The Online Photographer

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.]

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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.

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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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

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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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.]

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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

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

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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

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:

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

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

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.

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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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.

What It Comes Down to For Me

The discussion in the previous post was certainly interesting, but sometimes I wonder if we're not getting lost in the minutiae. I thought I should just say what I think as plainly as possible to cut through all the specifics and get to a clear "global" overview of the issue:

Mathew B. Brady, Abraham Lincoln, 1864

For me—just for me, I'm not telling you what to think or do—the power of photographs comes from their connection to the real world. That's where their magic resides, and what gives them their power. A photograph of Lincoln required Lincoln to be sitting in front of the camera. He's not just a meme. The man was there.

(As an aside, Monday was the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.)

The greater that connection, the more direct the connection, the more interested I tend to be, and the stronger my responses. The weaker or more suspicious that connection, the less interested I am. If I'm looking at something obviously created or invented—fabricated—then I'd rather look at paintings or other kinds of art.

The question is, can I retrieve from the picture something true about the appearances of real things, real people, real places, or actual events? That's what cuts to my heart. YMMV, as Internet says.

Of course, we can all argue from now to Kingdom Come about the details, from whether you should crop or not to whether B&W is realistic all the way up to relativistic ramblings about the nature of truth and the im/possibility of honesty.

If you look at the extremes it makes the distinction clearest. Rod Sainty's comment (the last Featured Comment in the previous post) tries manfully to summarize the mechanics of how pictures might hold some truth. On the other extreme, we've all seen "photos" that amount to manipulated, highly unrealistic "fantasy" digital photo-illustrations. Not that there's anything wrong with that if it's what you want to do. But it's not the middle of that range we should be looking for, because that way lies hair-splitting and disputation: there isn't a dividing line waiting to be discovered. Understand the extremes, though, and you can sense what the whole issue is about—and make some inroads as to where on the spectrum you yourself might want to land.

And it's up to you where you land, of course. Your photography belongs to you. Although I think it's better if you do it consciously...but maybe that's just my teacherish nature speakin'.

Not everyone sees it as I do, and that's fine, but that's how I see it.

Mike
(Thanks to all the commenters from yesterday. Very interesting!)

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Dan Homan: "I find myself fascinated by this topic. I might be kidding myself, but I’ve always viewed the goal of my photography as the capturing of a moment or a scene in a way that reveals something ‘true’ about my subject. If I’m taking an image of something large (landscape, building, etc…), that sometimes involves a two- or three-frame panorama to include all the elements I think are important. If it is something very small (snowflakes, spiders, etc…), I may need several images to combine in a focus stack in order to get what I judge to be sufficient depth of field. For macro objects, I often carry my own lighting rather than rely on ambient. For portraits, I will position people in good lighting, gently ask that they change their posture, and try to get them to laugh and smile. In the rare instances that I am trying street photography, I still pick my moments carefully and frame the scene to include just what I want to communicate. All of these things are manipulations of various types, and I am pretty comfortable with all of them; however, I find myself sometimes wondering whether I should crop an image as much as I do, or make a local adjustment for emphasis, or (rarely) clone out an unwanted element from a photo. I list those last three manipulations from most to least comfortable for me personally, and I’ve really struggled on occasion with the notion of what is the ‘true’ thing I am trying to reveal. My personal favorite snowflake photo has a thread propping up the snowflake on one side. It is distracting, but it was there and part of the reason the flake was at such an interesting angle. I’ve shown the image online both with and without the thread, but after a year I still can’t decide which version is the right one.

"Ironically, I’ve been playing recently with ‘still life’ photography where the elements are more deliberately arranged…I am not sure anything will come of it, and I’m still trying to fit this into my previous notion of revealing something ‘true’ about the subject."

Charles Lanteigne: "I find your position wholly understandable and reasonable, even though I don't feel the same way about it. The thing I'd want to resist is the attempt to define photography as a whole around how one feels about this, instead of merely specifying that it's a genre/type/style/approach to photography that one prefers. In other words, I can appreciate that one might prefer images that have not been significantly altered/composited, but I don't care much for the idea that other kinds of photography 'aren't really photography, they're digital art of sorts' or something along those dismissing lines. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go listen to some 'electronic audible art' (which is not really music because it's not a straight recording of musical instruments)."

Mike replies: There is indeed an interesting parallel with recorded sound here. I read a book a while back called Perfecting Sound Forever, basically a history of music recording techniques. I thought the progress of technology was deeply exciting as it raced toward better and more accurate recording of the sounds musicians were already making, but then at some point a line was crossed and it transmuted into the pursuit of better and better fakery, ending up with creating things that never existed in the world...and in that part of the book I was initially dismayed and ended up just plain uninterested. Yet that view is limited too, because in some sense the synthesizing of sounds is just a different form of creativity, new tools that can be used skillfully or ineptly just like old-fashioned instruments can.

I recommend the book. I enjoyed it.

David Comdico: "Agree. Photography's power lies in its ability to describe the particular. This is why 19th Century allegorical Pictorialism has such an odd quality and why photography was for so long dismissed as an art: it was too real. Barthes' punctum is such an example: the ragged sleeve the photo reveals is unintentional but defining. Or more prosaically, witness the high-rez digital portrait that shows every nook and cranny to such a degree that it is unflattering for the vast majority of subjects.

"As a means to gain scientific objectivity, photography has been wildly successful. Think Muybridge or, more recently, the super collider at CERN. We have become so accustomed to the gift photography has bequeathed us that we take it for granted (a problem in itself).

"To deny that objective reality (a nominal one, not a Family of Man platonism) is at the heart of photography is just a rhetorical stunt. That photos can be fakes is actually dependent on this foundation, not vice versa. To claim otherwise is like taking the position that money has no real value because some of it may be counterfeit.

"The naive and propagandistic use of the photographic image is an interesting question, but, mostly, a totally separate domain of inquiry. The conflation of this with some deep artificiality that taints photography is seen as a useful way to gain authority for certain conclusions but this is not only disingenuous, it's unnecessary."

Another Modern Digital Internet Falseism

I read it on the Internet again: "It's no use using older lenses on digital cameras. With today's best digital sensors, you must use the very best, very latest lenses."

I must? Why?

This is another IF (Internet Falseism, a "falseism" being a truism that isn't true). You have doubtless read it a hundred times in one form or another.

What if you want to use a soft-focus lens on a digital sensor? Will the sky fall? The world explode? Will you be arrested?

Must be true, though, because I've read it on the Internet so many times.

Actually, you can use any lens you want to on a digital sensor, no matter what its potential resolution. If it's a good sensor, it will merely capture whatever the look and properties of the lens happen to be.

Optimizers do it best
The only reason to use a high-resolution lens on a high-resolution sensor is if you want a high-resolution picture. But if you have an interchangeable-lens camera, you can switch that high-res lens for a low-res lens and back again, and no hostages are taken and no one gets hurt. You remain free to roam about on your own recognizance and the sky stays where it belongs.

It's a lot of fun to use old lenses on new sensors.

If you "optimize" your camera for high resolution, all you have is a camera that takes pictures with good resolution. You still have the exact same problem every other photographer has with every other camera: what to do with it. How to put it to good use. How to make the dumb equipment make a smart picture. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or for ninety-nine out of a hundred photographers, incrementally better resolution makes zero difference in the aesthetic and expressive success of any particular picture.

And if you "optimize" your camera for high resolution, all you have is a camera that takes pictures with resolution that is good for this point in history and with today's particular technology. In olden days, John B. Williams wrote a book called Image Clarity that was all about his investigations into how to optimize photography for high resolution. He covered everything. Of course, none of it is relevant to digital photographers today because the technology has changed (and film photographers certainly aren't using film in order to achieve optimal image resolution). That's what will happen to your attempts to "optimize" resolution now, too. Only faster.

Flatware applications
Besides, very generally speaking, optimizing for resolution, these days, is akin to saying Warren Buffett needs more money. I see more pictures spoiled by too much resolution as I see spoiled by too little (just as I see more pictures spoiled by too much out-of-focus blur as I see spoiled by too little).

If it's what you want to do—optimize resolution, starting with the best sensors and the ideal lenses for them, a sturdy tripod, and some way to show your results meaningfully—well all right then. By all means go ahead. It's one thing you can do. It's one look. It's one kind of photograph to take.

And, of course, there might be a few specialty applications which require extreme resolution. A Zeiss spokesman, at a presentation in the '90s, used this example: what if you see a person holding up a table utensil several hundred yards away, and you want to know whether it's a fork or a spoon? ...And you have time to set up your surveyor's tripod, which he recommended and used? John Williams used a slightly more plausible example: what if you're doing surveillance photography and you want to be able to read a license plate from a long distance away? But he had to add as a caveat: ...and you can't switch to a longer telephoto lens? Or words to that effect. Well. There are some pictures that might work better with higher resolution than you can get normally. A few.

I'd own both. Old, bad lenses and new, super-sharp, hyper-clinical ones. One for fun. The other for fun.

Nowadays, we might add a third imperative: what if you want to win arguments on Internet forums about the superiority of your gear choices by showing little snippets of pictures at 100%?

Well now, that's important, as we all know. Just as important as showing whether it's a fork or a spoon, or for reading license plates when you left your 600mm at home even though you're doing surveillance.

...But mine are better!
I hate to break it to the Internet, but there's actually no law that says you get extra life points for a tiny bit more resolution in all your photographs. You get no credit for it. Most pictures will not be better for it. Most people will not care. Even the ones who do care won't care for very long.

Use any lens you want to on your digital camera. You stand just as good a chance of making a good picture with the most highly corrected lens it's possible to buy today as you do with an ancient screw-mount lens with low contrast and poor edge definition. It's just that the artistic problem will be different, that's all.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

James Weekes: "Hear, hear. Some of my favorite pictures of the last few years are taken with my Holga lens on a Micro 4/3 body. I love the color, and am surprised by the resolution, which is better than my old Holga cameras with TX.

"The biggest advance in my world has been the 20-megapixel sensor on my Lumixes. The color is just lovely and the resolution is really adequate."

Andrew Lamb: "A few years ago, I did some stills on a film set where the DOP was John Mathieson (Gladiator, Logan, X-Men: First Class, etc). He was using a state-of-the-art Red camera but the lens was a Cooke zoom from the early '70s. I asked his assistant about this combination and was told that using an older lens was to stop the image from looking too clinical. Anything goes."

Phil Stiles: "I've played a lot with vintage glass on modern sensors. I would add that the modern sensor can reveal that those old lenses are better than one remembers. My 105mm ƒ/2.5 AIS Nikkor produces great images on my Sony A7rIII. After comparing a Contax C/Y 85mm ƒ/2.8 with a Batis 85mm ƒ/1.8, I sold the Batis. Focus peaking and magnification have changed the ways we can use vintage glass. Since we're viewing on the web, you probably can't point to a shot 'spoiled by too much resolution,' although my guess would be that it's a portrait where the camera sees so much more than the eye that the hyper-realism becomes surrealism."

Huw Morgan: "I have a crazy-sharp 85mm portrait lens that causes me nothing but grief. Every subject looks at the pictures and freaks out over wrinkles and skin flaws that seem to leap out of the screen. I need to apply copious amounts of Photoshop 'wrinkle cream' to make clients happy, eating into my time and profit. I'm looking for an 85mm slightly blurry lens. Anyone have any suggestions?"

Mark Roberts: "Anyone interested in photography would do well to see the movie "Mr. Turner" (about the painter J.M.W. Turner). Director Mike Leigh had hoped to shoot on film to get the look he wanted but didn't have the budget necessary. So he shot digital but used the oldest, least-corrected lenses he could scrounge up. Can't argue with the results." Rob L.: "There's one little bit of 'maybe' here, though—I've had several older lenses that did weird things on digital bodies—reflections off the back elements, or the way they light hit the sensor—so it's worth testing things a bit. But as I age, it's AF, not optical purity, that's driving me to current glass. :-) "

Jim: "In my work (fiber optics) I've been exposed to a lot of recent systems for surveillance and the technology is getting spooky. Only part is due to camera resolution; the rest is digital post-processing. I've seen fisheye cameras over traffic intersections that can read every license plate and are starting to use facial recognition. Did you read about how the British identified the Russians accused of poisoning in the UK—they found many images of the guys and could easily track their movement. Drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and a camera will read your license plate and send you a bill for the toll. I parked in a parking garage recently and the ticket was printed with my license plate ID and used it to help locate my parked car.

"Of course this processing is not intended to create attractive images. But if you want that, you can find lots of software that will manipulate images to make them look 'better,' whatever that means to you. Did you see the New York Times Magazine portfolio a couple of weeks ago with the weird images manipulated by Cindy Sherman?

"The point is that we are reaching a point near where PCs were 20 years ago, where advances are becoming less hardware and more software."

James M: "Just what I need to help me relax about my gear. Can you please post this article once a month, so that the effect doesn't wear off?"

scott kirkpatrick: "'Falseism?' Better is the expression that physicist Wolfgang Pauli made famous: 'Not even false!'" [Link —Ed.]

George Feucht: "Absolutely true about the demand for vintage less-than-perfect lenses for cinematography. Here's a great example. This is the Cooke company re-manufacturing their old, flawed classic lens set due to the demand of the original sets from the '60s/'70s. Things just look too hyper-clean when you use perfect optic on a perfect sensor. Modern, sharp lenses look great on film. As for our new, perfect cinema sensors, they look best with flawed lenses."

Photo of John Lennon (And Double Appeal)

Speaking of the John Lennon stamp, this is a photograph of Lennon I've always liked:

It's a Polaroid by Andy Warhol. It's descriptive, but not grandiose or glorifying: the subject is wearing a T-shirt and hasn't bothered to arrange his hair, although Warhol might have liked the shape his hair makes. And the photo is plainspoken and small in size. Lennon's expression doesn't tell you what to think of him either way: he's not doing a star turn, not trying to make himself look appealing to the viewer with a conventional Murricun grimace/grin, but neither is he showing the darker side that his personality was reputed to have, anger or superciliousness or arrogance. To me, all this makes it more engaging; I find myself searching the picture for clues, as if to ask: what kind of person was this? The eyes seem simultaneously brightened (by the specular reflection of the flash) and obscured (by the glasses). And of course there's something slightly macabre about the portrait, because you're looking at a murder victim, too. And you're looking into history, at a man who died almost forty years ago now. Whatever you see in the eyes is changed by the fact that you know his fate.

And the photographer—who, like all great portraitists, is partly revealed, reflected, by the aspect his sitter presents to us—is dead too. The transaction we're voyeuristically witnessing is one of viewer and viewed, seer and the seen, both famous still, but both long gone.

Double appeal
And by the way, this picture contains what you might call double appeal. It's a lesson I learned in the magazine business from Outdoor Photographer magazine back in the '90s—that you increase your chances of success if you appeal to two different markets or audiences with the same artwork or product. (That presumes you don't limit the extent of  the appeal to either group by including the other.) In this case, the picture appeals to Beatles, Lennon, and "classic rock" music fans on the one hand, and it also appeals to people interested in Andy Warhol, pop art, and modern art on the other. OP appeals to both the photo-hobbyist audience and to outdoor-activity audiences. The key with a magazine was that you could sell advertisements in two separate categories, greatly increasing your chances of selling enough ads. My magazine at the time was a darkroom magazine, which, I recognized, meant that we were trying to appeal not just to one audience but a subset of one audience. (I left in 2000; the magazine folded in 2013.)

The movie industry has codified this down to a rather crude basic level—movies are designed to sell to one of four types of audience—older females, older males, younger males, or younger females. Producers are always on the lookout for movies that appeal to two of the four groups, and one that appeals to three of the groups or (this is rare) all four groups can be a bonanza. Movies are seldom made to appeal to older males exclusively, because, statistically, older males don't go to the movies. Usually, movies targeted to them are also targeted to older females or younger males at the same time. Old fashioned "auteur" movies, categorized as "dramas" now, are the motion picture equivalent of "literary" novels—potentially prestigious, but sales lightweights.

In photography, O. Winston Link is a prime example of double appeal—he appealed to photographers and photography collectors, and also to railfans and steam train enthusiasts. Scott Schumann's "Sartorialist" blog appeals to street photography fans and people interested in fashion; Brandon Stanton's "Humans of New York" appeals to people who like environmental portraits, people who like human interest stories, and people who are interested in New York City.

I realized the appeal of "The Simpsons" years ago while watching it with my then-five-year-old son—he and I would both laugh at it, but at completely different parts. He liked the cartoon slapstick and the in-your-face jokes, I liked the cultural references and sardonic asides. (I think we both rather liked Bart's part wise, part wiseass Bugs Bunnyesque take-it-all-in-stride attitude.)

Any time you can appeal to two (or more) constituencies without limiting the appeal to one of them, you increase your audience as well as your odds of success.

Mike

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hugh crawford: "And a dead medium as well. Warhol used a Polaroid BigShot fixed focus camera (with the amazing chemical mechanical lighting of the Magicubes, also extinct). The Polaroid peel-apart 669 film is long gone and the Fuji is in the outdated and expensive category. A great camera that looked like a toy. With 655 positive negative film I could make 40x50 inch prints. I still have a pack of 655 in my RB Graflex but it's 'too special to use.'"

Eolake: "I have just watched "How The Beatles Changed The World" (I think it was Netflix). It was excellent. Being from 1963, I didn’t know that much about it. They weren’t just the most successful band in history. Warhol’s book From A To B And Back Again is interesting. Like all his work, very abstract."

Mike replies: Relative to the movie you mentioned, I can recommend Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald (Ian MacCormick), the British music critic who committed suicide in 2003. He's a Lennon partisan, but then so am I. And he has an inexplicable antipathy to George Harrison, which I definitely don't share. But it's a fascinating book, and had me going back to many of the old songs to listen to them intently with "new ears."

Doug Thacker: "Warhol must have made thousands of Polaroid portraits over the years, and almost all of them were strong in the way that only the best photographic portraits are. I've always found this fascinating, and instructive. Because he was using rudimentary equipment, with a fixed lens and on-camera flash, the extraordinary character of his portraits comes down to his connection with his subjects, however fleeting, his trust in his own intuition, and his timing with the shutter button.

"As you point out vis a vis the Lennon photo, both the subject and the photographer are now dead. Each of them was among the most influential figures of the century, and each of them was shot by an assassin, or, in Warhol's case, a would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas.

"When Warhol was shot, in Manhattan in 1968, he was rushed to nearby New York Hospital, where his life was saved only by the heroic efforts of a team of surgeons. In all the years following, he would refuse to even walk past that hospital, because whenever he did so, he said, he could see and feel his own death.

"When Warhol fell ill and required emergency gallbladder surgery in 1997, it was this same hospital he was taken to. And it was here that he died, shortly after a routine gallbladder removal.

"It would be easy to look at this portrait of John Lennon by Andy Warhol and see prefigured in it somehow their fatal victimization, but that's not what strikes me. What strikes me in this portrait is their strength and their defiance and their victory. I don't know what more you could ask of a portrait, or of an artist."

Tom Burke: "I can’t comment on the image—pictures of the Beatles (as a group or as individuals) have been around my life since forever.

"But, as an aside, and seeing as this is as much about the Beatles as anything, I’ve come to realise that I was incredibly lucky to be the right age at the right time and in the right place. I remember buying 'She Loves You' in the late summer or early autumn of 1963. I was 13, and it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. From then I bought every Beatles single up to 'Lady Madonna' on the day it was released, apart from 'Help!'—I was out of the country that summer. It’s difficult to comprehend now just how significant The Beatles were in the UK in those years. Britain in the early '60s was so traditional—the post-war era had seen a determined attempt to re-assert the normality of the pre war years, but by the '60s that was breaking down. There were parallel changes in other areas—theatre, TV, literature—but pop music reached a greater proportion of the population than anything else, and The Beatles were the first and best of a whole new thing. Much as I enjoyed Cliff Richard in the years before, he was a British copy of US originals. The Beatles rewrote the rule book. And as I got a little bit older and started wanting more than just 'Moon in June' songs, they were moving the same way at the same time. There’d never been a song like 'Paperback Writer,' for instance, or 'Penny Lane,' or the lyricism of 'Eleanor Rigby.' Amazing years. And I think that their significance is demonstrated by the fact that a couple of very old images of John Lennon still considered worthy of note and comment."

The Light's the Thing

Two pictures to illustrate a point:

Before sundown

After sundown

Same camera, same lens, same scene, same framing (or close). The Celestial Assistant suggested a setup change and kindly moved the main light a little—just 15 or 20 degrees, not a huge change. But not subtle either—in the second picture there's a planetary gobo impinging and all the light is ambient.

I've always loved watching how different light changes things. Whether I take a picture of it or not.

It begs a more subtle conceptual problem: is a photograph a picture of the thing in the picture, or the light on the thing? Mostly, I think good pictures are usually of light, whether "what the picture is of" is important or not. Learning how to pay attention to light instead of sorting everything in your field of view into its solid structure is a crucial step in photography if you ask me. In one sense, this didn't need to be a pickup truck...the pickup truck just serves to clarify what the light looked like. Light creates the composition, the mood, the structure of the picture, the color of the picture, on and on.

You can have a perfectly serviceable photograph without good light, of course. Many photographs just show things—places, objects, people, animals. Most of the important aspects of a good photograph, however, a successful photograph, are created by what the light's doing. It's at least half the battle.

You could look at it the other way around as well, of course. That the meaning of the picture is usually in the things it shows, and the light is just a means of revealing it. In the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for instance, they insisted on flat, overcast light for every picture, specifically to remove the light from being part of the subject and concentrate visual attention more completely on the structures they were photographing.

It fascinates me how pictures come and go. I took a picture of a farmland scene once that I put up on the blog a couple of years ago. (I didn't do a very good job of capturing it. Wrong equipment.) Since then I've passed that place perhaps as many as forty times and I've never again seen it look like anything. I look at it every time I go by. The light was just right that one time, that's all. There's never been a photograph there since then.

One of the ways to improve your photography is to give yourself an idea. Identical views in very different light would be an idea the right photographer could build a project on, I think, if they had the visual chops and sensitivity.

Back soon
As I do every Monday morning, I'm off to the Moose now to play pool with the guys—Loyle, Jerry, Lyle, Norm, and Tom. Back later to hear what you have to say. I might sneak over early to get a little practice in, too...Jerry's been coming outta nowhere lately and tearing up the joint, and I can't hit the broad side of a barn with buckshot.

Mike

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Walter Glover: "This post of yours brings two axioms to mind for me, Mike: 1.) My commercial days of making photographs of things are well and truly behind me and, in my personal work the pursuit is to make photographs about things. All the qualities of varying light form a huge component in the vocabulary and grammar of conveying the spirit or essence of a motif. 2.) To achieve such ends the notion that light reveals and shadow gives form is forever emblazoned in my photo consciousness."

Mark Sampson: "Subject and lighting are inextricably linked. In the best photographs they combine to make a 'good' photograph a 'great' one. Chicken or egg?"

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Light, and its strategic conceptual usage is the tool that hobbyists tend to overlook or misuse most in their photography. Light sculpts form. Light sculpts mood. Light manages the focus of attention. Light, not the camera, is the photographer’s tool."

Mike replies: Couldn't have said it better myself (and, in fact, I didn't).

Ernest Zarate: "John Szarkowski wrote a terrific book, The Photographer’s Eye. In it, he detailed the specific choices photographers make, consciously or accidentally, each time they press the shutter button: the frame, vantage point, time, the thing itself (i.e., raw material), and the detail. Great primer and one of my foundation books. Yet, brilliant though Szarkowski was, I’ve always felt the book missed a big one: light. It’s true most photographers can’t choose their light. It is as you say the Celestial Assistant in control. Give that, though, the photographer has the choice whether to use the light being offered. Your point about the farm lit in glory that one time, and never again (the fickle Photo Gods at their devilish best) illustrates the point exactly."

Mike replies: Excellent insight into the great Szarkowski title and one I've never heard or thought of before. But I think you're right.

Jan Kwarnmark: "Henri Cartier-Bresson: 'I go for form, much more than light. Form First. Light is like a perfume to me.'"

Arg: "Lighten up, Mike!"

Limitations Aren't

Photo by Mark Hobson, from "iPhone Made"

Yesterday, David Comdico wrote of Mark Hobson (who has a category on his website called "iPhone Made"):

I admit to being a bit prejudiced against the iPhone-as-camera, but his square iPhone shots are really great. Bravo.

I've noticed over the years that pros (especially studio pros) who are used to using whatever tools are appropriate for any given job—up to and including bleeding-edge high-tech, high-cost ones—often have little prejudice against low-status cameras. They'll cheerfully do projects with toy cameras, cellphones, and pinhole cameras if they feel like it and if it suits the look they want. Mark is a big enthusiast of the smartphone.

What's unusual about Mark is that he's not a chameleon aesthetically. Lots of pros are; they have to be, providing radically different "looks" for different clients and different jobs. I imagine Mark, who has a list of Fortune 500 clients, can do that too. But with the work on his website he works more like an artist.

My observation has always been that artists tend to adjust to the properties of whatever tools you give them to work with. Amateurs hanker for gear that will "do everything," and tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what they can't do and how to equip themselves to remedy whatever the perceived shortcoming might be. But artists work the other way around: they see what the equipment will do and then go out into the visual world and apply it to good advantage, or whatever they consider to be good advantage. So it's difficult for an artist to have "the wrong camera," or lens, or whatever. Whatever you give them to play with, they'll figure out what it's good for (for their own personal definition of "good for") and then use it for that kind of thing. Give the latter kind of photographer a "bad" camera and he or she will come back with "good" shots.

So over the years we've seen great photographs made under all kinds of severe limitations: cross-processed transparency film, Polaroid transfers, Diana and Holga cameras with single-element plastic lenses, pinhole cameras, you name it.

These days, is it possible that the limitation might be that there isn't enough limitation? Cameras have all gotten so "good" that what's starting to emerge is a certain tyranny of sharp, clear, detailed, correct-color, adequate-DR digital images. It's not all the same equipment, but more and more it's the same, or a similar, aesthetic look. Yes, individual practitioners can depart from it deliberately, but then they can get slammed for being "fake" and "contrived" and so forth—even if the picture's just black and white!

One of the interesting things about Mark is that he has such a consistent way of seeing, and it comes through in all his artwork.

Mike
(Thanks to David Comdico)

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Kenneth Tanaka: "My own shortcut expression to summarize what you've said is, Wherever you go, there you are! [...Jon Kabat-Zinn —Ed.] The work Mark shows on his site has a frank right-in-front-of-your-face quality that would be, if not necessarily distinctive, certainly very apparent in any photographic format. It's how he sees the opportunity (no pun), how he organizes his frames. It hardly matters what camera he uses.

"If I could offer any bit of advice to Mark it would be to drop the 'iPhone Made' distinction. It's dated to anyone younger than, say, early middle age. It's like saying 'color TV.' Just take the photos and merge them into the crowd according to the moments or concepts that propelled them.

"Last year while moving my site to a new host I counted over 30 camera models employed over the 13 years spanned by the images. Fun fact to know...but irrelevant for considering the work."

David Stone: "Very nicely stated. I teach iPhone workshops and one of my main goals is to have the students stop thinking of their iPhone as a phone with a camera, but as a camera with a really useful accessory. Think like a photographer and it will deliver."

Dan Homan: "As an amateur, I think part of our obsession with having the right gear to 'do everything' is a fear of photographic opportunity loss. For me this manifests itself both in individual photo outings and for my kit more broadly. With finite resources, the decision of what to bring on a trip or buy for your kits locks you in place (at least for the time being) in terms of what you can do, so we wring our hands a bit more than we should.

"I've tried in recent years not to worry about it as much and follow the advice I've read here and elsewhere to embrace limitations. On most outings, I bring just one or two lenses and commit to making the most of those choices. I do think this approach has helped me learn to see more clearly and have more fun with my photography."

Frank Figlozzi: "Re 'But artists work the other way around: they see what the equipment will do and then go out into the visual world and apply it to good advantage, or whatever they consider to be good advantage.' Isn't that exactly the way it's supposed to be? I've been photographing since I was 10 and now I'm 77 (do the math). My first camera was an old postwar Reflekta TLR and now I'm shooting digital Fujis. But every camera I've ever used has had limitations. Our job is simply to understand those limitations, work within them and make meaningful photographs. What a beautiful post—it hits the nail on the head."

robert e: "I wonder if future hobbyists will wax nostalgic about the 'look' of vintage sensors and firmware in the likes of, say, Canon's 5D or Nikon's D40? Perhaps there will be apps and filters to simulate the look. Only half joking."

Comments About the 'Yellow' Pictures

Photo by David Stock

I want to thank everybody who participated in the latest "Baker's Dozen" call for work—we received a large-ish number of submissions (about a hundred and sixty) and there were a lot more good ones than were included in the final set.

As usual I could have gone any number of ways with the edit. For example, the three most common subjects among the submissions were road stripes and markings (a number of great ones, but David Stock's simple and whimsical design above won by a whisker for me), flowers, and...little yellow rubber duckie bath toys. At first I thought I would pick a "winner" in all three of those subject-matter categories, but ended up jettisoning that idea in the end as being too programmatic.

The reason was that I was paying attention to sequence. To my mind, the yellows either needed to harmonize or contrast from image to image as you scroll down. The Pressman-Vincent-Poole-Smith sequence (3–6) was decided on pretty early on because they make such a nice progression to the eye, and they're all such super examples of mainstream strategies* that I thought people would identify with. From there we segue to Rich Reusser's picture of daughter Molly—she was a beautiful child and you can almost feel the fatherly adoration emanating from Rich behind the camera, but to me the punctum of that picture is the alarming whatever-you'd-call-it blue of those garish clashing gloves—it took me a long time to acclimate to that! (Additive secondary cyan or aqua is as close as I can come to naming it; the color manages to clash with both Molly's raincoat and Molly.) In Kurt's bathroom picture below Molly, there's a subtle echo of the blue gloves in the not-quite-matching blue of the towel on the rack. I don't think you see that consciously, but try to unsee it now that I've mentioned it.  :-)

As always in editing a set, the problem is flow vs. variety. The cop-out temptation is to pick a set of pictures that are all stylistically similar, but that's almost an affront to the great variety of approaches and subjects you get in any randomly-gathered "group show" (which is really what this amounts to).

And related to that heading, just so you know how much I care about your experience (and my responsibilities), let me just mention as an aside that I received exactly 13 of the aforementioned rubber ducky pictures. [Inset photo by James Hengst.] Do you even know how tempted I was to present all 13 rubber ducky pictures as the entirety of the final 'Yellow' set—as a joke? A joke that would have appealed greatly to the devilish part of my subversive B&W-maven heart. I thought about that idea for three days before I was able to get rid of it. Still kinda makes me chuckle.

Anyway, sequence, and the eye's pleasure in going from one picture to the next with minimal interruption, is why I put the emailed comments from the photographers (if there were any) at the end. I like looking at pictures next to each other, seeing how they play off their neighbors, and to me that's worth the modest inconvenience of separating the texts from the pictures.

Thanks again to everyone who sent work. Honorable mentions include, but are not limited to, Larry Angler, Mike Peters, Bob Gary, Craig Stocks, Marcelo Guarini (loved that one), Scott Campbell, Steve Goldenberg, Cathal Gantly (liked that too), Ricardo Cordeiro, Rod Locket, John Tellaisha, Al DaValle, Douglas Houk, Collin Orthner, Mark E. Johnson, Chris Kern, Ron Mayhew (don't think bringing Ernest Withers into it didn't catch my attention, Ron), Anurag Agnihotri, Animesh Ray, B.D. Parks, Terry Burnes, Randall Teasley, Richard Fox, and Harry Weide. All of their pictures were in the running to the end. There were many more nice ones than that, too.

All much fun for me, so thank you for that.

Finally, in David Stock's picture at the top of this page, do you see the faint faded remnant of an earlier yellow line on the manhole cover? Photographs often show us details we would not have thought to invent.

Mike

* Faux abstract, centered subject, woodsy landscape, critter pic

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Lois Elling: "I was a kid when I saw my first manhole cover with the painted stripe in the wrong position and got such a kick out of it. I still do!"

Matthew O'Brien: "First of all I am not a pixel peeper. I like the Bakers Dozen concept…other than I lose interest between its inception and realisation.

"Aside from that I am curious. I was about to admire the subtle extra line (1<–>1) when I suddenly noticed. The main yellow paint on the manhole cover has a remarkable physical property. It is capable of painting the empty spaces within the grating as well as the cast iron structure. The only elements which should be yellow in the white box below should be cast iron. The gaps should be dark and may contain a few splashes, but should not be the full colour. Maybe there is an interesting explanation. I never would have noticed this if I had not first spotted the 1<–>1 diagonal."

Mike replies: I thought about that too at first (wondering with my reflexive suspicion if there might have been a little Photoshop going on there) but I've observed a road-striping machine in action, and the line, which according to Wikipedia is a sort of thermoplastic resin that has to be pre-heated, goes down onto the road in a thick sort of ribbon, sort of like wet tape. Having seen it, it makes sense to me that it might have enough body when it's new to span small gaps in a grate. If the manhole cover actually is a grate, which I suppose the photo doesn't actually prove. We're getting very geeky here!

Another phil: "Re the manhole, it is unlikely to be a grate, more likely to be indentations to provide a bit of grip for tyres, rather than flat metal which is very slippery when wet. The yellow paint is (as you say) a resin which arrives in blocks and is melted, poured into a 'box' on wheels with a slot on the underside through which the resin flows.(I was a highways civil engineering tech). Longer lines are normally nowadays done with a vehicle which does all the above in one operation. That's also why the original paint still shows in the indentations."

Richard Gonet: "I really enjoyed viewing this collection. Thank you for initiating this project and curating it. Since we all have different tastes in art, I suspect there are some hidden gems in the ones that were not selected. Is there a way to present the 'runners up' so we can see more of the entries? Even a collection of stripes and rubber duckies would be fun to see."

Mike replies: Here are the submissions by Marcelo and Cathal that I mentioned above.

By Marcelo Guarini

By Cathal Gantly

Philomaphos: "Thank you, Mike, for the Baker's Dozen and for your commentary on how you arranged your final choices. I now can't unsee the blue gloves in Richard Reusser's photograph, and I agree with the comments praising Melissa O'Shaughnessy's photograph. I really like the bonus picture by Marcelo Guarini for its quiet, contemplative colour and the mystery it suggests. I agree with Dave Jenkins' comment regarding the photograph by Darren Livingston—it is a striking, unsettling picture. It's been a pleasure to see them all."

The DIGITAL Glow

Jack W. asked: "Can 'the glow' be obtained with digital cameras and digital papers?"

[If you just happened across this post, we've just been talking about B&W printmaking, and, just previous to that, the aesthetics of B&W tonality as seen in old-timey Hollywood movies.]

My answer: naturally, yes. As I said, I think it's actually easier now. As I said in 2002 in the previous post, 'the glow' is just a look.

There are slight differences, of course. "Long scale" platinum/palladium prints are difficult to reproduce even in ink, still less online, which is why we've had several Pt/Pd print sales in the past. But even fiber-base silver gelatin papers have a subtle depth that is difficult to reproduce exactly.

Color digital inkjet prints are potentially more beautiful than any color printing method in photography's history, although many different techniques have their charms. I say "potentially" because relatively few printmakers* have the gear, the skills, and the taste to produce top-quality prints; but it can certainly be done and it is done, widely. Professional printmakers have a little advantage in that they can spend more on equipment and they practice all day; amateur printmakers have a little advantage in that they can take their time over a single print—even days or weeks—and keep "spending" paper and ink until they get it exactly right. Who's best? Both pros and amateurs have about an equal chance at expressive success if you ask me. Depends on the individual.

Black-and-white has had a much spottier history in the digital age. It's more difficult than color to print well, and (thus) fewer people do it well. Personally I think the materials were getting problematic at the end of the film era, with the new "straight line" films that were problematic matches to certain papers. In the Digital Transition period, equipment and materials for taking and printing B&W digital images lagged behind all the tech and effort that was poured into color printing materials and methods.

Now, I think, we're over that. According to my definitions, we're seven years into the digital era of still photography, and now a.) the sensors are good enough, b.) the printers* are good enough, c.) the inks are good enough, and d.) the papers are good enough.

Actually several of those things are better than good enough. Especially the papers.

So how to you get a B&W print to sing when printmaking digitally? As ever, it's a question of skill and judgment.

In my view, the problem with printing is the same as with cameras: burgeoning complexity. Of course, some people like that...they're tech mavens, and they like being experts, and they get motivated by challenges. Which is all fine. But in general, my feeling with printing is that what keeps people away is that at the beginning of the learning curve you step into a rabbit hole, and the rabbit hole leads to a forbidding underworld of not knowing what to do, and things going mystifyingly wrong, and of not being able to find the information you need to figure out what to do next. Even if you do make it back out of the rabbit hole again, you just have to spend too much time "at a loss." It's not the time and effort to come up to speed that discourages people, as that so much of that time is spent feeling thwarted...just being frustrated and confused. So people get turned off of printing.

Really, the time should be spent "learning the music of tonality," rather than learning to play the instruments, right?

There's no one right way to print. In the spirit of the 2002 post, however, I'll mention a few specifics that might help you get there with B&W digital printing.

• Start with a small printer. When you can make an exquisite small print you're perfectly satisfied with, that's the time to get ambitious and start hankering after the big warships that need an entire small room or a big corner of a large one. There's always time for that.

• Use the best OEM (original equipment manufacturer) pigment/carbon inksets.

• Stick with the OEM's papers at first so you can use their profiles.

• If you want to have fun, once you get going—or better yet as you get going—invest in ImagePrint. ColorByte is just about to switch to new product names—there will be two: R.E.D., which means "runs every device," an easy-to-use interface for OEM drivers and OEM profiles. For B&W, you will need ImagePrint Black, which is the new name for the old full-version ImagePrint v.10; Black will be the name of v.11. (If you buy v.10 you'll receive a free upgrade to Black when it's released.) Yes, you need v.10/Black if you want to do B&W. No, it's not cheap—but you'll get an easy, ironclad interface with which to use custom drivers, plus custom profiles for almost literally every photo and fine-art paper made anywhere in the world. I haven't used this yet, but I keep hearing good things about it, and I admit I yearn for a simpler, more accurate method of printing. If you want to know more about ImagePrint, check out Kevin Raber's article and videos about it at The Luminous-Landscape. Tellingly, the L-L page is titled "Making Printing Easier."

• I use Photoshop CS6 with Nik Silver Efex 2 as a plugin, but whatever you use, I wouldn't necessarily become a converter "nomad," wandering from one to the next in search of the Holy Grail**. Just as with film and enlargers, it's easy to get sidetracked on minute differences in programs, but most of them will do what you need to do; learning what you want done is more important than slight differences in how it's accomplished.

• Forget the old saw that "every good print has a pure black and a pure white." An hour on Shorpy is the sentence for anyone convicted of this superstitious belief! Shadow (dark-tone) and highlight (light-tone) separation is what is wanted. For that, aim for a black just on the gray side of Dmax (maximum density) and a white just on the gray side of paper white.

Detail of a 1939 Russell Lee photo that recently appeared on Shorpy

• Look at the image as if it's real light. That is, look at it holistically. It's easy to get wrapped up in tones for tones' sake—try to relate the tones to what you know about what light on the surface of planet Earth looks like.

• Don't exaggerate. Gentle, gentle with that axe, Eugene.

• If you have ImagePrint, then experiment with abandon and try all the truly wonderful papers we have today! It's getting late on this Tuesday, so maybe papers is a post for a different day. 

I guess the most important point is that learning how tones sing (or "glow," I guess I should say in this context) is a lifelong learning process, a happy and satisfying journey for me for sure. We gradually come to find the expressive tonality we each prefer, and it becomes part of the "signature" of our work in B&W. Peter Turnley told me that when he sits down with Voja Mitrovic to show him a stack of B&W prints, Voja will cast his expert eye on the tones and indicate slight changes that to him would be improvements. Consider that when Walter Rosenblum was exposed for passing off his own later prints as vintage Lewis Hine originals, the original tipoff was that they seemed to betray the characteristic tonality of Rosenblum prints. Look at a book of Ralph Gibson's B&W photos after a book of Lee Friedlander's B&W photos after a book of Roy de Carava's B&W photos after a book of Sally Mann's B&W photos; you will see in each a different and distinctive approach to tonality. If you're a sensitive worker with a sense of what looks right to you in your own work, this will emerge just as surely in digital printmaking as it would have from the darkroom.

Mike
(Several fine printmakers and manufacturer's representatives
contributed to this post. My thanks to all.)

*I use the term "printmaker" for a human maker of prints, and "printer" for a mechanical device device used to produce prints. An Epson P800 is a printer; Charlie Cramer is a printmaker.

**Remember, the point of the search for the Holy Grail is that there was no Holy Grail.

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

James Weekes: "Just to add to the chorus. I have used Image Print for years, through two printers, Epson 3800 and now P800. A magical program. The hidden gem of the company is their free tutorials. Almost any problem solved in minutes."

Tex Andrews: "Very, very helpful. Have bookmarked ImagePrint. But there's one I think very important thing I'd like to toss in as a visual artist of traditional media who also does photography now. Digital ink printing is different than chemical printing, and should be judged that way. Japanese whisky is excellent, but needs to be judged on its own terms, not in a constant comparison to Scotch whisky. Same with printing. Printing digitally involves ink, so the real comparison is with ink prints, such as etchings or fine art lithographs. I always hated matte paper and prints until digital; now I adore them, and am having problems with digital gloss paper. It's because I see in the inkjet print the quality of ink on paper that I see in traditional fine art ink prints."

Joe: "I believe that one of the keys to becoming a really good printmaker, whether B&W or color, is to get out and look at great prints—in galleries, museums, etc.—as often as you can. Not computer screens, magazines, or even most books. Look at really good silver and inkjet prints, printed by the masters. One thing I learned from studying great prints is how often the best printmakers are not obsessed with the things we've been taught to do so easily in Photoshop. Like? Pulling all the detail out of the shadows. Sometimes a shadow should just be a shadow."

Mike replies: Looking at prints in museums used to be good advice, but now that museums are saving money by keeping their light levels too low (and that's why they do it—don't believe their hooey about lights fading), looking at prints in museums is just as often a frustration as a pleasure these days. It's a deplorable fad I hope passes ASAP.

Charles Cramer: "I remember you posting a link to Shorpy years ago, and I just love the tonality there. Gorgeous, and so full of light! In my digital printing classes I find that most people's prints are the opposite—too dark. Many detailed shadow areas are almost black. Perhaps this dark style of printing reflects a more modern, bleak view of the world? (Also, the webmaster of Shorpy does a great job at opening shadows and restoring highlight detail. See http://www.shorpy.com/node/451 for before and after examples).

"With digital capture and processing, we can achieve a more linear rendering of tones, without the characteristic curve of film that wonderfully separates mid-tones, but at the expense of compressed highlights and shadows. And in most of the Shorpy images, I see clouds that are pretty compressed—but with just enough detail so they don’t look washed out. The clouds are certainly not 'fluffy,' a la Ansel Adams. Tonality is a series of compromises, and if you want the Shorpy tonality, I think you have to give up some of the highlight separation now possible with digital.

"Another problem that contributes to dark-looking prints are monitors, which I believe can be very deceptive, even when carefully calibrated. I talked about ways to make monitors more perceptually accurate in a talk I did for OnLandscape, (found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8zxB4zMAg, around the 28 minute mark). Monitors always 'glow' since they are basically lit from behind. Prints have to exist in the real world, and are at a disadvantage. But, it still is very possible to make glowing prints. Just see some Adams, Weston, or Sexton original prints. One very obvious thing I tell classes about making a print glow is: darken the edges, and lighten the middle. I think that deserves a 'Duh!,' but it’s a good starting point."

[Charlie is one of the leading printmaking teachers in the USA. —Ed.]

TOP Classic: Ten Best B&W Movies (and Then Some)

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. None other than the great war reporter Robert Capa was the uncredited still photographer for this film, although of course there's no way of knowing if he took this particular picture. But he might have.

[2018 note: Watching B&W movies and paying attention to the visuals is an excellent way to improve your feel for B&W tonality—those old cinematographers were masters of lighting and of their filmstocks. You might also want to read this fascinating exchange about Roger Deakins' cinematography for the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There from the DVD commentary. And may I just add that I would love to see a coffee-table book of beautiful B&W stills from old movies, including a few of the masterful promo shots and actor portraits done as stills. There are a few more comments and a good example in this post. That would be a beautiful book...but maybe only in my head.  —MJ]

A question I posed on TOP in December of 2006 about readers' favorite black-and-white movies quickly racked up a near-record number of comments.

I tallied the results (no trivial task, either—see what I do for you?) which are presented below. Note that readers made what they wished of the question; I'm sure some people nominated great films, some people nominated favorites, and others paid more attention to the actual cinematography and the use of monotone. It's all good.

I've arranged the results in order of the number of mentions a film got, and then, within each category, alphabetically. In some cases I added the year of release to avoid confusion with remakes or other films of the same title, and for consistency I've generally listed the titles in their original languages with the common English-language title, if it's known by one, in parentheses. For simplicity's sake I haven't italicized all the titles in the main list. You should be able to find all of the titles on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).

Of special mention are Sunrise, a silent film that got two votes, and In Cold Blood, which is B&W but also in Cinemascope. A few "finds" among little-known films may be Eric von Stroheim's Greed (although it's not available on DVD yet [2018 note: it is now, under the original title]), Alphaville, and The Battle of Algiers. For obvious reasons I disallowed movies shot partly—or all!—in color; however, the runaway runner-up not on the list is no doubt Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, which got a whopping three votes despite the fact that it was shot in very subdued Eastmancolor. And, finally, the Special Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) which is not only in B&W, but has music by Miles Davis, a plot that turns on a B&W photograph, and the movie includes a scene in a darkroom! Can't beat that.

My only personal comment is that I see a subscription to Netflix in my future—I've seen nine of the top ten (gotta go rent The Third Man) and I consider myself fairly cinematically "literate," at least with older classics, but haven't seen anywhere close to half these films.

Thanks to everyone who participated. And if you see any mistakes in the list, please let me know.

[2018 notes: An old film that deserves special mention for particularly lush B&W tonality, although it's a truly weird movie, is Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête) with cinematography by Henri Alekan.

One film I particularly liked that I discovered from this list is Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette).

A sentimental favorite that, improbably, combines slapstick comedy with nostalgic wistfulness for bygone summertimes is Jacques Tati's lovely M. Hulot's Holiday (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot)—I feel like I spent many childhood summers at that place, and I don't even know where it is.

Peter Bogdanovitch's Paper Moon also didn't make our list (although his The Last Picture Show did), but I love László Kovács' B&W cinematography for that one.

And if you've never seen Akiro Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), for heaven's sake run, don't walk. A bucket-list movie without question. I'm not a "repeat watcher" of movies, but I've seen Seven Samurai three times.

And looking forward to the fourth. —MJ]

-

TOP Readers List of Great Black-and-White Films

Citizen Kane (14)

The Third Man (13)

Casablanca (7)

Dr. Strangelove (7)

Breathless (6)

Raging Bull (6)

Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai) (6)

Schindler’s List (5)

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (4)

Manhattan (4)

Nosferatu (4)

Touch of Evil (4)

La Dolce Vita (3)

Eraserhead (3)

Good Night and Good Luck (3)

M (3)

The Maltese Falcon (3)

Paths of Glory (3)

Psycho (3)

Rashomon (3)

Le Salaire de la Peur (Wages of Fear) (3)

Sin City (3)

Stagecoach (3)

Stranger than Paradise (3)

Throne of Blood (3)

Alphaville (2)

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (2)

The Battle of Algiers (2)

La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast) (2)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (2)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2)

Double Indemnity (2)

Down By Law (2)

Ed Wood (2)

Elephant Man (2)

High and Low (2)

High Noon (2)

Hud (2)

Ikiru (2)

Jules et Jim (2)

Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, Bicycle Thieves) (2)

Metropolis (2)

Night of the Hunter (2)

Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) (2)

One, Two, Three (2)

To Kill a Mockingbird (2)

Pather Panchali (2)

pi (2)

Rebecca (2)

Some Like It Hot (2)

Sunrise (2)

Them (2)

12 Angry Men (2)

Yojimbo (2)

Young Frankenstein (2)

Angel-A

El Ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel)

Angels with Dirty Faces

Aparajito

Az Én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century)

Battleship Potemkin

The Big Sleep

The Blob

Bob le Flambeur

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog)

Charulata

Dead Man

D.O.A. (1950)

Double Indemnity

8 1/2

Les Enfants du paradis

Fort Apache (cited for innovative IR photography)

Frankenstein (1931)

The Grapes of Wrath

The Great Dictator

Greed

La Haine

A Hard Day’s Night

Hidden Fortress

Hiroshima Mon Amour

The Hustler

Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke (Samurai Spy)

In Cold Blood (cited for being in Cinemascope)

Jalsaghar

Key Largo

The Killing

King Kong (1933)

Kiss Me Deadly

Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit)

The Lady from Shanghai

The Ladykillers (1955)

The Last Picture Show

Laura

Lolita

The Long Voyage Home

Lord of the Flies (1963)

Lost Horizon

The Magnificant Ambersons

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Man Who Wasn’t There

The Manchurian Candidate

Meshes in the Afternoon (short)

Mighty Joe Young (1949)

Misummer Night's Dream (1935)

Modern Times

My Darling Clementine

Night of the Living Dead Night

Mail (1936)

Notorious

Of Mice and Men

On the Waterfront

Orpheus

Ostre sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains)

Persona

Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows)

Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers)

Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly)

The Scarlet Empress

Scrooge (1951)

Seppuku

Soy Cuba / Ya Kuba

La Strada

The Stranger

Stray Dog

A Streetcar named Desire

Sunset Boulevard

Sweet Smell of Success

Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story)

Tsubaki Sanjûrô (Sanjuro)

The Wrong Man

Have fun!

Mike
(Thanks to all the readers in 2007 who contributed to this)

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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bruce alan greene: "All good films in the list. As an aside, watching digital reproductions of B&W films often give a very different impression than that was produced in the the cinema when the movies were new. I have been lucky enough (and old enough) to see some studio prints of some of the classic films on the list. A studio print is generally fewer generations down from the original negative than the copies that appeared in cinemas. Sometimes it is struck from the original camera negative. And if you really want to see the tonality of these films, seeing these prints projected is certainly the way to see them. I have yet to see any digital reproduction of a B&W film that comes close to reproducing the dynamic range and tonalities of the original prints projected in a theater. And, the digital reproductions have also been re-interpreted as well.

"Sad to say that one of my favorite B&W films, To Kill a Mockingbird, is available today only as a restoration from damaged release prints as I believe the negative was destroyed in a fire at the studio. And this restoration doesn't look anything like the beautiful imagery that audiences originally viewed and that I saw in the 1980s. So, if you ever get a chance to see an original print of any of the films on the list, in a theater, do it!!!"

[Bruce is a Hollywood cinematographer. —Ed.]

Bob Rosinsky: "Having seen 95% of the films on the list, it's hard to rate the best of the best black and white cinematography (my personal favorite is The Third Man). A few more: Ashes and Diamonds, Director Andrzej Wajda; Diabolique, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot; Wages of Fear, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot; The Triumph of the Will, Director Leni Riefenstahl (scary content, innovative cinematography); Double Indemnity, Director Billy Wilder; Nebraska, Director Alexander Payne; Repulsion, Director Roman Polanski; Jules and Jim, Director Francois Truffaut; Stalker (B&W and color), Director Andrei Tarkovsky."

Rob: "One of my all time favorite films, never mind just B&W, is The White Ribbon (2009). It is a German masterpiece by Michael Haneke. The cinematography is splendid. Also Ida (2013), a Polish film by Pawlikowski. This is one of those films that you can watch for the visual beauty alone. Finally, anyone who is serious about independent, classic and foreign films has got to check out Filmstruck, which is a streaming service put out by TCM that you can get bundled with the Criterion Collection. It is my favorite streaming service. My wife and I watched a restored version of Chaplin's Modern Times that looked like it was made in 2016, not 1936."

Mike replies: Several readers have mentioned Ida privately to me. It hadn't been made when this list was first published.

Max Cottrell: ""Ida" was made in 2014 by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski. Netflix: 'Raised in a Catholic orphanage during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Anna is poised to join the order when she learns she has a surviving aunt. But visiting the woman before taking her vows uncovers some inconvenient truths about her heritage.' The cinematographer must surely also be a B&W photographer. Stunningly well shot. I have watched it at least six times, shared it with non-photog friends, and purchased a copy. Not that easy to watch, but very rewarding, especially if you are engaged in spiritual practice."

[Here is the Amazon link for Ida. —Ed.]

Aaron C Greenman: "Hands down the most beautifully filmed black-and-white film I’ve ever seen is Ida—every frame is a beautiful still photograph. I recommend to everyone to watch it today—a wonderful film."

Andrew Lamb: "What? Did none us vote for Rules of the Game directed by Jean Renoir, which features Hank Carter as a butler (he was also assistant director)? ['Hank Carter' = Henri Cartier-Bresson —Ed.] From a photographic point of view, the film is noteworthy for its use of extreme depth of field, aided by special wide-angle lenses made by Kinoptik (think they're still going). This technique pre-dates Citizen Kane by a couple of years. Renoir also made a short film, based on a Maupassant short story, One Partie de Compagne, which has some of the most lyrical B&W imagery I've seen in a film."

Paul De Zan: "The current Blu-ray release (2011) of Citizen Kane is an absolute revelation, the finest transfer of a classic film I've seen. It gives the movie a stunning immediacy I've never felt seeing it in a theater, which I have many times. Highest possible recommendation. Use the TOP Amazon link now!"

Mike replies: Is this the one you mean?

Paul De Zan replies: " I have this set (which includes the very good documentary 'The Battle Over Citizen Kane'), but the disc is the same in both the release you reference and the newer '75th Anniversary' packaging; if it were not, Amazon reviewers would scream bloody murder."

Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir from 1947,
an allegory of impossible pairings

Peggy C.: "I did not know of your blog until only a few years ago or your list would have included the 1947 film, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The cinematography was by the great Charles Lang. I re-watch it several times a year now that I have the DVD. The lighting and tonality are just amazing. This film is the single most important reason for my love of B&W photos and films."

Mike replies: I started watching it on Amazon Prime last night, Peggy, thanks to your recommendation—just the sort of antique movie I like to look at for the cinematography. I have dim memories of the TV series. Lang's B&W tonalities are classic.

Richard Newman: "I am amazed that neither of Ingmar Bergman's great B&W films, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal were even mentiobed, or, even more, Sergei Eisenstein and Ivan the Great. Three movies with great cinematography by two great directors."

[There are many more good recommendations in the Comments section. —Ed.]

Richard S.: "Glad to see Grapes of Wrath on the list. I starting watching that on TV during a boring Sunday afternoon's channel hopping and ended up completely transfixed.

"Some years ago I knew someone who worked for the British Film Institute, and that year they did a Film Noir calendar; I framed and hung around half of the B&W stills they'd used in the calendar, they were so good."

Grizzlymarmot: "Somehow the list is missing an impressive number of great comedies. Perhaps in their recollections your readers stereotype B&W as menacing or dramatic. The patterns in 42nd Street are mesmerizing. Chiaroscuro makes It's a Wonderful Life wonderful. Mirror scene in Duck Soup; falling buildings by Buster Keaton; stunts by Harold Lloyd—comedy demands the most precise work. B&W is also the most glamorous—Some Like it Hot is in the list but where is Greta Garbo or Jean Harlow—B&W is perfect for creating glamor."