. I have no legal recourse, naturally, even though there are lawyers everywhere. And I never have the opportunity to refuse his jobs: he's the only client I have lined up for the next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, on and on, forever. I'm in hell.

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2006
(Photo believed to be by "S. Smith" from PBase; in 2006 I went to great efforts to try to find him or her, to no avail.)

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

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

(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)

Past Blasts: Its Own Reward

[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]

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Upon reaching a certain level of competence or accomplishment we photographers seem to feel that we should start getting attention.

I see this as more a characteristic of the activity of photography itself than it is a commentary on any individual's skills or talents. There's something about the way we commonly conceive of this activity that encourages the thought that we should be rewarded, somehow, for being able to do it.

Maybe it's the fact that some people are rewarded for it. Everyone knows the examples of the professional photographer and the artist-photographer, who, they imagine, are showered and fêted with money or recognition or both.

Not so often, really. The average "name" photographer is more like a recording star who no longer has a record contract. They, too, are usually feeling some version of the photographer's lament...just at a higher level than most of the rest of us. Fees are down, nobody's paying for original photography any more, I'm not selling many prints, my last book didn't sell well.

My question is, why does the idea persist that fame and earnings—more broadly, attention and admiration—should naturally be contingent on practicing this activity? What is it about photography that makes us feel we should get attention for doing it?

Look at other recreational activities. Water skiing, hunting, woodworking, bird-watching, cooking, video-gaming—or any of a thousand others. I suppose in each of those fields there are a tiny minority who get paid for what they do or are famous for it, although I can't name a single water-skiier nor imagine how someone who's good at knitting might become well known for it. Mostly, such things are their own reward. We hike in the woods, or travel for miles to eat at a nice restaurant, or teach our dogs tricks, or arrange wildflowers in vases, or work out, or visit famous battlefield parks, or build model railroads, or sew, because those things are fun for us, that's all.

We don't think, hey, I'm really good at scrapbooking. When am I going to get an award for this? Or...you know, I'm a hell of a great foodie. I go to the farmer's market every week and I read a ton of recipes. Why is someone not giving me money?

—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2015

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

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

(Sorry! There are no comments this week—the moderator is also stuck supine staring at the ceiling.)