The Online Photographer

The Fate of the Rose of Sharon

You recall the Rose of Sharon bush outside my kitchen window, from the post "Rose of Sharon Before and After" two days ago...last pictured on July 30th. Here's what it looks like now:

Eeek!

Poor plant! Wha' happen?

These nice ladies (and their compatriot, not pictured) gave the whole place a haircut yesterday—weeded all the gardens, moved plants around hither and yon, and (pardon the expression) spruced up the entire yard. The woman who's standing is Michelle, gardener extraordinaire. You can't hire her in the Springtime; she's too much in demand. They did more work in five hours than I could do in a week.

This Rose of Sharon was a big healthy beauty, but I have several Rose of Sharons (or would that be Roses of Sharon?!) on the property, and the magnificent tree right in back of it is the only magnolia tree hereabouts. The big R.o.S. bush right in front of it was blocking its sunlight, and it didn't bloom very strongly last Spring. So this R.o.S. had to get a severe pruning in order to let the magnolia have more sunlight in the coming year. Don't worry about it, though. R.o.S.'s bounce right back, usually stronger and fuller as a result of pruning. 

But notice...you can see it in the top picture too...

Still one bloom, just like in the first picture the other day, from July 18th.

These are Fuji pictures, by the way—from the X-T1. The 35mm ƒ/2 Fujicron (sweet, sweet lens) in the middle picture, the 14mm ƒ/2.8 (my favorite-ever ultrawide) in the other two.

Mike

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Yoram Nevo: "It would be 'Roses of Sharon.' Sharon is a region of Israel. Originating from an Akkadian word meaning 'forest' since historically this region was densely forested. The expression Rose of Sharon, in Hebrew havatzelet ha'sharon, is from the Bible Song of Songs book, chapter 2. Greetings from Israel, from your regular—Yoram."

Mike replies: Toda Yoram!

Black Raspberries and Black Currants

Breakfast

This is the greatest time of the year to live in the Finger Lakes. In the morning I head up to the local Mennonite market, which is located right next to the fields where all the produce is grown. Berries that were on the vine before the sun came up are in my bowl for breakfast. Yum. I just eat 'em plain, nothing added. A big bowl of fruit is a meal. These strawberries just melt in your mouth—you hardly have to chew.

It's easy to be critical of the Instagrammy practice of people snapping quick pix of the food they're about to eat. But I don't know—I consider it kind of touching and human. It's a quiet little celebration, isn't it? Almost a secular way of saying grace. "Look what I get to eat!" Isn't that wonderful? Thanks and praise.

I would never make it as a food photographer, though. I tend to think of a continuum with documentary at one end and the impulse to control and perfect over at the other. Documentary photographers accept what they find. They want to show how things really look. Studio photographers tend to be over on the "perfecting" end, making things look just so. Food photographers definitely do that. They want to control the way things look and make them look the way they want them to look. 

                                 (me)

          •----------------•--------|-------------------------•

Documenting                                                                   Perfecting

It's worthwhile thinking where on this continuum you like to be. It can clarify where you stand, what you're after.

When I was in art school, we went on a studio visit to a big, beautiful, well-established local studio in D.C. I don't think we witnessed any part of this—I think we were just told the story, and I visualized it in my mind. (Isn't it funny that I can't quite remember which it was now? Memory is part fabulized.) Anyway the story is that they were doing a shoot for a fast food chain, and the restaurant delivered a stack of racks as high as a human, all the racks full of fresh buns. Searching for the perfect bun, the food stylist quickly inspected each candidate and flipped it over her shoulder as she rejected it. Out of those hundreds and hundreds of buns, they found three (the selects are called "heroes") worthy of being photographed for the shoot. On the floor of the studio behind the stylist was a cascading mountain of rejected buns.

I decided then and there not to be a food photographer. Perfection kinda bores me. If I had to sort through stacks of buns, I would rather look for the oddball one that had something wrong with it and that looked weird and hence, interesting. I'd rather photograph that. But I would never have the patience in the first place. It's a bun. It looks like it looks. Take that picture.

Good and good for you: blueberries, black raspberries, and black currants

I plucked out a few distorted raspberries before I took this, though. Tryin' the best I can to do what I'm supposed to do....

Mike

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Dennis: "I've considered a similar scale, but instead of degree of control, I've looked at it as degree of creation. Found images on one end, fabricated on the other, with all sorts of variation in between. I love looking at photos made by people who create something that wasn't there, from Julie Blackmon to Abelardo Morell to Steve McCurry (whoops—snarky !), but my comfort zone, the reason I pick up a camera, is to find interesting things in the world in front of my eyes. Over the years, I've read articles about how, in order to grow as a photographer, you should challenge yourself to master this, that and the other thing, and I've dabbled with studio lighting and I just find it a chore. I guess that's too far on the creation side of the scale for me."

adamct: "The urge to perfection has some significant downsides that I've been thinking about more and more. Idealized photographs of perfect items/scenes/people have the effect of changing our perception of what is real in the world. The most compelling example I've heard of this was a photographer lamenting the fact that other photographers and magazines only published pictures of beautiful, clean, healthy lions, some of whom may have been photographed in a zoo, rather than in the wild. His point was that those images—which look wonderful in a magazine or advertisement—hide the fact that most wild lions look nothing like that. Lions in the wild may look emaciated, or have wounds or their manes may be ratty and infested with ticks. By only showing images of fat, healthy, clean lions, people believe that is how lions live in the wild, and therefore don't realize the actual plight of real lions. (I'm going off of memory here, so please excuse me if the example I'm thinking of didn't involve lions, but some other wild animal.)

"It's not hard to think of other examples where this plays out in daily life. If you only see pictures of slender, buxom, beautiful women with flawless skin, then you tend to believe that many women actually look like that. If all you see is pictures of hamburgers in perfect buns, you might expect to get a hamburger that looks like that the next time you are at McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's.

"That may not seem like a big deal, but think about how that plays out in another context: there are lots of children who won't eat fruit that has any blemishes whatsoever. No bananas with brown spots. No slightly bruised raspberries. No apples that are less than perfectly red. This is partly because they are led to believe that fruit should be perfect, and therefore any flaw is a sign that the fruit is bad or defective somehow. And because real fruit has minor blemishes or irregularities, these children wind up eating hardly any fruit at all. Imagine if those children regularly saw pictures of fruit and vegetables with minor blemishes being celebrated on Instagram or in advertisements as part of a delicious meal. Might that change attitudes? I'm almost certain it would. And we might wind up with more fruits and vegetables that are bred for flavor, rather than appearances and their hardiness.

"I could go on an on with other examples of how perfectionism skews our perception of what is normal, but this comment is already long enough...."

Graham Byrnes: "The sister of a friend was an assistant in an advertising agency when I was an undergrad...so, early '80s. They had the McDonalds account for Australia. None of the food was real; it was all crafted carefully from synthetic rubber to be reliably perfect, day in, day out. I got to hold a french fry and, aside from smell and grease, it looked absolutely 100% real."

Mike replies: Just going on memory, and IANAE, but I believe that's illegal in the U.S. The food pictured can be inedible—for instance, a burger might have acid dripped on it to create fake "steam"—but it has to be the real food being advertised.

Whoops, Wrong Camera

You're never more miserable than when you have a bad cold. You're suffering, you feel awful, it hurts to cough, it hurts to sneeze, you have a fever, you feel like you're head's going to explode, you're just miserable—and yet you know you're going to be okay, so inherently you're just being a great big baby. It's always an awkward juxtaposition.

So I was pulling out of the doctor's office today (acute bronchitis, and yes, I'm being a baby about it), and saw this across the road, and snapped a picture of it with my phone. Four pictures, actually. One (this one) is a little sharper than the others but none of them are sharp. The file's blown out and hard to correct. Doesn't really capture the subtlety of the light or the colors. Looks okay as an online JPEG, but it would have been a lot better if I'd had the Sony A7III along. So I had the wrong camera. Too bad.

I'll live.

I'm normally very good at seeing both sides of issues, but I have to confess, I'm completely mystified that some people don't accept the idea that the camera you have with you can easily be the wrong camera. I don't get it. It seems so utterly self-evident to me. I'm not seeing the other side of the argument, this time.

I mean, I suppose you could say that I got something. But what's the use in that? So I have a souvenir of the picture I wanted but that I wasn't able to take? Something to take home as a reminder of my failure? I don't get that people don't get this.

But I'll feel better in a few days.

Mike

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Terry Burnes: "I think the point of the aphorism you're troubled by is more that a 'photographer' should always have a camera, not that the camera that a photographer happens to have is necessarily the best one for the task at hand. If nothing else, having your phone along, as opposed to no camera at all, allowed you, both a photographer and a journalist, to create this post. So it was a useful camera to have along, right? Actually, I would argue that, for the point you are making, it was the best camera to have. The Sony presumably would have created a perfect image and then you'd be writing about that, not this. I like your photo by the way, at least at its size on my screen. Lovely light. You're lucky to be able to see that when departing your doctor's office. Get well soon."

Doug Thacker: "This has been exactly my experience with using a phone for photography. You see a picture you want to take, you take it, and it looks great on the phone screen. Later, when you blow it up to full size on your computer, you find that the image you thought you had is poorly rendered, soft and unusable, merely a notation or rough sketch of the image you had in mind.

"Back when the cameras in phones were a joke—one-third of a megapixel and no dynamic range—shooting with them could be fun. These were the antithesis real cameras. You knew you had no right to expect anything at all. When you pushed the button, you might get shutter lag measured in seconds, you might get blur, you might get lovely colors and selective focus. The fun was in finding out, but whatever you got it could never be printed, and only viewable at 72 DPI. It was like painting miniatures with a lot of randomness thrown in, but you'd never mistake it for an actual camera.

"Nowadays phones are good enough to use as real cameras—until they're not, which happens all too often. Encounter enough disappointment like this, and pretty soon you give up on the idea and remember to take along your purpose-built camera.

"'The best camera is the one you have with you'—like other dog-eared axioms of photography, such as 'If your pictures aren't good enough you're not close enough'—was, I guess, really only supposed to be a hint. Maybe it's time for a new axiom: 'Take a camera and leave the phone in your pocket.'"

The Visual World Is a River of Change

You might remember a picture of my fallen oak that I posted a month or so ago:

Yesterday George Fisher turned up, was here for a few hours, and now look:

And look how different those two photographs are. Years ago I listened, in the car, to a tape (yep, right) of a lecture by Alan Watts, the British writer and speaker who was an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern religions and philosophies for Westerners. I remember where I was when I heard it and what car I was driving, but not what year it was or what the title of the talk might have been. But he spoke about the desire of people to "lean on the world," thinking that the world was mostly solid and dependable, and instead asserting that even the apparently solid world was a river of change. You think an apple is real and has physical presence, but in a hundred years, where is the apple? Even the mountains rise and fall.

Jay Maisel talks about this in relation to photography in his simple but excellent photography tutorial books, especially Light, Gesture & Color and It's Not About the F-Stop. The same picture seldom presents itself twice. In Watts' terms, the river has moved on. Permanence is illusory. It's one of my faults that I'm always thinking to myself that I can come back and take a picture later; Jay would not approve. I'd be better off as a photographer with the opposite mindset.

Well, let's not get too deep. I've been behind on the comments all week (I'm still not back up to speed here, if I'm honest), but note the tracks on the grass of the heavy equipment George brought in to move the fallen oak. And note that the title of Jay's second book named above is already becoming anachronistic—he meant that the things photo enthusiasts care about aren't as important as they think they are—but the majority of young photo mavens these days have only the faintest vague clue what an "ƒ-stop" might be. Still, we take the old Master's point.

Mike

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Wayne: "'Sooner or later...we have to risk everything in order to gain everything. We have to gamble on the invisible and risk all that we can see and taste and feel. But we know the risk is worth it, because there is nothing more insecure than the transient world.' —Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (from the Thomas Merton Daily Quotes Facebook page, March 13, 2017)."

Peter Wright: "I have to say, I was surprised to see Thomas Merton popping up on TOP, even if it was just in the comments! But how very appropriate a quote—thanks Wayne! He has to be one of the most profound writers of the 20th century. Not many people know that Merton was also in later life, an enthusiastic photographer. I saw an exhibition of his work in Toronto some years back."

Francisco Cubas: "One of the first humans to talk about this was Heraclitus, with his famous quote: 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' It was a favourite of J.L. Borges. I'm glad you are better Mike."

The Fallen Oak

This turned out to be the nicest thing I shot of the snowstorm. It's a merged panorama composed of four frames shot with the X-T2 and 14mm ƒ/2.8. I was standing on top of the ancient picnic table I inherited when I bought the house.

To be honest this looks "miniaturized" when it's 23 inches wide on my monitor. It loses impact at blog size. I hope you're not reading on your smartphone today!

I was just trying to show, plainly, what the fallen oak looked like. It turned out to be quite a beautiful photograph.

It's curious how often "plain" or "straight" documentary photographs turn out to also be beautiful. You're just trying to show something specific, clearly, and it also works artistically. Thinking about it, I think I have a faith in that. Show something true and clear and as often as not it will work as a picture.

Every time I remember this I go look at Shorpy.

By the way, does anybody know where Adobe put perspective corrections in ACR 10? It used to be in Lens corrections > Manual, but they moved it. (And by the way, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about editing software. Say what you will about the darkroom, but at least in the darkroom I decided when I was going to break my workflow, and whenever I lost something I knew whose fault it was: mine. Every software provider does this—they change things arbitrarily that don't need to be changed, which means you have to re-learn things you already knew how to do. I suppose this is easy for people who are software ninjas, but the rest of us are relegated to becoming "intermittent idiots." I can only remember about 50 software commands at a time, and my life demands that I memorize 50,000.

Whoops, slipped into rant mode there by mistake. I'd apologize, if I was sorry.)

Anyway, this should be a 5-foot-wide print. But I haven't the means to make such large prints nor anything to do with them once they're made. So that's kinda frustrating. In my mind's eye it looks good, so I guess that will have to be where it resides.

Mike

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Kenneth Tanaka: " In ACR 10.2 (and previous version) you'll find the transform functions via a skewed box icon (8th from the left) at the top of the editing window."

Mike replies: Ah. Thanks Ken.

Snowy Field

 A snowy cornfield. This one one of the remarkable things I saw yesterday. Doesn't look like much at first glance, does it?

This is a case where you actually need one of the high-resolution, larger-sensor 35+ MP cameras.

I know it's kinda too small to see here on the blog, but the fields were actually chock-full of thousands of white geese, to the horizon and beyond.

...And then, the Mennonites coming home from church kept putting themselves in front of my lens—walking, riding bikes, and in buggies. I know they don't like to be photographed, so naturally I usually don't, but I can't help it if they parade in front of where I already have the camera pointed, can I?

That's how I filled up the SD card.

And another reason I got caught short—the X-T2 is 24 MP, vs. 16 MP for the X-T1. The card filled up faster than I'm used to partly because the pictures are bigger! Forgot about that.

Mike

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The Red Chair 2018

The Red Chair, post-snowstorm. The pitted appearance of the snow is from clumps of stuck-on snow raining down from the branches of the trees above it. The tree in the background might look picturesque, but it's been uprooted and it's a goner.

This isn't a great single image, but as part of the series it makes sense. Pictures in series don't lend themselves to Instagram and memes and sharing and so forth—the ways we see pictures today, and, overwhelmingly, the way the public is conditioned to accept photographs today—but it's a natural way for photographers to work and we shouldn't forget or neglect the power of it. (Joe Holmes doesn't—I recently got his Annual and it's a honey.) Most of the pictures in The Americans or American Photographs or America aren't great single images. It's from their context and their company that they build their power. (You can even argue that that's how photographic works are authored.)

Here's another in the series.

Mike

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The Great March the Second Storm

This was all that was left of my largest snow-pile as of last Sunday

This has been Bizarro-World Winter: we had who knows how many 50+ and 60+ degree days in February and set who who knows how many records for high temperatures for various dates. Yesterday morning it was downright balmy and the very last trace of former snowbanks had melted away.

And then—whaaam. I stopped at the grocery store last evening and it was jammed—more cars in the parking lot and more people in the store than I think I've ever seen. Woke up this morning and saw the reason why!

Look closely and you can see our old friend the red chair.

Lost a big tree from the hillside, too. I heard it come down with a great whump and clatter early this morning, and went to investigate. It wasn't the one I thought would go. But I'm just as glad it came down—seeing it in pieces on the ground it's obvious it was dead.

Wonder how much last night cost me? I'll have to call around and get prices for clearing away fallen trees.

Now I've got to suck it up and get on the snowblower...a task I dread. Never get a single-stage snowblower if you have a gravel driveway! No, amend that—just never get a gravel driveway. (They're a giant pain.)

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. That's what February did, though.

Onward! Life on life's terms.

Mike

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Weather Weirdness

Two days ago the mercury soared to 66°F here, which blew past the all-time record high for February 20th for Penn Yan by four whole degrees.

Same thing yesterday. I actually saw a kid walking across the parking lot of our local grocery store dressed in flip-flops, athletic shorts, and a short-sleeved T-shirt. (No sunglasses, though. It was overcast.)

And now look at the view out my office window right this minute:

Winter's back.

For a little while, anyway. This has been a very weird February.

Here's another earlier snow picture I like for some reason:

It's just a section of my driveway after the only heavy snow we've had all Winter. I was playing around with the X-T2 after I got it.

I suppose this is as close to meaningless as a photograph can get, since there are doubtless 18 trillion gazillion plain ol' quasi-abstract snow-detail shots floating around the servers of the world. And yet I kinda like it. Oh well, I guess I'm allowed to like it just because it's mine.

Stay warm, or cool, or both, or whatever!

Mike

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Modest Camera, Monster Sensor

Mike Johnston, Empty and Desolate the Sea*,
a picture from my Smartphone project

Smartphones are great cameras and I've been having fun doing a deliberate project with mine. In a couple of years I've gotten about ten pictures that have made the grade so far, and it gets me out of the house. It's been two years now since readers challenged me to get to grips with phone cameras, and I'm satisfied I've done so now.

But as good as they are at auto adjustments and balancing light, there are still a lot of operational and qualitative limitations with smartphone cameras. One alternative was suggested by a reader named Rube—the Sony A5100. It looks pretty delightful combination of a very modest camera and a very formidable sensor...he says it uses the same sensor as the A6000/A6300/A6500 series, and although I can't confirm that it seems probable. [UPDATE: Kevin Purcell did some sleuthing and tells me the A5100 and A6000 likely share the same sensor, and the A6300 and A6500 share a different sensor. Thanks Kevin!]

If so it's an extremely inexpensive way to get a really top-quality sensor in a very tiny package.

Add the tiny Sony 20mm ƒ/2.8 pancake, and you have very high performance in a diminutive package that can't be much extra to carry around. Not very expensive, either.

Mike
(Thanks to Rube and Sarah)

*The title is an English translation of "Oed' und leer das Meer," a line from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. He took in turn from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Act III, verse 24. The picture was taken at the edge of the Pacific Ocean at a remote beach north of Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, and it relates to something a friend from my community told me yesterday.

It could also be considered an homage to Caspar David Friedrich, a German romantic painter who often pictured solitary figures, their backs to the viewer, confronting vast, bleak landscapes.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

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Good Morning!

Heh. This was just for fun. I belong to an online music discussion group, and one of the members just posted a new mix called "Perpetuum Mobile," and one of the group, Scott Ettin, responded a photo of his cup of morning coffee with the message "digging this over my morning cup." Another member of the group then responded with a photo of his morning cup. So I took a picture of mine...and then decided it needed, um, a little something extra.

Both shots were taken with the iPhone 7+, the one of the coffee cup in "Portrait" mode with fake software-generated bokeh. I don't normally make any Photoshop creations except when I'm just fooling around. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm currently getting my coffee roasted to order by Stone Creek Coffee in Milwaukee, brewing it very simply. A few months ago I cut down from two 14-ounce mugs per morning to one.

A very nice guest post from Henning Wulff coming up as soon as I get it prepped.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Ettin, KK, and C60Crew)

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Bob Rosinsky: "Mr. Coffee."

David Dyer-Bennet: "The appearance of the face down in the cup was produced non-optically, right (by the app, presumably, combining images)? Because the only optical approach that comes to mind involves a fairly large half-surfaced mirror, and I doubt you wanted the effect that badly."

Mike replies:

No app—as I said, it was just me combining these two hasty phone snaps in Photoshop—bad Photoshop, by definition, since I hardly ever do this sort of thing.

'September Is the New August'

Taken this afternoon before it clouded up

September will someday be like August is now, or so sayeth the climate-change scientists. According to the projections, the seasons will shift forward somewhat—at least in the near term, Springs will be later and stay cold longer, and Fall will start later and the onset of Winter will eventually be somewhat delayed from historical norms. And September will become more like August used to be.

Certainly seems that way here at TOP World HQ right now, I'll say that. If we hit 80°F again tomorrow it will be a straight week with highs in the 80s. Not only that, highs of 80°F or more are currently predicted for another entire week.

That's all about 10 degrees, or a little more, over the historical norms. The average high for today, for instance, is 70°F, and it's 83°F right now. I keep an eye out because 68°F (20°C) is a perfect day to me, and I get a little greedy about the few 68° days we're supposed to get.

Yes, it could just be a warm September. Specific weather events in specific places can't be attributed to climate change, which merely predicts trends. And we had a cool Summer. In fact we were cooler than normal this month until recently; here's a chart of Rochester, New York (nearest big city to me) temps for so far this month:

(Source)

The straight lines are the averages (high and low), the crooked lines are this month's actual temperatures.

In any case, I'm ready for Fall to get here! Bring back the 68° days, and the extra blanket at night.

Mike

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Wildlife Photography...with a Phone

You might remember (from this recent comment) that our friend John Camp is no great fan of phone cameras. However, look what he managed to "capture" (not literally!) with his the other day:

John writes: "Okay, cell phones aren’t completely useless. I was out walking my German Shepherd, Scout, today, when I felt a strange set of eyes upon us. This was a block from my very urban house in Santa Fe. Taken with my iPhone."

Mike
(Thanks to John)

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Never know what you're going to see
Give TOP a “Like” or Buy yourself a present

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Peter Nigos: "Nice capture—but not wildlife. This is a serval, an African cat just a little bigger than a domestic tabby, and kept as an exotic pet. Very agile; they often escape."

John Yuda: "I don't think that's a serval—they don't tend to have the beard-like whiskers hanging down from their cheeks. That looks like a good ol' North American bobcat to me."

[Ed. Note: Serval; bobcat.]

John Camp replies: "It's not a serval, it's a regular old New Mexican bobcat, of which there are quite a few around, although I've not have seen one that close up (I was about 10 feet away.) The cat never moved, but kept his eyes on my dog the whole time. As for size, I would say maybe 15–20 pounds, although they look bigger because of their fluffy fur, and if walking, would be about knee-high.

There are four members of the lynx family, according to the San Diego Zoo site, of which bobcats are one."

Keep Trying

It's been a while since my live-in model Butters has shown up on the blog, and I figured it was time again. I love my two dogs equally, but Butters is photogenic and Lulu isn't.

I post this to mention that I've been after this shot for months...I keep taking pictures of Butters at this window, and never got it till yesterday. I've probably tried forty times, all different variations—different framing, different light, with Butters in different positions—usually with him looking out the window, not sleeping in front of it.

I learned this from Sally Mann...I mentioned her famous picture "The Last Time Emmet Modeled Nude" (a picture made more poignant by Emmet's recent tragic death), and she said, "would you like the see the genesis of that shot?" And she pulled out a Kodak film box full of 8x10 contact sheets and spread them on the floor. It turned out she had hauled Emmet to that lake a number of times, for many different shoots. The famous pictures (there are actually two different ones in circulation, although few people realize that) were taken on a cold day late in the Fall, and Emmet was none too happy about it, so he told his mother it was the last time he was going to co-operate. Hence the title.

But her persistence amazed me...she knew there was a picture there, and she also knew she didn't have it yet...until she did. It was a good lesson. I've been similarly patient ever since, when it's called for, sometimes trying things dozens of times until I finally get it.

The only problem with my shot here is that it was taken on the iPhone, and it's a little too far from ideal conditions for the smartphone's little camera module. It looks almost magical on the large iPhone 7+ Retina screen, but it's going to take a virtuoso printer to eke even an 8"-high print out of the file. I might have to go to the pros for a print.

Mike

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Boat Show!

Ed. Note: It turned out that "Look at Tone as Light" post was a great last post for a Friday, because the lively comments kept it going all weekend. Thanks to everyone who contributed their expertise and spoke to their own experience. I thought it was interesting that a number of people reported doing something similar (by a variety of different methods) as part of their regular workflow, and several people said they thought "depressed midtones" predated digital. Check out Doug Thacker's Featured Comment on that post, last in the stack.

Earlier last week I used a classic wooden boat as a rhetorical parallel (you remember the picture of the Chris-Craft barrel back), and, as if to order, there was a Classic Boat Show in Hammondsport this past weekend. I took the Fuji and THZ (the hated zoom) and did a little photography. How can you not like a boat show?

Do classic boats make you happy? These smiling ladies were clearly having a good time. Or maybe they just thought my hat looked funny.

Massive throngs of people jamming the waterfront. (You don't often see anything that can be called a "crowd" up in this part of the world).

The boats first did a slow parade in front of the crowd and then each did a "fly-by," i.e., passes at speed.

Just as all cars above a certain level of luxury are muscle cars these days, so all boats are now speedboats—you could pull skiers behind most bass boats, fer pete's sake. This is a launch, a boat intended to go slow. These have been replaced by the "martini boat" or pontoon boat for relaxed cruising these days, although Olive Oyl here has more style, don't you think?

(Even some pontoon boats are speedboats now too, and look at this!)

Old and new. I took the picture on the right up at Morgan Marine. Although you can't tell from the picture, the 200-horsepower supercharged Merc (spellcheck thinks I want to write "Mercado") is enormous—taller than the average ten-year-old and as burly as a gorilla in a zoo. Most outboard engines are now bizarrely huge, come to find out. When did that happen? I was unaware.

At one time there were 24(!) active boatbuilders on Keuka Lake where I live. This is a Penn Yan, named for the town just north of me. The Penn Yan Boat Company built wooden runabouts like this one meant to compete with the likes of Lyman. (The town itself was named to settle a dispute between Pennsylvanians and Yankees over who got to name it. There are a number of boats on the lake named "Penny Ann.")

The stylishly nautical helm of 1958 Century Raven, a boat that's just a tad younger than I am. The owners were very nice. The boat is an unrestored survivor in remarkably good shape.

The third cockpit of the appropriately named Razzle Dazzle, a three-cockpit Gar Wood. I learned to my surprise this is a 2007 boat—they still build Gar Woods new. You will need to bring your wallet.

Classic boating is a family affair!

Something for everyone—classic car buffs had these 1940s Chevrolet "woodies" to gawk at. And classic train buffs amongst ye will doubtless be interested in the police station building behind the cars, as it used to be the town train station.

Note the height of the vehicle—and we thought SUVs were a recent idea? This one had the original invoice in the window—written on a typewriter. The car cost just over $2,000 in the mid-1940s.

loading Queeny on her trailer. I hope you like the positions of the two gentlemen in the frame—it took me a lot of shots and lot of jockeying to make it look easy!

Time to wrap up! Show's over.

Mike

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John: "Your post triggered some good memories. As a kid I spent my summers on Keuka Lake, skiing behind a boat much like these. Our cottage was just across the lake from the college. When we five boys weren't on or in the water, we were usually exploring the endless creeks and gorges. Or in Penn Yan spending the quarters our grandfather paid us for pulling weeds. Life speeds along like a Penn Yan Swift. Thanks for the flashback."

Steve Higgins: "I think we need to see the hat to be able to make a sensible critical decision....  :-)   ."

Mike replies: Here you go. Bought on doctor's orders—dermatologist's, actually—to protect my bald spot from excessive sun and possible future skin cancer.

MikeR: "Your hat looks funny! (I have one just like it. Recent trip to Florida proved its worth.)"

Mike replies: It only looks funny if you're younger than 55. Otherwise it looks perfectly natural.

Dave Kee: "I have a hat like that, but years ago I was told by SWMBO not to wear it because it made me look as old as Henry Fonda did in 'On Golden Pond.' Just checked, and I am now as old as Henry was when he made the movie. I think I will dig the hat out of the back of the closet."

Bob Johnston [no immediate relation]: "Thanks for showing these great photos Mike. Those boats are works of art. I particularly liked Olive Oyl. Isn't it great that there are people who keep these going for us to see?"

Mike replies: It certainly is. I wouldn't want to do it. I have a cousin who loves these boats, and he's rich, but what he does is build models of them. When I asked him why he doesn't buy a real one, he said something like "who needs the headache?" Re the hat scene from 'Caddyshack': "Looks good on you though."

D. Hufford: "Yep. Checked the hat at the link. No doubt it was the hat."

ITAP

So I just wanted to explain to you why you haven't heard from me today...my son Xander is visiting from Wisconsin, post-graduation and pre-new-job, and we spent the day together. This is an iPhone portrait of him goofing around at the Rockwell Museum in Corning.

A couple of months ago I loaned him my old Sony, and he's been having fun with it ever since:

Photo by Xander Johnston

This picture he took yesterday in the gully made me sad, given that our own three baby robins flew away from their nest out back just last week. (We have lots of robins around here.) But it got on the front page of ITAP, which stands for "I took a picture," at Reddit. ITAP is a subreddit just for posting pictures.

...Which is what this post is for too, come to think. I love that title, "ITAP"; it explains a whole lot of photo sharing.

Xander at Garrett Chapel. It's an exacting 1928 copy of a 6th-century medieval chapel in Scotland. We went out to the Bluff in a driving rain because the interior of the Chapel is open to the public in the Summertime.

Myself at the Rockwell looking at a painting of some very strange-looking cows. A900 Photo by Xander.

Behinder
So what I'm trying to say is that I got behind with posting what I was supposed to post this week, and sorry about that. I have a great post in hand from Euan Forrester, and another great one from Jim Hughes—some of the missing pages from his W. Eugene Smith bio. I'll post both of those next week. Reminder for when you're behind—don't get behinder.

I had a wonderful, happy day, though, FWIW.

Mike
(Thanks to X.)

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Geoffrey: "That robin photo could have been posted under random excellence, it is really good."

Mike replies: Xander really appreciated that.  :-)  Thanks.

Open Mike: Skychaser

We've been blessed with some wonderful weather here lately. I wish it could stay like this all Summer.

This was just on the way to dinner and back a couple of nights ago—

I certainly love living in an area I find photogenic—it's just so beautiful here.

I think I'm starting to feel just a little bit of sympatico with stormchasers, too. When I saw that sky in the third picture, I went racing off to a place where there's an open field and I knew I'd be able to see it. 

The weather's supposed to be great again tomorrow. I think I know what I'll be doing.

Have a great weekend!

Mike

(P.S. As you know I never write about pool, but if I did, this would be your shot of the day for today. Shane is badly in jail and has almost no hope of a way out and watch what he does.)

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Luke Smith: "Farmland."

Michael Perini: "Living in a physically beautiful place is good for the soul. I listened to a talk given by Eileen Rafferty on the Creative Muse in Photography. She makes the case through examples that the Muse is often a person, but that it certainly can be a Place.

"Personally I feel this very strongly. I live in two places separated by 200 miles, Bucks County Pennsylvania and Montauk Point in New York. Both are physically beautiful, but when I am in Montauk I have a much stronger need to photograph, which brings with it an energy to get out and look—to document the ephemera of weather and place. It makes my time there far more enjoyable, and the work I do seems better. So my experience is that a place can indeed serve as a creative muse."

Dale: "Yes, it's good to appreciate where you are. Four years ago I moved from the American Midwest to Reno, Nevada. We're surrounded by mountains, lakes, desert, big skies, all of it. Lake Tahoe is 50 minutes away, the California coast is a three and a half hour drive, the Eastern Sierra is less than three hours away. I'm still pinching myself to make sure this is real, and it feels like a perpetual, limitless playground, photographically and otherwise. Yes, it's important to appreciate where you are, especially when it's this rich...."

K Berke: I agree with another commenter who observed that the first picture calls for a different focal length, or at least a bit of cropping.

"All I did was crop your photo to show what a lovely landscape photo you actually have here."

Mike replies: Thanks. I don't agree with that, though. I tried lots of options including (more or less) that one, from several different standpoints (until the cloud changed too much), and then spent some time "feeling into" which one I liked best. To me the plowed field is important to the picture in several ways. First, it provides contrast for the yellow-green bands of flowering ground cover. Second, it better implies the hilliness of the land—your crop makes it look like the land is flat, or close to flat, which it isn't. Third, I think there's a subliminal visual thing going on where the dark plowed earth makes the rest of the scene feel like it's on top of a cliff or up on a shelf—raised up, somehow, by the thick dark visual band at the bottom. I'm not saying that sounds elegant put into words, because it certainly doesn't, but to me that vague feeling is there in the picture. One reason is because the feel of the picture changes depending on how light or dark I make the plowed field; when it's lighter it "reads" more as mere foreground:

Stepping back, this brings up two issues that interest me: one is that each of us does with our pictures what we want to. I'm not saying your crop is bad or wrong—it's just yours is all, and happens not to have been my choice. Given that it's my picture, I have the option of considering what you suggest and either going with it or going with my choice. Same with everybody of course.

The flip side of this is just as important—which is that we can get valuable insight from others about improvements we can make in our pictures, and it's unwise never to pay attention to that kind of input. Whether it's one insightful friend (two, in this case!) or an accumulation of knowledge from a large succession of viewers, other peoples' reactions and opinions can be very valuable in shaping your work...whether it's one picture, a project, or the direction of your work as a whole.

So I think the best general advice under this heading is to be respectful of suggestions and opinions, but in the end remember it's your picture and you always have the option to...er, stand your ground (sorry :-).

Pictures of Farmland

April is my favorite month (breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.)

That's not how that poem goes...

...But April is my favorite month in the Finger Lakes. It's so beautiful it can make me feel nostalgic for...Earth. (That's cribbed from my brother Scott; when his daughter was three, I asked him if he was enjoying being a parent, and he answered "I'm already nostalgic for now." A beautiful line.)

Today it's rainy again, and even a bit dull, and it feels almost like a respite from all the heartbreaking beauty. If that makes any sense.

The new-to-me used GX8 landed here in bucolic TOP Rural Headquarters the other day. I slapped the Panny/Leica 45mm Macro on it, one of only two Micro 4/3 lenses I had in the closet*, and have been happily out and about shooting farmland.

The picture above is a scene I've had a bit of a fixation about. There are hundreds of small farms around this general area, but I've tried to photograph that particular one about six different times, with three different cameras, from different angles, in different kinds of weather. Once when the corn was high. I'm not sure why. It's not like it's obviously such a great subject. It's just a subject I needed to understand, for some unknown reason.

I'd try to give a print to the occupants, but I believe they are Mennonite, and I've been told Mennonites don't hold truck with pictures. They consider them...what? Decorative? Or trifling. Anyway they don't approve. Or so I've heard. I might try anyway, we'll see.

If I did try to present them with a print, at least I might learn more about what they actually think, without relying on hearsay.

I'm getting a lot of blurry shots with the new used camera, even in good light, which I think I can ascribe to the fact that the firmware of lens and/or camera aren't up to date and aren't working together in sweet harmony like they ought. So that's another thing to do.

Having new-camera teething pains with the Panny is making me appreciate my Fuji a little more. At least it's dialed in. That work is behind me.

But I'm surprised again at how readily everything on the GX8 falls effortlessly to hand for me; using it is like hearing from an old friend. The older I get and the more cameras I use, the more I think people are best off using whatever camera they love, no matter what it is. Whatever feels familiar, whatever you like playing with and looking through, whatever gives you pride of ownership. It really doesn't matter what it is. It only matters how you feel.

When I took the picture above, the clouds were playing over the land, and I was able to try the farm buildings in shade or sunlight. In this one the foreground is sunlit and the buildings are in a band of cloud-shadow. To break my quirky little fixation on this motif, I'm not going to photograph this particular farm any more. The hardest thing about editing is picking the one; there's such a stern opportunity cost! This is the one means there are no others. I don't know if this was the picture I was after, but it's going to have to do. I won't be taking any more.

'Do Your Work' —David Vestal
Here's one of those sweet little ironies with which life is heavily laden: writing TOP has opened all sorts of doors for me. Most of them, however, involve me doing something other than...well, writing TOP. I've been asked to give lectures and run workshops and fly to conferences and give people private lessons in this, that or the other thing, write book introductions or articles or interviews, and of course go photographing—in Iceland or Prague or Utah in a cave up in the hills or what have you. The irony is that then I would be doing something else and not writing. Even going out photographing, if I do it too much, makes me neglect the website. And you gotta dance with who brung ya. For better or worse, it's this I do. It's probably what you want me to do, too, really. So after an hour or two of photographing farmland, it's time to get home and check comments. C'est ma vie. In April it's particularly tempting to chuck housework and the comment section and doodle around the countryside photographing all day.

Neat little Amish and Mennonite farms dot the countryside under our
turbulent, often spectacular skies.

How long does it take you to get a new camera set up and dialed in? It takes me a couple of months, because I have to use it to know how I want it to be. But I think I'm casual about it. Too casual, probably.

Is it just me?
When I taught photography I'd put up a "quote of the day" on the bulletin board every day—just something I overheard one of the students say, usually, that I thought was eloquent or on point. So I got used to paying attention to what people said. I would also put one of my own pictures up on the bulletin board every week so that my students could see what I was up to myself. One week I put up a landscape from Northern Michigan that included several farms. That week I overheard two girls talking about it. They didn't know I was listening.

First girl: "Whose picture is that?"
Second girl: "It must be Mike's. Only Mike would take pictures of farmland."

Made me laugh.

I hope you are enjoying April as much as I am.

Mike
(Thanks to SHJ and Bert)

*By the way, apropos yesterday, I keep this lens around because I like its bokeh. LOL!

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Slow growth
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Eliott James: "Farmland is a good subject. Photograph it as often as you like. The scene will reveal itself to you at some point. I really believe that, as I have proven it to myself. It may not be the scene you anticipate, but one will stand out eventually."

Darlene: "I very much enjoy the tonalities and open space of your Farmland photo. When I want to get to know my new-to-me camera, I will 'doodle around the countryside photographing all day.' There is nothing like getting intimate with the new camera in my life.  :-)  "

T. Edwards: "I tend to take batches of pictures, obsess over culling/cropping/etc. for a while and then forget about them. I've returned to the same place for many vacations over the past 15 years and when I went through all of those photos the other day I found that I've taken many photographs of the same tree. Just a tree, in a yard, with phone lines running annoyingly through the top branches. Utterly unremarkable, yet I return to it year after year."

Mike replies: I think I wrote about that once. The subjects we all have inexplicable weaknesses for. I can't find where I talked about it, but I mentioned that for some reason whenever I see waterfowl I think I need to take pictures of them. Kinda weird.

Joe: "I think you should definitely approach the Mennonite farm owners. Worst case: they educate you about their beliefs, you make new friends I never lived around practicing Mennonites but I spent time around a lot of Amish (which I probably foolishly think are almost the same as Mennonites) both in Kutztown PA and the middle of Ohio, and I found them to be a friendly and talkative bunch, if I may generalize."

Mike replies: I've enjoyed meeting the Old-Order people I've met so far. They live a usefully different lifestyle that I'm jealous of in some ways (strong community, lots of company, and an orderly quality to life), averse to in other ways (you can't listen to music, look at art, or drive). As people I've so far found them—generalizing, as you say—to be open, frank, and friendly.

jim woodard: "Not to be snarky or trollish but I don't see any bokeh in this picture. Also wanted to say that I think you should take the time to do the things you enjoy besides writing TOP. Its your writing as a whole person that makes this such an interesting blog!"

Mike replies: No, no bokeh in a great many pictures. After John's reprise of his 'What Is Bokeh?' article, our friend Gordon Lewis sent me a picture illustrating what he called "the opposite of bokeh":

...Gordon likes to use pan-sharpness to help "flatten" a three-dimensional scene into two-dimensional graphic elements. You can feel the tension between the two in this shot. It's a strategy he has a particular feel for and uses frequently in his work.

Bluff Sunset

The weather and the light in the area of my new home can be amazingly beautiful. We've "enjoyed" a sinister heat wave here for the past week or so—it's gotten up to 63 degrees*, and day after day has been in the 50s. Our snow is gone and the days are sunny, or partially cloudy, and Springlike. It's extremely pleasant as well as naggingly frightening. Yesterday afternoon, walking the dog, the light was just astounding—the sun peeking through the clouds and playing off the lake, the air pearly with moisture. Like walking through some mystical fantasyland from a fairy tale. I've been lax; I should never go anywhere without a camera. Never. Anywhere.

One of the peculiarities of the area is that Keuka Bluff, which rises steeply more than 700 feet above lake level, is quite close, because the lake is narrow. It blocks maybe ten degrees up from the horizon. So from where I am, the sun "sets" behind the Bluff something like 15 or 20 minutes before it sets behind the curvature of the Earth. The light in those minutes is interesting—it extends the period of dusk. I've come to call this "Bluff sunset," and I've made a game of trying to detect, just from the change in the light, the moment of actual sunset. I've gotten pretty good at it.

Bluff sunset leads to some spectacular views, most of which I miss because I don't have an unobstructed view from my house. But yesterday evening I stopped the car at one of the few cleared areas along the two-lane highway up above me because I saw a patch of blue sky through some dark clouds. Here's the picture I stopped for...

...Not that big a deal. But once I was out of the car, I noticed that the ridge of the bluff to the South looked almost exactly like it was on fire, because the sun was approaching the ridgeline from above...

So I decided to wait around. Here's the sun "setting" behind the Bluff...

But then here's what I thought was really cool. For a few minutes after the sun itself disappeared but still before sunset, the clouds let some rays through from the other side of the Bluff...

Isn't that cool? It was just intensely pretty. I hadn't expected it at all.

I think people here drive right past sights like this. It's just ordinary. No big deal. Makes me wonder how much I miss around this area all the time.

Meanwhile, looking more to the North, you could still see plain blue sky past the clouds, because the sun was actually still above the real horizon.

Maybe somebody can fill in some of the terms I'm missing here...are there actual names for when the sun "sets" behind a mountain, or for when it sets below the theoretical horizon? I don't know any meteorological or astronomical terminology.

Anyway, it kind of made up for earlier in the day, when I'd seen that magical light at lakeside but didn't have a camera.

A micro-blizzard
A few weeks ago I experienced another amazing thing (did I write about this already? I can't remember). It was a mainly clear day and I was out in the back yard flinging the ball for Butters, and I saw a vast lump of bizarrely dark cloud mass start to loom over the Bluff; but I could see blue sky on either side of it. As it grew, it became obvious that there was snow falling furiously beneath it, and that it was headed straight at us and moving fast. The falling snow obscured the far shore of the lake behind a veil of undifferentiated gray, then moved across the lake, and before I knew it we were right under it, Butters and I. The light darkened dramatically and the sky above was dark, and we were buffeted by winds knocking this way and that, and snow was flying, falling in thick swirls. As the cloudmass continued to move off to the East, there were just a scant few astonishing minutes when I could look toward the waterfall in the southwest corner of my yard and see a virtual blizzard, with snow falling thickly and the sky a grim dark gray—and then turn around a hundred and eighty degrees and look out toward the lake, from the direction the snow-squall had just come from—and see nothing but sun and blue sky again, the far shore clear and sharp! A few minutes more and the cloud-mass was gone past the steep hills, and nothing was changed from before—a pleasant, sunny, clear, blue-sky day, only now there was a frosting of snow on the grass and the trees.

Less than half an hour more, and that was gone too. Just an isolated snow-squall barreling along from West to East, and we happened to be right under its path.

The Finger Lakes. I'll tell ya, it's a show.

Mike

*68°F today. Creepy.

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giulio croce: "That's the reason why I love photography. It forced me to look, and thus allowed me to see."

David Babsky: "Regarding 'a micro-blizzard,' when I first visited New York (in 1984, I think) the doorman at the Empire State Building—which was just about to close for the day—told me that sometimes it's bright and sunny down at street level, as it was that day, but occasionally, while that's happening down there, there's snow swirling right up at the top! Wow. I took the last lift skywards...and there, at the top, there was indeed snow falling, but the updrafts never let the snow drop as far as the street below. What a sensational delight!"

Steve Rosenblum: "I know what you mean by everyone there driving by these scenes as though they are routine. Lately, I have been trying to force myself of turn off NPR during my half hour drive to and from work, turn on my 'mindfulness,' and truly allow myself to be in the moment. I live in Ann Arbor and drive on an interstate-like highway to and from work through the suburbs of SE Michigan. One of the things I've noticed is that very often the sky looks really amazing. Here's the thing—I spend a lot of time in the Rocky Mountain West (Colorado, Montana, Utah). Out there in 'Big Sky' country, I always notice and pay attention to the sky because it does indeed look huge and dramatic. However, I have realized by actually trying to stay in the moment during my Michigan suburban commute that the sky here is often equally amazing looking. It's the 'frame' and my own expectations that are different. A sky framed by 14,000 foot mountains seems different than one framed by highway exits, subdivisions, and strip malls. After a lifetime of driving these routes I have trained myself to tune out during these times. But...when I pay attention, there it is! The same amazing sky with all of its variations of colors, clouds, and light. As Jon Kabat-Zinn said, 'Wherever you go, there you are.' Your friend, Steve (almost the suburban Buddha) Rosenblum."

Rod: "I live in Tasmania. A giant island on the cusp of several weather channels. We used to be known for our regular 'four seasons in one day,' but with weather patterns changing, it looks like we may be the stable place to live! I remember driving from sunshine at my house, 45 kilometers to a nearby mountain (Mt. Barrow), camping in two feet of snow and coming home to sunshine, in the middle of Summer. Not unusual, but becoming less unusual worldwide. Now we sit sit back and watch as wild weather batters the mainland (Australia)."

Bourquek: "I'm a lifelong fan of meteorology and astronomy, so I'm always looking up, and I encourage others to do so. Clouds are an amazing, ever-changing show. Some people don't even know if it's cloudy or sunny out...I guess we just live in different worlds. Not too long ago I located the planet Venus in the mid-day sky. With the aid of binoculars I was able to show it to a number of people. Who knew such magic was right over our heads.  ;-)  "

Pete Souza, Provocateur

Former White House photographer Pete Souza made the front page of Google News on Thursday by "throwing shade" on the contrast between the Obama and Trump White Houses—using pictures. One example, of many:

 

Photo by Pete Souza

Pete's caption for this shot on Instagram: "Meeting with top advisors. This is a full-frame picture. I guess you'd say I was trying to make a point."

The story has been picked up far and wide, but is nicely summed up in this article at The Mary Sue. (Note that a different title shows up in the URL. On TOP, too, early working titles for posts that were changed for publication sometimes survive in the URL.) Pete Souza's Instagram feed is an interesting little object lesson in how to convey messages with pictures, if viewers know enough about the situation they depict.

Pete was also White House photographer for Ronald Reagan, from June of '83 till the end of President Reagan's time in office.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Glos and several others)

P.S. It occurs to me that "this is a full-frame picture" could be misinterpreted these days. He means it's uncropped, not necessarily that it was taken with a full-frame camera (although it might have been, I don't know).

[Ed. Note: TOP normally doesn't discuss politics except if the topic relates to photography, with a few exceptions.]

Wayne: "Didn't President Obama severely limit access of photographers to the White House?"

Mike replies: Who told you that? Wait, don't tell me, I don't want to know.

Anyway, no. That's the whole idea of a White House photographer, and it's been in place for decades. One photographer covers everything and makes his (or her) results available to the rest of the media. It avoids the mess that would result if there had to be a gaggle of photographers from different media outlets and agencies wandering all over the White House, and the headache of overseeing shared access in a fair way. The traditional press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room in the West Wing is the other means of fairly controlling press access. The White House is a busy place—it's an office building, a family residence, a tourist attraction, and the venue for State dinners and of meetings with foreign dignitaries, among many other things.

Ken replies to Mike: "Regarding your response to Wayne, the Associated Press and over 30 other news organizations protested Obama's photojournalist restrictions as being 'Soviet-style' and propagandistic. See 'Obama's Orwellian Image Control' and 'Photographers Protest White House Restrictions.'"

Mike replies: Looks like my response to you was uninformed—sorry, Wayne. Thanks, Ken.

Frank Petronio: "It could just be a simplistic cheap shot or perhaps it's the witches' coven, yet another oppressed identity group lobbying for access. Hard to say with Barry."

Mike replies: Frank, Frank. When your knee jerks like that, doesn't it sometimes hit you in the chin?

By the way, I noticed you were one of the featured testimonials at Edgar Praus. Props fer that.