The Online Photographer

Open Mike: David and Goliath

"Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. wanders hither and thither as if in a dream. It normally appears on Wednesdays but sometimes not.

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Speaking of camera dreams...whoa. Last night I dreamt I was taking all sorts of lovely pictures using my iPhone, then set my phone down (at a bar, which is bad—dreams including alcohol are thought to be a signal of stress for those of us in recovery!), neglected to pick it up, and returned for it to find it vanished. Television-inspired sequences involving police and suspected thieves followed. I was so distressed by the loss of all my pictures that eventually I managed to realize, within the dream, that it was only a dream and that my phone had never left the house and was downstairs, safe. An uncomfortably vivid dream, though, with lots of fantastical twists and turns—eventful, emotional, strikingly visual.

Also within the dream, though, I believed I would be forced to get a new iPhone, and wondered (do you dream of yourself thinking?) if I could afford "the good one," and was musing that it would be nice, at least, to have Apple's latest camera. When I woke up it struck my brain, for some reason, how interesting it would be to take the same picture on all the different digital formats and make prints from them. Do normal people think about such things first thing in the morning?!

Back to reality
Such a test would flawed, though, because the test picture would only be one subject taken under one set of conditions. Part of the advantage of larger formats and more sophisticated cameras is that they (presumably) cope better with being stressed in various ways. It's no longer straightforward to determine which is "best," though, because of what can be done to files either manually in Photoshop or automatically in software—we're no longer looking at just the capabilities of the sensor in a single split-second exposure. Things like the "Night Mode" on newer smartphones is radically better than the inherent capability of the small sensor alone, for instance. And of course software bokeh has been available in "Portrait Mode" for several generations of smartphones now. So when you make the prints, do you take the files "out of camera" or do you optimize each one as best you can? I think the latter, because that's what we do in real life. So then is that a test of the camera, or of your Photoshop skills?

One of six winners in Apple's "Night Mode Photo Challenge," this was taken by Konstantin Chalabov of Moscow, Russia, using an iPhone 11 Pro

Any "test" would be only a snapshot, so to speak, of specific implementations in specific circumstances using particular equipment and processing. Comparisons would have to be multivalent, considered over a range of various trials. And then, of course, the usual problem: after all that work, all you'd have would be a snapshot in time of this particular moment, of today's existing equipment. A few years go by, and some new introductions come along, and the work of comparing would need to be started all over again. I did a lot of work comparing some cameras a few years ago—pitting the Canon 5D Mark II vs. the Nikon D700/D3 vs. the Sony A900. That post got more views than any other post I ever wrote on TOP, something like 100,000. But who cares about those cameras now?

And I wonder what effect economic realities are having on our perception of technology. For instance, great emphasis is being placed on computational photography in smartphones, because that's where all the resources are concentrated. Meanwhile, Micro 4/3 is apparently withering even within enthusiast precincts. What would we think, however, if all the advantages of smartphone imaging—and all those resources—were being applied to Micro 4/3 or 1" sensor cameras? I'd rather have "Night Mode" and "Portrait" computational bokeh available in a 1"-sensor camera or an Olympus than in a phone, personally. I think it would be more interesting, and possibly more freeing. Almost surely it would be even more impressive. But that's not the direction the technology happens to be evolving, for business reasons primarily.

Monsterish
After the lost-pictures dream woke me up, at 3:30 in the morning, I impulsively did something I don't often do—took a "selfie," using the iPad I keep on the nightstand. In the dark! (Was I trying to reassure myself that I was not really in that dreamworld, which seemed uncomfortably real?) Groggy with sleepiness, I turned the camera around, turned the flash on, and let the device do its thing. The picture was well-exposed and competent, and preserved a sense of the surrounding darkness. What would once have seemed like magic is now commonplace.

I hope I'm not especially vain, but I'm not going to show you the picture, because it struck me that it's the exact opposite of what portrait photographers try to do—it's the most un-flattering picture of me ever! (That could be a challenge to give a student—take a very flattering picture and a very unflattering picture of the same subject. But maybe the families and friends of shutterbugs are long-suffering enough as it is.) I looked worn, exhausted, almost monstrous. Taking a self-portrait casually in pitch dark is something that I couldn't have done even twenty years ago, much less 40 years ago when I first got into photography. (This is right around the 40th anniversary of when I got into photography in a serious way, incidentally—August 1980.)

But I digress. As I was saying, meaningful comparisons of today's options are sort of, well, a phantasm. Still and all, I'd love to pit something like a Sony RX1R II against an iPhone 11 Pro and let the chips fly. David against Goliath? It wouldn't prove much; but it would be interesting. It's the kind of thing I can consider fun. And after all, I like "snapshots."

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

psu: "Re 'I was so distressed by the loss of all my pictures that eventually I managed to realize, within the dream, that it was only a dream and that my phone had never left the house and was downstairs, safe.' If your dream self set up the iCloud backup for the phone then your dream self would not have lost any pictures. He would just have to download them again when he set up the replacement phone.  :-)  "

Bahi: "You're going to get lots of links to this concept called Alice, based on Micro 4/3. Like you, I wish that camera companies would develop the processors and imaging engines of their cameras to compete with today's run-of-the-mill smartphones, but would be very surprised if it happened.

"People complain about software from Apple, Microsoft and some of the Android phone makers, but the stuff that camera manufacturers have churned out or supplied with their cameras has been monumentally bad. Excellent on-camera software and some really well designed and integrated hardware is needed to make a dedicated camera that offers something better than the Night Mode shots that come out of a Google Pixel or an Apple iPhone.

"It should have been the other way around: the digital camera is huge compared with a smartphone, sensors are relatively large, cameras were big enough to support powerful CPUs and long-lasting batteries, and many of the camera companies were part of conglomerates with wide-ranging software and hardware expertise.

"I wish it had happened. With the camera market shrinking, it's less likely now but never say never."

psu: "After reading the rest of the piece, I have one further thought.

"It should certainly be possible in principle for 'real' cameras to have some of these fancy computational features that have been shipping in the phones for the last few years. But as you say there are various structural (not just economic) reasons why it never happens.

"IMHO the main one is that camera companies are hardware companies that:

1. Only understand one particular mode of hardware (box, lens, capture device)
2. Do not understand software or software usability at all.

"Part of what makes the Night Mode/Portrait/HDR and even 'straight' capture on the phones so much more useful than attempts at similar features on 'real' cameras is that they are transparently integrated into all the ways you are using the device anyway. You just hit the button and they happen.

"For example, in the iPhone 11 the multi-frame/HDR capture mechanism is no longer an extra knob in the camera app. You hit the button, the camera takes multiple frames and then does the contrast processing if it needs to, but even if it does not do that, it's using the multiple frames for noise reduction and/or sharpening, if the subject stood still and that is possible.

"What's important is that you don't have to think about it. The out of camera frames just look better.

"Of course there are ways (usually in third part apps) to bypass this and control it yourself if you want to...but it turns out to be hard to do better than what the camera is doing.

"Long time photo enthusiasts, of course, are conditioned to be suspicious of this sort of thing. We shoot 'raw' (they aren't really raw) files so we'll have more headroom for custom dynamic range, or white balance, or whatever, and so some canned set of decisions are not baked forever into a JPEG that we are then stuck with.

"The phones challenge the assumption that this is the way to work. But I digress.

"The camera company cameras will never work this way because the camera companies are not competent at building features like this.

"I think Night Mode in my Olympus E-M1 would indeed be a great thing...until I remember that to use it I'll need to navigate through 16 levels of on-camera menus...and then to see the result I'll probably have to put the storage card in my computer and run a special Olympus-only tool with a UI that would have been primitive in 1995 to do the post-processing.

"Meanwhile on my phone I hit two buttons, the phone does a thing, and I have the picture in 10 seconds.

"That's the real power of it. It's just there.

"Another example: compare taking panoramas with a 'real' camera to just just sweeping your phone over the scene and having the stitching happen automatically."

Michel Vos: "Re 'But who cares about those cameras now?' I still use the A900. IMHO it is still a very nice camera."

KeithB: "Which is David and which is Goliath?"

Mike replies: Good question!

Look Hard

Do you ever just look hard at the world? Even without a camera in your hand? I saw something wonderful early yesterday morning.

I first learned to "look hard" when I drew from life as a kid. I was good at drawing when I was young, and "artist" was my main identity among my peers for the first 18 years of my life. In the way that kids latch on to simple identities for other kids. I was not so good at painting because my color sense is only so-so at best...you learn whether you have a color sense when you try to paint; it's an acid test for that.

But I was not a true natural as an artist. It's frustrating to be uncommonly good at something yet not quite good enough. I remember reading an article about the guys who make it to Triple-A ball through hard work and singleminded devotion but just don't quite have the gifts to make the majors. Like that.

Trying to draw from life is a good way to hone your observational skills, though, that's for sure. Regardless of how well the drawing turns out!

The fall
I saw something unusual later in the day, too. We had a windstorm—the power went out—and there were big waves and whitecaps on our normally very protected, narrow lake. The neighbors were down on the shared dock trying to keep the tied-up speedboats from smashing against the dock; one guy was trying to lower the flags but the rope had come off the pulley.

I happened to be looking out my window, thinking I might record a short video of the swirling leaves and the thrashing trees for my niece, when I saw a big tree fall. I was looking right at it. It was obvious there was something in the atmosphere passing that spot, because the tops of the trees in the one little area were thrashing around in a frenzy. As I watched, a medium-sized tree—fifty, sixty feet, maybe?—headed for the ground with a sickening crack and a vigorous whump into the ground.

It didn't hit anything except my poor smaller rhododendron that blooms delicate purple flowers in its season. It was pulverized. It's gone. Blitzed.

Speaking of weather, get a load of this completely bizarre weather report:

I've never seen anything like that before. (For those in other parts of the world, 123°F is 50.6°C and 1°F is –17.2°C.)

So here's what I saw this morning. I got up very early, just before dawn. (Not on purpose—in my whole life, I've just never been good at sleeping. I'm better at it now than I ever was, but I still have problems.) Looking out the window, I saw in the half-light of dawn a blustery, overcast day. The windstorm hadn't started yet but an unsettled breeze was lazily tossing the leaves of the trees around. There was still a lot of the dark of night in the sky—the world was shrouded in murkiness. The sky, spitting a little rain, was solid cloudcover, gray with some cobalt blue, beautiful shades of blue, but the overcast was high up so I could see some shape and details in the clouds.

And then, from the sun just rising over the high ground behind me, piercing in from under the overcast, the top of the bluff across the lake was illuminated with a rosy, orangey dawn sunlight.

Mind you, I don't live on the lake, and I didn't get a clear view of this. I saw it through telephone lines and treetops, the line of sunlight on the opposite shore interrupted by a lot of junk in the way. There wasn't any possibility of a picture.

Except in my mind. What if I were at a good vantage point, somewhere where I could see? I could envision the finished photograph in my mind: a darkish, blueish, brooding landscape but with that raggedy line of beautiful dawn sunlight at the crest of the high bluff in an unbroken line, glowing like hope.

As it was, I just stood there and looked at what I could see. The magical light lasted for about ten minutes. Then the sun reached the blanket of cloud-cover and hid.

Sometimes the picture is there, but you aren't.

Still, we get to look.

Mike

[It happened again! Last year a red oak cracked at the crotch between two main branches (they do that sometimes) and half of the upper part of the tree fell to the ground. The other half has been hanging up in the canopy—what loggers call a "widowmaker." They're dangerous because they can come down at any time. So I was out throwing the ball for Butters a few hours ago and there was a loud CRAAACK! from the hillside and the other half of the tree came down with a great clatter and commotion. I knew right away what was happening. It was far enough away from us that I didn't feel endangered, but, just like yesterday, the chances were pretty slim that I'd be standing right there when it came down, such that I could watch it fall and break apart. It's a perfectly still day, too, although I'm sure the wind storm yesterday weakened it and hastened its fall.

I'm glad it's down. Now it can't endanger anyone, not that anyone ever climbs that hill.]

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:

Greg Bolarsky: "To me, photography is a way to share a private moment. But trying to capture it can ruin the very moment I want to share. The fact is, nature has a way of telling you when to put down your technology and simply immerse yourself in the experience. I find that—sometimes—sacrificing a photo for the experience brings much greater rewards. A lot of the time (maybe most of the time), the image I have in my head would never come out the way I see it. If I try too hard to make the image work, I miss the moment. So, I tell a story with words instead of images."

Rob de Loe: "I see much more now than I ever did. I also look more, and notice more. I study the relationships among things, I notice the colours, tones, shapes—all the things that photographers and visual artists who rely on the 'real' take note of. And yet, I photograph what I see less. I don't carry a camera with me all the time. Even when I happen to have a camera, I regularly spend a lot of time looking and seeing, but not making photos. I'm not describing a problem or pathology. I just don't feel the need to make photographs of things I see as much as I used to. Sometimes it's because I've made that photograph before, or because I've seen many versions of that photograph. Other times it's because I have enough experience to know it won't work as a photograph. Often, it's simply because I know that the photograph I could make from what I'm seeing isn't going to add anything to what's out there already. The benefit of being picky is I'm more committed to the ones I do make. I work harder and care more at the taking stage, and I have a clearer sense for what they need at the developing stage. More seeing, and fewer pictures: that's not necessarily a bad thing."

Geoff Wittig: "Just looking hard feeds the soul; nothing quite like being present for one of those perfect little moments. It can be that divine rose light just before the sun crests the hills to the east. Or the dead-calm an hour before sunrise, when the silence and the sharp aroma of wet earth feels like something you can hug. The challenge of distilling that feeling into a photographic print is precisely what I find so compelling about the craft."

PaulW: "One of the best things I've ever done to improve my powers of observation was to take a drawing class. I remember the instructor telling us that to really see the world, draw it. I haven't looked at things the same since. Even though I don't draw much anymore, I frequently pretend I'm drawing something. It's amazing how much more I notice when I do this."

Dogman: "We had a bit of wind recently here in Louisiana. Roofers, contractors, wrecker drivers and arborists are busy these days around town—and I live in the northern part of the State, far from Hurricane Laura's landfall. We were lucky at my house. One big pecan limb fell on our patio furniture, but did not cause much damage, and a smaller limb made a mess of a gutter but missed the roof by inches. I recall hearing the sound of trees and limbs breaking while sitting in the dark due a power outage. Kinda freaky. Kinda scary. Trees can be deadly. Remember Beaumont Newhall's wife and writing partner Nancy was killed by a falling tree while rafting on the Snake River in Wyoming. Our pecan tree drops limbs frequently but this is the first time it did so with a vengeance."

Mike replies: I never knew that was how Nancy Newhall died. I have several of her books. I seem to recall reading that, on average, 150 people are killed by falling trees every year. A friend back in Wisconsin told a truly awful story of a young couple heading home from their family engagement party during a thunderstorm. Only a block from the house a tree fell on the moving car and killed the young man, while leaving his bride-to-be untouched. Truly tragic.

MikeR (partial comment): "There's a weather phenomenon called a microburst. A small parcel of cool air suddenly departs from whatever has been holding it up, and it plunges to the ground. It can affect a surprisingly small area on the ground, and if a tree happens to be there ... (Experienced here May 2019. Two willow trees perhaps 100' from the house flattened, and nothing else. Glad it wasn't 100' closer.)"

Brandon: "I first became interested in digital photography in order to take better snapshots of my kids/vacations and to understand the optics that my iPhone X was trying to mimic in 'portrait mode.' Although both of those goals have been achieved, the more important thing that happened was that I started seeing things everywhere I looked—clouds, graffiti, birds, sunlight reflecting off the lake, even the flowers that grow in my own backyard—that I'm pretty sure I previously knew were there but had somehow never really seen. Initially, I took lots of pictures of these newly-noticed things, but now I often just look hard, even when I have a camera in my hand."

The Big Question....

...Final coda to my previous two retrospective posts, looking backwards at my life over the past 35 years and the things I did wrong and did right. The biggest question probably is, how do I feel really about not having primarily pursued art photography as a career? Because, being a teacher and writer and editor and critic and blogger, actual photographic work took a back seat. Was that the right choice?

I do admit to having some regret. But it's hardly the whole story.

As I was mulling over what to say about this, what came over the virtual transom but this lovely comment from my old friend Steve. Steve put it into words so much better than I could have that there's little I can add.

Steve Rosenblum: "I think that what I did right in my life and my photography have been based upon something that I only realized looking back at it. I won't bore everyone with the details, but last July I retired from a 40-year career in medicine, most of which was spent as a cardiologist, a career I never intended for myself, performing procedures that had not been invented when I started. Both in my career and in my life there was no way to have predicted the opportunities and paths that appeared along the way which offered me choices I could not have imagined. A good general example is that when I was at University from 1970–74 there was no such thing as a desktop PC, or a 'mini' (think the size of a filing cabinet) computer. There was no internet, world wide web, or email besides primitive messaging for people with rare access to mainframe computers, which is the only kind of computer that existed. There were no cell phones or smart phones, much less wrist-watch computers (something we only saw in Dick Tracy cartoons). My first encounter with a flat screen TV was in a short story written by Ray Bradbury called 'The Veldt' that he wrote in the early '50s and I read at age 12 in 1964. No digital cameras of course.

"Nonetheless, I took a year of computer programming in 1971 because the problem solving of using Fortran interested me. (I had to punch my own cards and wait a day for the guy behind the glass booth to hand me a foot of bi-fold paper printout because I made one error in the code!) Later in my life the same curiosity led me to become an IT consultant for heath care systems struggling with newly mandated electronic records, not to mention using Photoshop which was invented by two of my Ann Arbor neighbors.

"My point is, you never know what life will present you with—technological change, who you fall in love with, where you will move to, who you sit next to on a plane, when you will lose your job and then miraculously, end up doing something you love much more! You have to keep your eyes, brain and heart open to what life puts in front of you and then have the courage to follow a new path where it leads you.

"I once saw this saying on a slide during a presentation someone was giving about managing change in a stressed organization: 'When one door closes another one opens. But sometimes there's hell in the hallway!'"

Well put. The map we drew for ourselves when we're young can't take into account the changing terrain we find once we actually have to cross it. It's like Robert Frost's famous poem of the fork in the road. Life is a series of forks in the road, or of those doors opening and closing as Steve says. We pick our paths as we go. We do the best we can. And it depends on all kinds of things, some of which you can control, a lot of which you can't. One thing's for sure, though, you can't do everything.

I like to joke that my retirement plan is to keep working, but if I ever do retire, that's when I'll be an art photographer full time. That'll be good enough.

...First, though, I'll need to pick which camera to use! (Just kidding, just kidding....)

Mike
(Thanks to Steve R.)

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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MikeR: "I'm 78, and finally retired last December, but I still haven't figured out what I want to do when I grow up. All I can add here, besides seconding Steve, is that I mostly followed the advice of that great philosopher, Yogi Berra: 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it!'"

mike sinclair: "I've enjoyed this discussion. As someone who has spent his life photographing, the looking back at the many forks we all have taken is noteworthy."

Crabby Umbo: "I made two large mistakes in my life (among many small and medium ones). The first was not to get advanced college degrees when they were so darn cheap back in the early '70s (I believe I was paying 265 dollars a semester at University of Wisconsin before Reagan defunded the colleges), the second was not reading the handwriting on the wall and leaving the mid-west after the Arab oil embargo and most cities, including Chicago, started a 40-year decline and brain drain.

"I started out doing exactly what I wanted as an advertising photographer, and then started having to change it to stay employed from the late '80s on. Many friends who I went to college with who immediately went to the East and West coasts were able to work doing mostly what they wanted to in the business until they decided to 'retire,' whereas by the middle of my career I was no longer operating any way that I wanted to in the industry. Just holding on.

"I ended up chucking it in and finally going to the East coast, but by that time, too late and too old, and I eventually had to come back to the Midwest over family matters.

"The question you need to ask yourself is, did I spend a fair amount of time doing what I wanted to do? By my late 40s, I was spending pretty much all of my time doing nothing I wanted to do. I knew people that fancied themselves as commercial photographers, and they sort of were (not that good), but they ended up being photography teachers because they were good at it, and they could accomplish far more of what they wanted to in photography, doing that.

"I love the person on here that says they retired at 78! I thought I'd never retire (who retires as a photographer?). You retire when the average age of the people buying freelance services is so young, and they don't care how good you are, they want to use their friends and they don't hire you; and when the corporate gig you finally lucked into was pulled from you when they fired everyone over 55 in a corporate reorg. I barely made it to 63 until I had to rely on social security (and not much of it).

"Mike, you sound like you ended up far better than almost everyone I knew in commercial photography, and doing far more that you wanted to as well. I'd call that a plus!"

...And Six Things I Did Right!

[This is the flip side of yesterday's post, if you haven't seen that already. —Mike]

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I certainly started early enough. I did my first serious documentary project in seventh grade (to calculate the age of kids if you know what grade they're in, take the grade and add five and you'll be within a year). We went on a school trip one Spring vacation from Wisconsin to Washington D.C., and I took two whole "rolls" (126 cassettes) of film on our day trip to the battlefield at Gettysburg. I was a Civil War buff as a kid—this isn't a trivial fact, because poring over many books of Civil War documentary photography turned out to be a big part of my early education about photography. Two cassettes for my Instamatic 104 was twenty-four pictures, in just one day—that was something; I was already an outlier  :-) .  I got my first serious camera at 16, a present from my father, and I had my first one-man show in the dining room of my prep school either that year or the next. I think I started cutting out cool pictures from magazines when I was six or seven years old, and I was drawing at three or four. So I can't say I didn't start early enough.

I saw a whole lot of original work. By the time I got to the Corcoran in 1982 (I had been class of '79 at Dartmouth—never graduated—so I was a few years late already) I was already in the habit of studying pictures. I would make regular circuits of bookstores and libraries and galleries and museums. For years I would go to a big newsstand store on Dupont Circle on Sunday morning because that's when they put out all the new issues out, and I'd page through all the magazines I could and look at the new features. When I was at the Corcoran I learned where the "back stairs" were, up from the basement where the school was located to the public museum above, and when a new photography show was hung I'd pop upstairs during the day to visit it—sometimes every day. For a long time I made a regular walking circuit of galleries and museums in the downtown D.C. area to look at work. I'm particularly grateful to Kathleen Ewing, of Kathleen Ewing Gallery. She was the significant other of my mentor Steve Szabo, who taught at the Corcoran, and she used to let me have access to her stored portfolios of artists' original work. As long as I handled it properly, I could pull out any box and look at the original prints up close, no glass. I could do the same thing at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division in the Jefferson Annex, where I could browse the rows of old filing cabinets containing all the original work from the Farm Security Administration, and I could order up portfolio boxes from the vaults. For really valuable works, an attendant had to stand next to me and handle the work with white cotton gloves, because visitors were not allowed to touch. I tried to limit those requests so as not to terminally pester the staff. But for many lesser portfolios I was trusted to leaf through them myself, especially after they got to know me. That was where I got one of my favorite compliments—the late shift entrance guard at the Jefferson Annex was a big friendly black guy who I often chatted with on the way out. Once, when he saw me coming out again, just before closing time, he exclaimed, "Je--s Chr--t, do you live here?!" I liked that. I was paying my dues. I would travel to different cities to see shows, and I'd see more demotic work at places like historical societies and the National Archives. To paraphrase something Thomas Jefferson said about reading, I had a canine appetite for pictures. For a while I felt like I had seen as much original work up close and personal as anybody. That's not true any more, because I haven't kept up those old habits and I haven't seen as much post-2000 work. At the Photo West trade show in San Francisco once, a friend asked, "what have you seen?" and I surprised him by answering "there's almost nothing here!" We were talking at cross purposes, of course—he wanted to know what new gear I had seen that was interesting, and I assumed he meant what work I had seen—pictures—and there were only about three displays of photographs on the entire show floor. I was always more interested in the pictures.

I stayed in photography. For someone who is basically pliable and accommodating and easily influenced, I can sometimes, about some things, be remarkably stubborn. Once, in a hallway at the Corcoran, I was having a conversation with the then Director of Admissions. He explained to me that if a law school class has ten percent of its graduates not working in law or a related field ten years after graduation, that class would be considered a failure, whereas, if an art school has as many as ten percent of its graduates still working in art or a related field ten years after graduation, it's considered a banner year. I decided in the space of an instant that, come hell or high water, I would still be in the photography field ten years after I graduated. I graduated in 1985, and in 1995 I was Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques magazine in Chicago (now defunct—I left in 2000). In fact, apart from several unwilling descents into near-total unemployment and one short detour into magazine work in an unrelated field, I've pretty much stayed in photography for 35 years. Pyrrhic victory, maybe, but I'm kinda proud of that, because I might as well be.

I kept learning. When I realized I wasn't going to be able to go to graduate school, I made a little list of...hmm, I never remember numbers...maybe 12 things that I thought I should achieve or experience on the way to "mastering" the subject. I think over the years I achieved all but three. Regarding one failure, I recall sitting across the desk from the formidable Eugene Ostroff of the Smithsonian Institution, while he explained to me, patiently but forcefully, that I couldn't just waltz in off the street and ask to work at a major museum for six months just "for the experience." (That had been one of the objectives on my list.) He explained that people worked for years to fit themselves for such jobs, and sometimes still couldn't find opportunities. Made sense to me. But the same thing didn't stop me from doing several other things on the list that technically I shouldn't have been able to do. Now, what keeps me fresh is that I learn from TOP readers all the time, so I feel like I keep my hand in. There's always more you can learn.

I was always on the right side. I'm not going to blow my own horn here, but I think I was always on the the side of the people I was serving—the side of my students when I was a teacher, and of my readers when I was a writer. I was doing what I did because I loved it, not primarily to turn a buck. This percolated to the top every couple of years in one way or the other. Situations would arise that tested my principles. Like when I was offered a large sum of money for a reprint of an article I had written—I was pretty sure the payment would compromise my editorial integrity, so I turned the money down and let the company reprint the article anyway. I never really could be an insider with an attitude like that. But I'm happy with my choices.

Finally, I got to spend years with my hobby as my job. How great is that? I recall the day when reality smacked me upside the head back in downtown Washington, D.C. I was a penniless, literally ragged art student at the Corcoran, and one day I was walking from the Corcoran (at 17th and New York Avenue, right across from the Old Executive Office Building, which in turn is right next to the White House) to a museum on the Mall to see a photography exhibit. As usual I was full of all the stuff I was learning and seeing and doing, and I realized I was actually pitying the poor souls I was passing on the streets—clean-shaven young functionaries, bureaucrats and laywyer-types in dark suits and red Reaganite "power ties." (So their main opportunity for self-expression in matters of dress was essentially dictated too—they all wore red ties. It was supposedly to project that you were powerful. It actually projected that you were conformist.)

I just felt so privileged, and so fortunate. I got to live photography 24/7—work on it, learn it, experiment in the darkroom until two in the morning, hunt down the next picture—and this was all just too great in my opinion. It filled me up. I loved it. I felt so lucky. All those poor pitiable people in their red ties and the females in their "business suits" didn't get to do what I got to do. They didn't get to eat, drink, and breathe photography.

Then it hit me...wait a minute—I'm a poor, raggedy art student with a bad haircut and a cheap camera around my neck. None of these people envy me. They think what they're doing is important. And I'm walking around with a superiority complex?!

I had to smile at myself. I honestly hadn't looked at it that way before.

But you know, I still felt like I was the lucky one.

Mike

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Kylian: "Would love to see the photographs from your first one man show. If you can find them.  ;-) 

"And I might be a tiny bit jealous of your life, raggedy art student and all."

Mike replies: How about a few shots from my first-ever documentary project, of our seventh-grade trip to the Gettysburg battlefield? I haven't had the dining-room show prints for many years. I don't know where or how they were lost—probably to the school, since many of the photos were of students and teachers and a number of them appeared in Yearbooks. I think one was actually used in the school's promotional materials. But I'll bet I could find a few of those Instamatic snaps I made as a 12-year-old. Stay tuned, I'll go look....

[Later in the day] ...Here you go. Hope this serves!

Original size 3 1/2 inches square, including border.

I was excited to be at the famous battlefield I had read so much about, and was very intent on taking pictures, eager to preserve the occasion and the facts. However I was disappointed by my results (not the last time that happened, I have to say). Topography that I thought was clear at the scene did not seem to appear in the pictures. And it's quite possible my imagination was supplying some of what I thought was there to be seen. Of course, fundamentally a battlefield memorial is just countryside, with some plaques and statues and old cannons here and there.

I do remember that, as a whole, the documentary project was a big, vivid early lesson: namely, that a photograph is a thing, but it is not the same thing as the thing.

I ask you, is it any wonder Yr. Hmbl. Ed. began wanting a better camera? Not too long after that I began using my father's Zeiss Ikon Contaflex, with its fixed 50mm ƒ/2.8 Tessar, and that was a big step up. The Zeiss, alas, was stolen from me at my job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand when I was fifteen.

Someday I shall get a good enough camera. I live in faith.

You might think this ill composed, but I took it from a moving tour bus with a camera with one fixed shutter speed. I know, nobody cares how hard you worked.

Two of my friends, Bill Jordahl and Cal Malone. I got to see both of these guys again just a few years ago. I can't recall if Bill is a grandfather now—I think so—but Calvin is. Bill had an older sister (on whom I later had a very big crush), and, with such an advantage, he was thought to be wise in the ways of girls and sex. So one night at the hotel he schooled us boys in the arcana of sexual terms like first base, second base, and third base...and then he sailed right on to fourth base (to which he did not assign the conventional meaning), fifth base, sixth base, seventh base, and so forth. I don't think any of us began to get wise to the fact that he was winging it until his imagination began to falter at around twelfth or thirteenth base. None of us really minded; he had our attention. Several boys and girls came home from that trip as couples, if I recall, including one 8th grade boy with a 7th grade girl, which scandalized the more conservative among us.

There are more of these—well, I told you, there are 24—but I think you get the idea.

Kylian: "Cool cool cool.  :-)  Thank you!"

Six Things I Would Do Differently If I had It All to Do Over Again (and One More)

Here are six things I would do differently if I could live my photographic life all over again. Who knows, maybe one of these will help some photographer somewhere who's still young and has years in front of him or her.

1. I would take more record pictures of the places and people that were important in my life. This leads directly into Item Number Two, which is...
2. ...I would keep my archive in better repair. More organized, better protected. I've moved house six times since my son was born 27 and a half years ago, and I can't really put my hands on anything I want to see. My stuff is all a jumble, or split up here and there, out of order and basically a mess. Or else, pictures I treasured got lost.
3. I would have stuck with film. During the first twenty years of my life as a committed photographer I made 35mm B&W prints, and my work as a whole was coherent and cohesive. That was my medium, for better or worse. I had settled on it. The coming of digital was a near-fatal disruption in the flow of my life's work. It's not that one or the other is better or worse; it's that it took a painfully long time for digital to get up to parity, and the little color snap from a 3-MP digicam, rendered in fast-fading dye ink from a c. 2003 inkjet printer, just doesn't have any continuity or coherence next to the carefully-crafted B&W 11x14 fiber-base print from a decade earlier. They don't go together. I suppose most creative lives straddle such sea-changes, and such changes in a person's body of work merely reflect what's happening in the external world, but I would rather have had consistency. I should have stuck with what I had settled on.
4. This sounds contradictory to the above, and maybe it is, but I would have taken digital more seriously. I had a tendency to mentally segregate various techniques into levels of seriousness—such-and-such deserves respect, such-and-such doesn't. For example, when I was younger I reserved fiber-base paper for serious work and relegated RC prints to proofs and workprints. A false divide—nowadays some of my old fiber prints look just a touch dingy, and I have 35-year-old RC prints that look like I made them three weeks ago. But who knew that was going to happen? Digital in the early days was trivial, and I didn't take it seriously. Easy to do when the quality was going from "completely unacceptable except as a curiosity" (the first digital camera I used fell far short of one megapixel) to "barely adequate." That prejudiced me, and I lagged behind when it came to engaging seriously with it.
5. I would have spent less time shopping. Gear doesn't matter all that much, turns out. I've partially made my living entertaining people with gear discussions, though, and as a reviewer, so it's been a good thing too.
6. I would have printed smaller. Throughout most of my era, big prints were more prestigious, and I often worried and fretted and accommodated to working larger. I never needed to, turns out. Made no difference except that I created a storage headache for myself. If I had just made prints on letter-sized paper all along, that would have been fine. The only reason to make prints big is so they can hang on a wall.

So then what's that last thing? I wish I could have started TOP when I was younger! I'm very lucky to have found the perfect job for me, the one that uses my talents and suits my skills. But blogs weren't a thing much before I started this one in 2005, and I was 48 at that time. That's a little late in life to find your bliss.

But hey, better late than never.  :-)

Mike

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Aaron: "Your last point about printing smaller—I hadn’t realized it but I agree. I spent (and I suppose still do spend) an inordinate amount of time wondering whether a sensor or film size will allow me to make large (huge!) prints of landscapes with lots of detail. But truth be told, my favorite way to view prints is on the couch holding them in my lap or perhaps sitting at a desk. And for that, 6x9-ish or maybe 8x12-ish is as large as I can comfortably go. And for that any modern digital format or any size film format can do a good job. After nearly 20 years of photography (non professionally), I’ve printed larger than 8x12 probably a couple of dozen times—barely a one a year on average."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "Number six: No! I would have printed larger. One of the clearest things having more money, and digital printing, have shown me is that I and most other people like photos considerably larger than they were reasonably able to get them in the film era, and I would attempt to work with that."

Mike replies: As ever, it depends on the individual!

Do-Over

Hey, assuming you are of an age to even think about such things, what would you do differently if you had your photographic life to live over again?

Mike

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Albert Smith: "I wish I could have embraced a more minimalist approach in terms of gear. If I go to the closet where I store my equipment, it could put some camera store's used gear sections to shame. I have so many of 'the last lens I'll ever need,' having purchased it because one of my photo heroes used it in some magazine article. I use to carry huge bags of glass around the world and would suffer paralysis by analysis. One camera, one lens. It's got to be mentally and financially liberating."

John Berger (partial comment): "Shoulda focused more on the things that were changing before my eyes, but somehow I could not see them, like family, friends, events, environment. Oh well, other than that it has been an amazing, satisfying, and rewarding adventure! Ever onward, with Good Light!"

Ned Bunnell: "I was an idiot to sell my Focomat V35 enlarger and its 40mm ƒ/2.8 Focotar lens."

James: "Carry a camera more often. Especially to those 'Nah, won't need a camera there' places."

MarkB: "My photographic life hasn't been too bad, but that said, it would've been more consistent and pleasurable if I had done a few things earlier: #1—Not believe everything written in online forums or comments section (yours excepted); #2—Go to more galleries in-person to experience different styles of photography; #3—Concentrate more on 'seeing' photos around me, rather than trying to capture every shiny thing; #4—Be less self-conscious when photographing people on the street."

Stan B.: "Currently reading American Witness about Robert Frank by R.J. Smith. Had a good laugh over this heart-to-heart about life choices he imparted to none other than Ralph Gibson, who was perplexed about his love for a woman whose lifestyle he could not afford: '"Well, there are two choices," Frank said. Pretty fast he could become a successful commercial photographer. Make a lot of money and keep the girl. That's one. "Or you could remain an artist and wait a while, until you become as famous as me." Then Frank turned to Gibson and delivered the ju-jitsu finish. "Actually, you only have one choice."'"

Mike relies: Hope I got all those quote marks right! I'm quoting you, and then you're quoting the book, in which R.J. Smith is quoting Frank. If I'm wrong, don't tell me.  :-)

Greg Heins: (partial comment): "[I wish] I'd simply worked harder earlier. I was waiting for it to come to me, instead of going out there every single day to drag it home."

Mike replies: Wow, I love that. Well put.

PaulW: "I would have carried a camera, and used it, far more often than I did. I regret the shots I didn't make."

Bob Keefer: "Having spent nearly four decades as a newspaper reporter, I wish I had brought my own camera to every single interview I ever did and photographed the subject. I'd have a heck of a file of portraits, from Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Yo Yo Ma and Christie Brinkley to less glamorous inventors, writers, poets, actors, murderers, con men and corrupt politicians—interesting people, all. Ah, well. You can't do it all, can you?"

Bob Rosinsky: "I spent way too much on equipment to get my business up and running back in 2006–7. Wasn't it Edward Weston who advised not to become a slave to overhead?"

Animesh Ray: "I would read more, travel more, think more and take more photos of what life is like. I left out an important part...I would try to be more courageous in finding a unique voice."

Bill Pearce: "I try to not dwell on the past. No percentage in that. I've made plenty of mistakes. Don't wish to revisit them."

Weekes James: "Nothing. What an enjoyable trip it has been for me. New discoveries every month. More to learn. The best part about now (read digital) is that once you get a print the way you want it, you can make copies easily and over time improve on them."

Mike + Video = ?

Well, I've been trying to learn how to make short videos for the Print Crit feature. I've received six prints in the mail so far, which is great—that'll keep me going for a while. The video thing, though, is not going too well, because I have a tendency to "give up early" on things that don't intrinsically interest me. Not such a bad characteristic in my case because the opposite is true too—if I'm motivated to learn something, I'm on it like a dog on a bear. So I'll keep trudging, for a while at least. I can picture what I want, but for now it's like the old New Hampshire joke: "you can't get there from here."

Maybe my friend Jerry could tutor me. He's great at making videos. For years, Jerry recorded all sorts of talks and lectures about this region and its history, made multiple DVDs of the recordings, and donated them gratis to local libraries, historical societies, and other appropriate repositories. He's just retired from that activity, but isn't that great? I believe he made over a hundred videos for the edification of future generations. Nice gift to the community.

The GoPro isn't going to cut it for me, by the way. The problem with a GoPro on my forehead is that I can't see what I'm recording, which wouldn't work for this. Well, that and the fact that it's got a wide-angle lens with lots of distortion.

Home Theater?
At least I'm consistent, though, when it comes to pictures that move. For six months in '93, after taking a business seminar for photographers, I took a job moonlighting at a high-end audio salon. The teacher of the seminar, who was a business whiz and made a fortune as a photographer, had revealed that the average professional photographer billed only two and a half days a week, and exhorted us to find ways to earn money in all the extra time. I analyzed my work patterns, which revealed that I was...yep, billing two and a half days a week. So I took the job at the stereo shop on Wednesday evenings and weekends. It was a highly entertaining little sidelight of my work life—wouldn't have missed it for the world. But the thing that frustrated the boss about me was that I wouldn't learn home theater, which was all the rage at the time. I learned a whole lot about the two-channel music-listening equipment we sold, but when it came to movies at home, well, not only was I not teachable, but I was kinda antagonistic to it as well. I wrote an article during that time called "In Praise of Theater-Theater." The premise was that you should go to movie theaters to watch movies.

(By the way, sadly, COVID-19 is going to be the death-knell of movie theaters. You watch. The studios have been itching to get around the exclusive-release clause that's been jealously guarded by the theater industry, and the pandemic is going to provide them their excuse. Without exclusive rights to new releases for that all-important early period, in-person movie theaters are going to wither and fade away. Is the Uptown theater in D.C. still operating? Or was it, rather, when the contagion hit? That was the nicest movie theater I can remember. I hope the pandemic doesn't kill that.)

In the late 'aughts I got interested in film noir (mainly for the cinematography, which I've always appreciated) and got it in mind to collect DVDs of movies. Well, I found the box of them in the barn the other day. Looking through them, I realized a bunch of them are things I've never watched. Kinda funny. Of maybe three dozen movies I bought before I ended my DVD collecting phase, I've still never watched about a third of the ones I bought. Hey, give me time. I've only owned them for a decade.

YouTube videos are problematic for me too. They mean I have to turn off the music. Every time a video pops up that I probably should look at, the cost has to be weighed: is this really worth turning off the music for? Most of the time I'll think, yeah, I'll watch this...but, later. If you subtract pool and snooker matches, I'd say maybe half of my YouTube viewing is things like this wonderful old TV footage of Dizzy Gillespie in his prime. I love the interaction with the crowd that starts out where he says, "I am eternally grateful for your boundless enthusiasm." Classic Diz. (I got to see him live at the Cellar Door in D.C., although my ears are still ringing.) Check out James Moody murdering that flute! He could really play. The only thing wrong with this video is that they end the show halfway through a James Moody sax solo. Augh! Sacrilege!

So even when I'm watching videos, half the time I'm still listening to music. Like I say, I'm consistent. I like the written word over video presentations of information, I like two-channel music reproduction over moving pictures. It's just the way I am. We've all got to have our priorities. On the other hand, I like photographic prints on paper, too, so that's my motivation here: sharing my thoughts about them with you in the most effective way. Short of mailing them on to each of you.

By the way, the teacher of that photography business seminar, despite his great success in our field, eventually quit photography to concentrate purely on finance, where he earned ten times as much money. We each have our priorities, like I say.

Mike

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Marshall Smith: "I thought you might get a laugh out of this photo from 2013, when a GoPro was a novel item. This guy recorded his dog as he competed at a yearly discdog event in Dublin, Ohio."

Photo by Marshall Smith

Tom Zillman: "I’ve enjoyed photography as a hobby since I was a kid, a time period that’s approaching 50 years now. Many times I thought I would enjoy videography as well, but every time I tried it, I ended up with a product that I couldn’t bear to watch, much less subject anyone else to.

"A couple years ago I saw an advertisement in our local paper seeking volunteers for the local public access TV station. Now after two years of volunteering at the station, adult education classes in TV production and video editing, and making numerous videos for our local library and my church, I finally feel that I can produce a watchable video. The point of all of this is to say hang in there. There may be people who can pick up a camera and make a compelling video, but despite what book titles may say, learning videography in a weekend may not be a realistic expectation for many of us."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "I believe the Uptown closed a few months back. Great place except for the few roaches that had a tendency to crawl on you mid-flick. Out of Africa was the last film I saw there and it was amazing on that big screen."

Mike replies: That's so sad. What use are billionaires, when no one will step up and save a thing like that?

James Z: "I'd like to comment about the Uptown. I don't know if it is still open, but it is a very nice theater. Right up there with the Ziegfield in New York, NY. One nice little tidbit about the Uptown is that it was one of a small number of theaters designed for three-strip Cinerama projection. There are three projection booths, and the original screen was deeply curved, and was made of a bunch of 1" wide strips of fabric, attached to a frame at the top and bottom of the screen. Each booth had a pair of projectors that would cover one-third of the screen. The projectors in the booths were synchronized together. It was the ultimate wide screen system. Of course, that is all long gone, and was by the time I visited there around 2000. There were only a few movies released in three-strip format due to cost. But the Uptown was a special place due to that history."

emptyspaces: "Video is harder than everyone thinks, so don’t feel bad...my job is producing videos for a retailer and we have three full-time videographer/editors doing it. All three of them went to school for it. I am a converted copywriter who kind of keeps track of them and keeps them on brand, but I am impressed with their skill and have learned a ton through osmosis."

Picturehunting

I think Michael Perini and a couple of other commenters were right the other day. Sometimes you just need get out with the camera and get the rust off.

There's that old expression, "separate the wheat from the chaff." Separating what's valuable from what's worthless. Most of what we do as photographers is mere chaff. All the arguing over equipment, all the status-markers we grasp for and throw around at others, all the justifying verbiage...and especially all the meaningless junk pictures we make around the pictures that matter: all that's chaff. 

What we're really doing is hunting. The "moral equivalent" of hunting, anyway*. Hunting for a few pictures that hit, that have punctum—the pictures we want, that we crave, that move us.

That's pretty sententious, actually. What I mean is decent pictures that you can make and that you like well enough.

They're out there; you just have to go out to find them and bring them home.

Hunting was Cartier-Bresson's metaphor. People forget he spent a year as a big-game hunter—although all his negatives from that year were ruined by fungus on the lens, and all he came home with was a case of black-water fever. If Jay Maisel said that you should go out "emptied out" in order to be ready for what chance presents you with, it's because that's the task...finding that shot that tells, that has the magic. That shot might not be pretty; it might not tick off all the conventional boxes, might not be dressed up in all the fashionable processing with the hyped-up detail and exaggerated color that are the equivalent to us of styled hair and fashionable clothes—presentable in the sense that it will be upvoted on your chosen photo site, which might be the equivalent of a painting being selected for acceptance into the Academy in the 1800s.

It's hard—I mean difficult—for me to ignore all the nattering in my monkey-mind that strives to justify the misses, and make excuses, and assert ego, and tries to make the case for all the pictures that are, in truth, not quite "it." Somehow we have to be open to the shot that works, the one that hits the target. No matter how subtle, contentless, or quiet.

Somehow you have to know when the magic happens and know you actually got something. How we recognize which ones those shots are for us defines who we are as artists. (I almost never use the term "artist.")

We should not get demoralized by all the chaff. Yup, sometimes I can go out hunting a picture and come back with a full card, yet there's nothing there! All that striving and struggling going through the motions and nada. No shot that makes it, that matters. Like a hunter wandering in the woods all day or sitting for hours in a blind who ends up with nothing to show for it, or a fisherman who keeps his line in the water for hours and comes home empty-handed. That happens. The difference with us is that we come home with a card full of imposters. A creel full of fake fish! You'll probably sit at the computer and pick a few anyway, and pretend they're the hits. Even though they're not. I do that sometimes. Later, it always becomes clear: that wasn't one.

The ability to recognize the picture that matters among the rest, and pluck it out of the flow and find some way to honor it (which used to be making it into a "fine print," so called then), and to disregard the rest as chaff—mere distraction, trappings, fluff, stuff that evaporates—makes an art photographer an art photographer. That's what I've always believed, anyway.

If you go picturehunting, you're just hunting for the one. The hit. And that's all that matters. Just get out and knock the rust off and you'll find it—or it'll find you. It'll happen. The pictures will come. It almost can't be helped. It's the way it works.

That's the theory, anyway.

Okay, I'm starting to feel better now!

Mike

*It was William James, psychologist brother of the novelist Henry, who coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," in a 1910 essay.

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Dave Jenkins: "Following the advice of David Hurn (you could do much worse) in his book On Being a Photographer (with Bill Jay), I began to work on projects instead of shooting at random about 25 years ago. My success rate has been much higher and my satisfaction has been much greater."

Learning and Looking

Honesty: isn't it refreshing? Adam Paul of "A Quirky Guy With a Camera" said this at the outset of a 2017 review:

"I'm not a photographer. Though I may occasionally use my 'Spidey Senses' and put forth some wonderful results, I'm not a 100% true, dyed in the changing bag cloth, 'photographer.'

"I'd best describe my make up as one part photographer, one part history buff, one part collector, and one part 'gear head.' The result is a quirky guy who likes using multiple classic old cameras to take photos."

Helps to know yourself!

I'm not a photographer either, I'm sad to admit, although at one time I dearly wanted to be one. I'm one part photographer, two parts writer, and one part gearhead.

Maybe three parts writer.

The kind of photographer I wanted to be, back when, was what was called an "art photographer," as well as a fine-art printmaker. "Art photographer" is not a mainstream term any more; at the time it was an ordinary term, at least in Washington D.C. where I studied. It meant someone who didn't do assignments but photographed anything he or she wanted to photograph, sold prints for money, had shows in galleries, placed prints in museum collections, and published the occasional book. Many photographers work that way still, although most of them are older now.

I lacked something...perhaps talent, or drive, or self-belief, or something urgent to say, or consistency—the kind of consistency that imparts an identity that other people can grasp easily. (You need that, to become known.) One thing I'll give myself is that I didn't lack for a work ethic. I worked diligently. But a lot of what I worked hard at was learning, and looking. Rather than creating.

Another thing that might have hampered me, if I'm honest, was a mismatch between the type of photographs I aspired to make and my temperament and personality. I've long been convinced that people gravitate to making the kinds of photographs that are comfortable for them to make—that match their psychological make-up, you might say. A person who is introverted and likes solitude might gravitate to landscape, for instance. An adrenaline junkie might become a combat or adventure photographer. A person who loves problem-solving and a variety of challenges might become a studio advertising photographer, working to realize the visions of agency art directors.

I remember hearing about a wedding photographer who loved going to weddings. He thought they were great parties, he was wholly susceptible to the sentimental romantic vibe (which I always assumed was three-fifths fake—which says more about me than about weddings), and he was all-in with the idea that his pictures were going to be treasured by the lucky couple forevermore. He adored being a wedding photographer. He couldn't imagine how any other kind of photography could be more fulfilling.

...Whereas I've done two weddings in my entire life. I'm proud of the job I did in each case—I worked very hard and finished each of the jobs responsibly, although in both cases it took me a long time—but as far as I'm concerned, two weddings is plenty for one career! Two per weekend in season? I'd rather be a museum guard (my nightmare job, because I fear being bored).

Anyway, I like candid life-on-the-fly pictures of people going about their lives, but unfortunately I'm psychologically ill-suited to being able to take such pictures. I'm awkward with people. I radiate a sort of—what? Standoffishness, or reserve, or formality—that doesn't tend to put people at ease. And I have to fight against getting flustered and anxious when interrelating with subjects. I do get the occasional success, of course (because photography is like fishing—get your line in the water, and every now and then you catch one), but I wasn't made for the job. Ironic pictures of empty, lonely spaces and quirky, odd found objects, those are things my particular temperament is better suited for. But I don't really like taking that kind of picture and I'm not especially moved by the results.

The great photographers of people tend to either be forthrightly brash and brazen, simply taking the pictures they want without reticence or shyness, or else they're so mild and unthreatening that they blend into the background and become invisible, or they tend to be "people people." Bruce Gilden might be the paradigm of the first type. Helen Levitt or Vivian Maier (or so I imagine) might stand for the second type, while Alfred "Eisie" Eisenstadt was an exemplar of the third type. Even Jackie Kennedy, who famously hated being photographed, loved Eisie, and let him get close to her with his Leicas.

My early mentor, Steve Szabo, when students asked him, "What should I photograph?", would answer, "What can you photograph?" It's a subtle question. It has to do not only with what you have access to, or your skills, but what kind of person you are.

Know thyself.

Mike

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Wenshu Chen: "I like taking pictures of people on the street and did get some good ones. But there were a couple of great pictures I only took with my eyes although I had my camera with me; I just didn’t have the guts to raise it. I wish I were a bit more aggressive in terms of getting a good frame."

Lars Jansen: "Re 'I'm awkward with people, I radiate a sort of—what? Standoffishness, or reserve, or formality—that doesn't tend to put people at ease, and I have to fight against getting flustered and anxious when interrelating with subjects': Yep, that's me. All the talk about getting out of your comfort zone does not tackle the problem that you need particular skills to do (for example) good street photography. In the case of people photography, you also need a genuine interest in people. So I'll just enjoy what others can create when photographing people, I would only radiate the intent to create a picture, not interest in the person.

"Probably why you are good at more formal portraits: you are in control of the environment and moment, and you do have that sincere interest in the other person. Actually, come to think of it: I think you would be able to do a form of street photography with people; just not the fast version where you quickly snap pictures of passers-by. Maybe first a conversation and then a more formal impromptu portrait on the street?"

Patrick Murphy: "I love your writing, especially when it adds the personal to the general. Kind of like the delicious icing on a fundamental cake. This was an insightful post, and also potentially helpful to persons starting out or struggling with expressing their photographic vision. To do really good work, I think you have to know yourself. You hit it on the head—go where your strengths and interests are. Simple, but not a lot of people really listen to their inner voice. You do that well and that permeates your writing. (P.S.—Plus you can change lives. I'm on a plant-based whole food diet because of you, so thanks!)"

marcin wuu: "I'm not either. I'm a portraitist. I just happen to use camera to make my portraits. If I didn't have a camera, I'd draw, paint, sculpt or whatever else medium I'd have on hand. It just happened photographic portraiture is so easy, and I'm lazy."

Mim: "Thanks for putting this so clearly Mike. I have a photography mentor who keeps pushing me to 'stretch myself' into genres (like portraiture) that I'm temperamentally not suited for. I keep trying to tell him that I'm happy to stretch in other ways but that portraiture doesn't work (and after 40+ years I should know).

"I have a talent for abstracts, landscape details, and a bunch of other things. Portraits, I can occasionally grab a good one but it's luck, not good management. I'm catching a candid rather than eliciting a response. Interestingly, most people that do have the right knack/personality seem to think that it's something that can be learnt, whereas to me it's clearly something innate that I just don't have despite decades of trying to learn.

"We have a tradition in the extended family to leave cameras around at family occasions and it's noticeable that almost everyone else's people photos are better than mine. Meanwhile I'm the only one who is at all serious about photography, and my non-portrait photos are streets ahead of theirs.

"I'll 'stick to my knitting' and build on my strengths rather than bash away at my weaknesses with very little result."

David Dyer-Bennet: "'Know yourself' is such a classic concept. True, even useful, to some extent even actionable (there are ways to test self-knowledge some, ways to increase it in some directions; though none of them are so magically powerful they can overcome an absolute mental unwillingness to see yourself).

"And this may be one of the most valuable posts on TOP, despite being short and only barely about photography (the examples are all from photography, but the principles apply universally).

"I've known I was a 'documentary' photographer from before I got in the darkroom. When I first got a camera (negatives back to second grade, so the camera was then or a little earlier) my interest was things in my world to share with others. While I play at other things, 'art' in the various forms largely, it's the documentation I really value (and some landscape, etc., is partly interesting as documentary, to me; that's what Ansel Adams, one of my early and ongoing favorites, thought he was doing for example).

"While I've done stuff that's essentially 'product photography,' for me it was for documenting the objects, or the process of working on the objects, or something. And I do not love working even one-quarter as carefully as a good product photographer has to to produce professional results.

"Weddings come fairly naturally, though—they're just a particular flavor of event photography, which is all about documenting the event. I've avoided commercial wedding photography (did one wedding for strangers) because the stress level of the primary participants can be challenging, and because the stakes are high, but that's a rational decision, not an emotional dislike of the work. I shot weddings for friends each of the last two years, and it was fun. (My friends' weddings tend not to be heavy on sentimental romantic vibe, which is fine with me.)

"I'm also getting more and more into collecting and organizing older photos of things I'm interested in, largely science fiction fandom. Making the documentary work available to people! It's all connected impulses."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I recall a time when I learned a bit about myself as a photographer. On a great trip to the Galapagos, I realized that what I love to photograph is people. That is something the Galapagos offered very little of. People intrigue me. I'm at ease with them. I'm very comfortable photographing them. And I like the challenge of disarming them for the process of photographing them. My next trip was to Cuba."

Gary Nylander: "Interesting when you say that people gravitate to making photographs that are comfortable for them to make. That's good advice. Although for me I was definitely stepping out of my comfort zone when I started my newspaper career in 1976. I didn't really plan on being a newspaper photographer, nor did I think that it would be something that I would enjoy doing for my entire working life. When I started my photography career I was 18 years of age and very shy. I guess you could say I didn't really know thyself, although that changed very quickly. Before my high school graduation, I had aspirations to be a photographer of some kind and had knocked on the doors of local photo studios which didn't get me anywhere. One day my father suggested I try the local newspaper, a new weekly had just started publishing a few doors down from the auto-body shop where he worked.

"So I went in there and talked to one of the owners, I showed him some of my pictures, he gave me some film, that led to me hanging around then I started doing the film development and printing for them. Three months later I was doing photo assignments for the paper and before the year was out I was on staff. From there I moved onto a small daily newspaper in Ontario then moved back to my home province of British Columbia and spent the majority of my career at another small daily in Kelowna, B.C.

"All in all a very enjoyable 41-year career. Even at smaller size newspapers, the job can be rough and tough and very competitive. Not really the kind of photography made for a guy like myself who is introverted and likes solitude, and yes, I did gravitate to making landscape photos on my time off. Anyways always good to know thyself or get to know thyself as the journey proceeds. Sometimes taking a more challenging pathway in photography can also be rewarding."

Notes on the State of Photography

It's funny, but I've been feeling a little demoralized lately. It's like my connection to photography is feeling a bit tenuous, and/or my interest is at a low ebb (like the tide, it comes and goes). I can't quite organize my thoughts on the topic, and I can't untangle a dispassionate appraisal of the "the state of photography in 2020" from what might merely be my own personal passing psychological condition at the present moment. (I'm recovering from a long sickness, so there's that...I'm not suffering and I'm not unhappy, but at the same time you know how that is—things haven't felt "normal" and I don't have my usual level of day-to-day energy. And it's Winter—a curious climate change / non-Winter Winter. It's been warm and rainy compared to what used to be normal. I'm a little "down." Is all that just carrying over into my other interests? Could be.)

So I've been trying to get a handle on what's changing in the field. Here are a few notes:

• Photographs are no longer objects. They're mostly files we see on screens. The implications are far-ranging and would need a lot of discussion and analysis to parse properly, but one gross difference is that things that aren't objects are more difficult to buy and sell, collect and archive, etc. Generally, information (of all kinds—writing and music too) detached from its carrier or container is more difficult to control as a commodity.

• Almost all photographs are color now.

• Expertise and specialized knowledge is not as important any more, and may be declining in the amount of respect it receives. When I posted about the demise of PDN, the former periodical for commercial and studio pros, our friend Kirk Tuck, an accomplished longtime pro from Austin, Texas, said "And professional photography has now left the room...." At almost every stage in its history, increasing convenience encouraged the incursion of interlopers on the turf of established photographers who were trying to practice photography as a business. So this is really nothing new—it's closer to a constant state of affairs than it is to a new problem. Whatever the objective state of the profession, though, it seems true that expertise just isn't as essential as it was even pretty recently.

• Mechanical means of recording an image from life (analog photography, roughly) rather strongly resisted easy modification, and revealed to the practiced eye all but the most skillful attempts at manipulation. Now, curiously, as technical excellence is becoming commonplace, photographs are simultaneously becoming more accurate and detailed yet also less trustworthy in terms of what they purport to record and present to the viewer. They're sharper and clearer and yet could well be less true.

• There's just a whole lot of confusion with video now, and video is running roughshod over still photography in lots of ways.

• Vast numbers of people, including many former enthusiast/hobbyist photographers, are apparently happy enough with smartphones for what amounts to point-and-shoot photography.

I should point out here that no value judgements are implied by these bullet points. With this item, for instance, it's a double-edged sword and both good and bad might be said to be coming of it. Really, it's not good, it's not bad, it just is.

• "Real" (i.e., dedicated) cameras are starting to become a little like fine watches...relegated to connoisseurs but fundamentally unnecessary. We're not there yet, but that's the direction it appears to be going in. And there isn't quite enough distinction between OK cameras and really good cameras to suit enthusiasts. Most of us would like it if there were more separation. The fact is, you can buy a really superb lens and put it on a very expensive camera, yet it's not that easy to tell the difference, in most images, between it and a merely decent lens on a merely good camera. Yes, you can tease out the differences if you try, and knowledgeable experts can (sometimes) tell the difference visually, but mostly when we look at pictures we're not really aware of strong qualitative distinctions—we're just looking at pictures. You'd think this would be a good thing, but humans like signifiers (of status, quality, intention, commitment, etc.).

• The boom period during following the digital transition (which I define as 1994–2011) is over. Growth has collapsed, and consolidation and failures are sure to continue. Along with this, is the popularity of photography in the culture as a whole also diminishing along with the camera business? It seems so to me, but I'm not sure I have any real basis by which to evaluate. It's more like a feeling, which isn't very useful.

• Question: Is "photographer" becoming less of a meaningful identity in the public perception? That identity has always morphed and changed, but it seems to me that "photographer" was always something fairly commonly understood and generally respected. I recall a joke where someone at a cocktail party is asked "and what do you do?" and answer is, "oh, I breathe," or, "I eat. Do it every day." It might not be long before answering that question with, "I'm a photographer," might be met with a retort such as, "of course, but what do you do?" What does it mean to be "a photographer" in 2020, and what does it mean relative to what it meant in 2000 or 1980?

• I have questions, too, about photography as an expressive medium. The apparatus and conceptual structure meant to confer claims of original individual expressivity to various photographers always seemed to me faintly contrived—the subversive nature of photography kept interrupting and popping through the efforts of individuals to bend it to what's now demotically called their "personal vision." But the fact is you'd never not recognize a Lisette Model, or fail to see a little of Arbus in any Arbus, or mistake an Eisenstadt for a Friedlander. I see less personality and more anonymity in a lot of photography these days. But that might be totally a false reading, the result mainly of the kinds of things I happen to look at and the infinitesimal slice of photography I get to lay my eyes on.

That last will be my final point for now—Sir Isaac Newton is reported to have said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Substitute ocean of photographs for "ocean of truth" and you'll have something that's been unavoidable for a while now: "photography" as a whole is utterly unknowable because it's so incomprehensibly vast. It probably always was, but, nowadays, no one can pretend otherwise.

Mike

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

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Darin Boville (partial comment): "iPhones are amazing. They have brought the magic back to photography for me. I've actually giggled—I'm fifty-four years old!—as I watched a Night Shot photo appear on my phone when I first purchased it. My hear rate actually increased when I was shooting during an artist residency in the Mojave Desert—I could feel it, my God—as the images from my tripod-mounted phone appeared on the screen, blackness all around me, glowing pixie dust on the screen.

"I used to know, from a technical point of view, how photographs were made. When iPhones came I knew how the images were made—they were using techniques more or less what you could do on your own, though much more quickly and accurately. But the new phones crossed some sort of line in recent years, especially with the newest models. I don't know what they are doing anymore. They are not just doing regular darkroom stuff, just way faster. I'm no beginner. [...] I'm not afraid of inconvenience in the pursuit of excellence, not shy about expense or suffering to get the image I want to get. But the new phones are magical. They are incredibly exciting, incredibly freeing. People should be happy enough with these phones, my God, and to dream of the future!"

anthony: "And yet, in this vast ocean of truth/images, some speak to us as no others. Many years ago, at the start of a hitchhiking trip around the British Isles, I visited the National Gallery in London, with the intention of taking in as much as I reasonably could in a day. I was moving at a good pace until I came to the 16th century Dutch Masters, including Pieter Brueghel. That room and those images stopped me dead in my tracks, and I only pulled myself away after a couple of hours. I felt it then, and remember it now, as a state of reverie. And a dip in the 'ocean of truth.'"

PhotoDes: "Your remarks do seem to be dispiriting, which may have been your intention or maybe a consequence of your recent illness—or maybe a reaction to the gray winter days. I guess I'm fortunate that I don't feel the same way. I've been maintaining my interest in photography lately with my collection of old cameras and lenses and trying some new lighting techniques. It's fascinating how small changes in lights and modifiers can make big differences. I haven't been caught up in the urge for a new camera or tricking out my smartphone to keep my interest. For me, it's been trying new things with the equipment that has already proven itself. And I don't think I'm missing that extra sharpness or clarity—I'm still getting some photos published on occasion. Photography really is about 'doing,' despite the possible retorts."

Robert: "Best article for ages. Thoughtful and interesting. What you mention fits alongside many of my thoughts. It is a conundrum and cannot simply be addressed by reverting to the nostalgia of the time of exclusively analogue photography, though there was a simpler and more exclusive field of identification then. I would be very interested to see these thoughts develop further. One thing that strikes me is that image making used to be more of a commitment in analogue days—film was a finite resource meaning frames cost money and getting images into a visible form required more work. Of course, in the age of instant gratification that can be seen as a drawback, but I wonder whether it did not also bring advantages of work, craft, and the value that comes from that level of input, and also a certain type of prestige and an added uniqueness to each printed image. (Of course contradicted in book runs, if one was lucky/talented enough to be published)."

[I've only singled out a few to Feature, but many comments to this post were thoughtful and added a lot to the discussion. —Ed.]

David Comdico: "The State of Photography: more people then ever are making photographs and have an interest in photography. Film photography has made a comeback and new formulations are coming to market. Camera makers continue to refine their product line. And yet, the question of how to make Art with these tools remains as elusive as ever."

The Magic of Photography

Mike Plews wrote: "If you go to places where photographers tend to gather (like national parks) pulling out a vintage piece of film gear generally strikes up a nice conversation. If you break out large-format gear and get under the dark cloth you will attract a crowd of both photographers and non-photographers alike, and inviting them to take a look at the ground glass is an excellent way to generate a little positive energy in a time when we could use some. After all, as every TOP regular knows, half the fun of photography is talking about it with people."

That's something I forgot to mention yesterday about my long-gone old Wista view camera. I used it extensively when teaching photography classes. It was always a big day when students lined up behind the camera for a chance to go under the dark cloth and look at the image on the ground glass. There were always exclamations of amazement and delight from under the shroud. It didn't hurt that the camera looked so exotic and old-fashioned, beautifully crafted of beautiful materials. High spirits were the order of those days. They were events.

I even used this to get out of a potential mugging! One day in DC I emerged from the dark cloth to find myself closely surrounded by three inner-city teenagers, who must have been purposely stealthy as they came up to me. As soon as I saw them they began to talk threateningly about why a white guy like me thought he could wander around in that part of town and how much a camera like mine might be worth if they were to sell it. I stammered awkwardly for a minute or two about how there's no market for old cameras, then remembered an article I'd read: if you feel threatened, the article advised, make friends. People don't attack friends. If you feel a cop is about to penalize you for something, for instance, ask for his help with something—it transforms you, in his eyes, from a miscreant requiring correction into a member of the public requiring assistance. It changes his own conception of his relationship to you. I ended up showing all three of those guys the view on the ground glass, and explaining to them why the image was upside down and how photographs are made and so forth. As soon as the first guy saw the ground glass and exclaimed "Wow! That's so cool!" in an excited voice from under the dark cloth, well, then the other two couldn't wait to see it too. We were all quite friendly by the time we parted ways twenty minutes later.

As far as I'm concerned there are, or were, three magical aspects to photography. The first was what we're talking about—seeing the world on the ground glass. The image is at the same time remarkably precise and yet completely transformed. Movement becomes magical. It's Alice-in-Wonderlandish, somehow, literally topsy-turvy, both this world and an alternate world, at the same time. It's like it renders the world into an abstracted scale model of itself. Sometimes I would stare, transfixed, at the ground glass for many minutes on end. Sometimes I'd set up the camera just to watch the world that way. Photographs were, if not superfluous, secondary.

The second is the emergence of the image on the photo paper in the developer tray. There was something wonderful about a solution that looks like water under the safelight revealing an invisible latent image you'd just created with nothing but light. The magic of that might recede with repetition but it never entirely got old.

Remnants
The third is more complicated—it's the way photographs are physical impressions of the past which are always changing in their relation to the present. If you're walking in the woods and you find a bearprint in the mud, that's a physical impression of an actual bear—the real bear had to have made it, meaning she'd been there, in the spot you're standing, not long earlier. When you find an arrowhead or a Civil War Minié ball in the woods, it's not the objects that are magical in themselves—one's a bit of chipped stone and the other's a lump of lead. But each is a physical remnant of the people who made them and used them, and the objects are direct connections to a fundamentally mysterious past.

In an article about the science fiction writer William Gibson written by Joshua Rothman, I read this:

The ten novels that Gibson has written since [his first, Neuromancer, in 1984] have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it's familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson's strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. "The future is already here," he has said. "It's just not very evenly distributed."

Couldn't something very similar be said of photographs? In fact, every single attempt to capture the present becomes a picture of the recent past. Human beings are most comfortable with what feels familiar (it's the secret to how we actually choose mates or partners, for example), and conjuring the recent past with photographs is comfortable because it's familiar. But photographs continue to change as they continue to move away from us, receding in time. Soon they become un-replicable and then they grow more and more unfamiliar. Finally they pass out of living memory (defined as experiences or events remembered by people who are still alive—the experience of buying a new Ford Model T, for instance, has recently passed out of living memory). As they do so, they simultaneously become both more and less valuable to us. Historical photographs are physical connections to irretrievable people, places, and things, but "antiques" stores often features tables of old photographs no one really wants.

It's like the old Mitch Hedberg standup joke: "One time a guy handed me a picture. He said, 'here's a picture of me when I was younger.' But every picture of you is a picture of when you were younger. 'Here's a picture of me when I was older.' You son of a bitch! How'd you do that? Let me see that camera." Michael Lesy's cult classic Wisconsin Death Trip was an early book that explored this aspect of photographs. Very briefly summarized, Lesy's insight was that sooner or later, all photographs of people will be photographs of dead people. This tension is a part of almost all photographs, in my view. A picture which is meant to be "read" and consumed right now, a reflection of the present moment, will always have some aspect of tension with the fact that the pictured moment can no longer change. I can't get too far into this here, but one thing I love is that the characteristic styles of the present moment tend to be invisible to us while the pictures are new, but are revealed much more clearly as the pictures age.

Joel Baldwin, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, from the
pages of LOOK magazine, April 1969. A photo which was
intended at the time of publication to simulate a then-present
moment. June died in the Springtime of 2003 and
Johnny went to join her not quite four months later.

Whether you tend to value or dismiss aging photographs is up to you, of course. But all photographs are of the past, and personally I'm with The History Guy: "history deserves to be remembered." For me that's true of the comfortably familiar very recent past or the unknowably mysterious distant past. For me, that connection, like the ancient arrowhead nestled in the leaf-mold of the forest floor, always has been the essential third aspect of photography's magic.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike P.)

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:

SteveW: "Thank you Mike, I enjoy your blog quite a lot, but I think today's might be the best one you've written, at least that I've read. Please feel free to wax philosophical any time."

Mike replies: Thanks Steve. I got into quite a bit of hot water this past week so it's nice to hear a compliment!

Soeren Engelbrecht: "Interesting how the mast vajority of photographers (or, at least, people taking photographs, if you will permit that distinction) today will never get to experience two of your three magical aspects of photography. From my perspective, your aspect #3 is by far the most important one—and the reason why photography was invented in the first place, I would argue. Preserving moments. Personally, I would add another one: The joy of sharing photographs with others while they are physically present. Print, books, screen—it's always rewarding when you get to see people's faces or hear the words/sounds they make. Far better than the quasi-anonymous 'likes'...."

robert e: "Well said, Mike. So, in other words, a photograph (or a bear print, arrowhead, or musket ball) can engage our knowledge, imagination, and feelings about time, life and death, self and other—about being, really. Puts an interesting perspective on the making of photographs."

Paul Bien: "Here is an 8x10 I took of my younger son Trent about four years ago. Taken with a hundred-year-old Kodak 2-D view camera and developed using an original 8x10 BTZS film tube in my bathroom, it is still one of my most cherished images. Digitized by shooting the negative with a Nikon 750 and printed via inkjet printer. The tones one can achieve with large format can even be appreciated by non-photographers."

DavidB: "Re '...But all photographs are of the past....' Especially true if you do astrophotography!"

Sunday Support Group: What You Really Want

["Sunday Support Group" is an eclectic series of discursive digressions on topics random and sundry, offered in the hope they might help various subsets of our readership in their work and their ambitions, or that they might contribute to our mental, spiritual, psychic or physical contentment. It is meant to appear, as the title suggests, on Sundays; however, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. sometimes meanders, in many senses of that fine old word.]

-

Haven't heard from Ctein in a while. Probably been asleep for a day and a half.  :-)  Thanks again for last week—it sure was fun.

I'd like to mention something briefly this morning that is looming as ever more important in my thinking—something that's easy to say, but that might be profound in the way you approach your photography.

You've got to do what you really want to do.

I can trace the beginning of the time I started working to help other photographers to the summer of '83. Our classmate Sarah was in a motorcycle accident (she recovered), and, on short notice, I took over as the lab (i.e., darkroom) assistant for the Summer. Answered a whole lot of questions, including from people who wandered downstairs from the Gallery! (The school was located in the basement of the Corcoran Gallery, a public museum about three stone's throws from the White House in Washington DC.) The next school year, 1983–84, I did a teaching internship at Northern Virginia Community College under John McIntosh for a Photo 101–102–103 sequence of courses. That led to my first full-time teaching job, and I was on my merry winding way.

Time is short
—spend it doing
what you really
want to do

So it's been 36 1/2 years now. The only time I wasn't working for photographers during that time was a half-year stint as Senior Editor of Model Railroader magazine. While at MR, though, I did help judge the annual photography contest, and made friends with the in-house staff photographers and graphic artists.  Otherwise I've basically never not worked in photography in some capacity or other. Even when unemployed in the early years of the century, I was writing articles for Darkroom User (under the psudonym L.T. Gray—el tigre, the tiger, get it? My dad's idea) and Black & White Photography magazines in the UK.

But this isn't about me. All I wanted to mention is that old-guy refrain—time is short! Spend it doing what you really want to do.

Figuring out what that is might not be the easiest thing in the world. It has a definite psychological component—you've got to listen to your heart of hearts. And I've been always been convinced that it takes a certain fortitude, too. There are all kinds of things that might stop you from doing what you want to. Simple reticence, for example—imagine you're an older guy and you want to shoot nudes, but you're afraid of what your wife will think. I'd say, forge ahead. Work it out with her. Quit if you need to (your marriage is more important than your hobby or even your art!), but don't quit unless you need to. And don't quit without trying first.

A child of the times
Another thing I'm pretty sure affects a lot of people negatively (and not just photographers) are the expectations of others. We're all influenced by our culture in a variety of ways, both close (whether our family members take notice and care) and far (what seems to be the fashion in the culture at large—sharp, brightly colored digital images on screens, for example. That can't be very satisfying for people whose basic gratification comes from crafting durable objects). I think of this often when I come across people arguing passionately online about the corner resolution of lenses or the relative amounts of bokeh of different apertures on different formats. In '83 it might have been the relative graininess of B&W film developers and the efficacy of competing methods of washing fiber-base prints. (Common to both eras? "Leica is best. Discuss.") It doesn't matter, friends. As many of you know. Have fun with it if you find it fun, but it doesn't matter. My point here is that you might have to swim against the tide. The greatest geniuses (think Vincent Van Gogh or Thelonious Monk) do their own thing and let everybody else catch up to them.

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those posts where the comments are better than the post. (In meetings of my 12-step fellowship, you give up the floor by saying something like "that's all I've got," at which point everyone else says thanks—thanking the speaker for contributing. But some people close by saying "I'll shut up now," to which the rest of the room choruses, "Thanks [blank]!," like they're thanking him for shutting up, which makes me smile.) I'll shut up now.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and an update: My book effort is going to be titled So You Say You Want to Be a Photographer, and I have approximately a hundred more days of work left to do on it. No telling how many weeks that's going to take (could be 100), or whether I'll get it done (I have a miserable track record, remember) but I've been working on it every weekend. Yesterday was a good day. It's basically going to be a really long, well-polished blog post, meant to flow smoothly from front to back. It's turning out pretty nuts-and-boltsy, with lots of concrete practical advice and tuff things to think about, but my main aim is for it to be good fun to read. That, I can do.

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New Word: Overtourism

Never encountered this word before that I can remember. "Overtourism" refers to major tourist destinations getting swamped with visitors and becoming degraded from overuse. I encountered it in this article, which essentially recommends that you help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places, or extending the burden on famous hotspots into what was previously known as the offseason. Not sure if that would really help. Maybe a better solution is just "stay home"?

Of course, that's easy for me to say—I've already seen the Tower of London and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a lot of similar places, and although I distinctly recall from my youth that feeling of freedom and adventure when setting out on a trip, even a weekend road trip, I no longer have the travel bug much. I do realize, of course, that for many it's a major aspiration.

As far as travel and photography is concerned, naturally I have nothing but support for those who like to combine the two activities. But I'm personally convinced that I take better pictures of places I know well than places I drop in on for brief periods. I'm also convinced that there are pictures everywhere. We don't necessarily need to travel to find them.

YMMV, as they say; everyone's different.

Mike

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Murray Davidson: "It's the other blight of our times—Global Swarming."

hugh crawford: "'Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.' Attributed to Yogi Berra."

Tom Bell: "I am lucky like you Mike to live in an area of real beauty. Luckily Dartmoor has a subtle beauty. But like many places it has one place,'Widecombe in the Moor,' made famous by the song 'Uncle Tom Cobley.' The result is that all the tourists go there! This has advantages in that everywhere else on the moor is empty...a glorious unspoilt wilderness. As time goes on I feel we need to take fewer flights and rush around less. For me I feel the time to see these great places has gone...the crowds destroy the ambience and must be a nightmare for locals. I remember a great travel book by Evelyn Waugh, in which he comments, 'I was not a tourist merely a traveller passing through...and I thank the Lord I went when the going was good.' That was written in 1950 or so...goodness knows what he would make of today.

"I am eternally grateful I have pitched my tent on Dartmoor for forty years. A life blessed and free of crowds."

Mike the Ed. adds: From Wikipedia, for those who don't know: "Dartmoor National Park is a vast moorland in the county of Devon, in southwest England. Dartmoor ponies roam its craggy landscape, defined by forests, rivers, wetlands and tors (rock formations). Trails wind through valleys with Neolithic tombs, Bronze Age stone circles and abandoned medieval farmhouses. The area is dotted with villages, including Princetown, home to Dartmoor Prison used during the Napoleonic Wars."

Nigel (partial comment): "I live in the industrial north, in a town which is off the tourist bucket list. Scratching around in local bookshops throws up a whole load of locally published books with places to visit near to home. It is amazing the interesting places you can find near to home if you dig around. I can walk in the high Apennines in some wonderful landscapes, without meeting another soul all day. I have a Renaissance 'perfect' city just an hour away as well as other interesting monuments that a bit of research brings to my attention. The good thing about local locations is that they are usually uncrowded and the people are happy to have somebody around who takes an interest in their town or village. I can usually get permission to use a tripod in some old dark monuments and other things that make my photography easier. I also get to have some nice conversations with the local people."

Stan B.: "While there's no going back in time, traveling to a far-off destination is like being revitalized, seeing with new eyes. It can be inspirational, life affirming, reinvigorating—add whatever reality-changing accolades you'd like. It can also change one internally, depending on what you see, where you go, what you do. Granted, you usually only get to scratch the surface when traveling, philosophically and photographically, particularly when limited by time. But travel is the introduction, not the endpoint; it is up to the traveler to pursue what he gleans from his travels and incorporate it into his life's journey."

Christer: "From an old tourist guide book I found on a flea market in France 30 years ago: 'A man who has seen a dozen cathedrals has seen a lot, but a man who has seen one cathedral twelve times has seen more.'"

Greg: "'How did Zion National Park become more popular than Yosemite or Yellowstone?' from the LA Times. Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr play a role in overtourism. Dobrovnik is limiting the number of cruise ships that can stop. The list goes on."

Misha: "Re '...help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places...[like] the Leaning Tower of Pisa': I did my duty, and went to Niles, Illinois instead."

Mike replies: That's pretty funny. Photo Techniques was based in Niles, and I never visited the Leaning Tower. I also went to art school for three years a couple of blocks from the White House, and never toured the White House.

On the other hand, I was there at the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, I sailed around the world in the Vendée Globe race, and I've hung suspended from a rope in a pitch-dark crevice in a remote area of the Peruvian Andes. So I guess that says a lot about me.

Dennis: "This idea occurred to me only after spending some time wishing I could travel more to 'hotspots.' When planning a trip to Yellowstone, I bought a book that gave step-by-step instructions on how to locate great viewpoints. I recall standing at one well known picture spot for maybe 10 minutes taking pictures while dozens of other people came and went, including one guy with a Graflex! While in Jackson Hole, I visited Tom Mangelsen's gallery and on another trip to Moab, I visited Tom Till's gallery. I read up on how much time Mr. Till spends out in the field away from his family. And it dawned on me that I'm nothing more than a tourist on these trips, with no local knowledge, no experience-based expertise, a one week window in which to hope for good weather. And it finally struck home that the best photos of any place are taken by people who know that place and can visit it repeatedly.

"I still want to see new places and I want to take pictures while I'm there, but that's more about vacationing than about photography, and I'm not content to do most of my shooting close to home."

Steve Rosenblum: "There is another approach. In my travels I have found that most tourists won't walk more than 50 yards from their car or tour bus. You can visit Yellowstone at peak season and if you throw on a day pack and walk one mile up a trail away from the road you will most likely find yourself all by yourself. Ninety-eight percent of the visitors concentrate themselves in the 2% of the park near the roads."

Bill Tyler: "You write, 'there are pictures everywhere.' I agree, and have an exercise I like to do from time to time, when I think of it. Here it is. Assuming you have a camera of some kind (a phone is fine) make at least one photo you find interesting, without moving your feet. If you're sitting, don't get up. It's not likely you'll make great art, but if you can't find even one composition within reach, you need to try harder. Oh yeah—one more rule—you can't plan this. When the idea surfaces, that's when your feet get sticky. Having said that, here's one I did just now—a  self portrait in a conical metal lamp reflector made with my iPhone."

Mike replies: I love that exercise, and I like the picture! Even though it's not sharp. (Just kidding.)

John Camp: "When you read certain kinds of articles that 'rank' cities by some selected criteria (taxes, cost of living, weather, crime rate, beaches, whatever) you're not often told that whatever the ranking, you really don't live in a city, you live in a neighborhood. St. Louis is ranked as the worst city for crime in the US, but I've been there, quite a few times, and there are great neighborhoods in St. Louis that are perfectly safe. But you could also pick out a different neighborhood, go there. and get robbed.

"The same thing applies to these tourist destinations. They're essentially ranked, and promoted as 'best' for whatever your enthusiasm might be—art, beaches, slot canyons, whatever. Most tourists who go to Paris aren't really going to Paris, they're going to 'Paris.' They're going to the City of Lights, the Louvre, they're going to the Musee d'Orsay, the Picasso, they're walking along the Seine, getting croissants at Les Deux Magots, buying books at Shakespeare and Company...but I bet your friend Peter Turnley could take you to great places in Paris that don't see a dozen tourists in a week. (I once went to a fascinating place in Chartres that I bet Peter hasn't been to, or even heard of.) I mean, if you go as a tourist to places that are advertised as 'must see' stops for tourists on every website on the Internet, what do you expect?

"There are even great places, I mean really great places, that aren't overrun. A certain propensity for bad weather helps—Madrid, Vienna and Amsterdam have museums to rival the Louvre, but for much of the year, you won't see Louvre-size crowds there. Buy yourself a warm Patagonia ski jacket and some gloves, maybe long underwear, and Amsterdam and St. Petersburg are wonderful places in January, though a bit dark. I was once in the Breughel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in June and was almost alone.

"You just gotta avoid the Internet traps. Unless that's what you want. I'm looking at you, Malibu."

Of Old Days and New Ways

Well, we certainly have gotten a lot of comments over the past couple of days. All the comments sent me scurrying back to eBay to revisit film camera faves from days gone by, a bad habit I long ago left behind but that feels awkwardly familiar even now. 

It sure is fun to revisit the idea of old film cameras. I miss the sense of control I had using them, and the feeling of a direct connection with the world that an optical/chemical method of recording the lens image imparted. I feel neither with digital imaging. DI just doesn't have the essential magic of film photography—that sense, when you look at an original print, that you are seeing a shadow of the real world. I don't feel that with digital and never have.

However, it's mainly the idea of old film cameras that I like. In fact, I've been lucky—almost incredibly lucky—in that various advancements in photography have come along just as I needed them. Autofocus (AF) came along just as I was starting to have trouble focusing. Digital's short feedback loop came along just as I was getting frustrated with the ongoing complexities of visualizing ("previsualizing," in Minor White's redundant, yet somehow still superior, word for it). Digital came along just as I was getting burned out on all that work I used to have to do. High ISOs became a reality just as I was getting really interested in low-light photography. Image stabilization (IS) came to the rescue just as I was starting to have trouble holding cameras steady.

It's almost like whatever I've needed immediately gets invented. 

The journey not the destination
Each step along the way has come with a sense of liberation and fun. Just to name a few...my first AF camera was a Nikon N8008, and boy did I have fun with things like no-look shooting with one hand, knowing the camera would set its own focus. Whee! I "borrowed" my doctor brother's early Nikon Coolpix (950, I think it was) and shot all afternoon with it. Fabulous fun. Loved that thing. The first camera I owned that had IS—the Konica-Minolta 7D—was a revelation. And although it's controversial at the moment to admit, the most fun I've had in the past three (five?!?) years has been shooting grab shots with phones. It's as close as I've ever come to the imaginary visual notepad I always wanted. I always imagine it's the same feeling of freedom, liberation, and playfulness that Oskar Barnack must have felt when he was out roaming the streets of Wetzlar with his Ur-Leica. You're set free.

I will never regret having mastered film photography, or having learned to see in B&W, or having trained myself to guess exposures without a light meter, and I will always remember the darkroom with great fondness. "Rolling my own" film from bulk rolls onto cassettes and developing film by hand were merely chores, but I loved everything about printing under enlargers and I enjoyed working in—and being in—darkrooms. Using Leica rangefinders for four years or so really did teach me a lot about shooting skills. I'm grateful and glad for everything I went through earlier in my life in photography. Wouldn't trade any of it. And if I ever retire—okay, retire rich enough to have someone else develop my film and make my proof sheets—it'll be B&W film till the end for me.

More work for less return
But the fact is, I need the cameras we have today. Astonishing though this fact may be to me, I am no longer young (just because you can see it coming doesn't mean it isn't still a surprise). I need autofocus. I appreciate today's sophisticated autoexposure, coupled with what I can correct using my favorite program, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). And I am reassured by IS. Having instant visual feedback and the ability to check results on the fly has made me a better photographer. High ISOs that can reach into the darkness, coupled with shadow recovery in ACR, has expanded the kind of subject matter I can consider—I've always loved low light and near-dark. And being liberated from a set per-exposure cost has made it easier, more comfortable, and more fun to simply play. Even though I never minded, the journey from viewfinder to finished print in 1980–2000 involved an awful lot of scut work. There was powerful austere beauty in the "purist" version of the way things used to be, but there seems no way around this conclusion: I used to have to work harder to get worse results. Or fewer good results.

I'm probably going to love well-made 35mm B&W prints best until the day I die—it was the chosen technique of my younger days and I seem to have been imprinted—but when it comes to color, finely-judged inkjet prints are prettier than any color printing method from the film days in my opinion. I find it curious that inkjet prints still have low status value. But then, humans are weird.

Don't get me wrong—I still have deficits as a photographer. And I suffer from some of the usual grumpiness, ennui, and disaffection that stereotypically goes along with my age and stage in life. I am an "adept" (noun form) when it comes to finding things to complain about.  :-)

But: much as I enjoy daydreaming about going back to the past, for me, and for who I am now, things are better today.

All that jazz
Now then, that's done. What to do now? ...I guess I'll put a vinyl record on the turntable and go listen to some '50s jazz!

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

Mark Barton: "Very, very long time reader—first time commenter…. Speaking of eBay and film cameras, I was recently very surprised when I decided to sell a bunch of the gear that I’d 'accidentally' accumulated over the last 15 years. The surprise was that I ended up with an extra 20–30% above the original purchase price for each and every item! I’d always half justified buying stuff on the basis that I could sell it again without loss, but never expected to make a profit!

"And to bring things back to the post, I’m currently listening to Dave Brubeck at this moment on the speakers bought with the proceeds from the camera sales!"

Pierre Charbonneau: "The beauty of analog photography is hard to define for me. For some inexplicable reasons, I prefer my inkjet prints from well-scanned negatives. During five years, I was enamored of the Leica Monochrom. Quite a superb camera capable of splendid technical results. Sharpness and possibility of dodging or burning were fantastic. But since few years, there is a somewhat softer, a delicate highlight, and a unique and real grain, not fake, that pushes me to shoot 400 ISO film. The 13x18-inch prints are a fine reward for compensating the cost of film, and the time spent on processing and scanning. I guess there is something more organic to film photography. If the word does make any sense here."

Ernie Van Veen: "Interestingly, that is almost exactly the opposite of my emotional experience with photography. For the first 35 years of my photo-snappin' I was frustrated and mentally blocked by film and all of its 'magical' complexities. These were chores that I could (will) never 'get my head around.' In spite of the enthusiastic mentoring efforts of a couple of very talented photographer friends, film opened no doors for me; instead it always stood in my way.

"It was the purchase of my first DSLR in 2011 that set me free. That's when I felt that sense of control and that feeling of direct connection to the world that you feel with film. I have always been a technical, rather than artistic, person. But film has always left me bamboozled. A bit like prestidigitation; you can show me again and again but I will always see only the 'magic' and not the technique. Computers, however—these I understand. That's probably why I was a programmer and systems analyst for 30 years. I happily shoot in manual mode and I understand the usage of the camera and lenses, but I love the menus, I love the screens, I love Lightroom and Photoshop and I love inkjet printers (not the cost of ink). Without digital I would have given up photography years ago."

Gary Nylander: "For many years I split my time between using digital and film. When I was working as a newspaper photographer I used digital exclusively since 2001. I never wanted to go back to using film for newspaper work; with digital I could get time-sensitive pictures to my editor a lot faster, with no colour chemistry to mix up, which was a bonus.

"On my days off and holidays, I opted to use film cameras, mostly a 4x5 view camera. It was a lot bulkier and heavier than the digital cameras that I was using for work, but I liked the alternative way of seeing, I felt I was really on holidays when using my view camera, it was a much slower pace to use in comparison to the fast-paced work I was doing using digital cameras on a daily basis for the newspaper. But alas all good things come to an end and the photography department at the paper I was working at went the way of the dodo bird and so did my job. Now that I am investing in my own digital equipment, newer and much better than what I was using at the paper with their 15-year-old cameras. I have now found that my new-fangled digital camera has met and exceeded in some cases the quality I was getting from my scanned 4x5 view camera negatives. That I find amazing."

Michael Perini: "A near-perfect summary of the way I feel. We didn't notice the work because we were just doing what was required. Sometimes I think a film background is required to fully appreciate the wonders that are possible with digital. I have all my film gear, and keep telling myself that I'll make 8x10 contact prints again...but I think I'm lying. I hope I'm not...but I think I am. Thanks."

Film vs. Digital (Not What You Think!)

To yesterday's "I Feel Old" post, Steve Jacob wrote:

I bought my first SLR in 1981. I bought my first digital camera in 1999. It's now 2019. I have officially been a digital photographer for longer than I was a film photographer. It just doesn't seem like it because time passes so much faster when you get older.

Interesting thing to look at, I thought.

I caught the photography bug but good in 1980 when my Mom's first cousin's wife asked me to do a portrait of their family (we summered with them so I knew them well), and by 1982, after two years of being frankly obsessed with photography, I had enrolled in photography school. Although I used a digital camera for the first time in 1997 (a loan from Agfa of venerated memory), I didn't own my first digital camera until 2003. But I gave up my darkroom in 2000 so I hadn't done any developing or printing since then (the film I exposed in 2000–2003 I never developed. It's still in a box in the barn).

But actually I'd been pretty interested in photography since 7th grade (age 12) when I shot six 12-exposure rolls of Kodak Instamatic film on a class trip to Washington D.C. I did another six-roll project, with an SLR this time and 36-exposure rolls of 35mm, on a European trip when I was 14, and had a show in the dining room of my high school when I was 16. So really, I was a film photographer from 1969 to 2000, 31 years, and I would have to go till 2034 before I equal that in digital.

So my numbers are 31 and 16: 31 years with film (1969–2000), 16 with digital (2003–2019).

How about you? You don't need to give us the rundown; just the numbers will do. Plus any comment you might care to make.

I'm going to be disappointed if there aren't at least a few people whose first number is zero—and I'm curious to see whether there's anyone whose second number is zero!

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Jacob)

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

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Fritz: "Fifty-four and 16."

Dennis: "Zero and 16. Not counting some use of disposable cameras on family trips and whatnot. Got a Canon point-and-shoot in 2003, been at it with a variety of equipment since with a lean period between 2014–2018."

Bill Pearce: "Thirty-one, 20. The first number includes the transition years, where I shot film and had a lab scan it so I could use PS as needed and then place in publications. I miss the direct to-the-point nature of film. For the last ten or 15 years of my film career, I went out with a Hasselblad and a couple of rolls of film and never even used a light meter. The tyranny of menus was never a problem. I have seen no evidence that all the micro adjusments and the 'flexibility' of bloated camera menus have improved photos the slightest bit."

Bob Curtis: "Sixty-five and zero."

Mike replies: Hard core!

Peter: "It's interesting the assumption is that people start in film and move to digital—maybe reflective of the age of the readers here (older), whereas many millennials start in digital and move to film. As an oldster myself: 12 (film), two (digital), 12 (film)."

Sixblockseast: "About 16 and 14 for me. Transitioned to digital around 2005 with a Canon point-and-shoot, made my way to Samsung mirrorless in 2012 or so, and now Fuji since 2016, so I actually never owned a true DSLR! I do not miss film one bit, especially not the widely varying quality of retail developers/printers."

Greg: "Sixteen analog and 17 digital All my digital photos are sorted, backed up multiple times and sorted in different locations as well as tagged for fast searching (under 1 minute if I have the right key words). Scanning the slides and negatives I have left is this Winter's project."

Doug Vaughn: "Film 26, digital 19, film again 5."

Henning Wulff (partial comment): "I have glass plates that my grandfather shot as well as slides, so he made that transition."

Joost: "Film: 0-ish, Digital: 15. Though I've at times done some analog shooting, as a kid with my parents camera, later for fun, no more than 300 exposures. I did develop and print most of those myself. The feedback-loop for analog was just too long for me."

David Bateman (partial comment): "Seven digital, then two film, now eight digital."

Houses of Many Mansions

"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2)

-

Yesterday JimH wrote:

"In everything I have been involved with, photography, writing, managing businesses, racing, flying, etc. I have concluded that some people are naturals, some try hard and improve and some just need to try something else. I am sure the same thing exists in athletics because I have no relevant abilities no matter how much I tried. Thus I am skeptical that any number of repetitions will make anyone competent. Some things you can learn, like grammar, but that will not make you a competent writer. Reading what others think is great literature might help but where does creativity come from? Perhaps it’s innate. Same with photography, I think."

I'm finding this difficult to argue with, mainly because, as I read Jim's comment, examples popped into my head of each of his three categories. The line makes me laugh, it seems so bang on. I've definitely known photographers who were naturals, photographers who responded to deliberate practice and got much better, and (forgive me!) photographers who should just give up and go do something else.

The last category reminds me of a story told to me by one of my very earliest supporters on the Web, the aptly named Wendell Webb. When I was writing The Sunday Morning Photographer for The Luminous-Landscape, Steve's Digicams, Photo.net, fotopolis.pl, and several other foreign-language sites (I did not do the translations), I got the bright idea that if everybody who read my column—it was lots and lots of people—paid me a dollar for every installment, I'd be financially secure. So I tried asking everyone to please send a dollar every week. Only one person did. That was Wendell.

The officer's tale
As best as I recall, the story he told was this. He had been an officer stationed with the military at a post in the Middle East at a time when there was nothing to do. But the base was surrounded by a sea of hardscrabble desert, so he and his officer friends decided to take up golf. With some effort, they set up a golf course in the desert and commenced to play every day. They enjoyed it, and imagined they were improving. This continued for some eight months.

Then they got a new commanding officer who was a real golfer, and his new subordinates invited him to play with them. Wendell was nearing the end of his tour, and he was eager for a knowledgeable appraisal of his skills. So, after the round, Wendell earnestly asked the C.O. whether he thought he was any good and whether he thought he should continue to play golf when he got back to the States. He wanted to know whether he should take lessons and work at improving, and so on—whether he should become a golfer.

In response, the C.O. invited him to lunch. At the end of the meal, the man leaned forward and said, "Wendell, I'm going to give you the advice you asked for. First, I recommend that you take three weeks off. Just don't play any golf for three weeks. Take a break; give it a rest. Do you understand?"

Wendell said, "I see. Okay. And then what?"

The man looked at Wendell with the utmost seriousness and said, gravely, "And then, when those three weeks are over, I want you to give up the game of golf forever."

The power of the niche
Still makes me chuckle. And yes, I've known photographers like that...people who are so bad at it they don't even know how bad they are.

But here's the big difference, or one of them. What about the idea of finding your niche within photography? Because I think that can make all the difference.

A few people can do most anything, but most of us have things we're good at and things we're not. For example, you should see what happens when I try to write fiction. I butted my head against that ambition (because it was the conventional ambition) when I was young, but, really, I'm no good at fiction. I've tried it enough to know. I have no feel for it, no particular insight into people. The best I can manage is mimicry. And, if I'm perfectly honest, the whole enterprise of fiction makes me vaguely uncomfortable—I sometimes can't see the point in reading made-up stories someone else invented. Especially when I don't buy what they make their characters do. If I find myself thinking "no real person would do that" as I'm reading a novel, that's often the death knell of my interest in that book. I want, even need, "the slap of truth." (It's probably one reason I like photography.) The only way fiction works for me is if I think the writer is freeing him- or herself to write what they know about real life, but without the constraints and limitations of literal reporting. I don't think anyone could fail to see that Jane Austen, to name just one example, was a close observer of human nature, and was writing naturalistic portraits of her contemporaries even if her characters were not specific real individuals.

Many good writers, even great ones, have relatively narrow niches. J.D. Salinger had a very limited range, as did James Thurber and Hunter Thompson. James Herriot made a fortune telling just the kinds of anecdote-based yarns you might spin in a bar—in fact, that's how he realized he could do it, because his hearers down at the pub liked his little tales so much. But I don't think he could have written history. Can you image C.S. Forester, author of the Hornblower saga (the only series of books I've ever read twice), penning Samuel Beckett's plays? Agatha Christie was adept at plotting mysteries, but her characters almost resemble game pieces; imagine her trying to write a psychologically deep literary novel. I don't think that would end well!

What's "a photographer," anyway?
In that way photography resembles writing. Imagine Ralph Eugene Meatyard trying to be Joe McNally, or vice-versa. Could Karsh have been Diane Arbus, or Arbus Karsh? I don't think so. The sainted Ansel was said to have had such a bad color sense that his party guests were shocked at his sartorial choices; he seems to have been blind to color even though he was not color-blind. And so on.

And that's part of the work—part of the reason we keep trying things and continuing to explore. Because when you find what you are meant to do within photography, or within writing—the thing that really satisfies you and gives you a sense of inner reward—well, that's what's worth the trip.

When you think of it, there's not really any such thing as "a photographer," anyway. There's only the photographer each of us was meant to be.

Mike
(Thanks to Wendell)

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

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Homer Office: "It's all about decisions."

How Do You Become a Photographer? Want It, Then Find a Way

How do you become a photographer? You get to work, of course. You shoot a lot and you develop a daily habit of shooting, shooting whether you need to or not. You work out your style and hone your chops and get started learning. Find your style, but find it by working, not by looking for it or thinking about it. Every photographer I've ever known keeps busy at it. If they have nothing to do they'll make something out of nothing. Doesn't matter what kind of photographer they are. They find their work and find a way to work at it.

Jingna Zhang has a nice post on her blog about how she started out, which Pierre found for us the other day. It tells about how she got to work when she was young, "learning framing and how to work with what light you have." It's mostly about starting simple and how to pay for entry-level equipment, but it's a beautiful post, really. The work does look like student work—good student work—but both the words and the pictures reveal a young photographer who really knew what she was going to be good at, a young photographer who had little doubt about what direction she wanted to go. That's lucky, I'd say, that sense of direction. I love that mental image of her working tight in her impromptu studio, AKA her parents' living room after moving the couch out of the way. (It's tough to work tight—there's a reason studios are large even when sets are not. Lights need room.) Hardly a wonder she shoots Vogue covers now. People who want it find a way, and then work toward their goals.

I experienced something similar, but with writing rather than taking pictures. (Like I joked the other day, if nerds just learn about things obsessively and geeks do things obsessively, then I'm a writing geek and a photo nerd.) I gave a lecture at a school long ago. I drew a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles to represent the then-current photography scene in Washington, D.C.—the biggest circle was photojournalists, a smaller one was commercial and advertising pros, and the smallest circle represented what were then called art photographers, many of whom, the ones I knew anyway, were associated somehow with the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art and the Kathleen Ewing Gallery up on Dupont Circle. A hand went up in the back of the room. "What kind of photographer are you?" was the question. I actually kind of surprised myself with the answer that popped into my head: "I'm a writer," I said. Writing geek, photo nerd.

The first three weeks of my recent recovery period from surgery, which took place a month ago tomorrow, was the longest stretch I've gone without writing in decades. I believe that's literally true. I love to write, and I do it most days. It was tough to be forced not to do it for the better part of a month.

As I've said before here (sorry if I'm repeating myself), I started writing seriously after I was invited to a small reception for the Canadian-American novelist Saul Bellow, the last American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature before Bob Dylan, at Dartmouth. I waited in a short line at the end of the breakfast to ask him a question, and what do you know, the guy in line ahead of me asked him the very question I meant to—"What's the best way to become a writer?" Mr. Bellow had obviously been asked the question before, because he answered without a pause: "Write three million words." He went on to say more than that; one of his points I remember was that you don't even have to worry about finding your voice (a common problem for beginners); you can't help but find your voice over the course of three million words. Just keep writing and it will come. It'll work itself free. Well, anyway, I went back to my dorm room and got out my calculator. Three pages a day, I figured, 275 words per page, call it 300,000 words per year, and 3,000,0000 words would take ten years!! I remember being utterly dismayed. I was 18, so of course I wanted to be famous right then, or the next month or the next year, not a long trudge of ten years out toward the horizon.

But I'll say this for myself, I got right to work.

Before long I had established a daily habit of writing that is now more like an appetite. In fact (again, literally, and I do know what literally means), it's easier for me to go a day without eating than to go a day without writing.

Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and my lakeside neighborhood is full to the scuppers of vacationers—people with Summer cottages and their families and their visitors, and rental houses chock full of gangs of folks, parked pickup trucks and SUVs from New Jersey and Ontario and Virginia clustered all around the houses like wildebeest at a watering hole. And one thing I notice is that older men at their vacation homes seem to love to get out and work. They're out puttering around, running things with motors (the noisier the better), cleaning stuff, fixing stuff up, tearing stuff down, going to get stuff, throwing stuff out, tending to the yardwork, hammering, carting stuff around from here to there and back. They're on vacation doing what they want to do—which does include "recreational activities," of course, but then, in the in-between times, work of some sort. You can tell they're just in the habit of working and working is what they like to do. Relax? Sure, but just as soon as I get this done.

I write even when I don't have to. If I have no reason to, I do it anyway. Keepin' my hand in, I guess. Whatevs.

Well, I'm no Saul Bellow, and my prose is the opposite of deathless—it has a sell-by date as short as that of a bag of carrots. But then, I get to write, and you're reading this so you know I get to have readers, which is an honor and a pleasure (thanks). No complaints. No complaints except when I'm forced to not work for three weeks!

I think that's how you know if you're a photographer. You work, even when you don't have to. Because it's what you do.

Mike
(Thanks to Pierre, Jingna, and to Saul Bellow 1915–2005
Illustration: my friend Llew with the old musket he found in their house.)

P.S. An interesting coincidence: Jingna Zhang says in her article: "Growing up, my family wasn't very well off. My parents argued about money, and often. I remembered once when I was 4 or 5, I was so scared and angry in the next room when they were fighting, I swore to myself that day, that I'd become financially independent as soon as possible and then forever, so I'd never be a burden or need to rely on anyone again. Ever."

Then, as I was looking for a bio of Saul Bellow to link to for people who have never heard of him, I ran across his "Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son," a partial autobiography he started and then forgot about that was exhumed and published by Granta. The first page, before the paywall, vividly recounts his parents fighting about money. "Those are lucky who die when their childhood is over and never live to know the misery of fighting in the world," his father yells furiously at his mother. 

Pa would sometimes frown at me and say that I reminded him of [Ma's brother] Mordecai. He saw the faults of my mother’s family embodied in me. In my own mind I came to accept this, and was not ashamed of it even when Pa would say, ‘There’s insanity in your mother’s line. Her Uncle Poppe was a firebug, and he was very dangerous. He used to set the curtains afire. These things are inherited. There’s no taint like that on my family.’

‘Not if you don’t count hard hearts and bad tempers,’ Ma would occasionally, but too rarely, answer. Only occasionally, because she loved him. When he was away she’d say to the children, ‘If you told Mordecai that you needed something, he put his hand in his pocket and gave you what was in it, without looking.’

Good stories.

TOP will be off tomorrow for the U.S. holiday (Independence Day, AKA The Fourth of July)

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

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Featured Comments from:

Mark Hobson: "Making pictures, lots of pictures, is the only way to find one's vision, i.e., personal way of seeing. My suggestion for doing so is simple enough...use a phone camera, if only as a handy picture-a-day device. My iCloud photos account has 12,000+ pictures, most of which were made over two years. For comparison, my 'real' camera picture archive has 7,000+ pictures—pictures processed to a 'final' standard—made over the past 20 years. Obviously, I make a lot of pictures, but more so since I began my use of the iPhone camera.

"So, here's my point....if one wishes to make a lot of pictures in his/her vision quest, taking a 'real' camera out and about and subsequently going about one's processing routine is a time-consuming endeavor, especially if one is making a lot of pictures (which is the point). On the other hand, taking a phone camera—which is probably always on hand—out of one's pocket, touching the button (shutter) and doing a bit of processing on the phone using a processing app is a five-minute task. After making 20 or so pictures, send the files—directly from the phone—to an online printing source for the making of small proof prints.

In my opinion, viewing prints is mandatory in order to judge what one is doing. Before one knows it, there will be a box full of prints from which, with careful/thoughtful viewing, a picture-making pattern will emerge and form the foundation for developing one's vision. CAVEAT: before anyone starts saying that camera phones suck—they don't suck, they are capable of creating very fine results—remember that the point of this exercise is to make a lot of pictures. Not 'perfect' pictures. Just pictures. Pictures that don't require a lot of thinking but rather a lot of just plain looking and seeing."

[Ed. note: I wrote about Mark here. (One of my all-time favorite post titles, by the way.)]

Jeff: "TOW...The Online Writer. Doesn’t have the same ring."

Mike replies: Well, in the initial conception, you are the online photographer...that is, each reader is. Me as well, but certainly not just me.

Actually, the initial conception of the blog was that it would be an outlet for my friends to write blog posts occasionally. Several friends had told me that they would start blogs but for the fact that they couldn't keep up with the day-to-day demands for content. Since I've always been wordy (ahem), my idea was that I'd take care of the day-to-day, make sure there was something up every day for readers to find, and then they could each contribute whenever they wanted to. That has been reflected in the blog with a fair amount of success, but maybe not to the degree I first envisioned.

DALI Oberon Loudspeakers (OT)

[Warning: Bloviation Alert. The second half of this is what I meant to write on Wednesday for "Open Mike" this week. Marcin's right, I do go on too long when I get my teeth into a topic.  —Ed.]

-

A few further thoughts about the concept of an "apex product":

It's not an average. Nor is it mediocre. It's an ideal.

...But a practical, utilitarian sort of ideal. One that takes into account more than just the normal hierarchy of status and expense. For example, with highly salable top-of-the-market products, such as, say, the VW Golf, which is the best-selling car in Europe, even though each iteration is not terribly costly, the company is justified in putting huge amounts of research, R&D, and engineering into the "template" on which the "workmanship of certainty" is performed (i.e., the production process). "Handmade" products, such as a Superformance, have an undeniable appeal, but handwork is simply not as good as when you can spend millions of dollars on a robot to do a specific type of precision weld. It's true that you can spend $300,000 on a Rolls-Royce, but a Honda Accord would cost $300,000 too if there were no mass market and it were made one by one in low total numbers by teams of craftsmen, and the engineering that went into it had to be amortized over a small number of sales.

So "ideal" for me incorporates a number of things not normally associated with status. Is it easily replaceable? Is it non-precious, such that it can actually be used, and, if it's appropriate for the product type, used up? Is it reliable? Is it easily repairable? Example of that: I knew a guy who bought his cars by picking his repair shop first, then asking the mechanics there what kind of car they most liked to work on. If they said Chevy Impala, then he bought a Chevy Impala (he tipped them a bottle of whiskey when they worked on it, too). By contrast, I also knew a guy who was a Ferrari mechanic in the '90s, and he told me that an oil change on certain cars had to be done by the dealer and cost $2,000. Guess which one I would judge to be more ideal?

And don't say "Ferrari owners can afford it," either—the same guy got out of the automotive field altogether because the average Ferrari owner—80% of them, he said—can't afford routine maintenance, and it just got too frustrating for him to so seldom be able to take care of the cars the way the manufacturer intended.

This little guy (3/8 to 1/2 inches in length) will cost me
at least $600 this year. Not ideal.

So, continuing with the list...parts availability; the exclusivity<—>anonymity spectrum and where you want to fall on it; the simplicity <—>complexity spectrum and ditto; ergonomics; residual value a ways out (five years for cameras, 10 for cars, 30 for houses) as a percentage of initial new price (digital cameras suck at that); and mandatory related expenses. As an example of "mandatory related expenses," I'm finding out that my yard here is a fairly big line-tem in my budget. Last year I had to spend $1,400 on a used John Deere; this year a beetle called the emerald ash borer just killed a full-sized ash tree in my back yard, and the lowest estimate I've gotten for removing it is $600. Ask me if I think spending $600 on account of a beetle, even one in a Doc Severinsen suit, is an ideal situation. There are maybe five more trees on my property that could come down if I were actually wealthy enough to live here.  :-)

I don't think there's any such thing as a complete list of these things, because we all have different realities, comfort levels, incomes, ideas, locations, tastes, and specific needs and wants. but the point is that in attempting to locate an apex product, you can get pretty subtle about how you determine what it is. For me, a Toyota Corolla with a stick shift (automatics being expensive points of failure) is a better car than a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari. The Rolls is more luxurious and will impress people much more (although I saw a new Bentley on the streets of my semi-impoverished little town a while back and no pedestrian even looked up as far as I could tell), and the Ferrari is much more exciting to drive, assuming you have access to a race track now and then, but then, consider taking your dogs to the vet in the back seat of the Rolls, or plopping some wet bags of topsoil on the pristine wool carpeting in its trunk. The Ferrari is merely a toy that could land you in jail if you actually play with it. Neither can touch the Corolla at preventing cash from evaporating. The Rolls and the Ferrari are not in the Toyota's league when it comes to that. So what's best? Depends on what you value.

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries: DALI
How I got started thinking about this is that I was going to draw your attention to a new speaker called a DALI Oberon 3. As you might know I have pretty specific and idiosyncratic tastes in a lot of things, and two-way minimonitors with 7-inch paper (well, paper-ish) woofers (which I like) and soft-dome tweeters (I dislike metal ones, which is partly bigotry and partly not) are a holy grail thing with me. I love 'em. I owned a Swiss speaker called a Revox Studio 3 for years and I got imprinted. And I used to own Rogers LS3/5a's, which are legendary. Audio catnip.

I'd love to hear these DALIs. They tickle the endorphins. They look so tidy and minimalist and basic and simple and clean and pretty, don't they? Designed in Denmark and made in China, so they're well designed and well made but they only cost $800, which is well into the "sensible" range for a pair of minimonitors. (Compare here. Be prepared!)

But then I got to thinking...they're not the apex product.

In fact, no small stand-mounted two-way is. The problem starts with the fact that you have to buy stands, which are needed to hang the drivers in the right place in the air. And the stands have to be well-made because the coupling to the floor affects the vibration of the speakers. Good stands can cost anywhere from $200 to $1,200, but stands are something close to wasted money...necessary, but only because "bookshelf" speakers never sound very good on, well, bookshelves.

And minimonitors don't really have quite enough bass. They demand a small room.

But the biggie is that small speakers are, as a category, less efficient and harder to drive and thus require more amplifier power than bigger ones. Really, to pair with these, you should have an amp with decent grunt, something of good quality rated, I would say, in the  85 to 120 watts-per-channel range. So any money you save on the speakers you're going to lose on the amp.

A lot of people make this mistake. They think small, tidy speakers should go with small, tidy amps, and big honking speakers should go with big brutish amps. It's kind of the other way around, all else being equal. The small speakers need power, whereas bigger ones can be set free with less. Want a pair of Klipschorns big enough to hide dead bodies in? You can drive them with a flea-powered single-ended triode (SET) tube amp with only a handful of watts, like this little 3.5-watt [sic] SA3 amp from Bottlehead.

So the apex product in the DALI Oberon line is probably the more expensive and larger Oberon 7 floorstander. True, they're more expensive at $1,400, still a good bargain by audio standards. They sit right on the floor; no stands needed. They have two woofers rather than one, so they're three decibels down at 36 hertz rather than 47 hertz like the 3's. The sensitivity isn't that different—88.5 dB rather than 87; same drivers, after all. All in all they can probably load a bigger room and I'd say you could stick in the 50-100 wpc range with good quality solid-state amplification. Probably more satisfying in the long run than the little guys.

Besides, if you're going to get minimonitors—and stands—you should go all the way and get Falcon's loving remake of the BBC LS3/5a, the absolute all-time classic great holographic minimonitor, the "original gangsta." Drive them with a tube amp (Mike loves EL34's) that has at least 25 wpc and has 16-ohm taps. Nirvana. Don't have a small enough room of the right shape? Build a room for them.  :-)

Rooms!
Speaking of rooms—and efficiency and sufficiency—I seem to be annoyingly attracted to hobbies that need "room-sized accessories," as my friend Nick once called his darkroom. First I needed darkrooms, which caused me to always ask real estate agents to see the basement of a prospective house first, which they always thought was peculiar. Then there's pool—the real luxury of having a pool table is having a place to put it. I can tell you from experience that there aren't a lot of reasonably priced houses in Southeastern Wisconsin that will accommodate a full-sized pool table. I don't have space for one here, alas, and I feel the lack.

Then there's stereo. My brother Scott always thought it was fun to move, because then you get to know your speakers all over again—different rooms make speakers sound different. Most people put a stereo near where they hang out, instead of hanging out where they put the stereo, and that's perfectly sensible, but dedicated audiophiles, who are, as a class, very far from sensible, will sometimes build dedicated listening rooms. In audio, the amp-speaker symbiosis is very important and the speaker-room interaction is just as important.

The best place for the Oberon 7's would be a rectangular room of medium size, say 150 to 400 square feet or thereabouts. Say you have a room that's 15x25', so 375 square feet. I'd start by placing the optical axis (imagine a line running vertically down the middle of each speaker face, touching the front of the drivers) along the short wall 1/5th of the way out into the room—so, 5' into our 25' long room—and 1/5th of the room width from the sidewalls, so, three feet in our 15'-wide room. Then place the listening chair at the other end of the long dimension of the room, also 1/5th into the room, or five feet from the back wall in the 25'-long room. With the Oberon 7's I'd start with no toe-in, meaning, with the speakers facing squarely forward rather than pointed partway toward the listening chair.

That would be a good starting point. Then you could fine-tune the positions of both speakers and listening position based on listening. I should mention that assuming you have a pretty "regular" room, it's worth it to measure as exactly as you can even when first setting up—get the speakers to 1/4th inch of the intended placement if you can.

So, should you buy a pair of Oberon 7's? Well, I never said that! I haven't heard them. I've only read about them. They look interesting to me, but you'd need to hear them for yourself before committing to a purchase, whether you do that by going to a dealer or by buying a pair with a reasonable period of return privilege. Unless they seem just too excruciatingly cheap, however, they, or similar floorstanders for a similar price, seem pretty close to an apex product for me. Not the best, not the worst, just a very well-judged approximation of the optimum bang for the buck.

Mike

P.S. Before we leave the topic of audio for another six or eight or ten months or two years or however long it's going to be, here are three more current audio products I personally think are really cool: the Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers, a modern update of classic 1970s three-ways, designed by Peter Comeau, a designer whose work I really like; the newest version of the now newly retooled Panasonic direct-drive turntable, the Technics SL-1500C, a semi-automatic (!!!) version of the new rebuild of the classic, which also has a built-in phono section and comes with a cartridge, truly plug and play; and the Benchmark AHB2 power amplifier, which is tiny and light and is mopping up awards and earning lavish praise all over the place. I was going to write about these, too, but I have run out of steam for today.

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

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Dave Miller (partial comment): "I enjoy discussions about hifi. I used to be an audiophile until I was cured. This happened when I met hifi design engineer Phil Marshall. Phil worked for Dolby Labs amongst other companies but for many years he designed NAD's amplifier range including the power edge models (1990s?). I met him for the first time after he replied to some questions I asked about articles on his website explaining the importance of the room environment to the audio experience. I ended up working with him as a volunteer for a while, just a naive pair of ears, helping him with listening tests and learning from him. Phil now runs a tiny bespoke loudspeaker company called Marshall Choong Audio. He moved to speaker design because that product still had a lot of room for improvement and a skilled and creative engineer had scope to advance the art.

"Phil taught me a fundamental truth about music reproduction understood by engineers but not so much by customers. The most important component in hifi isn't the amp, speakers, source, cables or even your own ears, but the listening room. Speakers sound different in different rooms—something that a lot of people know. But perhaps what many people don't realise is that the difference a room makes totally dominates any other factor. Nothing you do in your choice of components makes any difference if you have an unsuitable room.

"The magazines would love you to try and fix the problem by buying ever more expensive components but if the room is the issue, it won't help. The key factor is room resonances. A typical room has reflections and standing waves that create massive response boosts at certain frequencies. Phil showed me how to measure room response. A typical small living room in a typical modest UK family home (say a brick-built three bedroom 1930s semi-detached home) has room dimensions that create resonances at around the 50Hz region that can sometimes be greater than +50dB above a flat response. That is a ridiculous problem. Almost all speakers will have bass overhang and undamped resonance that make getting a smooth, accurate sound very difficult. There are few ways to effectively counter this problem (set up your music listening space in a cow field?)...." [For the rest of Dave's comment, please see the Comment Section. —Ed.]

Mike replies: ...Or the near field! This is one reason I like small two-ways so much—near-field listening. My current speakers aren't great shakes by audiophile standards but set up on my desk they're a reasonable approximation of near-field listening and take the room more or less out of it.

Of my two favorite stereos, one was a pair of Celestion SL700's (bought as cosmetic seconds for half price) that I set up in the middle of the barn-like living room of a rental apartment and listened to in a near-field setup. Wonderful. And of course a good way to manage room resonances in the 20–150Hz region is to not have the bottom half of it in the first place.  :-)  (My "personal standard" for "enough but not too much bass" was –3dB at 42Hz, which I arrived at because that's the response of Thiel 1.5's.)

The other was in the basement room of my house in Woodstock, Illinois, which happened to be almost an ideal room—best room I ever had, anyway. Shoebox-shaped, big but not too big, with a concrete floor and two concrete walls, heating ducts encased in drywall on the ceiling which turned out to be great for disrupting reflections, and a wooden closet that stretched all the way across the back wall that turned out to be great for breaking up standing waves. I placed two floor-to-ceiling bookcases at the strategic points on the sidewalls. It was carpeted wall-to-wall, and I experimented for months with the position of my desk (listening seat) which was at the back of the room, and the speakers, which were given most of the rest of the room. I ended up, entirely by ear, with a very close approximation of George Cardas's room proportions and setup. George's site was where I got that tip about measuring the position exactly—when I did that, I moved the speakers less than two inches, but the focus was improved remarkably. I wouldn't have believed it any other way except experiencing it.

That house also had really crummy AC, so the other revelatory change happened when Paul McGowan (who is a photographer and was reading Photo Techniques at the time, although I don't think he reads TOP) let me be one of the beta testers for his then-upcoming original P300 Power Plant. My prototype didn't have the fancy casework, though—it was built by Cullen Circuits in a Ayre amplifier box. I kept it for years and in fact might still have it.

I've certainly heard of Phil Marshall. Very cool that you got to work for him. I suspect I would like Marshall Choong's "bookshelf" speakers...I once started a website called "The Sealed Box" which was intended to list all the non-vented speakers available! That was not popular.

Peter Wright: "One of my theology professors once remarked that when considering something like the shroud of Turin: Had it ever touched the face of Christ? It made no difference to Christianity either way, so we could choose to adopt what she called a 'hermeneutic of trust,' or a 'hermeneutic of suspicion.' Now, when it comes to audio, I am definitely a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' type of person. (And I speak as an electronic engineer who studied tube and transistor circuit design at university.) I agree that different speakers sound different, but past say $1,000, the differences don't have any effect on how much I enjoy the music. Placement of speakers has a more significant effect, but most of us have live-in partners (used to be called a 'wife' long ago) who don't generally allow the sort of room arrangement you describe. As for amps and CD players, nope, they all sound essentially the same. (Don't get me started on cables!) My strategy for buying audio is therefore to get midrange NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers, and then enjoy the music. That is my apex audio.

"The emerald ash borer destroyed the ash tree in my front yard, and all the other ash trees in town (in Ontario), so I feel your pain. The town management said they had come from China, but now I learn from you that they may have come from upstate New York!! I used to do a lot of wood turning, and frequently removed unwanted trees to feed my hobby. Ash is a good wood for turning, so you may want to see if there are any wood turners in the area who could have the ash for taking it away."

Mike replies: Actually, everything makes a difference—but saying nothing does is a pretty close approximation of the same statement. :-) 

And you're absolutely right to place the primacy on "how much I enjoy the music." Listening past the mechanics of the reproduction and hearing the music is the key skill, and stereophilia shouldn't be allowed to overwhelm that. In very much the same way that "seeing" through to what must have been in front of the camera and not getting too distracted in the technical aspects of a photograph is also the key skill that must be cultivated and protected. As we know, it's very easy to lose sight of the forest for peeping at the pixels.

And I hate to break it to you, but mid-range NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers could well be a perfectly nice music-listening system. Not expensive or exclusive maybe, but potentially highly listenable and nothing to scorn. A perfectly fine proposition for being apex products!

Open Mike: Apex Products

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP, wherein Mike scats and vamps and riffs off the top of his pointy head. When all is right with the world, it appears on Wednesdays.]

-

Thomas Riley Marshall, Vice President of the United States under Woodrow Wilson, was presiding over the Senate—one of the VP's duties in our country—when he was forced to listen one day to a litany of complaints from various Senators about what was wrong about America. When it came his turn to speak, he spoke a line that became famous: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

The phrase, usually credited to Marshall, went on to be used by several generations of Americans to complain about anything that was overpriced or fancier than it needed to be.

Marshall, however, was probably quoting a line from the 19th-century humorist Kin Hubbard, the author of a popular cartoon that ran in newspapers from 1904 to 1930. The Senators were probably already familiar with it. Another line Kin Hubbard made famous was, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be," quoted later by Kurt Vonnegut in his novels Slaughterhouse-five and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

Another of Kin Hubbard's many maxims might pertain to more than a few photo enthusiasts: "Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men."

Guilty!

Levels
I don't smoke cigars and never have, but, without ever thinking about it too much, I've always kinda liked the five-cent cigar thing. One reason might be because I'm a Hoosier* by birth, and Hoosiers cotton to cornpone. They like, or used to like, homespun, old-timey, good-natured down-home humor. And another might be because the notion of solid, unpretentious, middle-of-the-road, good-enough products, of whatever type, has a natural appeal to me on the level of idealistic principle. I like 'em. And I enjoy the task of finding that level.

So what level is that?

Products of all sorts by nature follow a bell curve, where the left side of the graph and the lead-in tail of the curve represents woefully insufficient quality and dolorous cheapness, and the far tail over at the right is excess, decadence, one-upsmanship, greed, naked status display, and the rubbing of one's neighbors' noses in the fatness of one's wallet. Both extremes are deplorable in my view of things. Both are unbalanced; both verge on the immoral; and both are traditionally un-American. I don't care for extremes. Just because something is good doesn't mean more of it is better. Seek the middle. Find balance.

It's raining, better get back inside
I'll give you an example. I saw a memorable interview on television once with a couple who were living in a dumpster. That is, the dumpster was their address; it was their domicile; it was where they slept and kept their things. As an abode, a human habitation, the dumpster had a few shortcomings. It was not big enough to stand up in, for one thing. It smelled bad, although the man informed the interviewer that "you get used to it." (I doubt many in the audience were eager to test that claim themselves, though.) Entry and egress were awkward. The roof—AKA the hinged plastic lid—did not keep rain out entirely, nor did it provide the ordinary security of even a screen door with a hook-and-eye on it.

A hook-and-eye latch—too luxurious for a dumpster dwelling

And of course, passers-by regularly threw a varied mix of trash and garbage down on their heads, which the couple then had to remove and stack on the pavement in the alley next to the dumpster. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet the lack of a kitchen or a bathroom in the home was also a drawback.

At the end of the interview, it started to rain. The couple apologized that it was inconvenient for them to get wet, because they had no place to wash or dry their clothes. Thus they excused themselves. The camera and the television audience then watched as they climbed into their house and closed the lid.

Contrast this to where another couple lives: a 37,000-square-foot mansion with thirteen buildings, forty bathrooms, three complete kitchens, a movie theater, indoor and outdoor pools, a bowling alley, a sauna with massage tables, a 20,000-bottle wine cellar, six bars, twelve bedrooms (seven with adjacent sitting rooms), a meditation room—and so on; the list of all the features of the home is longer than it is interesting, but you get the idea—on 52 acres of meticulously manicured land. In this house, the servants' quarters occupy more square footage than, well, several average houses. (In 2015 the average American house had 2,687 square feet of living space, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That would be a pretty lavish apartment in New York City but smaller than you're allowed to build in some Midwestern housing developments).

Both of these examples, the dumpster and the estate, are beyond three standard deviations from the mean—one at one end, the other at the other. Neither are very satisfactory.

You might say one extreme is noxious, whereas the other is obnoxious.

Seek the middle way
At the apex of the bell curve might be, what, a good, solid, tidy 3,500-square-foot house, nicely constructed of good but not lavish materials, durable, safe, with one kitchen, three or four bedrooms, two and a half or three and a half bathrooms, and an attached two- or three-car garage, on a half acre or so of land maybe, in a nice, friendly, safe, and hopefully not too sterile or "Stepford-wife"** neighborhood. Affordable but not cheap; nice but not too nice; gracious but comfortable.

That or something near it would be the apex house, at least in the areas of the United States where I've lived, and according to my middle class, middlebrow values.

Of course, the apex of a bell curve is, sensibly speaking, a region, not a single point. For instance, if I were to pick the Fujifilm X-T3 as the apex product among cameras, it would perfectly sensible for you to pick a product a little to the left of it (a little more basic) or a little to the right of it (a little fancier) as your own nomination for the apex point. In automobiles, the apex product has long been said to be the Toyota Camry. Or these days, maybe it's a good mainstream small SUV like the RAV4. 

You get the concept. The point is that there's usually a segment of the line at the top of the bell curve where sufficiency is reached, economies of scale are optimized, decadence has not been breached, and the product (whatever it is) is utilitarian, not too precious, and not too difficult or expensive to maintain—a place where usability is optimized, reliability is good, resale value remains robust, and where enjoyment and pride of ownership on the one hand, and practicality and a decent modesty on the other, are in balance. That kind of product is the best kind if you ask me. Somewhere in the middle ranges, a balanced option, neither too much nor too little, nothing too extreme.

That was Kin Hubbard's good 5¢ cigar***, back when.

Mike

[UPDATE later the same day: Believe it or not, this post started to be about stereo equipment. A family of loudspeakers from Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries (DALI) to be specific. I figured it had been a while since I wrote an Open Mike about audio. But I just got going, and it turned out it wanted to be about something different, so I gave the horse its head. What can I say? I usually write a post before breakfast every day, and something's gotta get written, at least in first draft, before I fix my oatmeal.

But one of the points I would have made if the post had been about speakers was this: sticking within shouting distance of the apex can help save you from OCD. Stereo equipment and OCD go together like cheese and crackers (whoops, wrong eating plan: like rice and beans), so you have to be mindful of perfectionism. I'm constantly trying to tell myself that good enough is good enough, that I don't need the perfect car or the perfect camera or the perfect whatever—to get something that works and just make do. It doesn't always work. But it's one of the reasons why the notion of an apex product—"settling" for a practical, utilitarian, mainstream choice—can be helpful in real life.]

*Born in the state of Indiana

**Oh, how clever and cunning your humble host can be. The Stepford Wives is a 1972 sci-fi thriller novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil) in which a woman moves with her husband to a suburban neighborhood and gradually discovers that all the other women there are submissive robots created by their husbands. The book was made into a movie twice, once in 1975 with Katherine Ross in the lead role, and again in 2004 with Nicole Kidman as the star.

So why is that sly? Well, the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart—in the book, at least (I haven't seen the movies)—is a photographer.  :-)

***Men a century ago clearly cared about their cigars. In his bawdy poem "The Betrothed" about a man who received an ultimatum from his wife to choose between her and his cigars—spoiler alert—the rascally but entertaining Rudyard Kipling, roughly contemporaneously with Thomas Riley Marshall's pronouncement in the Senate, had his character say, "...a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke."

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

B&H Photo • Adorama

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Featured Comments from:

Matt (partial comment): "I feel like the best strategy is to look to the left at least one standard deviation for products you care very little about, and to move to the right at least one standard deviation for products you care a great deal about."

Al C.: "On the economic well-offness bell curve, I am now situated well to the right of apex. However, I was born and raised at slightly left of apex, which conditioned me lifelong to agonize over spending beyond +1 sigma, except, curiously, for the few big ticket items such as houses, cars, sound systems. For smaller items, including cameras, I have a hard time justifying paying more than five cents for cigars. Which, I have learned but not yet managed to correct, is often false economy, because, using cameras as examples, I end up churning through multiple good but not great apex purchases which in total cost more than if I had reached for the +3 sigma model in the first place. How many of us have a shelf (closet?) full of 'apex' cameras and lenses, gathering dust? Quality over quantity may be the better advice, and strategy. Besides, YOLO [you only live once —Ed.]."

Mike replies: Your cameras example was the subject of one of my more famous posts, "Letter to George" (2010).

Tom Duffy: "Didn't St. Thomas Aquinas say, 'Prudence is the mother of all the virtues'? Ironic since he's been described as very short and weighed over 300 pounds."

George Feucht: "Having grown up in Wisconsin with a lower-middle class background, I was absolutely raised to these same values and I would totally agree, but I've found a curveball: I moved to Los Angeles to go to school and ultimately become a cameraman. The idea of having a 3,500 square foot house here is laughable. That is far right side of the curve. The average house in my apex-of-the-curve suburb of Burbank is 1,400 square feet, three bedrooms, on a 7000-square-foot lot for about $800K. That is way left of your curve for size and way right of your curve for price. It's odd when I'm home for Christmas and tell my relatives that I'm in a house half the size of theirs but pay five times the mortgage. As for other indicators of where I like to live on the curve, I own a RAV4 and the previous middle-of-the-road camera standard: a Canon 5D."

Mike replies: I have a cousin who has a two-story house on a spacious lot about a block from the ocean in a place called Palos Verdes Estates in L.A. (He's in finance.) He said "It's a really nice house for L.A., but any place else, it's just a house."

James: I'm going to pile on and say 3,500 square feet is well to the right of the apex. Not insanely far to the right, but to say it is about at apex is pretty far from reality.

"While the AEI [American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-thank —Ed.] is not everyone's cup of tea, they do not lie about basic statistics: In 2015, in the US, the average new home was 2600 square feet. Here is a PDF from the US Census.

"Even at 2,600 square feet, I have no idea what I would do with the space. And I live in a household with three total humans."

Mike replies: Fair enough. I saw a study which claimed that most people do most of their living in about 680 square feet inside their homes, even if the homes themselves are much larger than that. Then add about 140 square feet per bedroom per adult, and 100 square feet for a child's bedroom. Even with large bedrooms which had "sitting areas" at one end or off to the side, the occupants never used the sitting areas...they used only 140 square feet inside the larger bedroom.

I think they also subtracted "halls," meaning any space that people walked through to get to another space but didn't spend any time in per se. For example, if someone has a 6,000-sq.-ft. home, they might have to walk a considerable distance to get to their bedroom, but the study didn't count the stairs/halls that were passed through on the way unless they were actually occupied or used for some other reason or at some other time.

I suspect that the 1,000 extra square feet Americans have now, per the AEI statistics, is not exactly "living" space...it's space for "stuff." We own so much stuff that one of the few recession-proof businesses these days is self-storage. The issue becomes obvious at the extreme. When hoarders fill their home entirely, leaving themselves only "goat paths" along which to walk through rooms, they radically reduce their living space even though they might live in large houses. I saw an episode of A&E's "Hoarders" TV show that profiled a woman who could not use her bed because she had heaped so much stuff on it, so she slept curled up on half of her living room couch...the other half being piled with stuff. And she lived in an apparently generously-sized two-story house. On another show, a man had blocked most of his staircase, such that he could only get upstairs and downstairs by picking his way gingerly along a very narrow pathway. No matter how much "living space" such people have statistically, they don't actually have that much space to live in. Anyway, the same is true for many of the rest of us as well, only to a lesser extent.

Random Excellence: Photographer Unknown

I thought I'd try something a little different for "Random Excellence" today. This isn't an expressive photograph; it's a descriptive one. That's its purpose. It's not "authored" in the sense we usually think of. It's an auction house catalog photograph of an object for sale.

For some reason I was struck by this Garry Winogrand comment, at the outset of the new documentary:

Winogrand: "Well, what is a photograph?"

Background voice: "I don't know. You tell me what they meant to you."

Winogrand (interrupting): Well I'll tell you, I'll tell you what a photograph is. It's the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Consider this. What does a camera do? What does photography do better than anything else, but describe? To use it for anything else is rather foolish."

There's something nice and neat and clean about description as a first principle for the way photographs work. I like it. Photography subverts any definition of itself, and we could come up with examples of photographs that describe nothing. But I've always been skeptical about meaning as the first principle. This picture describes a guitar. It doesn't mean anything. It tells no stories. It has no significance.

That doesn't mean there are no stories to be told. What the picture shows is a model D-35 acoustic guitar made by the C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1969, serial number 244869. The guitar belongs to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who said that of all his guitars, it has the most songs associated with it. In 1969 he was on his way to Manny's Music, a guitar store in Midtown Manhattan, but bought this on the street before he got there. It was his primary studio acoustic guitar for both his Pink Floyd years* and for his solo recordings. You can hear it, for example, on the album Wish You Were Here. The title song starts off as though we're listening to a radio, and then at about 40 seconds in a much more present guitar chimes in, as if a guitarist were playing along with the radio. That second, more immediate guitar is the one pictured above.

That's significant to people who love classic British rock or are fans of Pink Floyd, but the significance isn't contained in the photograph. It's in the object the picture describes. Does knowing what the object is imbue the photograph with more meaning for you? Even if it doesn't, you can understand how it might for others. There is almost always more to know about things described in a photograph, which is why I'm not one of those who say "a photograph has to stand alone." All that means is that sometimes there's nothing to say...which is fair enough. But it doesn't mean there's nothing that could be said, if we knew more. To claim there is never anything more to learn about the world of appearances, never anything to know about what a picture describes, is a bankrupt attitude. Or at least a barren one. There is always more that could be known about what a descriptive photograph describes. Our curiosity about that, I believe, is part of what brings photographs to life.

David Gilmour's guitar collection is being auctioned off this coming June. This, along with several photographs of Gilmour playing it and facsimiles of repair receipts, is estimated at $10,000 to $20,000.

Curiously, the collection itself, like a rock act, is going on tour—selected highlights will be on display at Christie's Los Angeles in May.

Mike

*"The guitar was first seen in the recording studio during sessions for the 1972 soundtrack album Obscured by Clouds. [...] The acoustic can be heard on the tracks 'Wot's… Uh The Deal,' 'Childhood’s End' and 'Free Four.'

"Gilmour confirms that the guitar was present for writing purposes during the recording sessions for the band's 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon at London’s Abbey Road Studios between May 1972 and January 1973, although no acoustic parts were recorded for the final record. The D-35 has become most readily identified with the acoustic title track of Pink Floyd’s next studio album Wish You Were Here, another concept album, built around the theme of absence [...] the acoustic can be heard on the track 'Welcome To The Machine,' as well as the timeless 'Wish You Were Here,' hailed by Rolling Stone as the band’s most enduring composition." (From the Lot Essay.)

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

(Not) everything must fade away

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Ben Rosengart: "Manny's Music, which closed in 2009, was part of 'Music Row,' a series of music shops on 48th St. in Manhattan. I would guess that Gilmour didn't obtain this instrument literally 'on the street,' but rather popped in to some other store en route to Manny's. Although I didn't haunt Music Row until some 20 years after Gilmour, I never saw anyone hawking instruments outdoors."

hugh crawford replies to Ben: "Across the street from Manny's Music and a little to the west, between Sam Ash and Rudy's, there was a store with four-foot high letters saying 'We Buy Guitars,' known to everyone as simply 'We Buy.' They served as the place that the clueless and desperate would sell guitars at low prices. I knew people who would hang out in front of We Buy on Saturday morning cherry-picking guitars. (I used to do the same thing on 32nd Street buying old cameras. I once got a Crown Graphic kit for $15 when a store offered $10.) Anyway, anyone who knew anything about selling guitars in NYC would know that you would get a better price for a Martin at Matt Umanov on Bleeker Street, so picking up a cheap Martin on 48th street from some clueless guy with a guitar to sell sounds perfectly plausible to me.

"Come to think of it, my wife bought a car from someone stopped at a red light in NYC. We were standing on a corner in SoHo and I said how much I loved Volvo station wagons, and one with a for sale sign stopped in front of where we were standing. NYC is like that."

anthony reczek: "Another level of meaning comes comes from actually owning and playing a (1975) Martin D-35; that personalizes the photo for me. It initially triggered memories of my brother, from whom I inherited the instrument, which morphed into memories of how it sounded earlier today in a gig as a strolling musician at a nursing facility. How the residents responded, the acoustics in different hallways etc., etc. That's just for starters; this 'descriptive' photo quickly became a veritable rabbit hole of 'meaning' for me."

Mike replies: That's great. It's perfectly valid, of course, and crucial. What the viewer brings to a photograph is a big part of how it operates. It's one reason why people can have such varied responses to art. One of the basic problems of art appreciation is that sometimes people who believe they "don't know anything about art" discount their own responses, dismissing their personal associations as being not valid because (they think) they aren't part of the maker's immediate intention and aren't sanctified by some imagined authority. It's odd that sometimes we have to be trained to feel our own feelings about things. I reserve the right to react to art as if my experience of it is a significant experience for me, and I reserve the right to bring to it whatever I bring to it.

I suspect the reason I wrote this post in the first place is because I bought that Pink Floyd album when I lived way out in the countryside after dropping out of college. It was a difficult time of my life. Seeing the guitar that struck those notes took me back to the first time I heard the song, sitting on a couch in that old house in Vermont.

David Comdico: "Winogrand is direct in his insights into photography in the same way that a photograph is direct. This parallel always strikes me in how performative it is.

"Gilmour's guitar is a good example of Barthes' explanation in Camera Lucida of how 'the referent adheres' which is maybe just a fancy way of saying what Winogrand said from the other side. A photograph resists becoming a sign and in order to observe the signifier (not just any guitar but Gilmour's guitar) 'requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.'

"Barthes supports his claim that the photograph is unable to serve as a sign (the magical guitar that made spawned many Pink Floyd hits) by stating that the 'marking' doesn't take. Barthes says it 'turns' like milk—which I always associate with old advertising that in a decade often looks ridiculous—'buy this product' turns to 'can you believe people actually bought this product?'

"In a collection of photos of Martin guitars there is no Gilmourness to this particular photo that makes it stand out as such. It then turns back to being a description of a guitar—and the information in the image proves that the guitar is a 6-string not a 12 string.

"In short the photo needs to have a caption 'Gilmour's guitar on which he wrote "Wish You Were Here" etc.' where the solidity of the sign then relies on data external to the photo and is meta-photographic.

"Theory aside, the thing that strikes me the most about this photo is its impersonality, the flat, one-dimensional lighting and the white limbo that surrounds the guitar—not a whiff of the life of a musician in sight.

"The presentation is impersonal and austere, probably given to the needs of publishing, where directional lighting could clash with other images in a layout and the white background allows it to blend on a white page with text. On another level, the anonymity of such a presentation (i.e. the most minimal of information needed to convey that this is Gilmour's guitar—i.e. no Gilmour) highlights the importance of Christie's imprimatur and the brand's seal of authenticity which provides the crucial piece of information—again such authentication is meta-photographic. So, I read the proposed sign not as 'Gilmour's guitar' but 'Christie's Gilmour Guitar.'"

Mike replies: Actually, I think the guitar itself resists becoming a sign...I've always been troublingly disappointed by souvenirs, and my beloved grandmother's treasured French wall cabinet, which hung in her bedroom for many years, and which I thought would be a way to hang on to her memory, is just a piece of old furniture in my house. A nice one, but the referent does not adhere. Enough.  :-)

John Camp: "I read the occasional guitar magazine and one had a feature on this sale at Christie's. The article said that these guitars often sell at ten to 20 times the official estimate. There are two segments of the guitar world interested in sales like these. The first is musicians, who would treasure a D-35 of this age if it's in good condition. They would buy it to play and it might sell for a couple of thousand dollars and maybe a couple of thousand more because of the Gilmour connection. The second group is collectors, who would value it for its Gilmour connection alone, and they are the guys who might take it to $200,000.

"I do think the best photos (and other artworks) stand alone, and I think the photographer's intent is usually quite plain in the best photos. There's no puzzle. There are not many of those photos, though. There is a second tier of photos as excellent in form and meaning as the first, but whose meaning may erode over time and eventually the work may no longer stand alone. The same is true of other art works.

"For example, Annie Leibovitz shot a famous photo of John Belushi standing alone and a bit tattered looking on the side of a highway, with the red taillights of a car that has just passed him, and apparently (though probably not really) the headlights of another car illuminating him. Given his career, and how he died (from wretched excess) I think that photo had a lot of meaning for a lot of people of his generation. But as recognition of that complex set of face/facts/culture begins to fade, so will the meaning of the photo for viewers.

Annie Leibovitz, John Belushi, Staten Island, New York, 1981

"The first tier photos, though, and I would include such things as Ansel Adams's 'Moonrise' and Paul Caponigro's 'Running White Deer' among them, won't fade as long as there is a moon and as long as there is wildlife. They are not only striking as objects in themselves, but they elicit an almost automatic response from sensitive viewers having to do with such universal things as death and nature. Even if we eventually succeed in killing all the deer, a memory of such things will stay with us, if only as memories (even as they do with ancient Egyptian wildlife paintings.) And the intent of the photographers couldn't be clearer, in my humble opinion."

Alex Mercado: "I used to photograph items for an auction house. It was the task of photographing these items that imbued the photographs with more meaning for me. The results were straightforward and rather unimposing; however my part in creating those catalog photographs are now part of their provenance. Here are two descriptive photographs I made that are quite memorable to me [one two]."

David Raboin: "I wish I had more time to write a proper comment.... After 11 years of reading TOP, this is my favorite post and my favorite featured comments. This blog is a treasure. Thanks Mike."

Mike replies: And thank you for signing up to be a Patreon contributor! Very kind of you.

Michael Perini: "Good representational photography like this is not as easy as it looks, and I have always been attracted to good examples. Early in my career I shot for catalogs, mostly low end, but some higher end—which led to advertising 'still lifes.' A collection from Christie's has lots of requirements, including no techniques that call attention to themselves, a similar look throughout, perfect color balance, and preservation of relative size. I've been drawn to this kind of photography ever since I saw Walker Evans' 'Beauties of the Common Tool' [Fortune magazine, July 1955 —Ed.]  and Bernice Abbot's scientific illustration where 'the idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.' A very enjoyable post."