The Online Photographer

Print Crit: Jim Arthur's Owl

Jim Arthur's owl

Are you one of those who feel that cards—greeting cards, Christmas cards, etc.—are not suitable or prestigious enough as a medium for fine prints? If so I'm pretty sure I don't agree. I like photographs, and I like them whether I see them in books or magazines, prints on the wall, or even—gasp!—on the internet. I think I like nicely printed books and nicely printed prints the best. Into that select company I might also admit handmade greeting cards. More demotic, more democratic, sure, but that's nothing against them.

Jim Arthur didn't mean this as a "Print Crit" submission when he sent it to me—I had to ask him after the fact if he minded me writing about it. He graciously consented. Inside the card, he had tried to convince me to not throw it away for two days by repeating an exchange from "Seinfeld":

Jerry: It was a 'thank you' card from Kristin because I'm doing the PBS drive. I mean, how long am I supposed to keep it?
George: The rule is a minimum of two days.
Jerry: You making that up or do you know what you're talking about?
George: I'm making it up.

On the contrary, I actually wish I had a box full of the best cards I've gotten over the years. There have been some beauts. Sally Mann used to write letters in pencil on the back of 8x10 contact prints that she would then fold and stuff into an envelope. David Vestal made Christmas card prints every year, tiny three-inch enlargements from 35mm negatives on gelatin silver paper inside a folder of translucent tissue paper; Oren Grad followed David's lead and did the same for a number of years. Kent Phelan used to send beautiful cards, and Nick Hartmann did too. Ansel Adams and Helen Levitt wrote on printed postcards made of their own photographs. I've gotten so many nice cards from readers over the years. Many of them are extremely nice homemade prints.

Not all images work small, and here I think Jim has excelled—his detail of an owlish scowling visage is perfect for a card, giving a "big" impression in a small space. That, at least, is something you can see perfectly well in the snap of it above. The image is beautifully printed, with strong detail and great clarity and no artifacts. It's maybe a bit more contrasty than you might make it as a more sober wall piece, but that just makes it jump out at you properly as a card.

I think the things I like best about it are the implied humor—those startling owl eyes glaring at you in apparent fury—and that trick of seeming big even though it's small. It was taken with a Canon 6D and EF 100–400mm ƒ/4.5–5.6L IS II lens at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, "a 98-acre zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, natural history museum, publisher, and art gallery founded in 1952. Located just west of Tucson, Arizona, it features two miles of walking paths traversing 21 acres of desert landscape" (Wikipedia). It's a Great Horned Owl. Jim didn't supply any of the printing details.

A well-judged image choice for a card, and perfectly nicely printed for purposes. Strong job all in. George Costanza was wrong—I'll probably keep it a minimum of six months, just to enjoy, and it might hang around here for two years before it goes the way of all cards and gets lost in the shuffle.

I like cards!

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

ADDENDUM Thursday a.m. (it's October!) from Jim Arthur: After a long and stressful day preparing my Dad for a move to memory care I plopped down at the computer looking for a distraction and found your kind words. Thanks Mike, you really made my day.

The card was printed on a PRO-100 which uses Canon’s ChromaLife 100+ inks. The paper is Canon's inexpensive MP-101 matte paper. While I like the look of the prints, the 45 lbs. weight of this paper is a little thin for anything but greeting cards.

I never pass up an opportunity to make a greeting card. It's quick and fun and the recipients always appreciate finding a handmade treat among the bills and advertising choking their mailbox.

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

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

Frank Gorga: "Jim's owl photo is great! After having read, here at TOP some years ago, about David Vestal's tradition of sending small prints to friends at the holidays, I began a similar tradition. This year will make the ninth year I have done this, so I think it really has become a tradition! The recipients are always appreciative and there are at least two mini-galleries of my photos out there in the world. One friend has all of the prints pinned up on a cork board in his home office. A neighbor keeps three or four of the prints on a shelf in her kitchen. It is gratifying to know that a few people like them enough to want to keep looking at them. In years past, I have sent a 5x7 inkjet print, usually black and white, printed on half of a letter-sized sheet of paper. These fit in a readily-available 6x9-inch envelope with a piece of cardboard for stiffening. This year, having pandemic-induced time on my hands, I have taken to making cyanotypes again after a twelve year hiatus. Thus, I am toying with the idea of sending 4x5 inch cyanotypes this December. I'll need to get my you-know-what in gear soon if that is going to happen!"

John: "I maintain the David Vestal tradition, which he got from Sid Grossman at the Photo League. Four small analogue prints on an 8x10 sheet, then whack 'em through the guillotine. Many end up stuck to fridge doors or on pinboards for surprisingly long periods. What is really interesting is how many get carefully kept for years. Last year, at a motorway service station, I noticed a stranger intently peering at me for no apparent reason. Once past the a newly grown beard, I recognised someone not seen for seventeen years. After the catch-up stuff, he and his wife told me they have box reserved for the accumulating cards, as do others. Confirming the German phrase, 'Papier ist geduldig,' paper is patient. (Has an alternative meaning, paper doesn’t blush.)"

John Krumm: "I've long used greeting card photo paper from Red River. It's good quality and comes with a crease for easy folding. They also have printing templates for Lightroom (and I think Photoshop) that makes for easy printing."

Kristine Hinrichs: "Over the years I’ve made a few $$ selling my photo cards. What has really been fun is printing a card for birthday, wedding, sympathy that I hope will have special meaning to the recipient. About a month into the pandemic lock-down I looked at my substantial card inventory and decided to send a card, with a personal message, to every single person in my contact list for whom I had an address—friends, An old boyfriend, ex-husband, business associates—everyone. In the end I sent 96 cards. I had no expectations. I was overwhelmed by the response, many cards in return. Several said that theirs arrived at a particularly lonely time, a friend’s son sent me a letter on origami paper, several were framed. It was quite an experience."

Jamie Pillers: "Over at the Rangefinder Forum website, there's a bunch of us that do a card exchange roughly once a year (I think we're about to embark on the 12th exchange). There are usually 30 to 40 participants. Everyone picks a favorite photo for their card and sends one to all the other participants. Its great fun then to wait for cards arriving over the next couple of months from all over the world."

Thoughts on 4x5 and Full-Frame

It was kind of Joe Kashi, from Alaska, to share his Nagaoka with us. For those in the balcony, Nagaokas were always relatively rare; Tachiharas and Wistas were far more common as sort of the "standard" Japanese 4x5s of the view camera revival period. I hope Oren will correct me if I'm wrong. There were others—Horseman made one, I seem to recall—but those two, the Tachihara and Wista, were the Toyota and Honda.

Meaning, they were the affordable ones for "Everyman." (Or woman.) There were many others, of course—American versions such as those made by Ron Wisner (the Zone VI camera, which many people are familiar with because of the success of their catalog, was, successively, a Wista, then a Wisner, then one they made themselves). Bespoke Gandolfis were made in England, and Ebony was the high-end Japanese offering. Of course there were many metal field view cameras, and many other view cameras that weren't of the flatbed folding field type. But they're not what we're talking about here.

The wooden-and-metal 4x5 field view camera to buy today would be the Shen-Hao (Amazon files it under "Electronics," which is funny) or the Chamonix. Both are made in China. They've chased the Japanese out of the business, Nagaoka-san notwithstanding.

'There's no substitute for square inches'
Joe sent nine pictures of his Nagaoka. Normally I would have picked perhaps three for the post. But I opted to use all nine, thinking that there would be those in the audience who aren't familiar with view cameras. Joe's pictures are worth 9,000 words of description as to how folding view cameras work.

MJ, Gas Station. I take iPhone pictures wherever I am. What got my attention here was the Milk Bone on the concrete, and the light, the evening of a particularly clear day.

View cameras were common when I came up. Art photographers in the 1970s began using cast-off Deardorff 8x10s that were easily available secondhand. Nobody wanted them; my studio partner bought a nice one for $300. It created a Revival for the field view camera that has never entirely died. By the '80s, when I was in photography school, the school owned several monorails that students could sign out. Which I did, just to try it. That was the beginning of my own "large-format period," at the end of which I bought the Wista of sainted memory. Much as I adore large-format photography, though, I wasn't very good at it, and I quickly learned it wasn't my thing. Honestly, an iPhone suits the way I like to photograph better than a view camera. It's like a field notebook on which I can jot quick notes.

Bathing beauties in 1921, from Shorpy. My grandmother would have been 20 that year. Don't you like the dude in the upper left? He's into the whole thing.

If you're unfamiliar with large-format photography and curious as to what all those square inches bought you, you can get a real feel for it at Shorpy—some of the old pictures they reproduce are from sheet-film and glass-plate negatives that would have been shot with cameras broadly similar to Joe's Nagaoka and the others of its ilk. Velvety smoothness, gobs of detail that didn't call attention to itself, and, usually, a long, gentle tonal scale: all those felicities of big negs are visible in many of the JPEGs at Shorpy (although sometimes from medium format, too).

Big digi
I should preface this next bit with a caveat and a confession. The caveat is that I have nothing against fans of full-frame. Don't accuse me otherwise, because it's a false ack! I want photographers to have the gear they want, and that's an end on it. If full-frame's for you, power to you, period.

The confession is that I might be being iconoclastic here...a tendency I have. I've a bit of a contrarian streak. If the world goes to SUVs, I'll champion little British-style roadsters. If the world moves to streaming audio, I'll talk up vinyl. If the world is inundated by a tsunami of video games, I'll play pool, a physical game that requires an expensive half-ton to one-ton game-board that's a headache and a half to move, store, set up, knock down, and buy or sell. The fad for "open concept" house plans (pushed relentlessly for decades because they leave more money in builders' pockets, I'm convinced) made me appreciate walls. Hey, I'm a photographer...we need walls! The more walls the better.

Anyway...my main reaction to the Sony a7C is that it's the wrong format. I know the format is the point. But to me, one of the great advantages of digital is small sensors. Thirty-five millimeter was the practical minimum for film, but digital lets us go a good deal smaller. It's one of the good things about digital! Why give it up?

If I were going to go big...well, let me put it this way. A friend of mine, a distinguished photographer and educator, recently privately made the case in an email for medium-format digital. He was reacting to seeing and working on many files of different kinds from students. Quoth he, "When the files are from a medium format sensor...the resolution and clarity and dynamic range just jump out at you. My impression, reinforced several times with different medium format digital files, is that 4/3s and FF are closely paired, with FF in front but not by all that much, while the MF files leap out in front of the FF. That doesn’t jibe with the arithmetic. Four-thirds to FF is a bigger jump in sensor area, but FF to MF shows a strikingly bigger improvement."

Anyway, if I were going to go big—turning my back on what I consider one of digital's main advantages—I'd want to go all the way and dive into "medium" format. (Remember, it's digital's large format—the word "medium" being merely legacy terminology). Honestly—and I know this is a minority opinion—I like small sensors better. You get more depth-of-field with wider apertures, which is a good thing, and everything's smaller and handier. APS-C is the largest I'd go, everything considered; I wouldn't turn down the opportunity to try a SotA 1"-sensor camera, and I do like that I can carry a camera in my pocket for visual note-taking.

So that's the downside of the a7C for me—wrong sensor size.

But like I say, that could be my iconoclastic side stubbornly surfacing. "Popular taste is always wrong."

Bless you an' yourn
TOP is off tomorrow. Have a wonderful weekend—be grateful to be alive, relish any good weather you might get to enjoy, and taste your food. And as always, good light to thee.

Mike

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

Help TOP keep on keepin' on via Patreon

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

Rob de Loe: "A wonderful mentor named Bob McNair introduced me to large format when I was a student. He ran the photo lab and let me use it for questionably 'academic' purposes. Maintaining my sanity struck me as a legitimate academic purpose. He got me into 4x5. Meanwhile, he was getting into 11x14 using a camera he built himself. I went from a Kardan Super Color, which I carried into the field in a homemade case, to a Wisner Technical Field. Eventually I sold it all, including my darkroom.

"I had a revival in 2018-19 and re-bought both a monorail and a field 4x5 camera with all the trimmings. Alas, it didn't last. The transaction costs of shooting film were simply too high. Too much time, too much money, too slow. Then I found a digital view camera (thanks Jeffrey) and it was game over for film. It seems what I wanted was movements. I now have all the movements I had on my 4x5 monorail, but with a digital medium format camera. It's wonderful."

Khürt Louis Williams: I’ve seen images from a Fujifilm GFX 50 and I’m convinced I want to go bigger."

Dennis Ng: "There is a UK-based large format camera I am targeted on to replace my old Tachiharas 4x5 and Deardorff 8x10."

James: "I actually own a Panasonic GX8, Fuji X-Pro3, Fuji X100V, Nikon D810, and Fuji GFX 50R. Your friend is correct. There is absolutely no comparison between the 50R and the D810 in terms of rendering and dynamic range. I am 60 years old and it's easily the same as the difference between a photo on my F5 vs. a photo on my Rolleiflex. It just looks different. The 63mm ƒ/2.8 lens is staggeringly good. I would say the difference is extremely marginal between the Nikon and the Pro3 or X100V. You would never see it in a print at 20 x 30 at ISO 1600. The only big difference between the Micro 4/3 and the Nikon is the dynamic range, but it's really not that significant. Yes, you can recover some highlights with the Nikon that the Panasonic wouldn't be able to, but now it's at a point where it looks artificial and maybe the better option is just letting them go as opposed to creating a phony-looking photo. I am selling the Nikon gear. No way I would ever part with the Fuji cameras. As for the GX8, it's just a great little camera. I often wonder why it didn't sell better."

Michael J. Perini: "I really agree with you about the latest Sony camera. Full frame sensors require large lenses if you want fast primes and zooms. Sony's A7 series are already quite compact, and full featured. They have had to reduce ergonomics and features in order to make the a7C more compact, making the mismatch between camera size and available lens size even more apparent. The real issue I think is that Sony, Canon, and Nikon have given up on high quality APS-C lenses, which could be more compact. They have helped Fujifilm along in that regard. One of the things I notice about Fujifilm cameras is that they all seem 'well proportioned,' neither body-heavy nor lens-heavy. I think that is part of good design. They are all capable cameras so it becomes more a matter of taste."

jean pierre (pete) guaron: "I had great-great-uncles on both my father's and my mother's side of my family, who amused themselves in the 19th century moving around the state, taking gigantic collodion wet plate glass plate shots, with wood framed field cameras, poised on monstrous wooden tripods. They made the plates themselves, in the field—and processed them in the field. Returning home to make contact prints. When the state Archives saw the collection of one of them, they all but fainted, on the spot—they'd never imagined such an incredible record of the state's history existed. And no digi beats a 10x12 or 12x16 contact print! You could practically use the bottom of a bottle as a lens, and still get a sharp image!"

Movie Tone

Edward G. Robinson in The Red House, 1947. Although an outdoor scene, note the rimlight even though the main light is high right. (Another lucky thing about film was that you often had to light it.)

I watched another old potboiler the other night, The Red House from 1947—I'm kind of on an Edward G. Robinson kick. That guy was an amazing actor. One reviewer called The Red House "country farmhouse noir" which about pegs it. Robinson plays a character that has to be simultaneously sympathetic and monstrous, a tough line for an actor to walk. What a pleasure to watch him pull it off. The ingenue is played by Allene Roberts, who died only last year at 90.

As I was searching for cast pictures—I do a lot of image searches because they encompass a nice mix of directedness and serendipity—I ran across this:

The Wikipedia caption is "Photo of Marcia Strassman from the television program Welcome Back, Kotter. Strassman played Julie Kotter, the wife of teacher Gabe Kotter," and the picture is in the public domain. Here's a link to the picture on Wikipedia, which may look better for you than it does here.

The best bet is that this was taken with a Hasselblad on Kodak Tri-X Professional (code letters TXP), using a strobe with an umbrella, high center. It's possible that's wrong, but it is, as I say, a good bet. I just looked, and TXP appears to be available only in sheet film now.

So how can we guess this is TXP? Two ways: 1.) it looks like it; and 2.) that was what most professionals shot back then when they shot B&W. And why a Hasselblad? Because in 1975 when this publicity still was taken it was the camera brand used by a majority of the higher-level professionals in America. Could have been a Mamiya, though. Pros who specialized in portraits also used those a lot. Why an umbrella center high? Because that's what the light looks like, and you can see it reflected in her eyes. Well, sort of—the resolution of the JPEG isn't good enough to be definitive.

Anyway, none of that is what I want to talk about.

Skilled pros
The point I want to make is, when you're learning about B&W tonality, it makes a lot of sense to look at old movies and old professional studio pictures. The reason is that both of those were usually consciously lit, by seasoned professionals who really knew what they were doing, and then exposed properly for the lighting and the balance of tones desired. So you're seeing a report of conscious, skilled work that was the result of deliberate intent.

A significant caveat with old movies is that you need to be looking at a good print. With so many old noirs having been kicking around in the public domain for a long time, that's far from a given. It can be worthwhile, if you enjoy that sort of thing, to dig for the best versions of old movies—many review sites provide information about that. For example, I watched Scarlet Street the other night—a very early slasher film with Edward G. Robinson inhabiting a very different kind of character than the one he plays in The Red House—and Amazon's print is lousy, whereas one I found on YouTube is much better from a B&W tonality standpoint. Even if you do have to put up with interruptions.

Of course, many old movies will never exist in a great print again, just as many old musical masterpieces can never be remastered from the originals...Google "Universal Fire" and you'll see what I mean. Actually, don't Google "Universal Fire"—it's far too depressing to read about.

Naturally, you can find beautiful B&W tonality almost anywhere if you look hard enough. I've seen it in snapshots, documentary photographs taken as records, in old magazines, in museums and historical societies and antique shops. And of course in expressive artwork. Even (gasp!) online. But I wouldn't say it's common under any circumstances—excellence is always a small percentage of all the examples that exist, in anything I guess. And of course different pictures look best with different kinds of tonality...it's hardly a one-size-fits-all-kind of thing.

As you develop a taste in tonality, you'll probably notice that although you have your own preferences, you can also appreciate good examples of other kinds. That's the case with this portrait. There isn't a lot of shadow separation in the hair, and the contrast is bold and clear, and it's not the kind of spectral response I like best. TXP has a sort of dirty, gritty look in the mid-tones, which you can see best here in the area of her blouse and necklace at the bottom of the picture. But overall this works. It's vivid and pretty, and balanced, and the highlight modulation in the skin tones is lovely...something that survives even in the JPEG. (Do click the link to study it more carefully.)

Think of a musical analogy—even though your basic preference might be for a particular genre, classic rock or '70s Brit-pop or '90s grunge or contemporary drums 'n' bass or whatever—you can still appreciate well-done songs or pieces in wildly different genres, even ones you generally dislike.

Of course—back to today's example—tonality doesn't make the picture. It's the personality the actress projects with her lively eyes and nice smile that does that. Marcia Strassman, who played "Nurse Margie Cutler" on some early episodes the TV series M*A*S*H among other roles, died in 2014, of breast cancer. She wrote a memoir before she left us.

A lovely old picture of a person in her prime. Too bad we all don't need to get headshots made at a few points along the paths of our lives.

I'll try to put up other examples of excellent B&W tonality from time to time, for those who are trying to calibrate an eye for it.

Mike

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Maynard Switzer: "Actually TXP was not used that much in the studio with powerful studio strobe lighting. Richard Avedon used nothing but Panatomic-X in his Rolleiflex in the studio. ISO 32. How do I know? I was his assistant for a year."

Stephen Cowdery: "Looking at old movies for lighting inspirations is a great idea. I recently watched the Criterion set of Marlene Dietrich/Josef von Sternberg films from the early 1930s and the lighting, especially on Dietrich, was spectacular. It was obvious that von Sternberg (who did most of his lighting) was working on some other level."

Huw Morgan: "We were once stranded for a day in New York after our flight was canceled. Rather than go back into Manhattan, we stayed in an airport hotel near LaGuardia. The next morning, we had time to kill and visited the Museum of the Moving Image, a remarkable collection of movie-related materials. They have an excellent collection of publicity portraits of famous movie stars, taken by the studio photographers of the day. The collection is a lesson in lighting techniques and beautiful black-and-white printing. The tones in these photos are to die for and just can't be reproduced with inkjet printers. If you have a few hours to kill, I'd heartily recommend this museum."

Reminder!

If you have some time this weekend, you might want to treat yourself to Bill Jay's famous essay "The Thing Itself." We mentioned it the other day.

The phrase was Edward Weston's. Edward, behind the formidable veil of his artistry and mastery, was essentially a still-life photographer. Few kinds of photographers care more about things themselves.

Bill was an iconoclast, always a little outside the art-world mainstream despite his numerous publications and academic positions. He thought for himself, followed his path, went his own way. He was also a photographer. His primary subject was other photographers. He made a great many fine portraits. I've seen very few less than good.

I think it's probably unlikely that you'll agree with everything he claims and says in this essay. But I also think it's likely that you'll find it thoughtful and thought-provoking—and a constructive, rewarding way to pass time on a lazy Summer weekend.

And if you don't want to read it now, put it on your virtual bedstand for some future day.

Mike

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Ricardo Hernandez: "Thank you so much for linking this Mike. I was not aware of it and it sure is making me think about my photographic journey, what I want to do, and though a big part of me already knew it - how petty are all these tribal sports like fights in forums about camera brands. I really like in particular the example he gave of the violinist on the TV interview, the very pragmatic "if you have filtered subjects of interest and you remain with equal subjects, pick the one people are interested the most at that point (but only at that point)" (I am paraphrasing) - the pick a subject that you are passionate about because it's how you will carry on examining it over and over again. Great, great read. Thank you so much!"

Animesh Ray: "Written with unusual clarity...what a difference from Sontag's On Photography. While trying to read the latter I couldn't go beyond what it is not to get to what it is. Here Bill Jay gets to the heart in a few short strokes of his pen. He writes like the best of the journalists, which he was for a long time. I agree with him on the primacy of the subject in photography. The surprise was his opinion on a personal style, that one cannot make it consciously, that it is an unconscious by-product of passion and work (and, may I add, of talent)."

Awful Tones for Awful Times?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Please help support TOP through Patreon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Confession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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Marco Maroccolo: "The great Josef Sudek!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike replies: I agree.

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

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

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

Test Shots

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

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

What does that mean though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's my excuse. Ha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Inset: Long Story Short)

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Another Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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Bokeh Is Not a Stable Characteristic of a Lens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

A "made in Japan" sample

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bazooka Joe

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

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

Two reader comments—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good weekend! Good light.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve and Julian)

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures for Discussion: Figure-Ground Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

Here goes.

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

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

Common Problems with Digital Black and White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does the following look better or worse to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Bokeh? And the Dog's Nose

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

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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

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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

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

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

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

Yesterday's Post...

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

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

Mike

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Open Mike: Sharp Is Another Way Photographs Can Be

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

-

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

I've never believed it.

Here are a few things I believe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Warhol, Sean Lennon, 1985 (Polaroid)

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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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