The Online Photographer

Awful Tones for Awful Times?

Every time I talk about what digital B&W "looks like," I get a cascade of blowback—people saying things like you can make it look any way you want it to look.

Right, and a lot of people these days seem to want it to look bad.

And anyway, I'm just looking around me at what's typically being done—I'm not talking about best cases, or exceptions—I'm talking about what are emerging as shared cultural defaults, the styles and fashions that are emerging as prevalent.

As a brief case in point, take a look at Todd Heisler's portfolio entitled "What New York Looks Like Now: A Photo Journey" in the New York Times, especially the lead picture and the picture titled "Brooklyn Hospital."

The photographer is very accomplished, and the Times shows some of the best photojournalism being done these days, so this isn't meant as a general disparagement of either. But the tonality in this particular portfolio is too far over the top. A number of these pictures are obviously taken in daytime sunlight and yet much of the tonal range is rendered as...well, black. Not sunlit, unlit. And I get it—the topic is hospital tents and other makeshift temporary emergency shelters at New York hospitals, so the mood is meant to be grim and threatened. Hence the use of the extremely dark, depressed tones. Awful times, awful tones.

But this goes too far. It's as bad in its way as extreme HDR or "slider slamming" with color and saturation, or any other species of digital extremism. You can call it "expressive interpretation" if you like, and doubtless that's how it is meant. In my opinion, though, it's not expressive, just excessive. The question about whether manipulation (of the pictures, and of the viewers) to this degree goes too far for photojournalistic objectivity is one I won't raise. To me it's a question of taste rather than appropriateness. Exaggeration like this gives black and white a bad name.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Omer (partial comment): "My guess is that there is a photo editorial processing concoction in place across the board meant to dramatize or infer seriousness for the sole purpose of attention. Not unlike the designs of supermarket tabloid cover pages. It probably works, unfortunately, meaning the public at large is acclimatized to that look and then won't consider a more subtle finish as worthy."

Eliott James: "While I think this was a creative choice reflecting the horror of what's going on in NYC right now, I agree with you. Being objective (FWIW,) I think it's overdone. I think it might have had even a greater impact if it weren't so dark. I favor creative choice over set traditions but in the end it's a matter of opinion."

Rob de Loe: "OK, so it's not just me. I saw that series before reading this article and had the same reaction."

Alan: "Personally, I like it! It's deep, dark, and moody. Basically, the way I feel today! Perhaps the lack of shadow detail is a metaphor; can't see into them...can't see the light at the end of the tunnel either."

Kye Wood: "I saw these too. And thought the exact same thing. A bit like music. It should be broadcast 'flat.' Then if you want, adjust the treble or mids or whatever, to taste. Season as required. But showing the images as they have, you're not free to interpret them using your own mind—which is like a movie that has overbearing music to push the emotions the scene is aiming for. Hey people! If you do it right, you don't need crunch the tones in the image, or deafen us with violin swells at the movies."

Mike replies: One of the great demonstrations of that I saw was during a lecture by the great photographer Ralph Steiner. He presented four short films consisting of various views of agricultural sprinklers in action, set to four very different pieces of music. He then asked the audience which film was the longest and which the shortest. Great argument ensued. I myself was certain that the piece with the slow music was about twice as long as the one with the bombastic Wagnerian music. Well, you probably can guess the upshot—in the great reveal, Steiner admitted that all four segments of film had been exactly the same. The only thing that was different at all was the music. I was amazed. Even knowing what he had done, it was clear that the music seemed to bring out, or emphasize, very different aspects of the visual presentation. Thinking of the slow music, I felt the slow-motion cascades of water were prominent; whereas the fast music seemed to emphasize the cuts from one camera angle to another.  

A Confession

I find photographs in all sorts of places. And I'm almost radically egalitarian in how I'll prioritize their status.

I used to love "antiques" (junk) stores that had large collections of old snapshots. I loved to look through them and muse about what they showed, always aware that I could at any turn happen across that chance perfectly-imperfect one-in-a-thousand shot.

I seldom bought even those, though. I'm not a collector. I'd love to be, but I move around, I'm disorganized, and I'm not really a good steward of the objects I own. This pains me, but you're got to know your weaknesses.

This is what kind of collector I'd be. Extra credit:
know who this is? Hover over the image for a hint.

I've written a few times how fascinated I am by the "good" pictures people have on their smartphones—meaning, the ones that mean something to them and show things they want to show other people, and preserve. I like old postcards, Shorpy, collections of Kodachromes*, and so forth and so on. I especially like curated collections of ephemera...as an aside, I believe that editing and curation have recently become much more important in the culture of imagemaking. Our apprehension of this hasn't begun to catch up to the reality, but I think a lot of the creativity of the future might shift from the making of images to the collection and arrangement of them. There is just so much now, and it all gets lost in a sea of more and ever more.

Virtual tours
But I digress. Anyway, here's my confession...I love poking around on Zillow and on Google Street View. For the pictures. On Zillow you get to see inside peoples' houses—spit-shined and made presentable, mostly, but it's fascinating the way people can't quite entirely erase the traces of their lives and the way they lived inside their spaces. And I love interiors, as a genre of photography. Sometimes—not often, I'll admit—I come across an interior that looks as formally beautiful as a Vermeer. Of course, somebody photographed that, and that somebody might have self-described as a photographer or even been a professional. But just as often it was an anonymous realtor, or the owner, and the picture was meant to be utilitarian. Show off the nice garage.

On Google Street View you can virtually "walk" neighborhoods all over America—seeing what there is to see, and again getting a sense of how the (mostly absent) people occupy the spaces that are familiar to them. And just as with the old snapshot tables at junk stores, occasionally the random photograph taken automatically from the top of a moving vehicle magically arranges itself into a real photograph. It "arrests" me, that's the word—I stop, stilled, and stare. How did that happen?

I don't screen-grab it, though. My hard drive is already junky enough.

It's as close to the real magic in photography as the stuff I see in museums, the stuff that's presented with such great deference toward the status of the auteur, the curator, and the institution. Often, though, all that ego just gets in the way. The magic of photography is radically egalitarian—never plentiful, never easy to access, but open to all, anywhere, everywhere. Sometimes where you least expect it.

Mike

*I love how, at that link, the writeup has to start by explaining to people that "50 years ago, people used 35mm cameras like we use smartphones in the age of Instagram." Ha! I'm older now, and I'm a-living in the future....

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Marco Maroccolo: "The great Josef Sudek!"

Dennis: "A neat thing about Google Street View is that the view changes. Same with satellite views. They get updated every so often. A couple of years ago, three co-workers and I were walking to lunch from work and crossing a street single file when a Google truck photographed us. For a while, if you checked out the Street View, there we were doing an unintentional impression of the Beatles' Abbey Road cover. But that's been replaced by a newer set."

Francisco Cubas: "I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph. I see poetry exactly the same way. Borges wrote that poetry can appear in any simple conversation—it's not a prerogative of great books or great poets. As you say, its magic is radically egalitarian. Maybe all those institutions and powers just get in the way and make people think they're not worthy of art.

"About the shift from making to collecting images you may be interested in the late work and essays of Joan Foncuberta."

Ulrich Fraaß: "This is the famous photographer Josef Sudek (1896–1976) in his small studio in Praha. Unfortunately he lost his right arm during World War I."

Mike adds: If anyone out there reading this ever gets a chance to see Sudek prints in person, jump at it.

Mike Plews: "Sudek by Sonja Bullaty belongs on every photographer's bookshelf. Magic on every page."

Mike replies: I agree.

JG: "One other great thing about Google's Street View is that serves as a convenient, always and easily accessible time capsule. My father died in February 2017, yet no matter where I am, I can always log into Google Street View, scroll back to May, 2011, and see a photo of him in his car waiting at the stop sign a block from his house for the Google Street View car to pass."

Greg Heins: "The example of Sudek is especially pertinent now, in our shelter-in-place era. You could mount multiple exhibitions from the still-lifes he made in his tiny studio and then some more from the photographs he took of the window into his little garden with its solitary tree. Additionally, he lived from 1939 until his death in 1976 under either the Nazi or Soviet totalitarian regime. Many of his prints were made on whatever papers admirers in the West sent him. We are fortunate here in Boston to have a very choice selection of Sudeks available for viewing."

Martin D: "About a year ago you asked your readers to list their five favourite photographers. My list included Sudek. He is the odd one out in my photographic pantheon: the quiet voice of pure poetry amongst the prose of Hine, Evans, Abbott."

Test Shots

A commenter mentioned that yesterday's post was about life rather than about photography.

Apropos of that, I just wanted to mention that my position for years has been that "Photography is not about photography. It's about life."

What does that mean though?

I guess it means that I tend to prefer photography that has significance related to what's being photographed. What do the photographs mean? What is the photographer attempting to communicate? ...Or just show? Is there a purpose for which the photograph was made? If so, what is that?

Doesn't matter what it is. Well, it does, but there's no one thing it has to be.

This value seems to have been in retreat in recent years. I don't see any conspiracy in this or even any deliberate trend—more like, it's just a consequence of cultural forces at play. Digital imaging made photography much easier and, on a per-frame basis, less expensive, and the web and phone sharing made it much easier to see much larger numbers of photographs by others—especially the rejects and seconds, the thoughtless random effluvia of shooting. The waste-product of getting that occasional "hit."

The stuff we never used to see. (Of course, the same filters that kept us from seeing a lot of junk in traditional photo culture also choked off a lot of good work from being seen. I won't argue there.) And, there's no longer any final product. There's just the pixels on a screen, a transient representation of another transient representation of a thing that isn't even a thing. Re-representations.

Something that I've long disliked are pictures that attempt to be generic scenes or objects "known to be pretty." More recently, this has widened considerably into what might uncharitably be called "my sh*t that looks a lot like other peoples' sh*t." In other words, people new to photography look around and see everyone else posting random approximate empty meaningless snapshots, so they post random approximate empty meaningless snapshots that look like everybody else's and they're in the club and everyone's happy.

The worst of these that I see—and it's probably my own fault, because of what I have to look at—is the dreaded "test shot." Any photograph labeled "test shot" comes pre-loaded with an excuse for its own lameness. I'm deathly tired of looking at test shots.

Of course, I post a lot of test shots. But it's my job. Part of my job, anyway.

That's my excuse. Ha!

The opposite of the test shot—IMNSHO—is the personal phone pic. Everybody has some. Pictures that exist for no other reason than the very thing I value, namely the meaning of what they show. It's seldom put into words—well, into more than a few words anyway—but everyone who has such a picture knows why that picture is meaningful to them. They know the significance of the pictures they love.

I'd much rather look at normal peoples' best phone shots than yet more test shots.

I suppose the most telling question I would ask of a photograph is, why should I look at this? Why should this picture interest me? Or, to put it the correct way 'round: why should anyone else look at this? Why should this picture interest someone else?

I've noticed that a lot of photobooks these days are filled with pictures that are just devoid of meaning, feeling, specificity, or any interest in the subject matter whatsoever. They're stylish, or highly stylized. They're going for a sort of attenuated implication of significance. But there's no there there. There seems to be a meaning but there isn't.

And that gets us to the flip side of the generic pretty picture—the opposite side of the same coin, the other end of the same stick—which is when people show me a picture that might interest me, but they haven't even bothered to take any interest in what their own photograph shows! If the photographer wasn't even curious about what he or she was seeing, why should they expect me or anyone else to be?

I see numberless photographs that don't answer my first, most basic question: what am I seeing here? Much less the next question, why am I being shown this?

It doesn't really matter what the answer to the question is. I just wish there was an answer. It's not enough that it just be a photograph. Anybody can take an image, these days.

Mike
(Inset: Long Story Short)

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Another Comparison

I mentioned a comparison in passing the other day about the same lens showing different kinds of bokeh in different situations. Here's another comparison...two examples of B&W tonality.

The first example might be considered to be "typical," very broadly, of fashionable digital B&W tonality. There's nothing wrong with the picture—but note the range of tones, the lack of grays, the overall balance between the predominant light tones and the predominant dark tones, the way the highlights tend to wash to sameness (lots of fashion photographers like that, and have for many years—they used to overexpose transparency film to get that effect).

The second example, to my eye at least, is more typical of film tonality. Take a look at that. Nothing special about it—not a famous lens, and the film is one that's actually not known for good tonality. But I doubt any informed photographer would not realize that this tonality is more typical of film. Note especially the rich midtones and the subtle gradations of the skin tone.

There's nothing wrong with either aesthetic. They're just different. But they do look different.

Juxtapose
I often enjoy looking through Flickr search pages because of these comparisons, and the accidental juxtapositions that happen. I had one all prepped to show you, but alas, I haven't been able to get in touch with the photographers for their permission. Can't wait forever. Suffice it to say that there are often pair of images that show up next to each other that are thought-provoking or effective in some way, or funny or just delightful (the one I prepped shows one picture of an old peasant woman with a cow next to a picture of a young woman in scanty workout clothes hanging from the netting of a soccer goal, both with remarkably similar expressions on their faces as they regard the camera).

Look again and the images have been shuffled and the combinations are different.

Mike

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Bokeh Is Not a Stable Characteristic of a Lens

I ran across a nice example yesterday of the same lens exhibiting both "good" and "bad" bokeh. I was looking through pictures taken with the old Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8, a fine little lens (identical in design to an earlier generation of Leica Summicron, by the way) which is widely available for very little dosh. Take a look first at this lovely portrait by Konstantin Konduktorov, taken with the old lens adapted to a digital DSLR. Although there isn't "lots" of bokeh evident in the picture (I've always considered that a bit of a harebrained concept anyway, cf. "The Dog's Nose"), the blur is very smooth and gentle and provides just enough contrast with the sharper image of the woman's face.

Konstantin Konduktorov, detail. Soft blur and not too much
of it, with good coherence.

In general the old Oly "nifty fifty" renders bokeh quite nicely, among its other attributes. Fifty millimeter lenses are problematic in terms of their rendering away of the plane of best focus; not very many of them are always free of ugliness. While we're at it, note how smooth and subdued the in-focus image is, too, in this picture, despite being very sharp.

It's a nice old lens, and although prices are going up—I bought one for $10 in the '90s—you can have one for anywhere from $30 for a beater to $100 for one "new in box" when you can find it. And you can have it in single-coated or multi-coated flavors, too*—Japanese lens mavens prefer single-coated lenses for B&W film work. Note that this lens isn't good wide open. It cleans up nicely by ƒ/2.8, and is as sharp as it gets by ƒ/5.6, but I'd never shoot it wide open unless I really needed the speed.

This "new in box" sample of the Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8
sold for $99 on February 16th

Now on to the negative example. Here's another shot by the same photographer with the same type of lens—probably the same exact lens unless Konstantin owns two samples. That ugly mess at the top, where the bright light comes through the trees, is very distracting. I might have cropped that out. 

Konstantin Konduktorov, detail. Ouch! That's not getting out of the way
like good blur should.

I should note also that you can "fix" bad bokeh in Photoshop to a certain extent, by reducing contrast and adding Gaussian blur, blending it into the picture with a layer mask. This would "step back" a little better, and draw less attention away from the subject.

Without correction past whatever the photographer applied, though, the two pictures are a nice demonstration that "bokeh" is not a stable characteristic of any lens. It can change with aperture, focus distance, whether the blurred object are in front of or behind the plane of focus, how much blurriness there is, and, especially, with what's being imaged. So we can't really talk about "the" bokeh of a particular lens, except generally.

Mike

*Here's how to tell. Older Zuikos had a letter code for the number of elements in the lens that preceded the word "Zuiko" (then and now Olympus's name for its lenses) with a letter and a period. For instance, "F," being the sixth letter in the alphabet, denoted six elements. When you find one of these 50mm ƒ/1.8's marked "F.Zuiko," that's a single-coated lens. Lenses marked "MC" are always multi-coated. Some have neither marking, but when you see the words "made in Japan" on the ring around the outermost element, that's also a multi-coated lens. (Those were later lenses after they stopped single-coating altogether, and the letters "MC" denoting multi-coating were deemed to be superfluous and were dropped.)

A "made in Japan" sample

Mike

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Michael Fewster [responding to another commenter, not the post —Ed.] wrote: "It always amuses me when people talk about 'natural bokeh.' There is no natural bokeh. It is an effect created by the lens and varies from lens to lens. Bokeh created 'artificially' by software in computational images as done in some camera phones or with post-processing software is every bit as natural.

"Of course, we might find some bokeh more pleasing than other bokeh but that is a question of aesthetics, not 'naturalness.' Computationally applied bokeh is not artificial. It is every bit as valid as that created by a lens."

Andy F (replying to Michael) wrote: "I don't think I've ever seen people talking about 'natural' bokeh, but I've certainly seen mention of neutral bokeh—that is, blur discs with neither overly hard nor overly soft edges.

"Incidentally, there is natural bokeh—your eyes are simple lenses, after all, so by focusing on something close up, things far away go blurry, and you can examine your eyes' natural bokeh. Mine isn't that pretty to be honest."

Mike J. replies: I think we can use any adjective we like to apply to bokeh, since they're just descriptive words. So you could call it "businesslike" or "prissy" or "craven" if you imagine those words will communicate your meaning. When trying to describe something, the words you choose are up to you.

Behind that, though, is our understanding of how the overall image communicates. Anything about bokeh (and everything else, really) relates to the effect it has on how the viewer understands and responds to the picture. As an extreme counterexample, take those attempts at pleasant portraiture that happen to catch two animals humping in the out-of-focus background. The humor comes from the dissonance between the putative subject and what the photograph accidentally shows. Also from the fact that the photographer failed miserably to put the viewer's attention or emphasis where he or she intended to put it.

You'll notice that several times in the post I did apply value judgements, though. I said that bad bokeh doesn't "get out of the way" and that it draws attention away from the subject, when it should "step back." This acknowledges that the child on the log is the subject of the second picture, and you want the rest of the picture—the "setting"—to set that off. With many good photographs of all kinds, many different elements of the picture contribute to the overall impression it makes. I've always been of the opinion that "bad" bokeh isn't a technical matter; it's just a question of how the out-of-d.o.f. areas contribute to or distract from the overall impression. The softest and most technically appealing bokeh in the world doesn't matter if the dog's nose isn't in focus—the picture is spoiled anyway. (That dog could be the brother of my Lulu, by the way. And any dog person would know instantly that that poor fellow is uncomfortable!)

Matt Kallio (partial comment): "Just as there are different qualities of bokeh, there are qualities of sharp too. The portrait is so sharp it takes me aback— yet it is pleasing in a way that my own over-sharpened images are not. Maybe Mike is reveling in his new eyesight and seeing everything that sharp, so he doesn't notice it. In normal life I never see anyone that sharply, particularly from the distance we're at in Mr. Konduktorov's portrait. Every hair...."

Peter Wright: "How I enjoyed this post! In a world seemingly obsessed with world stock market decline, virus outbreaks, climate threat, and of course, certifiably insane politicians of every stripe, it is so refreshing to come to a site on the Internet where the topic of discussion is the out-of-focus characteristics of a popular lens from last century! And I do mean that with total sincerity. Of course we need to consider the above problems (that we probably have little control over), but we need to leave room for that class of 'issues' that pose no threat, but seem to feed the soul, if we think about them."

Mike replies: That's TOP—incisive, insightful, irrelevant.  :-)

Stephen Scharf: "Andrew of the 'Danae & Andrew' YouTube channel did a really nice video back in October, 2018 of how viewers felt about different photographs shot wide open with fast lenses, or somewhat stopped down, say, ƒ/4 to ƒ/5.6. The link is below, but the bottom line is that viewers are much more concerned with the sharpness of the subject of the photograph than how out of focus the background is, and many viewers prefer to see some of the background behind the subject that helps tell the story, or provides a sense of place or context. Of note is his comments, 'what is in focus is always more important than what is not in focus,' and 'the average person cannot tell the difference between photos taken at difference of couple of aperture stops, even when looking for differences....' Link here (very insightful survey)."

Mike replies: His conclusions line up with my beliefs very well. Of course, it's mainly because I grew up in the era of lenses that performed more poorly wide open than today's lenses tend to do, but I've always recommended stopping down two or three stops for best optical quality.

Bazooka Joe

Still working on that book roundup. Sorry, I've been "sick-ish" this week (sort of skating above it, merely in danger of falling through) and short of energy. Taking naps. And of course such projects can be expanded to fill any available time. I don't work as fast as I used to.

In the meantime, I wanted to address an issue that came up under this post, the one about my resolution not to resort to my phone camera so often.

Two reader comments—

SteveW wrote: "I'm loving reader comments on this one. Ah, good ol' TOP! I think I can channel some MJ here: the camera you have fun shooting with is the one to be shooting."

Julian Behrisch Elce wrote: "My goodness, everyone—the condescension here is very unpleasant, not to mention that not one of you knows what the people you’ve granted your approval do in their spare time or use in their artistic efforts. I really hope that this space will be more generous in the coming year."

The two comments came in right next to each other, and I'm always amused when two diametrically opposing reactions are coincidentally juxtaposed like that.

And I usually don't publish comments like Julian's in this case (he's written many valuable comments otherwise) simply because I don't allow readers to judge each other—that's how disputation gets kindled, and on this site I discourage what were called, in the '90s, "flame wars."

But I do want make something clear, again. What you want to carry is the camera that makes the files, negatives, or transparencies that fit the way you're visualizing your pictures. Condescend? I don't view gear in terms of status. Didn't I recently recommend a classic book of pictures taken with a toy Diana, a camera made of plastic, with a plastic lens, that cost (if I recall correctly) less than $20 when the pictures were taken? For Camera & Darkroom magazine I wrote a feature—a cover feature, at that—on a Massachusetts photographer who did an entire body of work with a "Sun-Pet," an even cheaper plastic toy camera—the only way to get one was to mail in ten "Bazooka Joe" bubblegum comics and 70¢! (For those of you who don't know or don't remember, those little slabs of pink bubblegum came with a tiny printed comic inside the wrapper, and you could send in various numbers of the comics as "proof of purchase" along with small amounts of money to claim various prizes.) Mary Kocol, who worked in a color lab at the time and printed her own negatives when the lab was closed, would take color Sun-Pet negatives and blow them up to huge sizes such that they fell apart in interesting ways. Here are some of Mary's more recent toy camera pictures.

The point in that post was not that the smartphone camera is not an adequate camera. It's just not the camera that gives me what I happen to want at the present time, that's all. Any camera can be not only an adequate camera, but the perfect camera, if it's what the photographer wants and needs for his or her work! What you want is the right camera in your hand, not the wrong one, for any value you choose to assign to "wrong" and "right." My friend Christopher Bailey did some wonderful work with a Nikon that had a stuck shutter—only the "B" setting worked—and a lens with a giant crack through the middle of one element. He was devastated when it was stolen, because it was irreplaceable. Sally Mann did some work with very old uncoated lenses that flared badly—she got in touch with me wanting to know if any films that had no anti-halation backing (she wanted halation!). Daido Moriyama's signature look was created with both film and digital point-and-shoots. And of course a number of photographers produced artistically successful books of pictures made with funky early cellphone cameras. I've written about some of them too.

Henry Wessel photographed until his death with a 1950s Canon screwmount lens on a Leica. Why wouldn't he switch to a more modern lens? Because the old lens gave him the look he wanted. Was it a "worse" lens than a modern lens? Not for him. Or for his pictures.

The main blindness in modern amateur enthusiast photography as it is expressed and discussed online, in my opinion, is the conflation of "image quality" with good photographs. Enthusiasts have chased analytical perfection to a point of diminishing returns, while seeming utterly oblivious of the almost nonexistent relationship between technical imaging perfection and visual expressiveness. I've always been of the opinion that anyone can do anything he or she wants with his or her photography, as long as no laws are broken and no one gets hurt; so obviously I can't blast anyone for wanting the biggest and greatest, the most expensive, the supposed "best"—it's their business, not mine. But neither have I ever despised anyone who uses what some would consider a "bad" or "cheap" camera such as a toy Diana, a homemade pinhole camera, an early, poor-quality cellphone, or anything else they can make work for their work.

Power to them. Power to us all. When it comes to expressiveness, excellence is available to anyone. And yet cannot be bought.

Have a good weekend! Good light.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve and Julian)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

David Littlejohn: "Best post in a while! Thanks!"

Fer: "Your post about the phone camera resonated with me so much. After being laid off in 2015, I took a trip of several months across Southeast Asia to figure out a new direction for my life. At the time I didn't know I'd end up deciding to give photography a try as a profession, simply because I thought it was too hard to even contemplate it. My main goal for the trip was to relax and enjoy the travel experience to the fullest, not taking top-quality photos. So, while I brought my X-E1 and a couple of lenses with me, I ended up taking an inordinate amount of photos with my smartphone, about 40% overall.

"I can't tell you how many times I've regretted this, looking at the questionable quality of many of those files."

Andrew "Thick Skull" Lamb: "Wise words. This is a message I need drummed into my thick skull on an alarmingly regular basis. The weather is improving here, in London; time to take more pictures."

Dan Khong: "My Leitz Summar gives me the looks that I want. On top of that, since it's manufactured between 1932–1939, there is much history that goes with it."

Pictures for Discussion: Figure-Ground Relationship

Introduction: In July 2017, in response to a reader who wrote, "examples would help a lot to clarify!", I answered:

"It's a problem. I could find hundreds of examples of what I consider 'bad' photography, easily, but how could I present them? If another person's  picture is used as a subject of a critique, it's legal under Fair Use (probably—Fair Use is never 100% certain), but I'd have to be taking someone's work and holding it up as a negative example. As a normally courteous person I have trouble with that idea. I wouldn't like it if that were done to me. Over the years I would have loved it if I could have put up pictures I find on the Web to discuss—many pictures of many kinds, to discuss in all kinds of ways. But I just don't think it's polite to do that to the people the pictures belong to.

"It's a big difference between the Web and a classroom. In the privacy of a classroom you can use specific pictures as examples, easily. But I have a problem with doing the same thing here."

Back to now: I've decided that perhaps I can do that with pictures that the makers have donated to be more or less rights-free on Wikimedia Commons. So from time to time I'll look for pictures there that illustrate various principles we can talk about.

But please, I am NOT ridiculing the photographs and certainly not the photographers! I have made every mistake under the sun, as all of us have. On the contrary, I thank them for letting us use their pictures for discussion.

Here goes.

A quiz: What basic mistake did the shooter make in the following picture? Think about it for a minute before you click through.

Anna Anichkova, "Rolls Royce" (fragment), Vintage Car Rally, Aphrodite Hills Resort, Cyprus (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Common Problems with Digital Black and White

I love B&W—first love, highest loyalty, greatest pleasure—but I don't like most of the digital B&W I see.

Why? Not because it's digital. There's nothing wrong with the tools. The problem is merely in the fashions, styles, or conventions that have taken hold and become current and conventional.

Herewith, a brief rundown of my gripes. Bear in mind that I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the digital images I see on the Web taken as a whole.

Soot-and-chalk: The term is St. Ansel's. Curious, because he was not known for middle grays! But despite the dramatic appearance of his prints, he went to great lengths to tame contrast and get a full scale in his prints. "Soot-and-chalk" refers to a tonal scale that pushes too many of the lighter tones into pure white and too many of the darker tones into pure black. It can be used as a personal style; Daido Moriyama for example*. The reductio ad absurdum is a picture with almost nothing but black or white in it. Although even that can be used effectively, for instance in the most famous picture by Bill Brandt. However, most digital photographers whose work I see don't have a solid grasp of tonal range, and simply don't know how or why to get detail in the darkest and lightest tones or where to draw the line or what the aesthetic impressions they are imparting might be. As a general rule, the music of tonality is in the mid-tones, and in finding whatever the right amount of detail in the highlights and shadows might be.

Too sharp: Oversharpening is a typical failing of digital in general—and it's worse in B&W. It results in a razory harshness that imparts an acrid or acidic "flavor." (If you will.) B&W film in certain developers had an edge effect—light tones got a bit lighter near a tonal boundary with a dark tone and dark tones got a bit darker near a tonal boundary with a light tone. That could give even prints of gentle tonality a sort of 3-D effect. It's curious that over-the-top sharpening in digital results in "haloing," which is sort of a Devil's version of a similar thing. The general rule is that sharpness should be natural and not etched and harsh.

Depressed mid-tones: This was an effect you could get with Agfa Rodinal in the days of film. It was a developer said to provide "acutance" (I could get more acutance with plain old homemade D-76 [ID-11]: just dilute it 1:3 and stand back while Rodinal gets out-Rodinal'd.) People pursued that effect, seemingly never noticing that all their mid-tones were pressed downward in the tonal scale. That is, without changing 0 and X, what should have been rendered as Zone VI was rendered as Zone V, Zone V as Zone IV, etc.

Well, that's what happens with almost all digital conversions. Don't know why, but all the mid-tones are depressed, which gives me a feeling like the flu, or the fog of despond.

Hyped-up local contrast: There's usually "a slider for that." In Nik Silver Efex 2 it's called "Structure." In Photoshop it's known by the term that came from film, "Unsharp Masking"...except with sheet film, you actually used an unsharp mask, and it required special equipment and about a day's work. Now it takes roughly five seconds to do...and another split-second to overdo, which most people, especially the overanxious, do do. Speaking of doo-doo....

All of the above: And if all four of these shortcomings are found in the same shot—as they all too frequently are—the effect is like punishment. Flee!***

It's worth reminding ourselves that these are not rules. Any effect can be expressive if it's skillfully, tastefully, appropriately, or deliberately applied. Remember when I was bitching about dogs' noses being out of focus**, as a way of complaining about people who reflexively use too wide an aperture? Well, I even managed to find an example of that woeful effect that's delightful—check it out. In that picture the out-of-focus blur only emphasizes the extreme gloss of the ceremonial shoes—and to me gives the picture a tinge of the dizzying feeling of a wedding day. Nicely done.

But for the most part, I don't like looking at digital B&W. In general it's terrible and gives no pleasure. The exceptions mostly prove the rule. My advice: digital is a color medium****, so stick to color. Unless you know what you're doing. [UPDATE: See Sharon's comment in the Featured Comments, below.]

Mike

*James Maher wrote a trenchant brief description of the importance of "Stray Dog": "Moriyama’s most famous photograph is the 1971 Stray Dog, which took on a life as a symbol for post-war Japanese culture. In a culture that had been defined by order and purity, for a photographer to identify himself with, and celebrate the idea of a stray dog, was a profound shift. It brought underlying cultural feelings to the surface of alienation, darkness, self-hatred, and despair. He showed both himself and Japan as a stray dog, roaming for scraps of identity in an uncertain and quickly changing world."

**You see what I did there. "Amused myself, and that's half the battle" —Craig Ferguson.

***No, not the bass player. I mean "RUN AWAAAY!!" —King Arthur.

****Yeah, I know all about how sensors really work; the statement stands.

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

Christopher Mark Perez: "In the late '70s/early '80s I was a B&W print tech in Hollyweird and know well what you are talking about, but never really knew how to get close to the original effects with digital. You've written several very good columns on how to improve digital B&W images. I've taken your thoughts and ideas and examples closely to heart and am much much happier with my own work in this area as a result. Thank you."

robert e (partial comment): "There are vicious cycles at work. Aspiring photographers see legendary B&W work, but as compressed jpegs on web pages, viewed on uncalibrated laptop screens, and use that as their model. There's also the tendency of our short-attention-span habits to favor graphical impact over nuances requiring sustained attention. Which also suits the compromised gamuts of uncalibrated consumer tools."

Mike replies: I agree with what you say except the part about seeing "legendary B&W work." I suspect most just see lots of random B&W work on their computers. Some good, most not. They mimic what they see as a whole, because they assume what they are seeing constitutes a standard for acceptable work.

Mike Plews: "May I suggest one more? It would be trying to replicate the effects of a red filter by pulling down the blue level until the sky turns black. A little of this can be a good thing but too much and you run the risk of nasty edge effects. I have a couple (ok more than a couple) prints that look like someone outlined the horizon with a sharpie. I didn't notice it at first as I was so tickled with the overwrought fake filter effects I was getting. Out here in the scenic Loess Hills of Western Iowa this could be described as a 'bet you thought you were skinning a fat hog' type of situation."

Mike replies: That is one expression I've never heard before. But then, never been to Iowa, more's the pity.

John Camp: "The critical question you didn't answer: Can this be fixed? Or for people like you, will digital B&W always suck? Is the effect you're looking for confined to chemically developed B&W? Have you tried to match a good print? I have a B&W photo of yours hanging on my workshop wall, an apple nestled in grass, and the whole process was digital right up to the printing...is that a final judgment?

"(The reason I love that photo is because the grass is green and the apple red (I think) but they share the same B&W tonality. In addition to the general aesthetic quality, there's like a subtle color-based tongue-in-cheek joke there...maybe only understood by painters.)"

Sharon: "I agreed with your post until you threw in the towel on digital black and white prints. They are difficult but not impossible. Frankly most photography you see is crummy, just like most art. It doesn't mean it isn't worth the effort to try and get a good black and white pigment print. The process is improving. Every print is no longer green or magenta—the ink is capable of producing a more neutral print now."

Mike replies: Yes, I think you're right, and although I don't often do this, I take it back. Because of course there is good and even great work being done in digital B&W, and I certainly haven't seen much of all that's out there, even though I see more than most people do. After all, the title is merely "Common Problems." It's too easy for people to think I'm damning them, and throwing their babies out with the bathwater, and that's neither good nor fair on a site that's intended to be supportive of photographers of all levels. So I apologize.

Zack Schindler: "Here is some of my B&W work. I would love to know how to make them look better. Have never really been satisfied with how they look. One Two Three Four Five Six."

Mike replies: A small sample, but some of it strikes me as nicely seen work. As to how to make them look better, and only since you asked, let me start by asking you a question. Here's your original:

Does the following look better or worse to you?

Depending on how you like that, I'd use it as a starting point for getting to a rendition of this picture you liked better and by extension, getting you to a point where you're more satisfied with your technique in general.

The above comparison is in part a fool's errand, because B&W is very dependent on subtle differences of tone and density, and trying to convey that with JPEGs on the Web is analogous to trying to convey tone of voice in a short text. I didn't change much here, though. All I did was keep your sky the same but lighten the image overall, and change the curve shape of the lower tones. Your tones are heavy—inky—and look exaggerated, which to me is in conflict with the gentle, pensive mood of the scene. It's just an old man looking out over the water; why kick up the Wagnerian pomp and bombast?

Plus, your light looks like no light I'm familiar with. I'd go for a look like late afternoon light on a clear day with slightly hazy sunlight. I try resist understanding pictures in terms of technical measurements. I try to understand the feeling, the mood, and to relate those things to the feeling and mood of real light I know. What are we looking at here? What are we showing? What did it feel like to be there? There's a point at which the picture will snap into a feeling of "rightness" for you. If that's what you learn to go for, that's how you develop a personal style.

I straightened your lamppost just because I saw the distortion too much, but there's no necessity to do that.

Martin D: "Agreed with all three criticisms, but not with your conclusion. I do only digital these days, and only B&W. Excessive contrast, over-sharpening, depressed mid-tones: I certainly agree on the first two and probably on the third one too. I commit these crimes on a daily basis and try to reshape myself into someone at least does not commit them by default. Over-sharpening is the worst offender. Somehow we seem to be able to detect this immediately in other peoples photographs, but not in our own work. The problem is I think less in the actual nature of the digital image but in the psychology of the digital editing process. Over-sharpening is the weakness inherently associated with digital B&W picture making—the answer is not to give up on B&W, it is to develop the perceptive maturity that allows us to see in our own work what our untrained eye can only see in the work of others. Digital is still fairly recent; it may take us a few decades to become naturals in the new visual world. Let's start now."

Rodolfo Canet Castelló: "This is the kind of post I enjoy the most, those dealing with visual education. In Spanish we say lo que pica, cura (what smarts, cures). This post smarts to those who, like me, love B&W and try to make perfect prints. Let's hope it cures as well, by making us to look for better editing."

Brian Stewart (partial comment): " The relativities have changed. In the film era, I found good B&W easier than good colour. YMMV, but this is my experience. I could develop and print my own B&W. Doing the same for colour was not an option, and having someone else do it for me was either too expensive or resulted in poor quality. In the digital age I find that this has reversed. I can do good colour very easily myself, but good B&W is more challenging. For the vast majority of us without a monochrome sensor, we shoot in colour and convert to B&W. There are just too many options. We have way more control and we need to learn how to master it."

Mike replies: I think you've said that better than I did. That "reversal" you're describing is very pronounced IMHO.

[See the full Comments section for the complete text of partial comments.]

David L: "Unfortunately there is a lot of awful black and white photography, in both film and digital, out there on the web and social media for millions to see and be misled. And then see others try to emulate that awful stuff. There are of course great examples of carefully crafted images with wonderful tonality. But they are the minority. Myself, after shooting large- and medium-format film for decades and knowing its characteristics and strengths, I can generally manipulate a digital file to look fairly good. It's much more than the simple click to monochrome in the software, neither quick nor easy. As in any pursuit, you have to put in the work."

What Is Bokeh? And the Dog's Nose

[Ed. Note: This started out, this morning, as the republication of the article "What Is Bokeh?" from 2009. However, I ended up revising it extensively. This version is based on several of my earlier articles about the subject.]

-

There are three common types of blur in photographs. Two are caused by movement. Moving the camera while the exposure is made, either deliberately or accidentally, is called "camera shake."

Example 1 by Tone

Example 2 Ray Graham

Blur because the subject moved while the exposure was being made is called "subject motion."

Example 1 by Aaron Reed

Example 2 by PhotoJunket

Example 3 by Roberto Rodriguez Adam

When the above two kinds of blur are deliberately combined, usually by trying to follow a moving subject with the camera during the exposure, it's called "panning."

Example of panning by Wanda Scott

The third common kind of blur is when parts or all of a picture are "out of focus" (o-o-f) or not within the depth of field (d-o-f). This is usually called "focus blur."

Example 1 by Zoran Rodic

Example 2 by Patrick Marioné

Example 3 by Reinhard Gruber

(Example 3 under "subject motion" is also an example out-of-d.o.f. blur or bokeh.)

Putting the plane of best focus in the wrong place is called "misfocus." (A fourth kind is software-generated blur such as the "Portrait" setting on my iPhone, but that's beyond the scope of this post.)

Example of misfocus by Meestro

As an aside, note that all three of these types of blur are common causes of less than perfect clarity when they are present in small amounts below the threshhold of conscious recognition. We became much more aware of this when digital came along and we could pixel-peep our files at any magnification. Even now, though, very small amounts of motion blur, camera shake, and misfocus are very common in pictures people assume are "fine." And, indeed, in some cases they don't ruin the picture. People actually have a pretty good ability to look at the image subject when the image isn't perfect.

"Bokeh" simply refers to out-of-focus blur or the parts of a photograph that are out of the depth-of-field, and, especially, the subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur. It derives from the Japanese word that more or less means "fuzzy," which also sometimes has the sense of "fuzzy in the head," i.e., confused. That works nicely.

Highlights
Bokeh includes, but is not limited to, consideration of out-of-focus specular highlights. Out-of-focus specular highlights (here's an example) are simply where aperture shape will show up most easily in pictures (i.e., spots of bright sky in out-of-focus foliage, for example). The reason the Internet thinks "bokeh" only refers to highlights, and that the shape of the aperture blades are the defining feature, is because that's the most obvious effect.

Section of search results page for "bokeh" on Flickr. The Internet thinks bokeh only means out-of-focus light sources and specular highlights, which is wrong.

The only lens I ever got rid of because of its specular highlight bokeh was a Zeiss 100mm ƒ/3.5 for the Hasselblad. (An extremely sharp lens.) It had five aperture blades, and small, bright out-of-focus spots were perfect pentagons. Specular highlights tend to pick up the shape of the aperture (here's an example—the shape of the out-of-focus highlights are the shape made by the aperture blades). Lenses with rounder aperture shapes avoid rendering specular out-of-dof highlights that way, but rounded aperture blades merely help a little in certain situations—they don't create good bokeh all by themselves. It's much more complicated than that.

A tip, though: if your lens's aperture has a distinct geometric shape that you see in specular o-o-f highlights, remember that it's probably still perfectly circular wide open, so you can sometimes avoid the aperture-shaped "blobs" that way.

The three original articles about bokeh were published in the March/April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine, which I edited at the time. Carl Weese was the one who introduced me to the idea. Oren Grad, who speaks Japanese, clarified the terminology. The articles were written by John Kennerdell, Oren, and Harold Merklinger. Harold's article is online at The Luminous Landscape. Oren and John still write on occasion for The Online Photographer.

The only reason I added the "h" to the end of the Japanese word in the magazine was that English speakers persistently mispronounced "boke," which at one time (but no longer!) was the more common romanization of the Japanese katakana characters. It's properly pronounced in two syllables, "bo" as in "bone" and "ke" as in "Kenneth" with equal stress on each syllable. "Bokeh" simply renders that a little more accurately. At least adding the "h" stopped all the "toke" and "bloke" jokes.

The word or spelling have nothing to do with the word "bouquet," from the French, and is not even pronounced the same (bo-keh versus boo-KAY).

The other nice unintended consequence of the alternative spelling was that it made the term easily searchable on the Internet. In the weeks following the publication of the issue, I was able to watch as the number of LexisNexis search engine hits (1997 was pre-Google) for "bokeh" went from none, to 15, to 90, to 450, to 8,000 and so on. (A Google search just now yielded 70 million results.) It was as if I had tagged a word the better to track it, like a naturalist might put a transmitter collar on a wolf. We literally watched it spread.

Some photographers apparently object to the word. It's been called "pretentious." It's not, any more than the terms "sharpness" or "saturated" are pretentious. It's simply a descriptive word for a property some photographs exhibit and some do not. It's shorter than saying "the way the lens renders out-of-focus blur (or out-of-d.o.f. blur)," which is the equivalent in English. That's all.

In this picture, everything but the screen is out-of-focus blur.

There's also no "good" or "bad" bokeh, at least not per se. As my father likes to say, "If it works, you're right, if it doesn't work, you're wrong." Same for bokeh: if you like it, then it's good. If you don't like it, then it's not so good. That goes for the presence of blur, as well as for its specific properties. Some people just don't like blur in pictures at all. And some pictures have none.

There's some agreement as to what's good and what's bad, but it's very rough. For instance, people seem to dislike "ni-sen" (Japanese for "double-line") bokeh—here's an example—but the late Phil Davis (author of Beyond the Zone System, a book every large-format black-and-white photographer should own) showed me a picture he liked taken with a very odd, very old camera that featured a church steeple way in the distance. The lens had rendered it as two very blurry church steeples, quite widely separated. I've still never seen more egregious ni-sen. Phil liked the effect enough that he framed the picture and hung it on his wall. (See above, under "if you like it....")

It's true that I got very obsessive about it for a long time (which I don't recommend), but my own opinion is simply that the blur should be unobtrusive, and not detract from or call attention away from the in-focus areas of a picture, unless you mean it to.

"Selective focus," another term causing confusion, just means the tactic on the part of the photographer of choosing which part of a picture is in focus and which part isn't—hopefully, photographers know enough to control which is which. (Some photographers don't, sadly. I see a lot of close-up portraits of dogs where the eyes are in focus and the end of the nose isn't, which bugs me like a bad tpyo.) The opposite of selective focus is sometimes called "pan-focus," which just means that everything is sharp from front to back. The term pan-focus has nothing to do with panning, which is a different technique altogether. I know, photographic terminology is a mess and getting worse. Don't blame me.

The King is dead
Then there's the issue of the applied connoisseurship of lens bokeh—specific aesthetic effects, or the adjective preceding the word. The Japanese term for the character of the bokeh (according to Oren) is boke-aji, which translates roughly to "flavor of blur." Typical "flavors" might be harsh, jarring, smooth, fuzzy, gentle, tizzy, confused, soft, etc. Just ordinary descriptive words.

In the early 2000s I created a .PDF download ranking some specific lenses for boke-aji. It's of limited usefulness these days, because all of the rankings are for old film-camera lenses, but here it is if you're curious. Remember, though, the ratings are just my own opinion. There are no agreed-upon standards.

There's also no perfect lens for bokeh. Please don't ask me how I know; I mentioned obsession, and it's very painful to suffer from such a blatant mental infirmity. Well, okay, the correct word is embarrassing, not painful. An acquaintance from Minneapolis once sent me a picture postcard that had an out-of-focus brick wall in the background. I looked at the picture first, and my eyes went right to the brick wall, because such regular but contrasty subjects are good at revealing shortcomings in the blur behavior of a lens. Then I flipped over the card to find that Gary had written, "As Mike's eyes go straight to the brick wall...."

He got me.

And as for "the King of Bokeh," which is what I unfortunately dubbed the Leica Summicron 35mm ƒ/2 version "IV" in a caption in the original articles: well, it's not. It's just not. I had no idea that reputation could adhere so firmly and so persistently to that lens even now, more than 20 years later, due to such an offhand comment! Here's what I should have said, if I could have explained myself better: that lens has nice, tight, coherent background bokeh when you shoot it stopped down and focused on middle distances, say, five feet and farther. "Nice, tight, [and] coherent" is merely the kind of bokeh I happen to like in B&W; and I always stopped that lens down at least one stop and usually two or three—honestly, I don't think I ever shot with it wide open in all the years I owned it; and "focused on middle distances" is how I usually shoot. So I'm sorry; I shouldn't have generalized. Troublemaker, I am.

'All generalizations are wrong'
As a general rule, I've found that bokeh gets progressively more problematic:

• the larger the aperture (meaning, the more aberrations come into play)
• the closer the focus
• the more distant the background from the plane of focus
• the more complex and/or contrasty the background

What these rules of thumb predict, quite naturally, is that you’ll have an easier time avoiding distracting bokeh with most lenses if you stop down a bit, keep the focus at moderate distances, and avoid contrasty backgrounds. With any lens, we discover our own limits for what we’ll tolerate, and then either shoot within those limits or deal with the consequences. The above rules of thumb also predict that “worst case” bokeh is easy to provoke: it’s when you use the lens’s widest aperture, focus as close as the lens can, and include deep background with complex subject matter or harsh contrast.

Front and rear bokeh (meaning in front of, or behind, the plane of best focus) might also differ.

The important thing to realize here is that there's no such thing as "the" bokeh of a lens! As the above indicates, the same lens can render blur differently depending on how a picture was taken and on what it shows; the bokeh can even be quite different in different areas of the same picture.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that if the bokeh is generally better, the in-focus image is generally a little softer and gentler, and not so "hard sharp" or "wire-sharp" as virtually all modern lenses have become. This is just a very rough equivalence and not a hard-and-fast rule. I might have said in 1997 that this was true of Bronica and Minolta film-cameras lenses generally, except I would never have dared to suggest that any brand of lens was less than super-sharp; that would have been the mafioso's kiss. Also, bokeh looks better in B&W.

No one lensmaker makes all its lenses with the same bokeh characteristics, so none can be said to be "best," and, really, no one lens can be better than any other at rendering bokeh because it's a matter of taste! I've seen statements like "this lens has beautiful bokeh" made about bokeh I personally think is atrocious. That doesn't mean they're wrong and I'm right, though. It just means my taste differs from theirs.

In general, digital lenses do better with bokeh than film lenses did. Probably because, post-1997, it started being talked about more and more (you know, from zero hits to 70 million hits), and lens manufacturers haven't got their heads in the sand. I've even seen the word used in lens advertisements. Lots of post-1997 lenses have really nice bokeh. I love the PanaLeica 45mm Macro, for example. (No, not a King. It's not even the Marquis of Bokeh. It just has pretty bokeh that I love. You can see an example in this post.)

One last curmudgeonly grouse on this subject: sometimes I think I helped create a monster. Please, Internet: bokeh isn't necessarily a desirable property all the time, and more of it isn't automatically better! Many beginners and a few ignoramuses on the Internet seem to assert that the greater an area of a picture is out of the depth of field, the better a picture it is. That's nonsense. I've even heard people say that since they paid extra for a fast lens, they're going to shoot it wide open all the time! How wrongheaded can you get? It's like saying a B&W print is better the more black it has in it. (They paid for that silver!) Photographers always try to get the placement of focus right and the depth-of-field right, and that doesn't mean more or less of one or the other—it means the picture should have what it needs according to your best judgement. Photography isn't about all-purpose rules applied rigidly to all circumstances. Get the dog's nose in the depth-of-field, please!*

Learning how your lens renders blur is no different from learning its other characteristics, such as whether it's unsharp at certain apertures or whether it smears the corners or whatever. Some people like that kind of thing, some people don't. It's all good. Want my advice? Don't obsess about it. (I know whereof I speak.) If you want to learn about it so you can attempt to apply it or control it, fine; if you don't, and prefer just to take pictures and let the chips (both the sharp and the blurry chips!) fall where they may, that's fine too. We're all just having fun here, after all.

I'm off till Sunday. Have a nice weekend! Get out and take some nice blurry pictures why don't you....  :-)

Mike

*I love that picture. Love that expression. The joke is, when you want to get the dog's nose in the d-o-f, one way is to photograph a dog with a shorter nose!

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

JH: "Re 'All generalizations are wrong': I use this all the time in the form of 'All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false.' It's a paraphrase of the philosophy of Kurt Gödel who proved mathematically that some things could not be proven, so he switched to philosophy."

Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, c. 1933

JG: "I frequently photograph my dog, a white standard poodle, using my Sony RX1, which has a 35mm ƒ/2 lens that renders photos in such a gorgeous way that I happily live with its many quirks and marginal reliability. Her nose is so long (approx. 6"!) that even with the lens stopped down to ƒ/8, it's impossible to get both it and her eyes in focus if I photograph her face straight on. At typical portrait distances, it's even difficult to get her nose and eyes in focus with her head turned 45 degrees, so photographing her well is more of a technical challenge than many people might realize."

marcin wuu: "There's a great read about bokeh and depth of field on Zeiss's website. Easy to understand yet scientifically sound, the best kind of article you can imagine. Funny thing about what's good and what isn't in the context of animal photography—as a cat person and shallow d-o-f fanatic, I suffer greatly because it's so much harder to put cat's nose out of focus with modern tiny sensor cameras—a cat's muzzle is way shorter than a dog's."

Mike replies: An excellent paper...I assume, as much of it is well beyond my own expertise! I particularly liked the sentence, on page 26, "The most important and clearest attribute of blurring is simply the amount of it." True dat.

The paper is a bit ironic for me however. In 1997 I had access to Zeiss's spokesperson. I can't come up with his name just now (my aging brain!) but he was quite an enthusiast (a resolution fanatic) and very intelligent, and perhaps a bit imperious as well. When I asked about Zeiss's position on the issue of "bokeh" (explaining what it meant), he reported back that he had inquired of Zeiss's lens designers but was met with perplexity. Apparently no one then at Zeiss had the habit of considering how the out-of-focus areas were visually rendered in pictures. I was told some version of the same thing we heard all over: you are supposed to look at the stuff that's in focus, not the stuff that's out of focus. Which is fair enough.

By the way, since then, I think Zeiss is one of the companies that has used the word "bokeh" in its advertising, if I'm not mistaken.

Relevant to what I said about small amounts of blurring degrading quality, I had been puzzled by an illustration photo in a then-recent Contax brochure that purported to show the resolution of one of Zeiss's best lenses for that system, but that, to my eye, was clearly slightly degraded by motion blur (and I was seeing just the printed brochure, not the original slide or print). The spokesman knew nothing about it and said that Zeiss had nothing at all to do with Contax's brochure pictures, which was doubtless true. I was curious, however, and at the time I had a practice of occasionally trying hard to get to the bottom of a random selected mystery—a good habit for a journalist, I've always thought—and I chased down the story about that particular factoid. At Photo East the next year I found the guy who knew the story. It turned out that the picture had been taken by one of the PR people tasked with writing the brochure, someone who wasn't even really a photographer. It was these sorts of facts that I learned to keep to myself, though, because in our industry it wasn't very difficult to get blackballed if you embarrassed somebody. I was already on the "outs" with Contax at the time, so I kept my mouth shut about that little point. I hope now that Contax is long out of the camera business, and the camera that brochure was concerned with is selling for peanuts on eBay, I won't get in trouble for saying this! (The Zeiss lens that made the picture is excellent; I actually still have one.)

Speaking of keeping one's mouth shut, my friend Jerry K. (who provided the picture of the soccer ball in the fishing net the other day) told me a joke yesterday. Seems an older gentleman had just passed his 60th anniversary, and was asked what the secret to a long marriage was. He said, "I've learned two things. To do what I'm told and to keep my mouth shut."

The interviewer said, "Oh, really? What if you wanted to tell her something nice, for example, that her figure looks particularly nice in a particular dress?"

The old man considers this thoughtfully for a few beats, and then says, "I wouldn't risk it."

John Krill: "Speaking of the dog's nose this photo was taken in Vietnam. The dog got so close that its nose was out of focus. Sadly the dog was killed by a land mine but his handler survived.

"Follow this link to see the photo and the story."

One More Thought About Sharpness

One more thing about sharpness. It's tempting to think of ourselves as outside of time and unconstrained by the limitations of our era and culture, but the opposite might be more the case. If you were a Greek in Homeric times and there was a storm at sea, it would be difficult not to believe—and perilous to propose to others—that the explanation was something other than that Poseidon was pissed off. I mean, duh—what else could it be?

Tastes change, and we change along with them. Victorian decor and dresses that hide that all-important erogenous zone, the feminine ankle, seem now like they must have been instantly old-fashioned, but they were once new-fashioned—hip, cool, happenin', the latest thing.

Our expectations change along with the changes in style and taste. Sometimes, older men (especially) stick with the styles of their youth, and resist change—I know two gentlemen here of my father's generation (still hirsute, the lucky dogs—I myself am going bald fast) who have never given up 1950s "greaser" hairstyles. Personally, I have trouble with the decline of proper cars and the capturing of the market by cargo-haulers as everyday personal conveyances. Bah humbug; a pox on pickups, etc., etc.

Anyway, all this long, moseying preamble is just coming around to the point that conventional tastes in image sharpness are always changing too. The other day I recommended End of the Caliphate by Ivor Prickett, and it's an excellent example. (Amazon is almost out—here it is from The Book Depository, with free international shipping.) Naturally the first few times you look at a book like that you respond to the content, with emotion; it takes a cold heart indeed to see a picture of a woman wailing by the bloody steps where her son was just killed and think, "they got a nice blue in that dress." So only on my fourth or fifth time through the book did I really consider the technique directly—I looked at it in the light of our sharpness discussion. When I did, it occurred to me that if I had encountered this book thirty years ago or forty years ago, I probably would have considered it to be bizarrely, garishly, intrusively oversharpened; it might have impeded my appreciation of the content of the pictures. As it was, when I took my first pass through the book I just sort of thought, in the back of my mind, that it's a good example of modern photographic style, and got right into the content. It was what I've come to expect. No big deal.

Ivor Prickett, plate from the book End of the Caliphate

In other words, aside from those few of us who are the equivalent of my older acquaintances with their '50s hairstyles, I would assume that most of us have adapted to the current tastes, and now have a much higher tolerance for sharpness than people would have had in 1970 or 1980. I do.

I'm kind of sorry, though, that I did examine End of the Caliphate with such a cold eye for technique...I'm finding it a little difficult to "unsee" that aspect of the pictures now that I've seen them that way. I don't want to see these pictures that way. I want to see "into" them, to the scenes they depict, the emotions on the faces. Like I did when I first looked through the book, and the second time and the third time. Eventually, though, all photographs will look "of their time." Nothing retains permanently the transparency and impartiality it had when it was new.

The upshot is that with any technical property, including what we call "sharpness," it doesn't just depend on the object—the print of the picture or the picture in the printed book; it also has to do with what we are used to—what is normal in our culture now, and what the audience expects and considers usual.

In that way, sharpness (and other aspects of pictures) can be considered to be not entirely under our control, no matter how many sliders we have at our disposal in our image editor applications of choice.

Mike

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

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

Dan Gorman: "Thanks for highlighting the work of Ivor Prickett. I wasn't planning to comment on the sharpness series, as it's rarely important to me as an attribute in my own pictures. But the image of the Iraqi mother shrieking at the sight of her son's slaughter on the family doorstep struck me to the core.

"In my last job I had the privilege of working with a student who had come to the U.S. straight from Mosul in 2014 - right around the time that ISIS took over the city and incorporated it into the self-proclaimed caliphate. Sana was a bright young woman, preparing for medical school, who was elected president of the student club I served as an advisor. In the two years I worked with Sana, I never had the heart to ask about her family's experience of leaving Mosul, but I enjoyed seeing her grow as a student and a leader—and took solace in seeing her laugh and enjoy goofy, lighthearted moments with her friends. May our country always be a welcoming haven for refugees from the kind of human-made hell-on-earth that Mosul became, circa 2014–18.

"I took a few moments just now to look at several of Ivor Prickett's pictures in Google Images—beautiful, amazing, and deeply affecting work. How lucky are we to live where where we do, and to have brave, talented people like Mr. Prickett who are willing to document the kind of horrors we can only hope our own children will never have to experience?

"Thanks again for sharing, and for all your good work."

'Sharp' Is Subjective

Marion Post Wolcott, Durham, North Carolina. Five Points, center of city, with Chesterfield cigarette factories in background, 1940 (detail).

Sharpness, which we've been discussing, is a subjective impression. The following is concerned with sharpness as seen in pictures, not as a technical property which can be measured.

Sharpness is not necessarily the same thing as higher resolution or greater detail; actually, true high resolution can seem subjectively less sharp because edges are less emphasized and contrast becomes effectively "more local." Often, a high degree of subjective clarity can still be conveyed where there is surprisingly little fine detail.

It all sort of depends what you mean by "sharp"; or, we might say, by what sort of sharp you happen to like. People who say they like sharpness sometimes like clarity, which can be conveyed by adroit lighting (artificial or natural) and the sensical delineation of form. One example of that might be certain classical Hollywood-style portraits, similar to this double portrait by Karsh, which, you'll notice, retains a sense of high sharpness even as a quite small JPEG (with very little fine detail, like I said above). Others might respond more to emphasized edges or boundaries, which emphasizes the impression of what's called "3D effect" even though you're obviously looking at only two dimensions. I know people who were pretty preoccupied back in the film days with finding high acutance (edge effect) developers. Still others might like the effect of clear and detailed elements set off by soft areas, finding vividness in the differentiation: pictures of soft motion-blurred water over precisely described wet rock, which describes the first print I ever bought, or in-focus objects conventionally set against out-of-focus background and/or foreground elements—such as this portrait by Dave 6163—exemplify this effect.

Sometimes, a high amount of readable visual detail does the trick, even if the detail might not be of the highest resolution, as in this 1940 photo of Durham, North Carolina by Marion Post Wolcott, in which 1940 Durham almost looks like a model of 1940 Durham. You can spend a lot of time looking around in this image. After clicking on the full size version, look at the house with the porch in the middle left of the picture, for example (the detail at the top of this post)—it's very clear in terms of form but the level of actual resolution isn't the highest, at least by Fuji GFX 100 or gigapixel standards.

Some respond to high overall contrast like this picture by keid* (the asterisk here is part of his handle or alias—it doesn't signal a footnote), while others respond to microcontrast. (The "Structure" slider in Silver Efex Pro 2 is basically a microcontrast control.) Color can even contribute to clarity, and thus a sense of sharpness, because opposing colors can create color contrast. This picture by Fabrice Schmitt has low overall contrast but is an effective use of color contrast.

I won't go on and make this into a full-blown disquisition; y'all know how Yr. Hmbl. Ed. can go on and on sometimes. (Sorry about the "y'all"—I'm still in Durham.) The point is, sharp isn't just one thing. It kinda depends on what you mean by the word. And, on whatever charms your eye.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

William Schneider: "Howard Bond made beautifully crafted prints from view camera negatives. Photos and stories by Howard were often featured in Photo Techniques magazine, the one that you once edited. He began experimenting with unsharp masking in the darkroom, and the magazine offered a sample print for sale. I purchased it, and immediately upon arrival, I knew that the technique was not for me. Good thing too, because the darkroom process was very time consuming to pull off."

Mike replies: I'm glad to hear that. My idea for those sales was so people could see original examples of various techniques for themselves.

Kefyn Moss: "Photographs are a conglomeration of many visual and aesthetic qualities, as you so eloquently point out, and sharpness is not a very accurately defined one. You're helping to boost the clarity here Mike."

Yesterday's Post...

...Drew a lot of comments. I had a dentist's appointment yesterday afternoon and I was away last night, so this morning I will be working through the discussion, posting Featured Comments and vetting the comments for the regular comments section [UPDATE: caught up now]. Please stop back to see some of the interesting things said.

This is it! We're finally going to get to the bottom of whole sharpness thing and settle it once and for all. (I'm kidding. Should be fun though.)

Mike

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No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Open Mike: Sharp Is Another Way Photographs Can Be

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Editor talks even more off the top of his head than usual. It usually appears on Wednesdays, but everything is a day late this week because I decided to let the Monday topic "soak" for an extra day—it was a treat to have Ctein back.]

-

In the vast precincts where shopping is king—that's what most "enthusiast photography" activity amounts to, shopping (and I'm not above it, God knows)—it's widely taken for granted that sharper = better.

I've never believed it.

Here are a few things I believe:

• Excessive sharpness can be visually unpleasant.
• As many pictures are spoiled by being too sharp as are spoiled by not being sharp enough.
• Sharpness is merely "one of the ways" a photograph can be...sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the picture.
• People worry way too much about sharpness. They treat it as if it's a test of belonging to the correct group, or of right and proper (orthodox) belief.
• There are different kinds of "sharpness." No one is actually ever precisely sure what anyone else means by the term.
• Other things are more important than sharpness. And not just content-related aspects of the image—other technical properties too.
• These days, virtually all decent equipment yields results that are sharp enough.
• When you've obsessively maximized and perfected sharpness, you haven't necessarily earned any extra credit for your pictures. That is, a picture can be superbly sharp and still suck.
• When post-processing, you have to be judicious with sharpness, striving for "just right"—a balance—instead of "as much as possible"—the extreme.

As I say, just my own beliefs. YMMV, etc.

There's nothing wrong with sharpness, and I'm not arguing against it—it's certainly the prevailing style, and it does help certain pictures work. But sharpness does not automatically equal better.

Artistically, even radically unsharp pictures can work better than sharp pictures. Let's consider just a few examples from history:

Paul Caponigro, Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967

Curiously, I've never seen an original print of this. Paul used view cameras, most usually a 5x7, so most of his pictures depend on exact description of form and texture; this one, an exception, is so much a "greatest hit" that at times he has declared a moratorium on sales because he gets so sick of printing it. The magic of the picture is in the motion blur, which powerfully conjures the feel of twilight and makes the deer ghostly and seem to flow. Had the deer been perfectly sharp this photograph would never have been so famous.

Robert Capa, American troops landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day,
Normandy, France, June 6th, 1944

Recently Robert Capa has become retroactively controversial, apparently for the purpose of retrospectively besmirching his reputation, to what purpose I have no idea. It has been suggested by ivory-tower critics, from the warm and comfortable confines of their safe surroundings, that he might have been scared (scared!) on D-Day and that he might have botched this particular part of his assignment, submitting ruined film from which only a few images were salvageable. Well, I imagine I would be scared if I were in the middle of the action on D-Day, too, and, although I am only speculating, I think some of his censurers would shit their pants in combat. And how you have "failed" your assignment when you create (by whatever combination of chance, contrivance, and circumstance) one of the iconic images of the entire Second World War and one of the most famous war images in the history of photography, somebody else is going to have to explain. How one still photograph could better convey the sense of being mortal and human and exposed in the midst of the hell of the invasion, I do not know; and I also don't know how Robert Capa's accomplishment could have been improved if this picture were sharp and clear and fastidiously exposed according to armchair optimum practices, and if it were accompanied by more outtakes.

Andy Warhol, Sean Lennon, 1985 (Polaroid)

Sharp color Polaroids were the exception, not the rule. At least you didn't need digital skin-smoothing actions.

I should go on—I could build ten examples like these three—but I have a dentist appointment to get to soon, and am feeling like the condemned man walking to the gallows (I am such a baby when it comes to manning up to the dental chair that it sends me spinning into hyperbole).

Is it just me, or does anyone else miss all the ways that photographs used to be able to be unsharp? It expanded the creative palette, the variety of ways we could achieve creative effects and use them to signify all sorts of things, from the time of day, to the immediacy, to emotion. Now that most every photograph from the most casual phone snap to the most careful professional advertising shot is bitingly sharp and glaringly clear, I kind of miss that. Of all the things to miss.

Again, I'm not arguing against sharpness. I have nothing against it. I often like sharp pictures. I am also completely open-minded to photographers who want all of their work pin-sharp from front to back. It can be a very effective personal style.

Sharp is another way photographs can be, along with all the other ways.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

Andrew Lamb: "I'm sure I won't be the only person to comment that many movie DOPs use older lenses on their Reds or Arri Alexas simply to get away from super-sharp, clinical images. I did the stills on a movie where John Mathieson (Gladiator amongst other films) used an ancient Cooke zoom on a Red."

Herman Krieger: "That's what you call a sharp analysis."

[Herman, who is officially TOP's oldest reader (we surveyed), loves puns. Here's a link to a recent interview with him. —Mike]

toto: "Just give me sharp bokeh, and I'll be happy."

James Weekes: "Thank you for this. I do love a decently sharp representation of what I photographed, most of the time. Then I put my Holga lens on one of my Micro 4/3 cameras and play. I also love the results of these. In color, a lovely, unreal smearing of colors, especially red. In black and white, a return to Tri-X 120, thank you DxO."

Dogman (partial comment): "Concerning D-Day, I once read an article or a section of a book that stated something like seven out of 10 veterans of the invasion admitted to soiling their pants during the operation. The writer said he related these statistics to someone who was also a veteran and the response he received was, 'Then three out of ten were liars.'"

Roy Feldman: "The new book by Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey, has some of the most beautiful unsharp Polaroid B&W's I've ever seen. They are like poems and excel because of their simplicity and truth. Polaroids, despite limitations, are truthful."

PhotoDes: "I've seen the expression 'natural sharpness' used several times on another website and it stuck with me and, more important, caused me to change the way I was doing post-processing, which was tending to over-sharpening. Just what 'natural sharpness' is is hard to say, but having the concept in the back of my mind keeps me in check."

Mike replies: It's a good idea to have that in your head. It's basically my guiding standard for all photo processing—that the technique or properties of the picture shouldn't call attention to themselves or distract from the content of the picture. But an image can be very sharp and still look natural. My standard for very-sharp-but-natural-looking is probably Ctein's bridge and moon print from the Big Print sale. In that he achieved extreme sharpness but in a way that doesn't look unnatural to me.

[A different] Mike (partial comment): "Thanks for this. I am weary of the worship of sharpness."

John Camp: "I have a print of 'Running White Deer' on my wall, and bought it directly from Caponigro's studio, where I'm told it had been hanging on the wall there. One of the cool things is that the photo is in a sense quite sharp—I believe it must have been taken a a very quiet, dark day, with a long relatively exposure, because the leaves on the trees in the background are actually quite sharp. Maybe not razor-edge, but they're not blurred. The contrast between the sharp forest and the blurred deer is one of the interesting things about the shot. Excessive sharpness can drain the life from a photo—blur is one way our eyes detect action or movement. It can also impart a sense of stillness, which may very well be desirable. You pick your poison."

Bandbox: "I've seen 'Running White Deer' often in gallery shows over the years, most recently in shows at 162 Russell Ave., Rockport, ME (just down the road from my house) in December 2018 and this July. I've thought for a long time that Caponigro's work is the gold standard for printing. He's a superb craftsman and still active, though I didn't see anything new from him in these shows."

Robert Roaldi: "Maybe 'sharpness' is just low-hanging fruit. To first approximation, you get it by just spending more money, so it's available to more people than other qualities might be."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Actually, one of the 'ivory-tower critics' who contributed to the recent research of Robert Capa's iconic D-Day photo was J. Ross Baughman, a Pulitzer Prize photojournalist and combat photographer who was severely wounded by a land mine in 1982. (As we know, Capa was killed by a land mine in 1954.) The D-Day project's goal wasn't to besmirch Capa's reputation but to correct the historical record. The new evidence tends to debunk the old story that a teenage darkroom assistant ruined most of Capa's D-Day film during processing. Instead, the evidence suggests Capa shot far fewer frames than he claimed.

"I don't fault Capa for quickly leaving the scene of battle. His position was extremely dangerous, everyone there was scared, and any pictures he took were valuable if he could return in one piece. But correcting errors in historical records is a good thing, no matter where the chips may fall.

"(Full disclosure: Although Baughman isn't a personal friend of mine, we were colleagues at a daily newspaper and were college classmates in journalism school before that. I admire his photography and respect his contribution to the Capa project.)"

Mark McCormick-Goodhart: "Just wondering if Peter Turnley's photo you posted yesterday of the young woman on a Paris balcony motivated you to write today's article on image sharpness. Peter's photograph is magnificently soft. A sharper image wouldn't make it better, and indeed I dare say a sharper rendition would have sterilized the sensual beauty of the scene. Lovely image...timely discussion about image sharpness."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Nice synopsis of sharpness’s stature, Mike. As I noted in a comment to an earlier topic, sharpness is a tool just like other visual characteristics and is best deployed with judgement against the overall visual mission for an image. By the way, as someone who has viewed many thousands of the world’s most highly prized photographic prints I can honestly say that hardly any would pass the sharpness grade of amateur photo fora. Only contact prints would have a chance of being approved by the keyboard crowd! It’s also worth noting that this is mostly an academic subject for work online, where subtlety is hard to achieve even with today’s high-res displays."

Thomas Walsh (partial comment): "A few blogs back I took issue with your comments on the new iPhone. You asked me to wait because there was always something different to consider on TOP. How correct you were. This blog on sharpness is one of the best I've read since finding TOP. I read all of the comments and thoroughly enjoyed them. Thanks, Mike, for this article."

Mike replies: You're welcome. A blog is like the weather in Vermont....

Stefan (partial comment): "I am bored by sharpness."

Prints!

Sometimes I think I've landed in the wrong business. I used to go far out of my way to see photographs, which meant physical prints. I mean literally—I'd drive to another city to see a show.

Sometimes, now, readers send me prints. David Francis sent me a print. It's small, a card, but it's still lovely. The picture, called Swan Gourd #2, is beautifully simple, and the print is gorgeous. I've actually considered framing it! I still might, except I have a wee little house and no room for everything. His judgement was just right. I've looked at it a lot.

Marcelo Guarini sent me a print, of his picture in this post. It's so different than the JPEG online...it has wonderful presence. Again, I think he got it just right—his judgement was bang on. His was a gift, after I offered to buy a print from him. (Thank you, Marcelo.) Such a pleasure to see.

Others have sent me prints too—don't think I don't appreciate them just because I haven't mentioned everyone here. I do. I look at everything. I read everything that comes in, too. I end up looking at some prints a lot.

...Just so you can get a rough idea. But this is like seeing
a shadow. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

I tell ya, I have a hunger to see prints. It's one disadvantage of living so far out in the country, in reach of only a few museums. I used to live in DC, and what a pleasure that was—museums all over the place, free for walking into. I'm being honest: I remember prints I saw thirty years ago, and twenty, and ten. The occasions—the experience of viewing them—are events for me.

I like JPEGs too, I guess. But it's sorta like wanting to see people and seeing only their shadows. Just not quite the same thing. Well, actually JPEGs can be very nice too.

I'm just going to have to work out a way to see more prints. Do you enjoy prints? To me they're a great pleasure.

Mike
(Thanks to David, Marcelo, and many others)

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

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

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

Michael Trupiano: "My work is not done until the physical object, a print, exists."

Jeff: "I’ve traveled not just locally, but to other countries to see both paintings and photo prints. Truly one of my joys in life (thanks, Mom and Dad, for appreciating art). And one of my decision criteria for home locations (even when considering job opportunities before retirement) has been proximity to visual arts.

"That joy eventually translated into collecting vintage prints (and photo books) in the '80s. The process introduced me to dealers, curators, and others, and opened my eyes to even more print-viewing opportunities. One such method has been to call the photography department curator at various museums to arrange for private viewings of prints that rarely if ever get exhibited, but reside in collections. On slower days, these folks are sometimes thrilled to be able to share the experience.

"Like you, many prints stick in my mind seemingly forever. Frustratingly so at times when I’ve missed an opportunity to buy a print well before the price has soared. I related one such story here regarding a Walker Evans' print at a DC AIPAD show.

"Not surprisingly, my own photography is grounded on a print-worthy picture as the ultimate goal (and maybe a book some day). That required my building four darkrooms as I moved across country for job opportunities. Now retired, having gone fully digital, the goal remains the same. My house no longer requires darkroom space, but still needs room for the printer and workspace/tools for matting, framing and supplies.

"Too bad that so many people today haven’t ever seen a gorgeous print, well displayed, let alone done their own printing."

Speed: "Mike wrote, 'I used to live in DC, and what a pleasure that was—museums all over the place, free for walking into.'

"I grew up and still live in Cleveland, Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie in the US Midwest. Historically Cleveland was a manufacturing city and world headquarters for industrial companies such as Standard Oil, Republic Steel, White Motors and the C&O Railroad. Fortunately, some of the wealth those companies created was used to build a great art museum (The Cleveland Museum of Art), a great orchestra (The Cleveland Orchestra) and other enduring public works.

"I was spoiled. In grade school we visited the art museum once or twice a year and, because we were immature boys, we enjoyed only the Armor Court where chain mail, armor, swords and axes were displayed. The works of Michelangelo, Degas and Picasso meant nothing.

"Decades later I was in Portland, Oregon on business and visited their art museum. I walked through the whole building in less than 20 minutes and wondered where the rest of it was hidden. How fortunate we were in Cleveland to have a great museum that we could visit any time. For free.

"And how fortunate for us that the scions of our industrial era had donated so much of their wealth to make Cleveland a better place to live.

"I keep a postcard reproduction of Edgar Degas’ Frieze of Dancers on my desk. It was my favorite—after the armor.

"The museum has a large collection of photographs."

Stan B.: "One of the great joys in my 'photographic life' to this date was going to Light Gallery at 724 Fifth Avenue in the 'seventies. Being there amidst its white walls with some of the most beautiful prints one could possibly see anywhere was like appreciating photography in the afterlife...."

Mike replies: Light Gallery was legendary.

JohnW: "I enjoy prints immensely! I belong to three prints-only photo groups, so I get a regular fix, and there are 13 prints hanging in my apartment—six colour and seven B&W. I also do my own printing."

Andrew Molitor: "I have mulled over this at, probably, far too great length. It turns out that I have almost the opposite position; prints do very little for me. I mean, I appreciate the physicality and the different way of accessing the picture, but I don't see the print as somehow better. I too have gone to great lengths to see a collection of prints stuck on a wall. But it's not the print as such, that attracts me. (Yes, I have seen very good prints, plenty of them. I have seen very good prints of pictures I am also very familiar with as small JPEGs.) My conclusion is that I am far more driven by the content, the subject matter, than by the character of the image itself than many other photography types. I simply don't care much about the tonality, the color, or even very much about the arrangement of line and form. I am interested in the guy in the picture, the place, the pepper, the mountain. Horses for courses!"

Ram: "Just yesterday I drove three hours each way from Austin to Houston to see the fashion photography exhibit Icons of Style at the Museum of Fine Arts. Totally agree with you, the experience of seeing real gelatin silver prints on display, like those of Penn, Avedon, Weber, Horst, Beaton, et al., was thrilling."

Marcelo Guarini: "If it says something, I spend quite a bit more money in printing materials (printer, paper, inks, etc.) than in photo equipment (cameras, lenses, SD cards, tripods, lights, etc.). Both take a considerable bite of my income, but it keeps me alive. I would love to visit more photo exhibits, but where I live, it is very uncommon to have one on hand. When I visit my sister in Tucson, I spend half the time in the Center for Creative Photography."

David Francis: "Mike, Thanks for your comments on my picture. My printing resources are limited (just an old Canon MP990) and my wall space is close to zero, so cards are an attractive option for me. They may not be fine art quality, but you can often get surprisingly good results. Photo books are my other option for displaying prints. I prefer making my own prints and spiral binding them. Well-produced books are actually my favourite medium for viewing photographs."

Prejudice, Guilt, and Shame

I've made a decision: I'm no longer going to be prejudiced about smartphone cameras. Ten years ago, when Janis Krums took a cellphone picture of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, we still had reason to be amazed that a non-photographer could take a news picture with a phone and it could be, like, meaningful. It seemed like a brave new world then. No longer. Now, smartphone cameras are just another kind of camera. Like any other kind of consumer camera from the Kodak Brownie to the point-and-shoot to the digicam, they can be used for any kind of photography up to and including expressive artwork. Any kind of contempt for their "unseriousness" is hidebound and old fashioned, merely the residue of older attitudes clinging to the present.

For example, I was doing my daily battle with the goldenrod in my "wildflower garden" (inherited with the house) a few days ago, pulling it out by hand, when I uncovered yet another poor plant that had been engulfed and smothered by the rapacious weed. It had large buds at the top so I suspected it was not a weed itself. The next day, returning to yank still more goldenrod from the ground (I have a feeling I will never win), a single day in the sunlight had encouraged the recently liberated be-budded plant to do this:

Blooming while the blooming was good! You could almost feel its gratitude at being freed from the clutches of the rampaging goldenrod. So I ran to the house, got out the full-frame camera and the 85mm lens, and took this. Do you like it?

Just kidding. This is an iPhone picture, in portrait mode.

Does it make any difference? It's just a picture, and it's just for here. I'm not going to print it. Anyway, I think scorning pictures made with phones is an outmoded behavior now, and so is feigning amazement that good pictures can actually be taken with phones. They're just another kind of camera, among all the other kinds of cameras. You might scorn them if you are disposed to scorn other consumer cameras—few photographers ever respected the Kodak Instamatic or Disk cameras, for instance—but don't forget that there have been people who have done interesting work with toy cameras and things like pinhole cameras made from shoe boxes.

Toy camera?!

I suppose it's sort of old-fashioned that I even bother mentioning this, at this late date. The whole rest of the world has already accepted that smartphone cameras are just cameras...it's only crusty old photo-dawgs like moi who have been holdouts. But really, I don't want to be the kind of person who holds other peoples' choices against them, like the crusty old pros in the 1930s and '40s who scorned the tiny 35mm cameras made by Leitz as "toys." Some pretty decent work was done with those, too.

Nothing but colors
I ate some ice cream on Friday, for the first time in this calendar year. I had a kiddie portion. I didn't enjoy it. I felt a bit sick afterwards, half because of the massive dosing of sucrose and cancer-promoting casein, and half out of guilt for betraying my fealty to WFPB. This is an iPhone snap a picture of the ice cream shop in Naples (New York, not Italy, don't get excited):

I'm so ashamed.

Not a great picture, and I'm not proud of it, but it illustrates a point I want to make. I admit I've had various bigotries about materials and methods over the years. For instance, back in the old days when black and white were the colors of photography, I could never seem to bring myself to make serious prints on RC paper. I had used some of the very earliest ones, and they tended to discolor and acquire craquelure, so I never quite trusted them and I could never take them seriously. RC was for work prints, fiber-base for final prints. Which is ironic, because some of my fiber-base prints made on expensive fine-art papers thirty years ago are showing a touch of age, looking a tad dingy (probably because of aging or fading brighteners), whereas prints made on Ilford RC papers still look very good. Some of them look like the day they were made. The RC papers seem to have lasted better than some of the fiber-base papers. If I were going to print traditional B&W today, I'd use Ilford RC papers. Well, except for the fact that museums and galleries are prejudiced against them too. Or are they, still? They used to be.

But I'll tell you one thing I can't get over—taking pictures like the one of the ice cream shop that just depend on pretty colors. I'm not talking about all color photography, just photographs that are entirely "of" bright colors. Whenever I take a photograph that's "just" of color, it's like I get hit by this paintball pellet of guilt and shame. This is just me—I know there are superb photographers known for doing just that their whole careers—but something about it just seems illegitimate to me, and it makes me feel guilty when I catch myself doing it. I find it very hard to concentrate on shooting carefully when the only thing that draws me to a subject is just a bunch of strong happy colors. Something in my brain screams at me for it and makes me feel bad. Bright colors? It seems to say. Is that all photography is?!?

Maybe I need to work on that. Or maybe I'm just not good at that type of color photography. It's all right not to be good at things.

Again, this is just me and my own brain, my own...feelings. For my own work only. Nothing against anyone who pursues colors as a subject, so please don't think I'm insulting you, or anyone. As with many things in photography, I try to separate the way I feel about things for my own work and my openness to the same things in the work of others.

I mostly succeed. Heck, sometimes I even take flower pictures now. That's a change!  :-)

Mike

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John Camp: "I do disdain cell phone cameras when used to make art photos, but I use mine all the time to make notes, record prices, take quick candids, etc. The only time they're removed from my phone is when I discard them or message them to someone, who most often won't remove them from her phone except to discard them.

"You're not far from Manhattan. Go to the Guggenheim, take a look at the huge Robert Mapplethorpe photos on display right now, and tell me how you'd make those prints after shooting the same subject with a iPhone.

"My daughter has access to a very fine, beautifully printed Mapplethorpe retrospective book; she says seeing the Mapplethorpes at the Guggenheim was, for her, a totally different experience. (And it is.)

"I don't run your blog, but it seems to me that you can either have a camera blog, in which all cameras are more-or-less equal, simply because they're all cameras, and that would be a fine thing to do; or you can have a photography blog in which all photos distinctly are not equal. Of the not-equal photos, the iPhone shots are the least equal."

JimH: "Congratulations, Mike.You have crossed the threshold from cause to effect, camera to image. It's easy to focus on what makes the image but that's understandable when we're dealing with an art that uses such seductive tools. I wonder if artists experienced angst over brushes or sculptors over chisels like photographers do over cameras today.

"I recently had to take closeups of some tech products for an online newsletter we produce and I was not pleased with the shots with my Pen F. I tried my iPhone 8 and got much better results. That was it—the whole lot of Olympus gear went on eBay and was sold (got a nice price too!) Why should I leave it sitting here unused? I had only taken about a hundred photos with it in a year.

"Thom Hogan rails at the camera manufacturers about ignoring connectivity and ergonomics and I agree. Using an iPhone is intuitive, simple and covers 90+% of what I ever did with a complicated 'camera.'

"And remember when it comes to art, there are Lomo, Holga, and pinhole groups doing great art. I even had Holga lenses for the Olympuses.

"Your comment about the purists scorning Leica 35mm users at first made me chuckle. My high school art teacher who got me interested in photography (and cars) gave me this drawing more than 50 years ago. Seems appropriate."

photoDes: "Like others who have commented, I just can't manipulate my phone well enough to enjoy photography. It seems to fight me when I'm trying to compose and then push the 'button.' I never seem to catch the picture I want. The photos I've taken are impressive enough but the handling is the worst of all my cameras (various types). I could comment on the lousy sound quality of the phone service too, but I won't."

Tom Burke: "Thank you! I too have been enjoying my iPhone camera. In fact I think that some of my favourite pictures of the last couple of years or so have been taken with it. In view of which, it’s interesting to note that in his 'One device...' anouncement, Steve Jobs did not include a camera as one of the three devices. The three were: a wide screen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and an Internet communicator. Yes there was a camera included as well, but Jobs didn’t think it was worth saying much about it. But the smartphone camera has disrupted an entire industry."

Henning Wulff: "I think my 'moment' regarding phone photographs was when I saw this print offer. This has now proudly hung matted and framed pretty much as you suggested in our house for the past six years. Definitely money well spent; the joy in viewing it is ongoing."

Mike replies: A beautiful thing, isn't it? I still love that.

Paul Van: "As a bit of a gear-hound, one of the things that has appealed to me about photography is the seemingly endless paths you can take. Cell phone photography is just another path, currently well-traveled with occasional footprints leading off the path. While I may be of an age or temperament that is not interested in going down that path (or at least not far), I can appreciate those who want to explore it."

Darrell Marquette: "Yes. They are another kind of camera which I use along with my digital and film cameras. I just love photography no matter what makes the photo."

The Biggest Flaw I See in Pictures*

In one way it's curious that Henri Cartier-Bresson is known for "the decisive moment," and for things like Joel Meyerowitz's description of him darting and pirouetting through crowds like a hummingbird, wielding his Leica like a hibachi chef's knife, because it downplays the amount of time he must have spent sitting around waiting.

Because as I understand it, one of his picturetaking strategies was to find a nice setting, and then wait around until something happened in it. Who knows how long he had to wait, but he was a committed, uncompromising guy, so I imagine that sometimes it must have been pretty long. A guy on a bicycle comes along a cobblestone street at the bottom of some stairs; a little girl runs up a long set of steps between some whitewashed buildings; a fat man ambles across a kids' playground; a man hops over a puddle behind a railroad station.

One PJ I know, who is a nice guy and not otherwise prone to criticizing others quietly calls modern digital-tsunami photography "camera-pointing." I think I can be just a tad more subtle, in the hope of being helpful...what I think is that too many photographers take too many photos that are just settings.

The settings need a "punctum," in Barthian terminology.

And what is punctum? A brief definition: "The book [Barthes' Camera Lucida] develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it" (Wikipedia).

A visual example would make my point more clear:

This is a good example of a picture that is just a setting. I think it's a nice setting, but it's not quite a picture. It's empty of the needed "touching detail." To be a successful picture it needs a punctum. Two young lovers sitting cross-legged against the stone wall, heads bowed together; the hand and arm of a passerby who is disappearing beyond the left-hand side of the frame; a sheet of white paper blown on the wind against the dark stone; an airplane in the sky in the extreme upper-right-hand corner of the frame; something obtruding from a window.

It could be anything. But it needs something.

Many pictures without a particular accent (in which case we might call them "scenes") can work, but, still, most we see are just settings. I think it's the biggest flaw I see in all the photographs I look at out on the Web. Endless waves of pictures washing ashore in which the photographer has found yet another setting, but that is all.

If he had liked the "geometry" of this street corner in Albany well enough, I'm sure old Henri would have waited patiently for ten minutes or an hour for something to happen—something to create a moment, decisively.

But I'm lazy, so I snapped this exposure, settled for a setting, and moved on.

Mike

*But not yours. Please don't reflexively assume I am talking specifically about you, because I'm not!  :-)

[UPDATE Thursday: I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions in the comments, for which I always blame the OP—failure to communicate in a few cases is inevitable, but failure to communicate in many cases is usually the writer's fault. I probably shouldn't have brought up "the decisive moment" or studium/punctum and I probably shouldn't have used just one example. My problem is that I don't like to use real pictures found out on the wild Web when I need negative examples—I don't think that's fair to the people who took the pictures, to single them out and criticize them for what I see as failings.

However, rather than further overspecify my meaning—and that partly because I'm still way, way upside down on comment moderation and it's driving me crazy—I think it might work to say it more simply. What I mean is that taking a random, approximate, undemanding snap of something isn't enough, alone, to make it work as a photograph. There needs to be something in it; it needs to have something. Something that gives it a point, something that draws in the eye, something that you can connect with, something to make you pause and think, something about it that has some measure of beauty, something, anything, that helps an exposure rise above the common mass of everyday average sorta-almost-maybe exposures. Something that touches the heart or engages the brain or reflects the truth or comes together in a form that has particularity or peculiarity, or grace or order, or surrealism or oddity, or meaning, or some other uncommon quality or qualities. Something, whatever it is, to make a picture a hit, not a miss...to someone.

As the now-probably-dated** expression has it: ya feel me?

**Because by the time an expression filters down to me, it's probably not current any more.

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.

Harsh reality

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Dean Zepick: "David duChemin's classes on travel photography talk about this. Just sit for an hour in a location and wait."

Mike replies: The strategy has another advantage too, which is that when you stay stationary for a while, people stop paying attention to you. Try it sometime, if you haven't—when you first appear and take up your position, you'll draw attention, but after everyone nearby has satisfied themselves that you're just standing there, you become invisible. They won't notice when you occasionally raise your camera or look down into the viewing screen.

Andrew Molitor: "I am pretty sure that most of the suggestions you have for punctum would actually be characterized as just more studium by Barthes. In fact, as best I have been able to determine, punctum means the telling, wounding detail, that only a supremely sensitive soul, to be specific, Roland Barthes, can detect.

"I cannot tell if it is that my reading habits have changed lately, or if there has in fact been a massive spike if references to Barthes in the last year or two. He keeps popping up."

Mike replies: A punctum by definition has to be specific to each individual viewer, because it's defined by the effect it has on each of us. That's why Barthes uses Barthes, because he's the only frame of reference he has access to, by definition. And I can't judge whether any of my examples might work as a punctum, because I can't see them! I don't see them because they don't exist. If I haven't see it, how can I guess how seeing it would make me feel? I'm only giving some examples of details that might have been in the frame. But maybe something else would have happened, something I can't foresee or imagine.

For me—and therefore quite possibly not for you—the first picture in this post is an excellent example of punctum. The little kid climbing out of the window is a detail that actually has the ability to continue to be startling to me even long after I've already seen the picture. I just can't quite guess what was going on here or what was running through the photographer's head, whether the girls were posing innocently or knew about the kid in the window, whether the whole thing is to be taken at face value (i.e., the girls didn't know about the kid in the window and the photographer was paying so much attention to the girls that he/she simply didn't pay any attention to the kind climbing out of the window) or it was all a deliberate put-on.

I have to say I love that picture completely.

Joseph Brunjes: "This subject is beautifully discussed by Sam Abel in his National Geographic lecture about his book, The Life of a Photograph. It used to be on iTunes U but I just found it again on YouTube."

Dennis: "I suspect this is a can of worms that probably warrants a much bigger conversation. The punctums (puncti?) you listed are mostly people with the others freezing motion of something moving through the scene. So I think that will make some readers assume that you're trying to say those are the types of things an image must have. I can think of plenty of photos that lack a decisive moment, but still include a personally touching detail. Like a tricycle left on the sidewalk in front of a house (instead of just a house). Meaningful words on a sign in front of a church or diner. Even a whimsical clash (or coincidental match) of colors. There's plenty that can be done to turn a setting into a scene."

Mike replies: Exactly so. That falls under "the perils of using only one example."

JOHN GILLOOLY: "Upon an additional reading of this post, I think it might explain a bit more. It seems that most people are able to find stadium and punctum in their own photographs—almost every one of their own photographs. In the commercial setting, this has taken a bite out of some less critical areas of the business. At most institutions, there is somebody that 'loves taking pictures' and that person is quite enthusiastic to offer their photography skills for free. While the photography may be quite bad objectively, they see both studium and punctum in their images. I think this is also why it tends to be very difficult to successfully edit your own work. It's not easy to separate your experience with the photograph enough to determine whether it objectively possesses these qualities. Or shall I say, whether others are likely to find those same qualities in the image."

David Comdico: "As a sturdy and simple heuristic, I think the setting/punctum rule elaborated here is useful. For example, when wading through the vast number of images we are inundated with it seems to me a reliable reference point.

"When faced with more sophisticated work and deeper analysis, obviously things get more complicated. For starters, take the texts associated with these ideas: Cartier-Bresson's essay in The Decisive Moment and Barthes' Camera Lucida: both have had a monumental impact on photography—nd, being subtle arguments, are (and have been) easily misread.

To give two brief examples: Cartier-Bresson warns against the simple staging of photos: 'The elements which, together, can strike sparks from a subject, are often scattered—either in terms of space or time—and bringing them together by force is "stage management," and, I feel, contrived...the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving. Sometimes you light upon the picture in seconds; it might also require hours or days. But there is no standard plan, no pattern from which to work.'

"In Camera Lucida Barthes states, 'However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic.' And then goes on to associate (and expand upon) a dirt road in a Kertesz photo with that of a personal experience in Hungary and Romania. That is, the subjective nature of the punctum will tend to erase the image itself and expand beyond it through associative substitution.

"This can, obviously, go on at length (there is much more that can be said about the demonic properties of metonymy). But nevertheless the Pareto Principle still applies."

[Heuristic: "Involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods." (Merriam-Webster). Metonymy: "A figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name of something else with which it is closely associated" (Literary Devices.net). For example, "suit" for "businessman." Pareto Principle: Also called the 80/20 principle, that " for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes" (Wikipedia). —Ed.

Mike's only comment to David: in my heuristics, I like simple and sturdy!  :-) ]

Hans Muus: "What a coincidence: my most recent photo, shot January 3, 2019, made me think about Roland Barthes' 'punctum' just a few days ago. At the end of a very grey and dark day suddenly a late sun shone almost horizontally from under the cloudy canopy and lit these houses with a very distinct triangular shape of light. This shape, together with the old fashioned sun screen in the dark at street level and the open dormer windows on top welcoming the sun, drew my attention. I focused and framed the picture. I didn't wait for anything else, just made a bit of haste because I couldn't see how long the sun would last. And then, with my eye glued to the viewfinder and about to press the release button, a young woman's head appeared, as it were inviting the sun much more strongly than the open windows would ever be able to do on their own. You could say it was she who pressed the button and made the photo.

"I didn't take another one, this was it. And I will never forget the feeling I got, of revelation almost, when her head appeared in the viewfinder."

Mike replies: That's a picture.

Thanks for the nice example. And since we're already talking about Cartier-Bresson, he described a similar feeling when the fat man slouched across the courtyard where the kids were playing. I wish I could find it—where he talks about it, I mean—but I can't.

Manuel (partial comment): "The 'decisive moment' is often misinterpreted as the instant something happens before the camera and must be shot immediately, or will be lost forever. While this take is true to some extent, it's a rather superficial one. As Cartier-Bresson himself explained in at least one interview I read, the decisive moment is when everything inside the viewfinder lines falls into place, thus creating a meaningful and interesting composition. You hit bull's eye when you mentioned the bicycle picture: it was when the rider moved across that particular point—between the handrails, which drive the eye to the bicycle—that the scene became a meaningful photographic composition; that was the decisive moment."

[Below is the picture we're talking about, and we're just using it as an example, not holding it up as any great paragon of perfection. Henri is a great photographer, but no photographer is a god. —Ed.]

Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Synthesizing

Synthesize, verb: combine ( number of things) into a coherent whole.

I was going to write more about this, but I see several people have already mentioned it: when deciding on my top five categories, I noticed that in a few cases I could synthesize several into one. For instance, I had "portraits," "kids," and "women" on my list of 25; so what's wrong with "portraits of women and children" as a category? Actually, there might be something wrong with it. I think I need to look at more of my portraits and pictures of women and children all together, to see if they actually do look coherent. Or to see if I could make them coherent if I wanted to and tried to. Maybe it would work as one thing. Or, if it doesn't, then which of the three is really most important to me? Could I combine two of the three? Somewhere in there, there's an answer to what I really find satisfying about those categories.

Also, I shoot a lot of landscapes even though I know I'm not primarily a landscape photographer. But I really love shooting skies and clouds, and find myself doing it a lot just for joy, even when I'm well aware I'm not making great pictures. So then I realized that most of my landscapes and seascapes/lakescapes—and virtually all of another category, sunsets—fit into "clouds and skies." Like the two pictures of mine in this post. So all those could be synthesized into one.

You get the idea.

I'll tell you what, though. As much as I like the concept of concentrating on a few categories or types of pictures in hopes of working with more direction and concentration—I really do feel like I've taken all the desultory meaningless dull dumb nothing snaps I need to for one lifetime—I think that if I'm going to studiously ignore the things that aren't my top priorities, then I really need to think very carefully about my Top Five. And get them right. For example, "women" could be a very different category than "beautiful women." (I suspect that, for me, "women" would be a lot richer and more interesting...for example, I encountered a 106-year-old woman in the doctor's waiting room the other day. I would really like to photograph her and learn a little of her story!)

I liked Jeremy's W.H. Murray quote, too. I've definitely experienced firsthand what it's like to struggle to find clarity, eventually find it, and then feel the power and energy the revelation brings. Still not quite sure how I'll get it, but I want that in my work again.

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.

Harsh reality

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Mark: "My list ended by being about style, technique and sentiment, not about genres let alone gear. So I’m now in a bit of a quandary: which genres? And are the things I have identified as big ones for me genuinely worth it or in fact rut-like habits of approach and sentiment I’d be better off dumping in favour of 'seeing fresh'? Certainly a very beneficial exercise but no easy answers here...so far...."

Mike replies: I ended up feeling pretty much the same way. I feel like I've made progress but I'm not there yet.

Tim Auger: "As you said, you can consolidate several categories into one. In fact I found the exercise more useful after I had read your third post, so that I could devise more meaningful categories knowing what I was trying to achieve.

"But this does go against the advice you often get, that the best way to improve is to shoot, shoot and shoot some more, no matter what is in front of you. Following the Buffett principle may encourage me to be more discriminating, and go out actively to seek out suitable subjects."

Mike replies: I'd say "shoot, shoot and shoot some more, no matter what is in front of you" is singularly bad advice and definitely not the best way to improve—it's more like a recipe for how to spin your wheels and waste your time. I like this advice much better: "shoot, think, shoot." That's from Mark L. Power.

David Comdico: "This exercise is both incredibly simple and impossibly hard. Really hits you in the solar plexus. It's worn out every defense mechanism I could muster. A good start to the year."

Warren Buffet's Principle (The Little Game, Part 3 of 3)

[Note: Some of you won't like this, and that's cool—we all own our own photography. It just means this post isn't for you, that's all. Don't sweat it—even excellent treatments can't be good for every patient.]

For those of you playing along, in Part 1 you wrote down 25 categories that your photography falls into; in Part 2 you prioritized them or ranked their importance to you.

Here's the big idea:

You should not only concentrate on your Top Five categories, but also actively avoid the other twenty.

The idea comes from "The Oracle of Omaha," renowned billionaire investor Warren Buffett. The story (which I first got wind of in the book Grit) is that one day Mr. Buffett was talking to his pilot, Mike Flint, about Mike's career goals. First, Buffett asked Flint to list 25 of his goals in life. Next, he asked him to think about it for a while and then circle the top five.

Obviously, you'd work hard on your top five.

But what, Buffett asked, about the other twenty?

James Clear, who heard the story secondhand and wrote about it*, tells it this way:

"Flint replied, 'Well, the top five are my primary focus, but the other twenty come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.'

"To which Buffett replied, 'No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top five.'"

The concept is simple. The other day, I used fashion photography and macro shots of insects as two genres of photography furthest from my own interests—I don't care about them at all. I've taken exactly one fashion shot in my life and zero closeups of insects. But what that means is that fashion and bugs aren't distractions for me; they're not the things standing in the way of my accomplishing anything. The things that are preventing me from accomplishing what I want to are things I like to shoot and enjoy shooting...just not enough to put them in my Top Five.

My observation over many years is that photographers, for some reason, hate being limited. We all really do like to think we can do everything. Again and again I see this in the work, and hear it in the statements, of photographers of all levels. I even worked up a private little name for it in my own mind—"token genres." Pictures we take which are outside of the mainstream of our work, but which we made just because we had the opportunity to do so and because we wanted to show the world we could. We must think this shows our range and adaptability—when what it probably actually says to the world is, "I'm all over the place and don't really have much of a clue what I'm best at."

I wrote about something similar many years ago when I suggested that you should never have just one wedding shot in your portfolio. The reasoning was that anyone not looking for a wedding photographer couldn't care less if you once shot at a wedding, and anyone looking for a wedding photographer wants someone who specializes in weddings—who's passionate about and committed to photographing them—and that would mean someone showing a portfolio that's exclusively of weddings. Having no wedding shots in your portfolio is fine. Having a portfolio full of wedding work is also fine. Anything in between doesn't do you any good. Nobody's going to hire a photographer to do their wedding based on one photograph. One wedding picture in a portfolio is just taking up space.

Whether you're a professional, an aspiring pro, an artist, an aspiring artist, or an advanced amateur or committed enthusiast, it's just a fact that although you might conceive of yourself as a jack of all trades who can "do anything," you simply cannot do everything well. And when prioritizing, it's not hard to give up the things we don't care about anyway. What's hard for us to give up are all those things we kind of like and enjoy and have spent some time doing—and are a bit proud of ourselves for, if we're honest—but that fall outside of our Top Five. Those are the things, according to Warren Buffett, that are sapping attention, time, energy, and effort from our central interests, our best skills, and what we most want to do. Those are our distractions. They're what are holding us back. They're what we must avoid...painful though it may be.

By the way, I don't think this means we can't still shoot anything at all...if it's in front of us and it's easy. It just means we should recognize distractions for what they are, and that we shouldn't expend time, effort, and energy on those distractions.

Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?

I have more to say about this, but I don't want to dictate the conversation too much. So I'll wait till tomorrow or Saturday to continue. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the meantime.

Mike

*There are numerous accounts of the story online, but James Clear says he heard it from his friend Scott Dinsmore who got it directly from Mike Flint.

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Harsh reality

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David Brown: "I’ve had a similar approach to life but I only circled the top three, not five."

Jeremy: "This is not only an excellent photography-related advice, I think it’s also an excellent way to deal with all things in life. Following a famous quote (attributed to Goethe, but likely not coming from him): 'Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back—concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.' And your exercise just drives the point that we can never really commit to 'everything.'"

Mike replies: I managed to find it—the quote is by W(illiam) H(utchison) Murray, a mountaineer, from his book The Scottish Himalayan Expedition published in 1951. It is misattributed to Goethe because Murray quotes a translation of Goethe at the end of it.Wikipedia's version is different from yours, so I'll quote it as they have it:

... but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money—booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Joseph Holmes: "Another take on this idea: I got to be a judge in two different national photo competitions, and believe me, the entries that were easiest to quickly reject were the ones where the photographer was trying to show versatility. As soon as a photographer's series contained both black and white and color, or a portrait and landscape, or macro and anything else, boom—next entry. Versatility ranked down there at zero for our criteria. What we loved to see was a series of photos that all clearly came from the same vision. That meant that some of the best series we judged contained images that were all pretty similar. That's not a drawback, it's a plus. That's the question I now know to ask myself. Do all of the photos in a particular series of mine look like they came from the same photographer? (Even better: do they all look like they could only have been shot by me?)"

Edwin Lopez: "In 1977 and 1978 I worked on the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Louis Stokes was the Chair of that Committee. On a luncheon date with him, he told me the story of his being elected to Congress and his meetings with Sam Rayburn upon being elected. At his first meeting with Rayburn, Rayburn asked him to make a list of the 25 issues most important to him. At the next week's meeting, Rayburn looked at the list and asked him to prioritize the 25. Louis Stokes dutifully did so. Rayburn told him it was good list and then said now, next week tell me which of these issues you consider life and death. The next week Louis Stokes came back with three biggies. At that point Rayburn told him that he should be ready to compromise on numbers 25–4. When he got to the big three, he should be ready to leave Congress as the last three issues were life and death ones.

"I've never forgotten this conversation."

[A different] Mike: "I think the realities of time have perhaps forced me to do this subconsciously (there are only so many hours in a day, only so many chances to shoot). Even as I was making my list, I was looking at many of the topics and thinking, 'Well, sure, I took that picture, but it's not really a subject area I actively seek.' Having a camera with you most or all of the time means you have opportunities to take pictures more often than not. But for me, those top items on my list are certainly more fun and interesting to pursue.

"Your wedding example is a good one; I've been asked in the past to shoot weddings for friends and I've turned them down, explaining that I shoot the way I shoot and it's probably not going to be in step with what they want for wedding photos."

Mike J. replies: Reminds me of Ted Orland's old joke: 'When your friends finally realize you are a true artist, committed to making sensitive and meaningful images, they will ask you to photograph their wedding.'

John Krumm: "I did the exercise. I probably won't concentrate only on the first five categories, which are all family related, but one thing became clear. No more landscapes and nature shots without people! They make up the majority of my shooting, and I value them the least."

Mike replies: So that's something good come of this, right there. In fact, one might sum up this whole post as "don't waste too much time on the things you value the least."

John: "There are many ways to manipulate these kinds of exercises by playing word games. Personally, unless you’re a pro and your best bet is specializing, I don’t see the point in limiting myself based on what I currently think. If you had asked me five years ago if I ever would take up bird photography, I’d call you delusional for even suggesting it. Now it’s my main interest and that’s because I kept an open mind."

Mike replies: "Change of mind is not inconsistency," quoth Cicero. Of course, he got his head chopped off, so should we listen to him?

Seriously, I don't see why this is incompatible with keeping an open mind. It has to do with focus and concentration, which sounds like exactly how you're approaching bird photography.

Dan Khong: "'Twas a good exercise. Now I know I am good at shooting people."

The Little Game (Part 2 of 3)

(Here's Part 1.)

For Part 2, prioritize your list. Put the things that are most important to you at the top and the ones that are least important at the bottom.

Be intuitive about it if need be; be logical about it if that appeals. Think only of yourself, not of an audience. Eschew thoughts of remuneration*. Keep shuffling till you're satisfied.

Tomorrow is "Open Mike" off-topic day, and I'm going to write about borosilicate straws and rice. So we'll get to Part 3, the payoff post, on Thursday morning.

That's all for now,

Mike

*Sorry. My favorite sentence in English is this, from Mark Twain: "Eschew surplusage." It rattles around my brain-pan with a thousand other phrases that have taken up permanent residence there. Pay no heed to thoughts of earning money, is what I mean to say.

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.

Harsh reality

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Bill Pearce: "Twain's sentence is good, but I can top it. I had a junior high school English teacher, the stereotypical old maid schoolteacher, who was known to say 'eschew obfuscation.' It's sorta the same thing, but with two words that could be found in a dictionary. It's also something that wouldn't be said in any junior high in America today."

Mike replies: I wrote an article called "Eschew Cliché" once. That's a nice phrase too.

The Little Game (Part 1 of 3)

I have a little game in mind, one that might be revealing and helpful to you in your work. There are three distinct parts to it. But I think it might be good to do it in order, so I'm only going to give you the first part today, for those who want to do it "in real time." If you don't want to play the game now, you can always go back and read all three steps later. But I think it will be most beneficial to do the first two parts before you know where it's heading—otherwise, I suspect you might be tempted (even subconsciously) to alter the outcome by manipulating the early inputs.

Here's the first step. This weekend, get a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper and spend some serious time looking over and reviewing your own picture archives. The goal is to write down the list of the 25 categories of things you most like to take pictures of, or that you consider within your area of visual competence and your usual practice.

I'm not talking about professional work or work you do to please others, unless that work also gratifies your soul. Pay attention only to your personal work, the pictures you take for yourself.

What do I mean by "categories"? Well, anything that can be identified. The most obvious would be genre—landscape, sports, glamour, portraits, or any other genre you can think of. Might be subject matter—kids, cars, clouds, or any of a myriad others*. Might be a type of strategy—constructed tableaux, still lifes**, aerial photography and so forth. Might be a certain style or look—snapshot style, documentary style, blurs. Might be a technical category—large format film, fill flash at dusk, studio lighting. Might be a certain commercial category—wedding photography, editorial portraits. It might be a property of the pictures—high HDR, light tones ("high key"), primary colors. Might be a theme—vacation destinations, loneliness, ancient holy places.

It might also be something more subtle—like a personal connotation, a kind of graphic design element, or a feeling, whether it's something you feel or something you're trying to make the viewer feel. It can even be something random or stupid. If it often inspires you to stop and snap a pic.

Anything you can think of along any of these lines. Just anything you can identify as being "one of the things I often shoot."

Or come up with your own possibilities. I've only listed a few, so don't be limited by the few categories I've mentioned.

Much as I'd like to provide a comprehensive list, I don't think it can be done. There are too many possibilities. But you'll see it in your work. Look for the commonalities, the patterns, the repetitions.

Pay special attention to those few pictures you've made in your life that you consider to be total successes, the ones you're proudest of. How would you describe the category they fall into? What is it about them that really cements their appeal, in your mind or your feelings?

When you get to 25, you don't necessarily need to stop looking, because maybe something you haven't thought of is actually more important to you than something you have on your list. For example, I've taken a few cat pictures I'm proud of, because I'm conscious that...well, that it's a category. But I might have overlooked the fact that bodies of water are an important theme in my work. So I might put "bodies of water" on the main list and jettison "cats."

•     •     •

This is the hardest, most work-intensive part of the Little Game, by the way. The next step is much easier, and the third and final step is all payoff, no work. This is 85% of the work, right here. But the more care you put into this step, the more dividends you'll get from steps two and three.

If you don't want to play, don't sweat it. Not every post is for every person.

But give it a try if you have time. There's more to come.

Have a nice weekend! I'm off tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to stay away on Sunday.

Mike

P.S. Even if the whole idea of categorization makes you grouchy, play along. Remember, it's a game.

*The Latin root of "myriad" means "ten thousand."

**That's the proper plural of "still life," by the way.

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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Peter: "My first thought was 'Twenty-five!?!? That's too many kinds of photographs. I don't have that many.' But then I decided to just do it and within a few minutes I had 21. Heeding your observation that this should be the most intense part, I kept going and was still adding categories after 35. Now I am reconsidering and re-ordering. When you announce Step 2, I will delete categories numbered higher than 25. Can't wait to learn what it is."

Mike replies: You're doing great. You'll get a lot out of this.

I found it difficult at first too because I was just doing it in my head. When I started looking at my actual pictures it became much easier.

Gerard Kingma: "I like the idea of a game, you got me interested. However! For me, there's a big 'Yeah, but...' to this game, namely that it appears to be exclusively about the subject of the picture. In my humble experience, the subject is, more often than you'd think, the least important aspect of the picture.

"People often ask me, 'What do you take pictures of?' and I usually say something like, 'Oh well, whatever's in front of the camera that makes me want to frame it and push the button.' Similarly, I read an anecdote once (probably here on TOP because I start here every day) about a photographer (and I hope someone can help me with the name) who, when asked the question 'What do you take pictures of?' replied something like: 'I don't take pictures of stuff. I take pictures about stuff.'

"Whatever triggers me photographically is usually a combination of light, shape, frameworthiness, quirkiness, and rarely about the thing that I point the camera at. During Jay Maisel's workshop that I was honored to attend in Maine he badgered us all week about three aspects that make an interesting image: 'Light, color and gesture.' The actual subject is not among those three, and not even the fourth, fifth or whatnot. As you always say, I'm just sayin.'"

Mike replies: I'm sorry to hear you say that, because it means I flubbed my writing task. I took (or tried to take) pains to explain that it's not "exclusively about the subject of the picture" as you say. It's just categories, and you determine the categories. "Gesture" is a category. I think "color" and "light" both need more specification to qualify and be useful ("light in darkness" is one of my categories—see here for a couple of examples)—but it's your list and they're your categories. You be the judge.

Also, the categories don't all have to have names that other people would understand. As long as you're clear about what you mean, you're fine.

And if I may have the temerity to suggest it, I suspect you might benefit from this exercise more than others.

YS: "I don't think you flubbed it, I've got quite the list now. It's an interesting game! I've got subjects, technical and artistic qualities down in my list!"

Mike replies: I'm doing it too, and it's not entirely easy to get 25. Don't forget to look at your phone photos too! There were some good clues for me in there.