The Online Photographer

Three Pictures Under Discussion

So let's look at a few actual pictures. These all come from the same sharing site and several are made with the same lens, but there's no need to read anything into that.

A digression first
Before I start, though, I just wanted to comment on one thing in passing: in looking for a deliberately soft lens that doesn't go for the analytical/clinical/forensic look, I happened across one of those very cheap third-party manual-focus lenses (I sometimes jokingly call them "fourth-party" lenses—you know, sorta like "off-off-Broadway"—but nobody gets the joke). It only costs around a hundred bucks, and it looks like it might be quite nice for intentionally less-than-sharp portraits.

So then what does the first review say? "This lens is total crap! It's soft at every aperture!"

...Which seems unfair. He's criticizing the fact that the $100 lens he bought is not the same as a $500 lens. Whose fault is that though? His, if you ask me. If you insist on a lens that renders like a $477 Nikkor, then save your money for a bleepin' $477 Nikkor, ya broke-ass, no-cash-having jamoke. Leave the soft $99 lenses to those who are looking for soft lenses.

There, now I feel better.

Picture 1
Okay, now on to the pictures. When you open this first picture, just look at it sitting a normal distance from your screen, without being critical. Pretty standard, right? And looks okay. At a glance, you know what's going on: sharp, in-focus blooms in front, fading into progressively more blur in the distance. So now take a look.

But zoom in by clicking to enlarge it two times, and we find to our astonishment that virtually nothing in the picture is sharp, save a few leaves on the left-hand side of the frame. None of the blooms are sharp, not even the one at the lower right which seemed like the prime candidate at first glance.

But remember 3R prints, the once-ubiquitous standard so-called "drugstore prints" that were 3.5x5 inches in size? This would look fine at that size. Those 3R prints were optimized to mask slop and imprecision of many kinds. It was a system designed to routinely make silk purses out of sow's ears.

Picture 2
Or take this one. Now, in my humble opinion at least, this portrait (which gets the important things right, the expressions and what it implies of the relationships—and it's a nice enough composition, too) has a few more pressing technical problems, specifically a tonal scale that's way too short and what looks to me like a virtual green filter (you can see it in the gums, which should be a much lighter tone that doesn't draw attention, and that characteristic mottling of the skin tones. Light skin often has slight reddish mottling which is nearly invisible, or rather inoffensive, to our eyes, but it's highlighted in an unpleasant way when you make the reddishness darker with a green filter). But again, if you look at it uncritically at the original screen size, it looks fine. But, enlarged, the boy (middle figure) is clearly less sharp than the other two and the face on the left is less sharp than the face on the right.

When I was a custom printmaker (I always said "custom printer" but that was before a "printer" was a black plastic box made by Epson), I would often call clients to inform them that a certain negative would only go to a certain size. My clients were mostly photographers, and they would almost always assume that I was talking about technical parameters. They might reply something like "I've enlarged Tri-X negs from the Hassie to 16x20 before and they looked fine." Sometimes I was indeed talking about technical parameters, such as the size at which a slight touch of camera shake became too obvious. But I was usually using my judgement about the size at which that specific image would most effective. For example, if I were printing this picture, I might suggest a smaller size as the max, to avoid drawing attention to the disparity of sharpness between the three faces. Printing it overlarge would just draw the viewer's attention to the differences in sharpness, and those differences are absolutely immaterial to the picture.

I might even cheat a bit and actually soften the sharpness of the face on the right. Have to be careful with that, though, because that would never be something you want to call attention to.

Picture 3
It's actually not easy for non-specialists to detect very small amounts of blur, whether it's out-of-D-o-F blur or camera shake. I'm more sensitive to it than the average bear*, but I can't claim to be infallible. Sometimes you almost intuit its presence depending on how large you're seeing the image. On this third and final picture, there are three women dressed in blue T-shirts front and center. Look at the middle woman first when you open the link.

She looks fine, right? Comma, at that size. But, again, after you enlarge this and look critically, you can see more easily that she's actually not at the plane of best focus. The woman on the left, with the tiara and the portrait of the photographer in her purple sunglasses, is the most sharp. The smiling woman on the right is now clearly out of the depth of field, even though she's in the D-o-F at the smaller size.

I would probably have simply placed the focus on the middle of the three women and stopped down one more stop. That can sometimes be a bit risky, of course, and I'm betting you know why: because if you misjudge and get the woman closest to the lens—the woman with the tiara—a little too soft, you draw too much attention to that. (As a general rule, subjects closest to camera position need to be sharp, and it can be distracting if they aren't.) Hence the extra stop of increased D-o-F, as a safety margin...assuming I'd have the presence of mind to adjust in the heat of the moment, which I probably wouldn't. But those are the things that experience teaches you to judge.

(Oh, and that "portrait" of the photographer in the sunglasses? I'm betting it's the other photographer. It seems to me that the three ladies are looking at someone taking their picture, and it's not the guy who took this picture. Because of the angle of their heads, I'm betting we're seeing the other photographer in the sunglasses, the one who they're looking at. Just my interpretation.)

How to evaluate your own pictures
So how can you start to get a sense for the optimum sizes of your own pictures? There's actually a pretty easy way, although it takes a fair amount of experience. Assuming your eyesight works for the distances involved and your room is big enough, just fill your editing monitor with the image, and stand up and back away from the monitor! As you move farther and farther away, notice how the image subtly changes and how the level of visible detail gradually diminishes. If you study what you see and learn to "feel into" the image and how it works, you'll start to get a sense of how much each image can take of enlargement, and the way different degrees of revealed detail "work" for that particular picture.

As mentioned above, though, I'd encourage you not to look at mere technical parameters, but rather to look at how the specific image is functioning in terms of content and meaning. All of what we've been discussing is a judgement call, a balancing act, based on what in the picture you want to call attention to, and what would be a distraction that would detract from the picture if it is spotlighted too much. This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work.

Mike
(Thanks to Junpei, Jim, and Glen, the photographers of these three pictures)

Ed. note: The second link was missing when I posted this. Gah. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

*That's actually a Yogi Bear reference, and if you even recognize that name you're showing your age as badly as I am.  :-)  Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for.

ADDENDUM: Here's some truly trivial trivia for ya. Do you know why Yogi Bear had a collar?

The answer, says Wikipedia, is because it allowed animators to redraw only his head when he was seen speaking, and not have to redraw his entire body. This was a cost-cutting measure by Hanna-Barbera, the studio that produced the cartoon. It reduced the number of frames needed for a cartoon from ~14,000 to ~2,000.

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Featured Comments from:

Gavin Paterson: "It’s Yogi Berra, baseball player, but I do have an advantage, as I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Hanna Barbera in the '80s, when we still produced animated series for USA networks, such as the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and the Jetsons—now that’s showing my age!"

V.I. Voltz: "Yogi Bear was named after Yogi 'You can observe a lot by just watching' Berra. My kids watch YouTube; we had to make do with cartoons, which, at first, were in black-and-white."

Rob de Loe: "You can do as many of these posts as you like...."

hugh crawford: "I got the bear reference, but you missed the opportunity to call out your Boo Boo. Did you know there is a Daws Butler stream on Spotify?"

Mike replies: I never knew his name before! Thanks for that.

w98abee: "The Yogi Bear reference was like deja vu all over again."

Guy Couture: "Thanks, Mike, for this clear explanation. I think it's the first time I see it explained this way. No doubt you're a good teacher."

Mike replies: Gracias Guy.

Jim Kofron: "Photography is 90% mental, the other half is camera gear...."

Steve Renwick: "The bear's namesake might have said, 'Most pictures are not as sharp as they look.'"

Lawrence Huggins: "Why would you bother to devote any of your time to writing about three such unexceptional photos?"

Mike replies: Because they are...

Cary Talbot: "Nice examples to illustrate your point, Mike. Reminds me of something I read in a photography book by Scott Kelby. He was stressing the importance of zooming in on your image when 'chimping' it on the back LCD to make sure you nailed the focus because 'everything looks tack sharp on a 2.5-inch screen.'"

Mike replies: Yes. And, in like wise, just as with the old 3R prints the small size of a smartphone-as-display masks a multitude of sins.

John Robison: "Ah yes, 3R prints. I well remember an ad by Keystone Camera for a cheap 126 camera, comparing results from it to a Hasselblad. Of course, in a magazine reproduction at a 3R print size, there didn’t appear much difference.

"When working at a camera store, more than once customers would bring in a strip of 35mm negatives with the sample 3R print and ask for a 8x10 enlargement. Grabbing a 10x magnifier would often reveal that the neg was just not up to that degree of enlargement. It was surprisingly hard to explain this to customers. Some would insist that we send in their order anyway. Once a year, at inventory time we always had a box of enlargements refused by customers that were written off and discarded.

Mike replies: They never want to take your word for it, do they?

Blur Never Sleeps

Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.

For starters, the higher the resolution of your system (lens + sensor + processing treatment + presentation method), the more will be out of focus and the less will be sharp.

Let's say these lines represent distances from camera position, which is off to the right somewhere. You are precisely focused on the "10" in this graph, meaning that's the plane of best focus. The numbers stand for higher or lower resolution.

Camera position —>

|                |             |         |      |    |    |       |         |            |            |    

5               6            7        8      9  10  9      8         7           6           5

If you're using equipment and methods capable of a resolution we're calling "10," then you can distinguish between 10 and 9, and the 9 from the 8 and so on. Only a small area around the 10 looks sharpest, and the 9 and 8 look progressively less so.

Now just imagine you're using a system that's only capable of a maximum of "8" as its highest resolution. Then, the area of highest resolution in your picture now appears to have expanded—it goes all the way from the one 8 to the other 8, because you can't distinguish any difference in blurriness vs. clarity within that distance range. Furthermore, the 7 distance is now closer to the zone of best focus, so there is more more depth of field. Sounds strange, but the lower the system resolution, the more depth of field there is in the picture.

So the higher your system resolution, the less will be in focus for any given aperture.

This would predict that photographers should be using smaller apertures now. But they're not. Encouraged by advancements in optics that enable high center sharpness at wide apertures, plus the current fashion of photographing everything with the lens wide open no matter how it looks, photographers tend to use wider apertures now rather than smaller ones.

One oddity this has led to is that photographers who are trying to make an isolated central subject "pop" off the background are going too far and not getting all of the central object in focus. So you'll see things like a single flower against a blurry green background, but the flower petals closest to and farthest from camera position will be slightly blurry, which reduces that sense of "popping" off the background. Oh well: having as much as possible out of the D-o-F has evolved into a status marker, showing that the photographer can afford big sensors and fast lenses. Photographers even say this in words sometimes, protesting that they're not going to shoot something at ƒ/2.8 when they paid for an ƒ/1.2 lens.

Unwelcome comments
Additionally, system resolution is highly dependent on another factor that has nothing to do with the lens, aperture, focus distance, and the sensor and its resolution: namely, degree of enlargement, or how many pixels in the file you're using to look at the image. I'm sure we've all had the experience of looking at an image small on our screens and thinking it's fine, only to enlarge it to 100% and realize that more areas than we first thought are unsharp.

This is not merely an illusion. Throw away enough pixels, and you're effectively reducing the system resolution; and as you do, more and more distances from camera position will be in the zone of best focus. In the terms of our illustration above, let's say you reduce the system resolution to what we're calling "7." What that means is that everything in the picture with a resolution of 7 or above will appear to be at peak sharpness. It's not just the peak sharpness that you can see; it's the peak sharpness that exists in the small rendering.

There was a time when most digital cameras did not have enough pixels—I can recall when "a million pixels" was considered an impressive landmark of progress. Now, though, almost all digital cameras have an excess number of pixels for common uses. So you can demonstrate the above claim for yourself. Simply find a large file that has lots of subtle differences in focus when viewed at 100% (closeups of flowering plants with multiple blossoms work nicely for this) and reduce its size progressively. As it gets smaller, differences in degree of blur you know are there will be masked, and more and more will look "sharp." 

At some sharing sites you can now enlarge posted pictures so much that it's easier to see when the photographer has missed focus or used too large an aperture. Sometimes it makes me wonder if some photographers now even recognize what slight misfocus looks like! I saw a picture the other day—a full length portrait of a woman on a beach—where the entire figure was subtly out of focus. Looking at the sand she stood on, it was clear that the plane of focus had been placed about two feet beyond the woman, and, then, such a large aperture had been used that the woman's face and body were not within the depth-of-field.  At smaller sizes, though (such that the entire vertical frame could be seen at once on my 27" monitor), the picture looked fine. Only when it was enlarged was the incorrect focus revealed.

Many is the time I'm tempted to leave a comment on some poor stranger's picture saying, "you do realize this entire picture is out of focus, right?" But "restraint of tongue and pen" is a helpful maxim to live by. He or she doesn't want to encounter that among all the other comments saying "fantastic capture" and "great pic."

It's tempting to make blanket condemnations that begin with "photographers these days...," but it's easy to be critical. Let's be real: photographers have struggled with focus and D-o-F in every era. It's one of the basic issues of what we call technique. Maybe it's easier to see these days, but it's always been an issue we have to contend with, and one of the choices we have to try to control.

Mike

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

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

Mani Sitaraman: "Re: 'Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.' The internet has created a large circle of confusion about the topic. Information online about depth of field tends to be unfocused and so, details are imprecise."

John Hufnagel: "A digital discussion of the 'circles of confusion' concepts I learned back in the mid 1970s. I've tried to explain this on various internet forums and mostly failed; no one is as blind as one who refuses to see."

Mike replies: I actually refuse to discuss it most of the time. For some reason, out on the wilds of the internet, those who are armed with partial knowledge, part of which is untrue, act like attack dogs on this subject. The reason is probably that there are a number of coherent-seeming misconceptions out there which feel persuasive to people even though they are wrong.

Plus, once you hash through the subject and exhaust yourself bringing the crowd up to speed, that crowd dissipates and a new one forms, a new one as contentious and belligerent as the first crowd was at first. It's neverending toil, like the rock of Sisyphos.

Bill Tyler: "The idea of low resolution yielding large depth of field reaches its ultimate in a pinhole camera. Everything is equally out of focus. And it's an interesting look, for some subjects."

David W Scott (partial comment): "I have learned not to judge other’s photos by close inspection. That lesson came from attending an exhibition of large prints by Yousuf Karsh. Standing nose to nose with Ernest Hemingway (one of Karsh’s most celebrated portraits) you could immediately see that Hemingway’s eyes were out of focus—the actual plane of sharpness was somewhere forward in Hemingway’s beard and his fisherman’s sweater. It spoiled the picture for a moment...and then I backed away from the print and let myself enjoy it!"

Mike replies: I've actually used that very picture as a teaching tool on this subject. There are also several H.C.-B. shots where the main subject is subtly out of focus which made for good discussion.

Gaspar Heurtley: "On one hand, you’re absolutely right. Period. On the other, about the picture of the woman on the beach: maybe the photographer knew that the picture was slightly out of focus but posted it anyway because he/she knew that no one is ever going to see it at 100% (let alone print it). I suspect many pro photographers share their work exclusively online and have learned that they can widen the margin of error, based on where their target audience is going to see the pictures (mostly cell phone screens and poorly calibrated monitors)."

Mike replies: Yes, and if Henri Cartier-Bresson can do it, why can't she?

Open Mike (a day late): The Way Photographs Should Look

This is an awkward subject, and I'm sure my attempts to verbalize it will be awkward and perhaps inept. So please forgive me if my words are insufficient. I'm hoping I'll manage to communicate anyway—that you'll "know what I mean."

All photographs translate the visual world we see with our eyes into some form or other. All of these forms have characteristics. With experience, we learn what characteristics belong to which equipment, techniques, and tastes.

So my question is, do you have a favorite kind of way that you prefer photographs to look?

I'm not talking about a litmus test...I'm not suggesting if you like one look it means you can't appreciate many others. I assume that the more photographs you look at knowledgeably, the more catholic (small c) your taste is. I'm not accusing anyone of being narrow-minded.

Years ago I had an exchange with Howard Bond, an underappreciated large format photographer. He, of course, has a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. I, too, have a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. But where our discussion of formats seemed to be leading, in the end, was that I had a certain kind of photograph I liked to see best—a 35mm B&W negative from fast film (i.e., Tri-X, HP-5+) printed full-frame on something close to 11x14 paper—and he had a certain kind of photograph he liked to see best—an 8x10 negative, also B&W, printed larger but still mid-sized I'd call it, with Zone System technique. (See Howard and get an idea of the print sizes he likes at this link).

I don't think it's a bad idea to have a sort of prototype of the way you like best to see the visual world translated by the camera. We have an appetite for these things, because when we see what we like best it actually creates a sort of visceral satisfaction for that goes beyond the merely intellectual—we can get a sort of "charge" out of it, a sense or even a sensation of gratification. The reason it's not a bad idea is that it's really unavoidable for many artists. It's an inherent part of expressing what we call a "style." You'd never mistake an Edward Weston print for a Eugene Richards print, or an Uta Barth for a Gregory Crewdson.

Some people have more than one style they work in. Carl Weese is a dedicated platinum/palladium printer but he makes other kinds of work as well. And I suppose some people don't have any preference at all...although I would have to confess to being slightly biased against such claims. Sort of like when someone says "I like all kinds of music!" (That post was one of the most fun to write of all the posts and articles I've ever written.)

And some people change, of course. Ctein used to "translate" his visual world into 16x20" dye transfer prints. Now he makes somewhat smaller color inkjet prints from Micro 4/3 files. (Do you subscribe to "Ctein's Occasional Newsletter"? You should; it's very non-intrusive and often entertaining and informative.)

However, I'm having a bit of a mini-crisis here...because I have to admit, my old allegiance to my "Photo 101" style as I called it—B&W Tri-X, printed with a filed-out negative carrier on an 11x14 sheet—is just that now, "old." I don't practice it any more and haven't for years. So what's my preferred type of photograph now? Hmm, I might have to do some soul-searching myself!

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

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

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

Grant (partial comment): "Like most people, I like all photos and all music except for the stuff I don't like."

Mike replies: Great line. I love it.

Geoff Wittig: "Another thought-provoking post, Mike. I rarely think much about what kind of photograph and what print size and presentation I like. Which already betrays a range of assumptions on my part; it’s the photographic print I love. Book reproductions are substitutes of varying degrees of sufficiency, but never as good. And on-screen representation is a completely tangential experience to me.

"I was reared on Ansel Adams, and I still see a good black-and-white photograph as a relatively large print with a tonal distribution very deliberately chosen for artistic effect. One that guides the eye and takes me on a satisfying journey while still demonstrating reverence for the natural world. So I’ve been drawn to beautiful prints by Clyde Butcher, John Sexton, Howard Bond and Roman Loranc. Michael Kenna’s in there too. I respect the work of documentary photographers like Eugene Richards and Larry Towell, but they’re not quite my thing. When I look at Koudelka’s work in Gypsies [link —Ed.] I find his stark tonalities like nails on a chalkboard. They look all wrong to me.

"I also realize I have a very narrow view of what a color photograph should look like. I love large, carefully crafted prints with color that can be subtle or rich, but never gaudy. Robert Glenn Ketchum’s early work, (his newer stuff is a bit too garish) Edward Burtynsky’s prints, Charles Cramer’s thoughtful inkjet prints and Christopher Burkett’s exquisite Cibachromes are my touchstones. I also love the unsentimental yet affectionate photographs of the built environment by Jeff Brouws; hard to describe their unpretentious beauty. Next to his work, Stephen Shore’s strikes me as smug and sarcastic.

"So I guess that identifies my organizing principle for how a photograph should look. I need to see and feel the photographer’s interest in, and perhaps love for, the subject. A carefully made print crafted with intention gives me that."

Dillan K: "Speaking of 'the way photographs should look,' thanks for bringing Howard Bond to my attention. I like the way his photographs look! I'm sorry that I didn't know about him earlier. I've lived a sheltered life. I appreciate it when you broaden my knowledge of accomplished photographers."

Photographic Value System

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her?
A long time ago, some literary friends were arguing about what allows readers to get "pulled into" a book of fiction. They were arguing nuts and bolts—one was claiming that Hemingway's simple, declarative style allowed more readers "a way in" to the stories he was telling, because more of them could understand him easily. Here's an example of his prose, in case you've heard of him but never read him:

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. He kicked his suitcase under the table to be sure it was there. Perhaps it would be better to put it back under the seat, against the wall. He leaned down and shoved it under. Then he leaned forward on the table and went to sleep.

That's from the short story "The Undefeated."

This was leading to some heated words about "writing down" to the audience and so forth, probably from people who were tired of defending their own more ornate or involved writing styles.

I thought about it, and I decided that what draws me into reading has nothing to do with nuts and bolts at all. It's in wanting to know what happens. What's called "the hook." As soon as I get the hook, that's when the word-by-word, line-by-line reading vanishes for me and I start speeding through it, propelled forward. Here's the beginning of Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? Who's the us of "our"? Are they in the mountains? Is Bunny dead and buried or dead and unburied? The first thing that springs to mind is a plane crash leading to a survivalist situation, but at the same time I know that might be wrong. I want to find out all these things. Prose style be damned, I would read on.

(It's a famous one-line opener.)

Intrusions
My wonderful former psychoanalyst, Karen Maroda, who has written many books in her field, feels that everyone has a basic value system. (I got the idea she also feels that many people aren't aware of what their own basic value systems are. But I mustn't put words in her mouth.) My basic value system is essentially psychological—I always return to psychological explanations by way of first principles, as my way of explaining the world to myself.

Photographically speaking—to hop to safe ground—I do have a pretty distinct value system. I like pictures that get me to engage with the subject. For all my apparent preoccupation with it, technique is a means to an end for me. It's secondary, not primary. Like prose style. So I like technique that doesn't call attention to itself—more specifically, I dislike technique that pulls my attention away from engagement with the picture.

I'd like to discuss two very different photographs, both of black females, one a young woman, one a girl. Here's Scottish photographer Leanne Boulton's "Silver Lining." It's pretty simple, straightforward picture, a portrait in the genre of "people on the street," and could be effective in context. Here the young woman is girded against accidental contact in many ways: sunglasses hide her eyes, earbuds allow her to either not hear or pretend not to hear, her hair is hidden by a cap, her hands turn inward and seem to literally hold her own torso, her expression is blank in the mask we adopt in public that says don't mess with me, nothing to see here, pass on by. Even in the angle of her head we get the idea she's not looking at us—that is, at the camera—from behind those sunglasses.

Of course, all this could be exactly what the photographer is examining and wants us to look at. I'm not criticizing.

Airless
Understand, I'm not the authority over anyone but me, but I have a right to encounter photographs as myself and to honor my own reaction—one of my basic principles is embodied in a phrase I wrote decades ago, "I have a right to respond to art as if my encounter with it matters to me." So what I say only applies to me and my own reaction.

However, everything about the technique here, to my eye, intrudes. The tonal scale has that distinctly depressed midrange so common in digital. I call it (as shorthand) "airlessness"—that is, it fights against showing us a sense of atmosphere. It does this by making all the middle values darker. The light ends up not looking real—the light that might have been there got sucked out of the scene by the oppressive tonality. I can't tell what time of day it is except from clues. The background, though readable as context, is unpleasant because the bokeh is jangly and jumpy. It gives the picture an unsettled feeling. Detail is way too hyped-up—back in the days when I hung around with a lot of wannabe Ansels, a friend privately called the style "zippy-zappy zoner sh*t," and the phrase has always stuck in my mind as something to avoid. Of course we're long past the popularity of the Zone System, but Photoshop makes similar looks easier and faster to achieve. In this case the zippy-zappy look draws my eye to meaningless details, such as the fake-fur lining of the coat, the fabric lanyard around her neck that holds her her ID and the words on it. (Have you ever been sitting somewhere bored and find yourself reading gratuitous words that happen to be visible nearby, just because they're there? It always gives me the feeling that I've allowed a particle of junk to enter my brain against my will.) The zipper, the half-seen necklace, all the "cranial accessories" as Mitch Hedberg once called all the stuff we wear on our head. Even the photographer, with her title, seems to be drawing our attention to...the coat lining, which is emphasized by the excessive local contrast.

Or maybe the title's just a handy label. I'm not interested in the coat lining, in any event.

Just for fun I processed the JPEG as if it were my picture, and I tried to de-emphasize the coat lining. (I tried to contact the photographer for permission to show you my version, but she—perhaps wisely!—didn't reply. She's a good photographer, by the way—see for instance her 16 Questions, about a color photograph that's quite successful. She can't help it if one grumpy old former custom printer over in America happens to be allergic to the B&W technique she's chosen. Can't please all the people, etc.)

All of this might be intentional on the part of the photographer, but it all colludes in making the photograph unappealing for me. YMMV.

Natural
Now compare that with an even simpler shot—formally just a headshot—"Michelle [Happiness]" by Stefan Elf, who might be from Sweden given what little I can find about him. (His website doesn't load for me.) His Photostream shows a much less accomplished and less directed photographer. Leanne Boulton is much more intentional and directed. But as a single image this picture is coherent, integrated, and has much more life. It seems to show a real moment. It engages me in that it seems like a particular moment, and it makes me want to know more about what surrounds this moment—who is this, why is she happy, who is she responding to, what's outside the frame?

I'd be willing to believe that if there were eight frames shot, this one was the one, and none of the others would do.

Technically nothing distracts. There's nothing rote or static in the pose. I like the slight awkwardness—here the slightly off-kilter composition just adds to the sense of immediacy, of the picture's individuality if you will. I don't get the sense that this is just one more exposure among a bunch of similar but slightly different exposures. In "Silver Lining" all I sense is the transaction—"May I take your photo?" "What would you like me to do?" "Just stand there"—followed by six or eight frames from which none truly stands out. Can we help but note that all the young woman's efforts to go unnoticed have gotten her noticed? The best-laid schemes. (I'm being too hard on "Silver Lining," you perceive, just to make my points.) In "Michelle [Happiness]" nothing about the technique intrudes. The depth of field is fine, the tonality is natural, the light is plain, detail is neither unpleasantly etched nor ostentatiously suppressed. To me there's an effortless sense of wholeness about it.

That sense of naturalness, coherence, and integrity is what I like in photographic technique. It should be like ballet dancing—all the effort put into it is only meaningful if the result looks effortless.

I'm me and you aren't
Anyway, this whole thing is just to say—I'm only going by my own value system. Yours might vary considerably. You might hang out with different friends who value different things. You might think every picture is all about how exaggerated and vivid the detail can be, and you might not even think about representing natural light at all—the idea might not even be on your radar. You might be a B&W-hater (they're out there in digiworld.) I don't know. My values aren't the only values, they're just mine.

We are who we are, as viewers as in every other sense.

Mike

P.S. I believe I have the right, according to Fair Use, to publish both of these pictures here—Fair Use specifically allows for works to be quoted for the purpose of commenting on or criticizing them, and that's surely what I've just done. But on the other hand, we're a photography website, and we support photographers, so I like to get permission. I often do receive permission when I try to contact people through Flickr or other sharing sites—just not this month. And sometimes not even next month. Once, a guy took eight months to respond. By then I had long forgotten why I wanted to show his picture in the first place. It's awkward, in other words.

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

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

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

John Camp: "As you said, YMMV, and mine does. I think the first shot is terrific, and I'm more interested in this kind of work than any other kind of photography, except perhaps some portraiture. That first shot says everything about the world we now inhabit, and it's like a latter-day riff on Edward Hopper—this young woman is as isolated and alone as Hopper's characters, while at the same time she's passing through a busy world. The earbud and sunglasses and hand gestures are classic; she's in her own world, tight, defensive, possibly hostile. The second shot, I would treasure if it were a shot of my daughter. But it's not, so to me, it's a nice snapshot. In cases like this I think YMMV should be changed to EMMV—everybody's mileage may vary."

Chris Hunt: "Question I asked myself while reading this post—so how would you feel about the two photos if the styles were swapped?"

Mike replies: Well, the tl;dr version of this post is that the technique of "Silver Lining" impedes or obstructs my ability to contemplate and appreciate what it shows, while in the second picture the technique seems (to me) to get out of the way. So if the styles were reversed I'd like the first better and the second worse.

In fact, after reading your question, I imagined the second photo with the look of the first imposed on it, and even though I was just seeing it in my mind's eye it actually kind of upset me a little.  :-)

Dave (partial comment): "Re: Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? I prefer the 'Bunny' prose to Hemingway's. Hemingway's example is too full of sentences with nearly the same length. It's just harder to get into a flow when I'm always encountering a period to stop my progress. Additionally, Hemingway has harsher words (hot, Zurito, kicked) which makes it seem more staccato sounding than the 'Bunny' excerpt.

"Re: Intrusions, the photo example with the harsh look surprised me. I had read the entire post before clicking on the photo links. Most digital photos on the web must have that look because I had to think about the points you made before realizing that indeed parts of the photo really were too sharp. The second photo is simply terrific. Great work by Stefan Elf!"

Open Mike: Square

I really need to work on comments this morning. I'm fast getting far behind again. I've had a couple of less-than-productive days, although I seem to have found time for exercise and for typing practice.

I confess I didn't know that I could set my Fujis to shoot square. I know why—it's because when I got them I looked for a 4:3 ratio, which I prefer most, and they don't have that, so I just left them set to 3:2 and forgot about it. They also have a selection for a longer, skinnier aspect ratio—16:9 I think? The camera isn't handy at the moment—and I never use that either.

I've never been attracted to the square aspect ratio per se. Most times I've shot with square cameras, I crop. It's only attractive to me on the iPhone because it makes the "camera" more natural to handle, removing some of its inherent awkwardness.

I did come across these recently:

They're my aunt and uncle. Mary Polk, my mother's younger sister, with Sailor the standard poodle whom I remember as an uncommonly good dog, and her husband, my uncle Smokie Polk. They had a farm south of Lexington, Kentucky, where Smokie bred and raised thoroughbred racehorses for a number of decades. He was at some point the President of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Breeders' Association. I was always very attached to both of them; Mary is a wonderful soul, and I admired, and sought to emulate, Uncle Smokie (who was always called Al or Dr. Polk at Keeneland Racetrack. Smokie was a vet as well). They're in their eighties now, and long since retired from the horse business. Mary never worked that I know of, but she's very accomplished all the same: she's an outdoorswoman and canoeist, who I recall went on Outward Bound wilderness treks in her 40s with people half her age, and she's an artist as well—she learned woodworking in midlife and built beautiful furniture. She not only designed the exquisite lake cottage they live in now, but she built most of the furniture in it. They raised four kids, and raised them well, and now the house is full of happy grandchildren every summer. They also own an island way, way up in the Boundary Waters of Canada where they have a small cabin—the trip in is so arduous that they've outfitted their skiff with survivalist supplies. Smokie is also an accomplished sailor, which is no doubt how the dog got its name. He's owned at least three boats since I've known him, not counting "stinkpots" (motor boats). Mary's canoes are the best of the best of the best.

In short, they've always been two of the coolest people I even know; that they're related to me is just an extra bonus. Uncle Smokie bred mainly middle-level racehorses, not the big-time names of the marquee races, but he did have a Triple Crown winner once—he was the breeder (not the owner or trainer) of Temperance Hill, who went off at 54.3-to-1 odds in the 1980 Belmont Stakes to beat Derby winner Genuine Risk and Preakness champion Codex to become one of the greatest long-shot winners in Belmont history. Temperance Hill was subsequently named Champion Three-year-old Colt of 1980 (all the Triple Crown races are for three-year-olds). The three Champion Three-year-olds preceding him were Spectacular Bid in 1979, Affirmed in 1978, and Seattle Slew in 1977, all names to conjure with; it was a golden age of American horse racing.

I took these portraits when I was ten. I think I was actually a pretty good portraitist when I was ten! Portraits are what I've always been best at. I had my first photo show in the dining room of my prep school when I was in ninth grade, and they were all portraits, of classmates and faculty members. Most were nabbed by the yearbook staff and used in the yearbook (without so much as a by-your-leave, which didn't seem unusual at the time), so I no longer have them.

These Instamatic prints are tiny, only 3 1/2 inches square including the borders, taken with a Kodak Instamatic on Verichrome Pan film. The film was 126 size, in a one-piece cassette that dropped into the back of the camera. The resolution is very low—the lens is probably a doublet or triplet. I don't actually know. And I don't know its speed or focal length, either. (It was an Instamatic 104.) [UPDATE: it was a plastic 43mm, f/11, single-element meniscus! Take that, Olympus 25mm PRO with your 19 elements! Thanks to several readers for this.] The Instamatic was the brainchild of Dean M. Peterson, one of the greatest unsung inventors in the history of American photography. It was designed in response to research that exposed the fact that loading film was one of the things consumers felt most insecure about. It shot in square format only, and the pictures came back from the drugstore printed square.  

I find I'm much more sympathetic to Kodak's whole program now than I was then—the advertising campaigns about "memories" and the little packets you'd get back from the drugstore with a neat stack of square prints with white borders, with the month and year stamped in the margin of each. Turns out that was a very robust and useful program. It has that sort of confident, plainspoken mid-century vigor about it. By the time I became an art student it was conventional to denigrate Kodak's resolutely middlebrow approach to photography—we were awtists, after all—but as aging has scraped away some vanity and ambition I've come to realize that Kodak was more right than wrong. I'm thankful I have these prints now, and thankful I can so easily place the date to April of 1967.

I'm not sure if there would be anything to be gained by "trying out" the square format of my Fujis. But it does have some of the appeal of simplicity, the square—a reminder that the real challenge of technique is to get past it, so that, once past, we can get down to work.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

This link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

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

KC: "Thanks for weaving such a nice story into this discussion of aspect ratio. I hope your aunt and uncle have a chance to see this post. As a former Lexingtonian I have to point out that the local racetrack is actually called 'Keeneland.'"

Mike replies: Thanks! Fixed now. My cousins reminded me of this when they saw the post.

Michael J. Perini: "Charming Pictures to be sure, and I couldn't agree more that as you say that Kodak 'was more right than wrong.' A company that realized and was willing to pay for pure research. Some great scientists and engineers there—they even invented digital. They were a supertanker and in the end, just couldn't turn the wheel fast enough.

"Like many TOP readers I shot with almost every format out there but mostly 35mm, 6x6, 4x5, and 8x10. The film camera I loved most was the Hasselblad. I did some good work with that camera. When I picked it up I 'saw square.' But when I was shooting 35mm or 4x5, I never missed the square format. I just shot what I shot.

"But even though I haven't shot a square camera in years, I often find nice square compositions hiding in my 2:3 files. Occasionally I will see a composition that is begging to be square and compose it that way on the 2x3 sensor. I've never felt the need for a square camera viewfinder to 'see' square or any other shape. I usually think—get the picture in whatever shape you can get it with whatever camera you have—if it is a strong picture, it will survive. If it is not, its shape doesn't matter."

Dan Khong: "One does not need many elements to shoot good pictures. The Instamatic lenses were like magnifying glasses but they made a lot of folks happy. The Tessar lenses stood their ground over many decades. They still produce astounding pictures in Rolleiflex TLRs. One might conclude: An average camera in good hands is better than a good camera in average hands."

Steve Belanger: "Great post, Mike! Thank you. I too had an Instamatic 104, given to me by my older brother as a birthday gift. My introduction to photography at age 12. My family and I took a trip to Montreal in 1968 to see the 'Man and His World' exposition. I still have a handful of great photos and memories of that trip."

Crabby Umbo: "By the way, I consider the 126 cartridge to be another of the great 'lost formats.' Manufacturers not only made rangefinder bodies with quality glass, but Kodak made a reflex with interchangeable lenses. The whole 'chink' in the armor was the cartridges' inability to hold the film flat, and in an exact enough plane to really get quality out of the image. My Mom had a high quality version with a glass lens and a wind-up motor drive, which I loved to use, but was always frustrated with the blurriness! A simple concentration on fixing that cartridge, and it would have had real legs. Can't believe Kodak made the decision to go with increasingly worse formats like 110 and Disc, all while the consumers were abandoning their models to go with the image superior autofocus, autoload, point-and-shoot 35mms. Sheesh!"

Mike replies: I believe the origin of the idea that eventually became the Disc was to solve the film flatness problem.

Peter Croft: "I find square format frustrating. I can never work out whether to hold the camera horizontally or vertically.  :-) "

Mike replies: Here's the trick: neither!

Actually, though, I had a photo school classmate who did a project shooting a square camera in the diamond format. 

SteveW: "'It's hip to be square!' —Huey Lewis & the News."

Frank Field: "Square format is not easy to shoot, I think. I see Michael Kenna as a contemporary master of square format. Study his compositions and your square format images are bound to improve."

I Like Small Prints

I've always been very interested in size and proportion.

With "my critic's hat on" of course, I try to remain as open-minded as possible. I try to extend as much credit and sympathy to creators as I can. What's important in that case is what they're trying to do, not what I prefer to see.

But for myself, I like small prints best. 

What is "small"? I'd say any size you might see printed in a book. Not counting double-page spreads running across gutters, which generally are their own sort of travesty, in a minor way.

Many decades ago, large got popular in paintings, and, naturally, "little brother" photography had to try to follow suit, and large photographic prints got popular too. I spent a lot of time in my youth dutifully trying to make bigger prints, because real photographers made big prints. 

Now I wish I hadn't. I've come almost to a contrarian position on this, similar to Robert Frank's "black and white are the colors of photography": photographs are small. 

Of course that's ridiculous as a position, but, for myself, I actually prefer small photos. Again and again I'd come away from museum shows thinking, those prints didn't need to be so big.

There's obviously such a thing as too small, however. Most pictures are uncomfortable to look at as thumbnails, and many are uncomfortable to look at on Instagram. How big do they need to be? Big enough to see; as long as the details can "breath," it's big enough. As to how I define that...well, I can't define that; it's a feeling.

It definitely depends on the picture, too. I had a discussion with Michael A. Smith about this once, agreeing with his decision to reproduce Edward Weston's pictures at their original 8x10 size in his books of Weston's work. I believe Weston visualized his pictures taking into account their 8x10 print size, because almost all his picture work well—one might even say "best"—at the size he contact-printed.

Some of my favorite prints of my own are small. Only a few are big, or "biggish"—one is 16x20" and one is a large panorama. One hangs above my dining room table and I have several others in a large portfolio case that's slumbering in the attic of the barn. But I can think of only a handful, or a few handfuls.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think now I would have been better off over my career as a photographer if I had embraced printing small, and not had my head turned by the dictates of fashion. Most of us are slaves to fashion, though, because we think it represents the desires of others, and we wish to please.

Mike

Gear o' the Week:

If I could shoot with any 50mm focal-length-equivalent lens, it would not be unobtanium: it would be the relatively modest, relatively older HD Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited on APS-C (it has recently been revised with new coatings). I don't know how it measures and couldn't care less. If you care first and foremost about pictures, especially prints, it is one beautiful lens. Luverly. As a normal too. This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

B&H Photo also has the Magic Macro, naturally.

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

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

Cecelia: "Print size preference for me is entirely related to viewing distance. Instagram is good for an image a few inches from my face, and I love standing 20 feet from a big enveloping painting.

"Once, I had a chance to purchase original art for a corporate space, and prints that were 3–5 feet on an edge were successful in modest interior spaces. 8x10 or book-sized prints need to be viewed pretty close as when reading a book, or standing a foot or two from the image. In other words, for me the size of the image is so tied to the viewing experience that I don't like or dislike any particular size without the context of how to experience the image. (Back in the day when I was working in a darkroom, I loved 8x10 because that size was the most comfortable to handle in the enlargers, trays, dryers etc. and the viewing distances in the darkroom were similar to looking at a book.)"

Geoff Wittig: "There is a fascinating interaction between size, viewing distance, composition, and the actual techniques used in creating a photographic print. But it's even more important when it comes to painting. I came to recognize that my landscape photographs almost always need to be relatively large to convey what I'm trying to say. My best photos really do work better as carefully presented 24x36" prints than as 8x11" or so, because I'm aiming for an immersive experience. I want a viewer to be able to walk into the image.

"Oddly enough, my oil paintings tend to run much smaller. I'm a fairly 'tight' realist painter, but even my broader landscapes seem to breathe more comfortably at about 12x16" or occasionally 16x20" than larger sizes. And lately I've been doing little 5x7" moody gems that really don't work as large paintings."

Steve Rosenblum: "I generally agree with you about print size, although we have a large framed copy of your beautiful still life of the apple up in our kitchen and it works beautifully."

Chris Kern: "Some years ago, Michael Reichmann argued that the intrinsic characteristics of an image determine how it should be cropped. ('My feeling is that cropping isn’t something that we do to an image. It does it itself—demanding to be constrained in certain ways. Sometimes there’s more than one way, but it eventually becomes obvious what the photograph itself wants.') I would make a similar point about print size. Some images 'want' to be printed large; others work better when they’re printed small. That’s the only formula I’ve found which works consistently for me."

Bruce Bordner: "Usually I print large as I shoot wide-angle shots with lots of detail (and D800 shows it well). However, I had a lot of fun printing a few hundred different 2x3" wallet cards as handouts. I picked out 192 images and had a set of 8x12" prints made (16 cards/sheet) and bought a paper cutter. Tedious but cheap. (Margins are hard) So now I have sets of my best shots that I can put into a jewelry box. Fun to play with but it will ruin your eyes...."

robert e: "Thank you Mike—what you said was kind of liberating. And thank you as well for provoking some very insightful comments, which you helpfully featured. To state the obvious, if one wishes to properly regard a small print, one must take it inside what many people would consider 'personal space,' making the interaction a relatively intimate one. (This is made obvious when two people try to look at a small print together.) Larger prints tend to end up in social spaces, or perhaps personal environments, but they are generally not meant to be taken inside that zone of physical and sensory intimacy. Of course we can and do interact with pictures at various distances, but for intended viewing distance, I believe there is a significant psychological or emotional threshold right around where we'd label a print 'small.'"

Geoff Smith: "I find it interesting that the great Michael Kenna normally prints at only about 8x8" because he prefers the 'intimacy' of them compared with larger prints. I typically print at home at 18x12", but sometimes yearn for a 24x16" or even a 36x24" if it's an interesting aerial image."

Howard: "I couldn't disagree with you more, Mike, at least for landscape images. What got me entirely fascinated with landscape photography 25 years ago was seeing big prints, larger than 16x20", especially color prints (Cibachrome at the time). For portraits, I prefer 8x10" but often also like larger prints."

A Picture With Promise

This is a spread from the book Elements that I'm attracted to. I've never seen the book. The picture looks like it might have a certain magic. It has the promise of it anyway—I can't really see because the JPEG is too small (I can't find a larger one). The village up high on the cliff (I think it's a village—can't really quite see), the seabirds wheeling in the air below—. The feeling of depth created by the outcropping on the lower right and the massif in the background. The strong central slash of the white waterfall. Of course who knows how the reproduction quality is, or whether the picture holds up when you can really see it.

This might sounds weird, but although I am not a photography collector, I do tend to collect images...and I have since I was a very small boy. I have lots of favorite images in books and there are even a few cases where I bought a specific book to get a really nice reproduction of a certain photograph. I used to sometimes "visit" favorite images by pulling out a succession of books from the bookcase and turning to the pictures I wanted to see. There are always treats in a good book.

I guess you could say TOP is a sort of photograph collecting mechanism. I love to trawl through old TOP images. I seem to sort of naturally collect images, without giving it much thought on a "meta" level; I just like to go back and look at things again. That might be why I take pictures at all, actually—to be able to study, at leisure and at length, a scene I enjoy seeing. To see what a longer look might reveal. To contemplate. Video doesn't scratch the itch for me very well, although I've watched many movies more than once. I'm very devoted to still pictures.

Mike

UPDATE: Well, I certainly know more about the picture now, thanks to Dori and several other readers. The picture features Múlafossur Waterfall, said to be the top tourist attraction in the Faroe Islands. The Faroes, a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, are situated in the Atlantic Ocean between Norway and Iceland. The tiny village is Gásadalur on the Western island of Vágar.

The picture was taken by Fran Mart, a wedding photographer from Spain who lives and works in Scotland. I reached out to Fran to see if he'd like to say anything about his picture for us but haven't heard back yet. The picture is on Instagram and it's available as a stock image from Adobe Stock.

A travel website I alighted upon referred to the waterfall as a "photographic destination." Jan-Peter commented that the locals are getting a little exasperated with all the photographers.

As for the locale, there are certainly a lot of pictures of it on the Internet, although many are from a somewhat different viewpoint than Fran's. Tony McLean sent me his picture of it taken with a Leica M240 and 21mm Super Elmar:

And there's a video showing several moods of the wind and the waves here.

Thanks to all!

UPDATE #2: After it occurred to me that I would not like to live in Gasadalur for one peculiar reason in particular, on Christmas morning I Googled "do people ever fall off cliffs in the Faroe islands?" and was led serendipitously to this nice post by Justine Kibler, a photographer and traveler from the UK, of the Lost in the Midlands blog. Reading it was like taking a virtual hike in the Faroes! With a little peril along the way.

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

Book of interest this week:

Elements: In Pursuit of the Wild, Rucksack magazine
(clicking on the links above takes you to Amazon)

Elements from The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)

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

David Mackenzie: "To the comment on the local citizens getting tired of all the photographers...they have learned well from the ongoing visitor-caused disaster in Iceland. Now in the Faroes they are requiring photographers to buy permits and hire guides. That will certainly help keep the hordes down a bit."

kwesi Budu-Arthur: "A beautiful image that perhaps achieves too much. For me, the inclusion of the three perfectly placed birds is what turns this fine work of art into a stock photo. Sometimes leaving a little something to the imagination can be a very good thing."

B&W Is Expressive

Regarding the intended-to-be humorous re-post yesterday, obviously I was simulating the various "looks" through the years, and of course I was over-exaggerating most of the "looks" so each would be a little more evident 'n' obvious in little JPEGs. The original digital shot of the crows over the field was taken with a Panasonic GF1 and Panasonic 20mm lens. Here's another shot that shows the raptor more clearly, whatever he was—the crows would appear to get after him and then he would get after them. Seemed like sparring, with neither side clearly the aggressor.

Here's the other photo as an Instagram (thanks to blork).

In the wake of the original post in 2012, I invited readers to make their own interpretation of the file. Here's the post that shows some of their efforts. It's rather embarrassing that it's labeled "Part I"—I had enough submissions for a Part II, but apparently I never got around to putting them up. Mea culpa.

When you look at it, try exercising your delectation—decide which one suits your taste. (I notice a number of people did that with the first post.)

The takeaway here? "Black and white" doesn't mean just one thing. There are many, many different interpretations that you can make of any given file, just like there were many different styles you could (and still can) apply to FDP (film, development, print). B&W is actually very expressive and individual, if you develop your own taste in the way you like your prints to look and learn to apply it consistently.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

Rory O'Toole: "Lovely to see this post again. Can't believe it was back in 2012!"

Brian Stewart: "You may have meant that 'B&W Styles Through the Years' post as satire, but it's actually quite useful. I'm currently editing a largish set of landscape images in B&W, and many of them as shot start out fairly flat. I have to decide in which direction to take them to make them tonally interesting. What is my artistic intent? And when have I taken it too far in that direction? A catalogue of radically different interpretations of an image, even exaggerated ones, is useful as a reference point and reality check, perhaps because they are exaggerated. More please."

B&W Styles Through the Years

SA*

[Illustrations and captions simulated. Hope that's obvious. —Ed.]

-

1940: Graflex Speed Graphic, 127mm Ektar, Wratten K-2 filter, Kodak Super XX Film, D-23 developer (scratch mixed).

1965: Pentax Spotmatic, 55mm Takumar ƒ/1.8 lens, stop-down averaging metering, Ilford HP3 ASA 400 film, Omega D2 enlarger with filed-out negative carrier.

1987: Hasselblad 500 C/M with Acute-Matte, 80mm ƒ/2.8 Zeiss Planar, Tri-X 320, HC-110 dilution B, orange filter. Shadows placed on Zone II. Oriental Seagull, lightly selenium toned.

2001: 3.1 megapixel Minolta DiMAGE 5, converted in Photoshop 5.5. Unsharp masked, uprezzed, and uploaded to PhotoSIG.

2012: Panasonic GF1, OIS zoom, RAW, Lightroom 3, Nik SilverEfex Pro. "Haloing? What haloing?"

Mike
(Originally published February 2012. Thanks to Grant for a correction.)

*Satire Alert.

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

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Ha, ha, would love to have see that Monochrom added! But of that grouping, I'll take the 1987 Hasselblad 'look.' It still seems that the defining quality is not the hardware, but rather taste. To a large degree, you can simulate these 'looks' rather accurately using today's raw files as the starting point."

Mike replies: I've exaggerated them (coarsely) here, of course. I'm not certain how close you can really get if you're being subtle. My sense is it's probably better to let digital look like digital.

Christopher May: "Nice to see this one back from the archives. I hope that 'Great Photographers on the Internet' can make a comeback someday, too.

"I'll still take the Speed Graphic image. If we're going with Super XX, though, the only proper thing to do is match it up with some Azo and make a delightful little contact print. I seem to remember someone (Michael Kadillak, if I recall correctly) discussing Super XX's unique ability to build density 'to the moon' at the largeformatphotography.info forum. That characteristic made it a lovely match for alt processes and contact printing on Azo."

Eolake Stobblehouse: "Either you are making most of this up (impressive), or you have a downright unhealthy amount of knowledge of history and B&W...."

Mike replies: I started another one of these as if it were taken with a Diana toy camera in the style of Nancy Rexroth and then I thought, no, I'd better pretend I have a life....

hugh crawford: "Tri-X Pro should open up distant foliage more than that with its green bump—oh wait—orange filter? I don’t know but it seems like one of the more compensating dilutions and a bit more development might open things up. Hell I’d go to diluted D-19 but that’s just me, and I’d avoid Tri-X Pro like the plague anyway unless the alternative was T-Max. Looks you forgot the compendium, that might as some snap too.

"If I were going full grad school I’d be asking what’s hiding under the trees and why is it so scary, but that’s outside the scope here.

"The best thing that I ever did on my 500C was get a Rollie screen with a microprism in the center installed, never figured out that Acute-Matte popularity. I think the only time I used Tri-X Pro was with a Press 23 in high school, so maybe that association (and the whole male portrait thing) has biased my opinion."

Mike replies: Yes, you used the orange filter to counteract the green bump. And, I agree with you about TXP. I remember my confusion when I first shot a roll of TXP thinking it was TX. And, the crows were chasing a raptor around and vice-versa. And, I never did like the Acute-Matte either! That was the very first time I ever had trouble focusing a camera. Not the last. Sure could see the frame, just couldn't see the focus. Autofocus came around perfectly on schedule for my eyes.

Crabby Umbo: "I forgot all about Super XX, now that was a film! So full of silver, the box weighed twice as much as weaker, puny films!"

Mike replies: And you know this, but others might not: what comes after two X's? Answer: Three, AKA the mighty "Tri-" X, the best-known single B&W film name in photo history.

Wasn't Super XX ASA 200? I only used it once.

Crabby Umbo: "You are correct sir, Super XX was ASA 200, but it changed with 'tungsten' exposure and was much slower (people forget that 'strobe' wasn't the ubiquitous method of exposure for studio, especially product, until well into the '70s). It really was silver rich, very long 'scale,' and, at least when I was a pup, was the film of choice for making the color separation inter-negs from transparences when doing dye transfer prints!

"As others have stated, I never understood why TXP and TX were so different. I usually had to go looking for 120 Tri-X (individually boxed), or order it in from Kodak; while my local pro dealer was always trying to make me buy the Tri-X Pro 5-packs, which, on processing, just did not look 'right.'

"By the way, long forgotten film lore: does anyone remember Ektapan? Since I started in high-school in portrait studios, I knew all about it, it was an ASA 100 film that was specifically formulated by Kodak to function well under strobe. This was back when a lot of films had reciprocity failure both in long exposures, but short 'strobe' exposures as well!

"Available in 4x5 sheets (and a bunch of those weird formats like 46mm long rolls for portrait cameras), it was my personal 'go to' film for shooting product when we all converted to strobe for everything. Everyone used to compliment me on the scale of my black-and-white studio product shots, thinking I was doing some kind of ASA change and processing push/pull on Tri-X, when all I was doing was using Ektapan. A great strobe film long forgotten!"

Richard Man: "They made TXP 320 in 120 format? [Yes —MJ.] TX 400 is the King, the Godzilla of all B&W films. TXP 320 is a...mutant lizard."

Mike replies: I used to joke that Ansel's best virtuoso trick was that he could actually make TXP look good. Har!

Gijs Langelaan: "On the Hasselblad interpretation, I'm missing seeing the black border with the 'V' notches at the edge to show it was really made with a 'blad. Or did that style show up a few years later?"

Mike replies: Ah, I wanted to try, but my Photoshopping skills just aren't good enough.

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "This is a great post. Ansel Adams changed his way of printing considerably over the years. When you see early original prints, you are shocked how 'flat' they appear in comparison with the calendar editions. And haloing is a real problem, but less so in digital age than in the analogue years. You possibly know these Jean-Loup Sieff-prints where the dodging of the trees is so painfully evident...."

Sunday Support Group: B&W Camera

Wow! I came in from a hard day's work Friday evening to find more than the usual number of comments on the "Deficiencies" post—as of now there are 115 of them, to be exact. I just finished moderating them, so there's lots of new stuff there.

I'm going to try to aim toward getting a Sony camera converted to monochrome by Daniel at MonochromeImaging (MI). Warm thanks to brian and Tullio Emanuele and a couple of others whose comments led me to that site.

The MI site makes an excellent demonstration of the benefits of a B&W-only sensor. Their process will also demonstrate to those interested that it would not be expensive or involved for a cameramaker to implement a B&W-only variant of an existing camera. They lack the will, not the means. Of course we're no longer in a flush market and cameramakers have much bigger problems to worry about, but that's a whole 'nuther issue.

Unfortunately, there's going to be a considerable delay before I can get this goal accomplished. The...

...has sucked up a lot of my moolah recently, which my friend Jack scolded me for in the "Deficiencies" Featured Comments. (I just bought this cool metal sign for above the door. Funky, huh? One of those fake-vintage reproductions. Fitting for a shed I think.)

I guess I have the personal-finance equivalent of "donor fatigue," which is when charities ask for big special donations and then find that their regular donors feel "tapped out" and donations for smaller, more everyday causes drop. (I understand this is what happened in Milwaukee when they built the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum—local institutions and organizations that depend on charitable giving found themselves starved for a few years afterwards.) Anyway I'm feeling poor because of the cost overruns of the pool shed / photo gallery. I took out a bank loan to finance it—it's about the same as maybe half of an average car payment—but, as often happens, I was too optimistic and didn't borrow quite enough.

Back to the subject: MI's conversions (and others such as MaxMax) come with some practical problems for the buyer. First, I'm pretty sure it will void any warranty on the camera and also cause the donor camera's resale value to plummet. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to get an expensive conversion done on a camera that already has a lot of shutter actuations on its odometer.

Daniel only does conversions on Sony cameras and I'm not in that system so I don't have any lenses. (Well, one—I still have a leftover Sigma 60mm DN). The one lens I would need, the Zeiss 24mm, has always been priced at about 2X what it should be for no earthly reason that I can discern, and so adds heavily to the projected expense.

More importantly, though, a.) you can't try before you buy and b.) you're stuck with what you get. And of course, getting an existing camera modified is much more expensive than the camera would need to sell for if a manufacturer were mass producing it.

I don't know yet how to proceed. I thought I had an old Sony NEX-6 around here somewhere, which would have been perfect as a donor camera for the project, but I can't find it and I can't recall what became of it; it's possible I sold it or gave it away and just don't remember. (I periodically get hypochondriacal about Alzheimer's, but I've been doing that for years. Part of the curse of being absentminded. I'll find myself searching high and low for some bit of equipment or other and only gradually remember that I sold it years earlier, or whatever. You know what they say: Oh well.)

Yo-yo
Back off topic again: the pool hall sign will go well with the style of the pool table I bought. I don't have a good picture of the pool table, but here's one of the seller's photos of it from Facebook Marketplace where I bought it:

It's a Golden West "Vintage" model (that's the model name) made in Los Angeles before the company moved to Portland, Oregon. It's entirely made in America (unlike Brunswicks, which are Chinese now). The model is still in the GW catalog at $6,250, but I got this for $1,500—the seller was about to close on his house, and had promised his buyer that the pool table would be gone before the closing. I think we beat the deadline by two days. Or maybe it was one!

$1,500 is high for a used pool table—they've been in uncommonly strong demand during COVID-19, but you should still be able to find perfectly good ones for under a grand, some well under. But the nice woodwork on this one makes it worth the price premium I think. I hope.

Unless it plays poorly. It's always a risk to buy a pig in a poke, but with pool tables you don't have much choice.

We'll see.

Mike Johnston, Malaysian Dinner, Fuji X-T1, 2014

And back to the topic again (I'm yo-yo-ing back and forth today): It's not mission-critical to have a B&W-only camera. It's not like I can't work with anything. I've made many B&W pictures with my current cameras and have shown many of them here on TOP, such as my personal favorite, "Malaysian Dinner." I don't actually care to see B&W in the viewfinder, though—my experience is that a number of the cameras that show B&W in the EVF aren't showing very good B&W. When I shot B&W, I looked through an SLR viewfinder at the full-color world through a K2 yellow filter, which doesn't look like either B&W or color. In any case, I want to do the conversion in my brain. I'm fully able to look at the world even without a camera in my hand and know how it would look as a B&W photograph...small, frozen, bounded within a rectangle, luminances only.

When I know I've got the means to record a color picture, I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it would be best in B&W or best in color. You've got to shoot for one or the other. Deciding in post is for chumps. It's a whole different mental process, a much different approach. Out photographing with a digital camera, resolutely determined to shoot only B&W, I start getting distracted by color, and start seeing color pictures. I mean in my head, not through a viewfinder. It doesn't matter to me what the viewfinder shows. What matters is how I'm visualizing what I'm looking at. When all I can do is record B&W, then I see B&W without any trouble. When I have the ability to shoot color or B&W—when it's either/or—then I visualize color pictures and B&W pictures, but color dominates, because, as numerous readers have helpfully pointed out over the years, we see the world in color. I can't go out into the world with a camera that records both color and B&W and ignore the fact that it can record color. It's a different thought process and a different experience. Of course you can work around it, and I do, but it's not very satisfying.

Driving the pharmacy crazy
I like color; I love black and white. I respond viscerally—emotionally—to tones—value—and I don't respond that way to colors. Show me a page of Google image search results, all in color save one, and my eye will go right to that sole B&W image. If I'm standing between two rooms at a museum and one is full of color pictures and the other is full of black-and-white pictures, there's no question which one I'll head to. Don't even have to think about it. It's not that I hate color; I don't at all. I enjoy it. I certainly don't only look at the kind of photographs I like to make; no critic could afford that. It's not that I don't "get it." I have a pretty good color sense, and I can "see" color casts in color pictures easily. I'm good at color correction.

But colors don't move me. Tones do. Tones...luminances, transliterated to values of gray. I know plenty of people who are the opposite. We are all who we are. Ansel Adams sucked at color, in life as well as photography.

When I was quite young I first shot Kodachrome color slides in my father's Zeiss camera. But when I discovered that the local pharmacy would develop and print black-and-white, I immediately switched over. But I'm afraid I drove the pharmacy (and the lab it used) crazy, because I would constantly return prints to be redone—more contrast! Less contrast! Lighter! Darker! This area is too light! This area is too dark! Crop it here! I must have been insufferable. I was, like, twelve. But I knew exactly how it should be, and couldn't the guy who made the print see that? It frustrated me. I got fatalistic about it. So when I found out that I could have my own darkroom and do it myself, it was like being set free...suddenly I had control of all those things, and I had the freedom to keep making prints until all the tones were just right and the prints sang. Glorious.

Having the freedom to ignore color pictures in the world was something similar to that for me. It made me smug, and happy. I didn't have to worry about seeing color pictures. I was free to pay no attention to them. I never got distracted by flowers and sunsets and brightly painted merry-go-rounds. Digital cameras don't give me that freedom. They consign me to color. I get resigned to it. Okay, all right, all right: I'll do color if that's what the devices give me. Ya gotta go with the flow. But I'd love the option, the opportunity, to be set free again.

It's not that big a deal, really. A dedicated B&W camera is not something I "need"—and I can work around it like we all do.

Still, I wish I could find that dratted NEX-6. I would love to have that little thing converted to B&W.

Mike

UPDATE: Found it!

I finally remembered that I sent the NEX-6 to Xander (my son, for those of you who don't know) to make YouTube videos with. Immediately afterward he was promoted at work to a position that required 50–60 hours a week, and then he and his girlfriend moved to Bloomington and COVID-19 hit. So he's not making videos, and he readily agreed to send the little Sony back to me.

Various kind readers have very generously donated equipment to me over the years, and I keep a sort of mental accounting in my head—I try to remember that those donations are intended not to enrich my coffers (or pay for pool tables and sushi dinners) but to nourish and encourage TOP. So I'm going to apply some of that donated plenitude toward getting that NEX-6 converted to a B&W-only camera!

Because, really, shopping on paper is fine, but you gotta try these things.

This was cool: I wanted to figure out what the shutter-count was on the camera. I figured I'd have to look up how you do it, then hang on the phone with Xander after he got the camera out of the closet, giving him instructions. But no. I was able to do it from here, remotely. Apotelyt.com has a page where you can just drop a picture into that will read all the metadata and up pops the number you need. Since Xander hasn't shot with the camera much, I just found the last picture I took with the NEX-6 and popped it onto the page...which revealed that there are 5,642 actuations of the shutter, plus the few Xander might have added. Sony's spec is for 150,000 shutter cycles. So there should be still enough life left in that NEX-6 shutter to protect the expense of the conversion.

Not only will I be able to actually experience a B&W-only digital camera, I'll be able to make a direct head-to-head comparison of the results with a converted X-T1 file like the one above. Should be fun...for a Mike-value of "fun."

Oh, and that picture I dropped into the Apotelyt page to get the shutter count? It was a sunset. No kidding. No more catnip color for you when we get done with your sensor, little Sony!

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

Wozcraft: "I have a friend who could solve your problem. He sees colour in one eye and B&W in the other."

John Camp: "After an evening's research into your goofy idea about converting a camera to B&W, I've decided it's not as goofy as I thought. It is, however, expensive—the conversion of my unused Nikon D800 would cost three or four times what the camera is currently worth on eBay. On those grounds, I'm resisting the conversion, but I can feel its tug, like gravity."

John Krumm: One way to keep yourself only shooting black and white: set your camera to JPEG and leave it there. I'm slowly, very slowly coming around to using more and more Fuji JPEGs with my X-T4. The files have more latitude than I expect for JPEGs when adjusting in post, but also have that stubborn contrast curve that can be both good and bad. I've been really enjoying some of the 'film' presets at the Fuji-X weekly website. They don't really look like film to me, but they are fun.

"This is supposed to be Tri-X 400. It relies on a big white balance shift to get the general look."

Dale: "I think a better B&W sensor would be Ilford Delta 100. Or Kodak Tri-X. Loaded in a readily available Nikon FE or Mamiya 645. You could set up a darkroom in the new structure. Just sayin'...."

Jack: "I love your pool table! While I regularly get called out on TOP for chiding you on your expenditures, this one was well worth the extra money."

PaulW: "I can't decide if I should thank you or curse you for turning me on to Monochrome Imaging. A Leica Monochrom was never in the cards for me, but now...."

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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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