The Online Photographer

New Age, Same Old Problem

Snow Moon 2023

I'm a lunatic, as you know. The moon is one of those things I love looking at that always makes me think I need a picture. Do we all react like that to some things?

The significance of this otherwise ordinary snap, taken on Tuesday evening, is that it was taken with my iPhone, handheld, in the dark, as I was on my way from the barn to the house with my hands full. And you can see a hint of detail on the surface of the moon. (Full disclosure, I did have to adjust the exposure manually.)

For most of photography's history, getting a clear, well-exposed, well-focused (and, in later times, color-correct) picture of all but the easiest subjects was often a challenge. The ability to achieve that goal consistently, especially under trying circumstances, was often enough, all by itself, to mark someone as "a photographer."

When I was a photography teacher in the ever-more-distant 1980s, I used to present a challenge to my more technically preoccupied students. It was a mental exercise (I'm big on thought experiments, as you might also know). "If you had a camera that could magically take a good sharp picture of nearly anything with very little effort, what would you photograph?" At that time, that magical camera was still entirely theoretical—my students had to expose Tri-X B&W film by setting their exposure controls and focus manually, then develop their own film and make 5x7 prints under the enlargers in the school darkroom. It was a long process that involved a lot of work, and one or two of the many mistakes it was possible to make along the way were often made. The pedagogical point of the thought experiment, as you no doubt apprehend on account of you are not chopped livah, was to get them to try to move their focus from the technical arena to the aesthetic one. For at least a few minutes.

We've had those magic cameras for a while now in our "standard mainstream AdAm cameras." But the other, lower end of the cameraverse was always the consumer product—the "Brownie, Instamatic, point-and-shoot, digicam" end of the market. Now, the magic camera that was only a daydream 40 years ago is, I think, fully present not only in enthusiast cameras that cost thousands of dollars for an outfit, but in the camera modules that are provided as a matter of course as a feature on a phone. The moon picture is a good test because I've been trying to take pictures of the moon since boyhood. I have lots of comps from across the last 50 years or so. It's a neat example of virtual science fiction becoming reality in a short period of time. More or less half the lifetime of some of the grayer beards amongst ye.

...But, of course, the real problem is still exactly the same as it ever was. If you have a magic camera that can take a sharp, clear, well-exposed, well-focused, and color-correct picture of most anything, what are you going to photograph? And, at a deeper level, how are you going to express yourself using photography in a way that is individualized or idiosyncratic to you specifically, such that other people can look at it and say "that looks like [X]'s work"? Because one of the real surprises to me of living in the middle of what once was the future is that personal expressiveness and a stylistic identity does not seem one bit easier to achieve than it ever was...and maybe even the opposite is the case now. And so it goes.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Obsessing

I don't think of myself as a particularly obsessive person. There are other times, however, when I suspect that my broad interest in different subjects is just the result of my brain searching for new things to obsess over.

Right—I'm going to "tell on myself" here, at the risk of making myself look foolish. But then, as George Orwell wrote, "autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Long story short: I might not be diligent about physical exercise, but I'm not shy about mental exercise. Some time ago I read that as we get older it's important not to get into mental ruts. The idea is that to keep your brain healthy you've got to exercise it by burning new neural pathways: accepting challenges, grappling with unfamiliar ideas, looking at the world in fresh ways. This notion was freeing for me, because I had always been too results-oriented. If I learned Japanese book-binding, it was because I expected to master it. Many things turn into disappointments that way. In the new regime, however, what's important is not mastery, but struggle. If you start learning Chinese on Duolingo, you're using it as a puzzle, essentially; a challenge for your mind—not necessarily trying to become conversant in tourist Chinese. So in recent years I've delved into a hodgepodge of seemingly disparate pursuits: learning to play simple tunes on the dulcimer, revisiting French, or struggling to learn touch-typing with the Kinesis keyboard—set up for the Dvorak layout no less. I got up to 20 wpm, and it took me months and many hours of working at it.

Most recently, having known since I was about eight that I'm bad at chess, I decided to struggle a bit with chess. It was that or Latin.

I'm taking a simple online course (at learnchess.net). It's been very interesting. I've also done a dive into chess culture, at least as it is presented online. If you want a sample, here's a fascinating video recounting a famous game. If you're not into chess, just follow along—it's not that hard to understand when you're merely observing while having everything explained to you twice, first by Garry Kasparov and then by GothamChess. To me it seems a good illustration, accessible even to rank beginners like me, of the kind of thinking involved in high-level chess. And it's pretty thrilling, frankly.

So then: several teachers recommend to learners that they get an actual physical chess set as they learn, so that they can leave a board set up to study, play against themselves, and so forth. Immediately I think, I am not going to invest money in that. I'll buy some unbreakable plastic pieces and one of those roll-up silicone chess boards.

So then what happens? Five days later, and I've got the basics of the entire universe of chess pieces all sussed out—weighted vs. unweighted, plastic vs. wood, handmade vs. mass produced, contemporary vs. antique, all the major websites, connoisseurs, collectors, aesthetics...and I'm this close to dropping hundreds of dollars on these:

And what are these? Why, I'm surprised you have to ask. Don't you know? It's a modern reproduction of a 1930s Soviet chess set, hand-carved by a husband and wife team of artisans who live in a battle zone in Ukraine who take custom orders on Etsy, of course. With the proper honey-colored white pieces appropriate to vintage Soviet-era Russian sets. Because you need that. Naturally.

So I'm just about to hit the buy button, when—talk about a flexible and resilient brain!—it occurs to me in the very nick of time that I don't know how to play chess. I'm pathetic at chess, presently. Of the 1,327 possible openings listed in the Oxford Companion to Chess, I currently have a grand total of zero memorized. I can't even score 100% on simple little quizzes like how to checkmate using two bishops. Not to mention that I live alone and don't even know anyone else who plays chess.

And there's more: chess pieces aren't even important to the game. They're just symbols. It's not like pool, where balls, cues, and the table have to be true or it will affect play. Chess pieces don't affect play. It's possible to play with a board you drew with a pencil, using scraps of paper with the names of the pieces scribbled on them. It makes absolutely zero difference to the game whether you play with a grubby old plastic set in the park or a £5,000 hand-carved set from Jacques of London.

Be sensible!
So how do we feel about people who obsess over equipage they can't even use? The guitar collector who can't play, the supercar owner who doesn't know how to drive, the hacker with the latest, most fashionable $600 driver? How about the Leica collector who doesn't use his pretties to, you know, take pictures? Has that ever described you? I fight against it, not 100% successfully.

Where photography is concerned, I've had to learn to be tolerant. I've been writing for a wide audience since 1987 when I had my first article published in a magazine. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they're not hurting anyone, anyone can do any tomfool thing they want to. I know people who buy new cameras about as often as most people stock up on toilet paper, people who haven't yet switched to digital, people who own 50 50mm lenses or 200 camera bags, even guys who ruin perfectly good color digital cameras by having the CFA stripped off the sensor at considerable expense. (Who would do that?) I've seen everything. No, scratch that: almost everything. Because I've also learned, if I've learned anything, that there's always one more surprise around the corner, something I've never, ever heard of anybody doing before. It's all good. As long as no one gets hurt.

As for me: no chess set for Mike. If I'm still learning chess one year from today, I'll buy a chess set I can comfortably afford. Somebody remind me, will you? And it will be just the right one. Until then, common sense shall pertain, and calm prevail.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ASW: "I'm right there with you Mike. If we need an extension cord, I don't just go to the store to buy an extension cord—I feel compelled to educate myself about the relationship between wire gauge and length and safe electrical load. Well, that seems reasonable. Then I start examining the little power sticker on every electronic device or tool that we own to see what sort of extension cord would be appropriate. Again, just being a safe home owner. Then I start to imagine scenarios where I might need to operate some high power tool that I don't even own (but might some day!) at the very edge of our property. Now we're talking about very long, very heavy duty, very expensive specialty power cords that you don't pick up at your local hardware store. Then (hopefully) my wife reminds me that we only need a 10-foot cord to plug in the 60-watt bird-bath heater and I've gone way overboard...again. "

Kenneth Tanaka: "'Obsession' is often cited as a negative, self-destructive trait. But the truly self-destructive disorder is 'obsessive-compulsive disorder' where one has lost self-control of one's obsessive urges and lets those urges run his/her life. Very bad.

"And, yes, plain ol' obsession can be debilitating and destructive, too, burning up all one's intellectual and emotional bandwidth. But, in fact, obsession is the force that has moved humanity (mostly) forward since humans stood erect. What if, say, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Jonas Salk, et. al. had not been 'obsessive'? No, obsession is a very important driver throughout human history. A world without it would be sad to imagine. (Even insects and animals are instinctively obsessed!)

"And what about being an obsessed collector? Same story. Museums would have little to show the public without obsessed collectors disgorging their treasures post-mortem! And how sparse would the used Leica camera gear world be without guys obsessed with getting the 'best' lenses and cameras? (Blushing, as a guy who recently scored the new 35mm Summilux and the wonderful 35mm APO Summicron lenses.)

Albert Smith: "George Orwell wrote, 'autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful...'

"'I'm writing my unauthorized autobiography.' —Steven Wright

"My recent obsession involves this site. Your post from many months ago on watches was a tipping point for me. I had a half a dozen purely functional watches with a combined value of under $300. Since that article, I have 20 watches, and $300 is the average cost of each, some hitting $700-plus. I spend hours on YouTube watching reviews and planning my next purchase. Most of these watches have been worn once or twice, just to confirm operation, but I really don't need 95% of these.

"I never use to understand hoarders, but I may now.

"Good luck with your chess sets."

Carl Coryell-Martin: "Thank you for not linking to the hand-carved-in-Ukraine chess pieces. I have a perfectly serviceable set thank you very much."

Bob G.: "This might be worth perusing: 'Chess Set Made from Camera Lenses: Canon ƒ/2.8 to Nikon ƒ/4, Check!'

Mike replies: Count on LensRentals to be way ahead of us. That's hilarious. And check out that rental price!

Keith Cartmell: "Once upon a time I was a triathlete. Some of them obsess about bicycles, trying for weight savings measured in grams. They'll use an oval tube in their drink bottle, oriented to cut wind resistance. The bike itself was designed in a wind tunnel, weighs almost nothing, and can cost a substantial fraction of what a nice new car costs. No matter that the rider is by far the heaviest and least aerodynamic component. The best professionals can take advantage of such bikes, but most are sold to well-heeled amateurs who are mid pack at best.

"We called such people posers."

Eoin: "Mate with two bishops is hard! I played in leagues and tournaments all through school (even winning a few) and took up chess again recently—and I only just learnt how to mate with two bishops."

SteveW: "Thanks for this. I think. I just (obsessively) made a list of 10 chess books and (obsessively) ranked them in order of preference and will be (obsessively) looking in my storage bins in the garage for my old chess board. Sigh. —Fellow Obsessive"

Cateto/Jose: "On this very topic, I remember reading recently a comment from a doctor, a psychiatrists specialized in older people. He advised that, contrary to the common idea, the best way to keep your brain healthy is not to engage in mental activity, bur rather to keep as much social activity as possible: to interact with other people, be it family, friends, colleagues, and keep that relationship as active as possible, along your whole lifetime. And honestly, I think it makes sense."

Frans Evenblij: "Fantastic to have the intricate details of the Kasparov–Karpov match explained. The funny thing is, your remark that chess pieces are just symbols that do not affect the game sounds perfectly sensible. I expect that for somebody at grandmaster level this is perfectly true. A lot of grandmasters don’t even need a board at all. They do it all in their head.

"And yet…for me, I find that a full-size tabletop chess board with the classic Staunton pieces give me a much more serious presentation of the game than when I would play with small icons on a video screen or an equally small portable travel chess set. Somehow as a beginner level player I do not seem to be able to take the game seriously when the board is small and toylike. Same effect you have with your monochrome-converted Sigma camera. Somehow the camera properties, for you, and the way the chess board looks, for me, changes the way we think. So what would the knowledge about his driver do to the fine motor muscle control of the golf player?"

Mike replies: A good point. We've always placed a high value on simply liking a camera being a good reason to own it. Of course you're also enabling me a little.  :-)

Is Photography Losing Its Mojo?

Looking at photography in general, would you say its status and prestige in the culture is going up or down, or staying about the same?

Mike
My flickr page / My New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Richard Alan Fox: "Everybody is carrying a camera and an album everywhere at all times."

Ed Hawco: "I think the status of photography is going down. A few generations ago many people had cameras, but they were mostly just snap-shooters, and most of their snapshots remained unseen by most people. So for the most part, the photographs that the general population would actually see on a regular basis were created by working professionals and artists. That not only meant that the quality was usually high, but there was a sense of ratification and prestige around it. To have a photograph published, or hung in a gallery, was exceptional and a mark of high status.

"Now, everyone has a camera, and everyone is capable of creating high quality photographs (at least from a technical perspective), and of pouring sugar all over them in the form of one-button 'filters' from Instagram and other apps. So there's no prestige in having a photo published, because anyone with a social media account publishes photographs whenever they want. And there's very little sense of the 'exceptional' image—as in, one that people go back to over and over—as the tsunami guarantees even the most 'liked' images get about 15 seconds [that much? —Ed.] per pair of eyeballs and then it's on to the next.

"There might still be some prestige in getting a photograph published in a top-shelf publication, but that goes largely unnoticed by much of the population. (Signal to noise.) It's about as noticeable and prestigious as winning an oration or handwriting competition was in 1950. What's the big deal? Everyone talks, everyone writes...only a few people cared if the oratory or handwriting (quotidian activities for most people) was exceptional enough to win an award. Same applies to photography now, I think."

David Aiken: "There is a difference between 'losing its mojo' and the state of photography's status and prestige within a culture.

"The state of photography's status and prestige in the culture is changing just as the status and prestige of everything else is changing. Over time, existing artistic styles and genres lose status and prestige as they become 'old hat' while newer styles and genres gain status and prestige as they become accepted. Video is supplanting still photography as the main photographic medium these days.

"I don't think anyone reading The Online Photographer thinks that still photography has lost its mojo. On the other hand most of us are probably old enough to think that its status and prestige in our culture are on the way down. That doesn't mean we appreciate it any the less; it just means that we see younger people preferring different visual media than we do.

"Still photography will retain its mojo as long as people continue to make great still photographs, and I don't think that the standard of still photography is dropping. The standards of the past look high because we only see what's passed the test of time, and the standards of the present look lower because the stuff which won't pass the test of time is still around in abundance and the stuff which ends up passing the test of time is always only a small proportion of what is produced."

Dan Khong: "Photography has not lost its Mojo. What has changed is the methodology by which this Mojo is upheld. In film days, photography was held in higher regard because people could trust in photo evidence. Now, digital manipulation could alter and fake an image. That is the greater threat to the Mojo."

James J: "I think imagery has never been more popular. Snapshots have never been more popular. But AI will change the profession of photography forever and it started yesterday. We are very close to being able to relight a scene in post."

PaulW: "Down, and I say this because we're drowning in imagery and people are becoming numb to it. I also believe this is a big part of the reason for the fascination with AI generated imagery. Many people are looking for their fix and 'regular' photography no longer provides that."

Bahi: "Its status is falling as more people make it up the learning curve to a state of competence. I grew up in a household where two or three rolls of film a year covered all our requirements—birthdays, the holiday season, vacations, visits to and from friends and relatives—and can still remember being startled when, as a teenager, I heard Cindy Crawford explain on TV what made her favourite photographer so good. The gist of it: the photographer was special and unusual because he knew what exactly he wanted and was able to get it within the first few rolls. That’s why she liked him. I couldn’t get that idea out of my head for weeks—the first few rolls! Well, we all have a few rolls to burn now and frankly, it makes us better.

"The idea of photographing the mundane is unquestioned, too—teenagers have iPhone camera rolls filled with perfunctory pictures, encouraged by apps like BeReal, the name of which is (partly) a play on ‘B-reel,’ supposedly.

"But the popularity of photography isn't declining. It’s still special and, even if it’s taken for granted, it’s here to stay. Imagine in the 20th century the idea of SnapChat, an app used to send ephemeral photographs that just vanish after you've received them. I can’t bring myself to even look at it but it's part of photography now.

"Random observation: a young server at a restaurant recently told me my camera was enormous. It's a Micro Four Thirds camera with a tiny 15mm lens fitted—it's the smallest interchangeable-lens digital camera I've ever owned by some way.

"And another: tourist attractions were full of people carrying SLRs, then compact film cameras, then tiny digital cameras, then DSLRs and now…phones. It's all phones now, give or take. It's odd but it seems to work."

Khürt L Williams: "I don’t think about it. I’m too busy enjoying it."

kirk: "Is commercial photography prestigious? About as prestigious as a Walmart greeter in a red vest. If you aren't doing photography because you find it fun then I don't have a clue why you would pursue it in 2022. Seems like an old peoples' hobby now. Just look at the numbers. Camera sales = 7% of what they were at the peak of the digital craze (about a decade ago). Sure. Cellphones. But no prestige based on the pursuit of photography in any professional capacity. Prediction: Photography as a paid service will become a subset of graphic design and just as graphic designers had to learn typesetting after the demise of typesetting services they will learn the nuts and bolts of taking photos and then fixing them in post. A few photographers at the high end will continue to be successful but everyone else in the commercial field will also need to be a videographer, designer, production person and even...a writer. When is the last time you got invited to a big gallery showing of gorgeous black-and-white images? How are those fine art photography magazines doing? It's all a mess in transition. Again, do it because it's fun. No other reason I can think of...."

Doug Vaughan: "Photography is still important to most as a way of documenting life, but the methods are definitely different. I'm not a fan of video and not a big fan of cell phone photos but realize I'm in the minority. When our kids were young and we documented events, we always had to think about how much film we were burning up and what it would cost to have film developed. My wife and I were laughing earlier this week about how young parents have no idea what it means to be careful how many photos you're taking or waiting a few days to get them back from the drug store.

"From another perspective, a friend posted a photo of her horse a couple weeks ago, and I commented about how nice it was with amazing light. I assumed late light was streaming in through the barn doors. She replied that she used her iPhone 14 and was playing with the portrait mode and applied various lighting presets until she found one she liked. I was fooled."

Bear.: "A couple of anecdotes on which my answer is based:

a.) A colleague of mine attended on of my exhibitions recently—she's strictly a smartphone photographer for personal interweb consumption—and her immediate comment was, 'wow, you see the world completely different to me, I like it.'

2.) I accompanied a true artist friend (high-end bespoke jeweler) on a delivery run to a high-end retailer—I was introduced as a 'photographer' (which is not my day job, as she well knew)—which gave me (and her) far more kudos in a real-world high-end art market than if she gave the true(r) answer, 'lawyer.'

"I think that sums it up. Although the world is awash with pointless images for immediate and short term consumption, there is still a recognition of photograph undertaken as more permanent art. And, given the decline in non-smartphone photography, I think that status and prestige is up, not down due to increasing rarity value...."

David Drake: "I am not really sure what you mean by 'status' or 'prestige,' but I would say that the appreciation of what it takes to take a well-crafted creative image is likely going up. I think the more people there are who are taking photos the more awareness there will be that taking a 'good photo' isn’t easy."

Tomorrow Is Another Day

Ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right?

We're under a low, thick layer of overcast today and it's been raining steadily. The land is at its least attractive—the farm fields have been harvested and the stubble's been plowed under, the leaves on the trees are gone, and the prevailing colors of the wet land are a green that looks like a dark gray, a brown that looks like a dark gray, and dark gray. Everything's gone wrong for me so far. Played some pool this morning and missed so many easy shots I made myself mad. Took a nap, had a nightmare. (A napmare?!) Read some more pages in my current book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, recommended in that GQ list I mentioned a couple of days ago, and it did nothing but impart a diffuse and dreadful agitation about the evil in the world. (I'm kicking that one to the curb. Life's too short and the book's too long.) Went to a restaurant and bought a meal, and it gave me Montezuma's revenge. Bought something on sale at half price, and got charged double. Drove slowly all the way home. Just in case.

I'm laying low for the rest of today. Not gonna say anything, drive anywhere, buy anything, invest in anything, or get in any arguments. Not going to work on my book. Not going to write a post. Not going to call a friend. Not going to open any mail, or even have anything more to eat. I'm just going to hunker down, stay in, try to keep warm, do nothing, and get through to bedtime with as little as possible happening. Even the moon is setting early tonight.

I'll try again in the morning.

Tomorrow's a new day!

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Nigli: "Actually yes. I went out on my cyclocross bike today, in a brisk 2°C. After falling off for the umpteenth time, looking at the 5' long, 2" thick stick that had thrown itself into my front wheel, I did wonder what the heck I was doing. Somewhat loudly and colourfully."

John Hunter: "Well, Mike, It's funny you should mention it today, because I'm having that kind of day, too. The mood just ain't right. The weather is cold, wet and dark. I made a special trip down to Cobourg just to buy something that turned out to be out of stock. I got called away to help with something silly that I really didn't want to do, in the rain. The supper that I worked so hard on, turned into something else that I didn't have the appetite for. ('Bit of a cock-up on the catering front.') Now I'm hunkering down,too, not wanting any more goofy stuff to happen before bed. Putting my jammies on, maybe reading a bit...I feel for you, man. Yup, tomorrow's a new day. The wood stove is making me feel cosy, and I'll be ready to fall asleep soon. Sweet dreams, my friend."

darlene: "This morning I packed up my van for a few days at St. George Island. Got up early to prep the food, clothing, and cameras. Set up the kitties' water and food feeders. I am looking forward to shooting some 4x5 B&W pinholes of the Gulf of Mexico waves and dunes with the digital. All set to go, and !@#$, the van won't start. Ugh! I got a charged-up battery booster jumper thingy, hooked it up, and got a red light; it will not start. ☹ I called my friend to tell her I won’t be showing up and then canceled my campsite; I will get the van serviced tomorrow. I bought it in February 2018, so I am sure it needs a new battery. I read four years was the expected life of a car battery under normal conditions. I do not drive the van that much ( < 18k miles to date), mostly camping/photography trips. After I showed back up and took their feeders away, the kitties looked confused. I was disappointed but glad it broke down at home. Better luck next time to us both, although your story has a lot of interesting twists and turns, whereas mine is dead in the garage."

Kirk: "Must be in the air. I was in the studio packing for a shoot tomorrow when I glanced at my calendar and realized that the job was really scheduled for the 30th, not the 28th. I'd already declined an invitation for something fun tomorrow. I was...deflated. I spent the rest of a sunny day sitting inside staring at the computer and wondering if I'd already crossed over into...general mental decline. This day just had a bad vibe all the way around. And it wasn't any better for being here instead of there. Some days just conspire to suck.

"Tomorrow might be better. I'm hoping for it. Funny that a bad day can cover so much geography."

Peter Wright: "By the time I got to the end of the main paragraph, I was laughing out loud! What a litany of woe! But nothing too serious, and I am glad of that. We get very similar weather here in Southern Ontario, to you in NY state, but if I was feeling a bit down in any way, your post cheered me up and made it a better day! Thanks!"

Mike replies: You're welcome. By the bye, things got worse yesterday despite my best efforts. By accident, I hit the wrong @#$! button on the thermostat, and now I cannot change the temperature in the house. The whole #$% @^%& thing's in Portuguese now. I've spent some time on Amazon this morning furiously looking up "simple thermostats." Which probably won't actually help—I'll just end up calling the plumber (he does HVAC) and asking him how to reset the thermostat. He'll act like it's elementary and something I should have been able to figure out myself, on account of they're all in cahoots. But then he'll tell me. And then I'll be able to take off my outdoor jacket while typing.

Grant: "I'm sure the HVAC guy has fixed your thermostat by now. Just in case he needs time to brush up on his Portuguese first, a quick Google search provides this: 'Common methods for resetting a thermostat include installing the battery backward for five seconds, pushing a recessed reset button with a pin or paper clip, or shutting off the breaker to the thermostat for 30 seconds.'"

Mark: "It was a great day! Afterglow from the U of M vs. OSU game...."

Mike replies: Funny article about that, by an OSU fan, in the WSJ.

What a Good Camera Does

Recently I've been happier with my photography than I've been in years. I'm very happy with my two current cameras. As I've mentioned several times, I've been conceiving of my gear as two very different cameras for very different purposes:

Camera 1: The Sigma fp(m) monochrome rig for serious work

"Camera" 2: The iPhone 13 for note-taking, immediate sharing, pretty colors, funny stuff I see, and messin' around.

Two purposes, two cameras. Both of them intersect equally with the simple joy of "seeing and noticing" which is probably as good a description as any of this activity—amateur photography for pleasure. As you can see from the previous two posts but one, the iPhone makes decent photographs for the Web and for texting to friends. It doesn't even do too badly for small prints, as my recent "Mike's Miniatures" print sale might have demonstrated to those of you who bought a print.

As for the Sigma, with its funky-but-oh-so-cool viewfinder attachment it's one of the weirdest, quirkiest cameras I've ever owned in my life...and I could not be happier with it. After its conversion to monochrome, it has felt gloriously liberating to go back to the kind of photographing I did all through my youth—with a camera that takes only B&W pictures. I love B&W. Always have. It's my medium. (I just put up two new pictures in my current album. Mind the descriptions.) As I described many times now, even though converting color digital to B&W works very well and yields excellent results technically, working that way just doesn't suit the way my brain works. I need to have color removed as an option. Not everyone is that way, and people like me might be a very small minority for all I know—well, a minority within a minority, as there are very few dedicated B&W photographers now. However, I've always known this about myself. My recent experiences with the Sigma have demonstrated to me, richly, how right I was about that. It's been like coming home again; it restores my photography to me, after many years of wandering half-heartedly in the wilderness of color-priority digital. (I did say wilderness...but that's just what it was for me. I know that what it is for most people is the opposite: the coming of age of color, the unlocking of the joys and beauties of color, the control of color, the liberation of color.)

Those are the two ways I photograph. These two cameras suit those needs admirably. I think it goes without saying that 99.999% of photographers will want and need something other than what suits me!

Cold Twilight

I've finished building the Sigma kit. It all fell together like magic. I got a bag that fits the camera (this one), on which I put an UpStrap Friendship strap (best camera strap ever made, and I speak advisedly—and no less an eminence than Jay Maisel himself agrees with me on that) for over-the-shoulder carrying; a wrist strap for when I have the camera in my hand (I chose this one); a charger; an extra battery for emergencies in the field; a spare card, ditto; and I put a camera baseplate on the camera and threw my lovely tripod in the car. That's the best tripod ever made. I took the picture above with the tripod. Oh, and I got a deep yellow filter for the lens, which I remove for low-light shooting...but I'll post again about color filters with the monochrome cameras in more detail after I do some more tests.

Getting to the point
The point I want to make here, although I am taking a long time getting to it: what I would wish for you—what I would wish for every reader—in fact every photography enthusiast anywhere, whether they've ever heard of TOP or not—is for you to be as happy with your setup as I am with what I'm using now.

What that is, though, will be different for all of us, because we're all different and we like doing different things. For all the enthusiasm I've generated for specific cameras over the years, I don't actually care what you use. What I want is for you to be happy. Enthused. Productive. Enabled. That's what a good camera does: it frees you to do your work. That's what gear talk is all about when it comes down to it.

And it depends on your personality. I knew a guy in the 2000s who was still shooting with the same Barnack camera (i.e., Leica screwmount) he bought in the '50s. I know another guy, a retired financier, who won't even tell me how many cameras he has, that's how many cameras he has. But that's fine, because he's an excellent photographer and works hard at it, and using different cameras of all different types all the time obviously agrees with him. A friend down in Texas tends to switch serially a wee bit, getting very jazzed about one set of gear but pretty soon migrating on to another and getting just as jazzed about that. No harm, no foul. A friend in Washington, a very good photographer who taught at the Smithsonian for years, hates all cameras—they all get it in his way and annoy him. He works around it. I know a reader who can afford his own airplane but is still happily shooting with an entry-level Nikon DSLR from fifteen years ago; he likes the color. A friend who used to live in Milwaukee, a retired beer company executive who makes more money doing photography in his retirement than 90% of the professional photographers I've ever known (hey, if you're a great businessman, you're a great businessman) for years used a Leica S as his point-and-shoot—at lunch one time he passed a Nikon D800 back to me saying he could never use a camera with all those buttons on it! But another reader, who shares a name with a large forest ungulate, has patiently unlocked all the esoteric technical capabilities, and they are legion, of a second-tier Micro 4/3 camera (although he recently bought the latest top model). This list goes on.

It just depends on what works for you. You're just trying to get to where you're free to do the work you want to do. It really doesn't matter what takes you there. Find your own bliss!

Mike

Featured Comments:

David: "As someone who still shoots B&W film (gasp!), I have been following your adventures with your new camera with interest. Mike, you have been taking some wonderful images with it! I am sure they look amazing full resolution on a monitor but what about prints? I have not yet seen digital B&W prints which come anywhere near classic darkroom FB prints. So for now, I will be sticking with film."

Mike replies: I'm as curious as you are about Sigma fp(m) prints.We are readying a print sale as we speak, so we can all see for ourselves.

The Fox

This morning I saw a fox trot past my kitchen window! That's a first. I knew they visited the back forty occasionally, because Butters finds scat back there, but I've never seen one down here before. Foxes are extremely pretty animals, I think. In Wisconsin you knew they were around because of the cottontails. A fox will eat the whole rabbit except for the fuzzy white ball of the tail, so a rabbit tail on the grass is a sign of the fox.

The day before yesterday I was out without my B&W camera (bad Mike) and the weather was so wondrous I had to stop and snap a few pictures with my "other" camera," my "color camera," i.e., the phone. The best representation of the spectacular skies was a video, of all things (I say that because I'm not a video guy) because it gave me the whole 360. I sent it to my son and some other relatives.

Here's a frame grab of the start of the video looking back at the car—

And look what's coming from the other direction!

The skies were a-boilin'. A few minutes later there were just sheets of rain dumping out of those clouds. (My cousin Liz from California said, "I am jealous. Water that falls from the sky, you say?") This picture looks less spectacular than it was, because this is the ultrawide lens on the iPhone, which I think is 13mm-e. The really amazing thing was to be out there that day. I drove all over the place happily snapping pictures of clouds and sky. I really don't think anybody on Earth appreciates weather more than I do.

Strange question
Here's a weird question: what would you say is the best-looking animal? For me it's horse for the win, fox for place, and dogs show. Fourth is certain raptors, such as the bald eagle—we have them around here, and I've seen a few. Why we like eagles more than, say, buzzards, is actually kind of a mystery. I think it comes down to the same factor that makes certain singers and rock groups more popular: they're better looking*.

Another random observation: a few evenings ago I was walking the dog and it was almost magically beautiful at dusk. It had rained and the world was wet, but the setting sun was getting through, and the skies were incredible. The air was fragrant and clear. In seven years, among all the beautiful evenings I've seen, only a handful have been as incredible. Butters and I walked past a rental house that had a lot of cars with out-of-state plates parked around it. As I walked past I saw a bunch of people inside...clustered around the television. How about that? Spend thousands of dollars a week renting a lakeside house, one that has a big deck where you can sit out and see everything, and then miss one of the best nights ever. I felt like knocking on the door and pointing out the obvious! But I didn't, of course. I hope they liked their baseball game or talent show or whatever it was. They missed the real show. 

Mike

*I used to wonder why certain music stars didn't seem to be as popular as their talent deserved. Or, the other way around, why certain stars were popular even though their music didn't seem great. I finally realized: it's looks. Robin Trower was never going to be a huge star; he's a bit homely and he makes weird expressions with his mouth when he performs. From the other direction (despite "Glycerine"), I used to listen to Bush songs in the car and wonder why they were so popular. (If you're a Bush fan, I apologize.) Driving down the freeway one day I had the aha moment: the lead singer must be good looking. That turned out to be true. (Gavin Rossdale is now married to Gwen Stefani and they have a passel of good-looking children.) [UPDATE: Sadly for those kids, their parents are no longer together. Thanks to Chico Ruger, Glenn Allenspach, George Davis, Johan Grahn and others for cluing me in. Gordon says Gwen is now married to Blake Shelton, a country star.] Hard to believe music fans are superficial enough to care about mere appearances! Er, not.

Of course, that does explain something else that we reflexively accept but that has always seemed intrinsically weird to me: all those costumes, from Kiss to Ziggy Stardust to Elton John to Michael Jackson to Lady Gaga and all the rest. I never quite got why we expect musicians to dress up in weird costumes. Maybe it's to hide their plainness? Maybe Robin Trower should have performed in face paint, dressed as an alien.

'Golden Oldie' Books o' the Week

I was going to link to The Life of a Photograph by National Geographic ace Sam Abell, the book version of Sam's video talk we've been discussing, but guess what? Sold out since we mentioned it the other day. You can still score one of the few remaining copies of the 4-volume Sam Abell Library from 2013, but buy it directly from the publisher—they still have it at the $75 publication price (I called them in Santa Fe to check), and Amazon is already charging four times more. We need a reprint of Sam's classic Stay This Moment!

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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

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

HVJ: "Rossdale, Stefani and newly minted child popped backstage at one of the NY shows in the mid-2000s. I was taking a wee break from shooting and got trapped between them and the catering table. All the lenses in the packed room turned to look, the child turned from the flashes to look at me; I didn't know what to do except accept its outstretched hand and hold it. The result was a strange triptych of gurning rock stars, indifferent baby, and hapless photographer. Good times."

Trevor Johnson: "For those musicians you mentioned, it isn't 'to dress up in weird costumes.' David Bowie, for example. The characters he inhabited were as much a part of his music as anything else, so he deliberately took on the physical appearance of those characters. There is an excellent BBC documentary on YouTube."

Dillan K: "The most attractive animal? I'd say deer: mule deer and whitetail. They're elegant creatures."

Keith: "Cats, big, little, in between. Polar bears. Ravens. As for musicians, I think now it's more about the spectacle, the show they put on. Used to be singers just stood there and sang. The Righteous Brothers, for example. Now it seems many performers can't actually sing, they're too busy doing an aerobic workout while 'singing.' Really, it's all lip synch and autotune now. The costumes are one way to differentiate your act from another."

Dan Farmer: "Fun story (that I hope will be read as my interpretation of what I saw, not as besmirching Mr. Rossdale): Some years back I saw Gavin Rossdale perform. If I recall correctly this was under his own name, not Bush, so must have been well past the height of Bush's popularity. A few songs in and he was really getting warmed up, dancing and tossing the microphone back and forth between his hands as he sang into it. Then he dropped the microphone. There was a look of horror on his face as scrambled to recover it. The vocals, you see, had kept going while he bent down for the mic...."

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "About the musicians: You can of course enjoy music pure. But I am afraid the Gesamtkunstwerk (a term coined by Richard Wagner) is even more impressive."

Ed. note: "Gesamtkunstwerk is defined as "the total work of art," in the sense of the whole experience, or, a variety of aesthetic aspects or artistic fields synthesized or unified. The dictionary says it has become a loan word into English, but I speak English and wasn't aware of it. Wikipedia says it was coined by K. F. E. Trahndorff in 1827 and then used by Richard Wagner in two essays in 1849.

I would point out that musicians appearing in street clothes and normal haircuts on an unadorned stage without a light show or props or special effects are in a sense making a statement about showmanship too.

Andrew Lamb: "I grew up in the countryside and only ever saw one fox. In London, I see several every day, regardless of the time. My dog goes crazy when she sees one but they don’t bat an eyelid. They know she’s on a leash. Smart."

Geoffrey Wittig: "It's not just musicians. There is an insidious but universal bias in every field of endeavor that unfairly favors conventionally attractive people. In the Internet age it has become much worse, as images are everywhere. My own bête noire is literature and scholarly books; nowadays the dust jacket author photo is a powerful marketing tool. Authors who are brilliant but homely are frequently kicked to the curb while vapid but pretty writers get up-front billing. Makes me crazy. Nowadays a literary genius who is plain may never get a chance."

Open Mike: If You Don't Need It, Don't Bother With It

Got this email when I was sick:

We all wish you a speedy return to health and mental clarity.
Do not be discouraged.
We depend on TOP as an oasis of sanity.
Well, except for this B&W sensor thing.

—Luke

Made me laugh.

But there's a serious point behind it, and I think it's an important one.

Artists—and let's not get hung up on that word; people who create things—do what they need to do to do what they want to do. You master what you need to master.

You do need to master your craft. But only the parts that pertain to you. There's no unspoken requirement that you should master everything. One of the most dispiriting things about the age of digital imaging is that people have thrown themselves so wholeheartedly into mastering things like the the minutiae of camera technology. What does that matter? It doesn't, except where it does.Why in the world would it matter to people, for example, to memorize the whole product line of the brand of camera they use?

It has always seemed odd to me that ordinary hobbyists take such an interest in the business problems of the manufacturers. If you specialize in that because you write about it, or because you're an analyst, fine—but what does it have to do with creating work? Do you have what you need? Then why do you care about some corporation's balance sheet? Why do you want to second-guess their marketing strategies? That has nothing to do with creating work. It still seems odd to me that people get so interested in that.

But when you have a need for something in order to create what you want to create, that's when you go all in. You master what you have to. Whatever it is. So it's quite possible in the history of photography to point out numerous artists/photographers/creators who were obsessive about mastering the techniques they needed...and who didn't know much at all about other things. I knew a guy decades ago who claimed he didn't know how to use a 35mm camera. Why would he say that? Because he shot 8x10. He could tell you all about 8x10.

Humble bragging
Along these lines I think of Peter G., a studio advertising pro for whom I assisted for half a year in the 1980s. He told a story about how friends would come up to him at social gatherings and ask him to show them how to use their flash that they couldn't figure out. He would tell them he had absolutely no idea—he never shot with hot-shoe flash, didn't own one, and didn't know how they worked. His friends would stare at him incredulously and say, "you don't even know how to use a flash? I thought you were a pro!"

Of course Peter did know how to use "flash"—back at the studio he had $150,000 worth of lighting equipment, including $90,000 worth of electronic "strobes," as they were universally if incorrectly called at the time—pack-and-head units, the ancestors of something like this, many times more powerful and much more versatile than any on-camera flash. Anything having to do with studio lighting he had unto redundancy. He had something like 60 C-stands, short ones, tall ones, big ones, small ones. Of all that equipment, he was an absolute master. He prided himself on being able to light anything with strobes. In fact, he didn't even like to photograph without strobes—he did almost everything with them. He mistrusted natural light. But he really wasn't kidding. He had no idea how to use on-camera flash units. I can't recall if he owned one or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if he really didn't, because he was cheap with a buck. He said they were too complicated—that pack-and-head units were much easier to use.

That's the way it is for most people who are serious. You do what you need to do to do what you want to do. So, yeah, you do a deep dive on that. But all the rest of it? Learn it when you need it. Otherwise, it's optional.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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

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

Luke: "I'm just glad you thought it was funny."

Thomas Mc Cann: "Years ago there was a pop music guitarist, who I won't name. He was a wizard on the guitar, an absolute virtuoso. His problem was he was so interested in displaying his virtuosity the music he played was dire. I think people who are overly interested in the technicalities lose sight of their aims."

Albert Smith: "I think differently. Photography is an art, but it relies on science, unless you don't care about 'wrong' things because of well, 'art.' I learned the theory of the science behind what the technology is doing, in a very general way not specific to the actual tool. It is this understanding that lets you know when the technology is violating the thing that you are trusting it to do. If I know the guide number of any flash, I can use it on any camera. I also would know when it won't work, like using flash in a football stadium from the upper seats. There was a time when ƒ/8 was ƒ/8 and 1/250th was 1/250th and guess what? That time is still now. Understand the science and you can be effective with any serviceable photographic gear. Fail to learn the math and formulas and you will be in trouble when the functions are not corresponding to the parameters because you won't know that is happening. This thought process has allowed many photographers to concurrently use a Leica M and a Nikon F plus a Rolleiflex. They all do exactly the same thing when you understand ƒ/8 is ƒ/8 and...."

Rick: "Work is hard, discussing gear is easy. Most people like easy."

darlene: "Re: 'you don't even know how to use a flash? I thought you were a pro!' A few times, I experienced a similar situation with point-and-shoot cameras when I shot high-end weddings in the '90s. If someone asked me to take a candid photo of their group with their camera while sitting at the dining tables, I struggled a little bit if the camera had more than one button on the top as I did not know which one was the shutter button. The only point-and-shoot camera I had during that time (my 'mommy camera') was a Nikon 35Ti, and the top of that camera had analog dials and an easy-to-distinguish shutter button. Some of us pros missed a lot of the pocket camera movement."

Mike replies: That's funny. I ran into the same problem teaching high school. Once, a parent gave me an earful for not knowing every button on his kid's ancient Zenit! "You call yourself a teacher?" etc. I wanted to tell him to buy his daughter a decent camera made sometime during her lifetime, but I held my tongue.

Hit Rate Zero

I had an experience shooting yesterday (finally got back to it after ten days of COVID) that sometimes happens. I'll go out, get into it slowly, but eventually "harvest" a few situations or stops along the way. I get into it, and various things seem to work. Then I'll get back home with high hopes and a catalogue of possibilities in mind and discover that...I was "cold" and didn't really get anything.

I only posted one fp-M sample picture from yesterday, "Vultures Eating the Remains of a Deer." Everything else, I felt, just fell a little short.

Vultures Eating the Remains of a Deer, Loree Road West of Angus

Ultimately there's a level of commitment to a picture that has to be there in order for it to have enough energy. With some of my shooting, I feel I'm just "playing tricks," returning to old strategies that I know work. Reflections, rocks, whatever. Bah. Many times they'll be things that I've seen a million times that other people do a lot, certain patterns and objects and "things I know that people will like." Odd things for sale at the side of the road. A car under a tarp. The old falling-down ruin of a house or barn. Or something a famous photographer made a picture of years ago that my picture looks kinda sorta like. None of it is really enough to give me a decent level of commitment to the picture. Or I'll take a hackneyed subject and "work it," trying to "make it mine," and then, reviewing the pictures, give too much credit to that effort, only coming slowly to the realization that it failed anyway. Sometimes when you struggle too hard to be clever is when you're at your least clever.

When I come home "empty" like that, though, something strange happens...I find that instead of working less over the lot, I'll struggle and work and worry over the files in that folder more. I try processing one thing after another, as if hoping something will offer itself. The feeling being, "there must be a decent picture here somewhere." Or, "something I tried must have worked." It's hard letting go of your failures. But you might as well. I've always felt that in photography there's not really any such thing as an "almost" picture. Either the picture works entirely or it doesn't work at all. Everything's a no that isn't a yes. And yet, we spend most of our time and most of our effort fretting and fussing over all the almosts.

Get out
Yesterday wasn't a total loss. [UPDATE: "Vultures" made Flickr's Explore feature on the 16th.] But I will just note that it took me a very long time—years—for me to learn that sometimes you can go out and not get anything at all. I always felt like if you shot a certain amount, some percentage must be "good." Even if it's a very small percentage. That's not necessarily true. Sometimes you can go out and get a hit rate of zero. It's possible. You just have to be ready for that, is all, and accept it. Sometimes, in fact, you can shoot for days, even weeks if you're stubborn, without accepting that your idea, the direction you're going, just has no energy, and that you need to redirect and reboot.

Being out with a camera is enough, though, actually. Because the magic can't happen unless you're out there with the camera in your hand. You're not going to find a picture sitting at home watching TV. If you're out and about, maybe you didn't find a picture. But you might have.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

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

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

Sean: "I save myself from a lot of unnecessary suffering by expecting and excepting bad days. I've adopted a why-not-me attitude to disappointing outcomes, all in the service of the long view. It's the variability of the reward that makes me get back out there; it's the not knowing."

Stan B.: "Just getting...the one (as above), is what it's all about—any more is added (and much welcomed) gravy. On (very) rare occasions, more refined editing can provide the percentage point that will turn that almost into a keeper; usually, almosts are opportunities to learn and practice much needed discretion and discipline."

Tom Stermitz: "'A good day fishing should not bee confused with actually catching any fish.'"

Ernest Zarate: "Again, we find a lot to agree upon. I could wax on about the shooting experience, the editing and winnowing drudge, and so on. But I’m going to turn that over to the late Henry Wessel, in this KQED video made in 2007. The whole video is a worthwhile 8:12 in length, but the pertinent section starts at 3:37."

Mike replies: It's been a while since I've seen that, and it was good to look at it again. I've always thought of Henry Wessel as the model of the kind of photographer I would have been if I had been a photographer. Seeing some of his work always makes me want to go look at more.

Ernest: "Hank was my professor at SFAI, and also my mentor and my friend. I visited him at his home in Point Richmond on many occasions, and he at my home in Elk Grove, California. We went on photo shoots together in Santa Cruz, California, and talked at length, over the decades, about photography.

"When I was considering not doing photography any more, he wrote a lengthy letter to me, and then met with me, encouraging me to stay the course, which I did. His approach to photography is ingrained in my approach to the medium. I don’t do 'street photography' any more, but his philosophy transcends any one style or genre, as did he. As an adjunct photography professor at the local community college district, my guiding question was always, 'What would Hank do?' for his acceptance of student experimentation, and validation of their efforts was paramount in his teaching style.

"I feel, like many of his protegés, fortunate indeed to have had him as a professor. Many other photographers added terrific and valuable insights into photography for me, but none did it with the cheerfulness, the openness, and the complete acceptance Hank did. I miss him to this day."

Nick: "Ugh, that thing where you get stuck on an 'almost'! Most of the photos I've taken that I like best required almost no fiddling beyond the basic (straighten and crop just a bit, mess with the exposure and conversion to get the tones or colors distributed right, sharpen, publish), while the ones I spend forever fussing with usually never even end up on Flickr. I've gotten a bit better at 'Nope!'-ing out of a near miss over time, but I still occasionally find myself wasting 20 minutes moving sliders around trying to fix an annoying tonal merger or something."

David Dyer-Bennet: "This is maybe the biggest difference between 'kinds' of photographers. For photojournalists, event photographers, anybody working on documenting things happening, failure is not an option. (And...this is true even if you're just doing it for yourself, as opposed to having a boss/client who will notice your failure.) Which doesn't mean we don't fail. Some days there are no picture that I rate three stars or higher—nothing with a spark of life to them. One must proceed with what one has."

The Two Keys to Success

I have very little time today—the whole day is going to be taken up with a trip to Rochester because Butters has an interview. The kennel where he's already stayed numerous times wants him to re-interview, so, I have to drive to Rochester (1:20), wait three hours, and drive back, and there goes my day.

But I wanted to point something out that's kind of curious. The "Secret Art" piece took the longest of any piece I've ever written in my life, and we worked over it the hardest of anything, ever. (I've never written a book or any other long-form piece of writing—no thesis or dissertation either.) And then yesterday I had the pool gang coming over for our regular Monday session (we do it every week, 10–12 Mondays followed by lunch), and I didn't get all the morning stuff done until nine, and that's when I sat down to write...so yesterday's post was written—conceived, drafted, polished—inside a one-hour window.

I just thought the contrast was pretty striking. Writing for newyorker.com is the best possible challenge for me at this time of life. I get to learn a new way of writing, with a working method—collaborative, directed, considered, detail-oriented, fact-checked, disciplined—that is the polar opposite of the way I've been writing for years. Couldn't have found a better way to improve and grow, is what I'm guessing.

Being organized and working hard
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that there are two things that contribute to success more than anything else: being organized and working hard. That sounds simple, but I had no clue about it when I was young. I valued many things above those two—intelligence and talent certainly, but insight and vision and other assets as well. Heck, I even valued my own opinion more than I valued being organized! (Opinions are overvalued by everyone always.) I'm not sure I really even considered organizational ability to be an aptitude at all. The Dunning-Kruger Effect might have been in operation there. I'm very disorganized, and have come around to seeing it as one of my major liabilities. You can learn to work hard, but I'm not sure you can learn to be organized. I literally can't organize my house. It's beyond my skills. Martha Stewart could organize a single house while the tea brews, and I can't do it at all.

Ego/self-belief is also important. Norman Mailer said "writer's block...is simply a failure of ego." Self-confidence is the outward sign of believing in yourself, but it's also possible for it to be compensatory, meaning it indicates low self-esteem and lack of self-belief. So mere confidence isn't the key. Inner self-belief is an asset to be prized.

And if you don't have the ability to be organized and you aren't able to work hard, devising workarounds for those two deficits will be among the most important challenges you have to face in a career. You can make up for either deficit, but to do so you have to be very aware of them and you have to understand their importance. I don't think I did until later in life.

The devil's-advocate position
Of course, outward success isn't everything. A lot of people lead happy and fulfilling lives without being "successful" in the conventional career sense. In fact, at my age, I know a number of people who feel they sacrificed too much for career and wealth; they missed too much else, worked too hard at outward success and didn't enjoy life enough as it was passing by. (Seeing both sides of an issue is one of my strengths.) But where career and accomplishment are concerned, I suspect that being organized and learning to work hard are probably the two keys to success. What do you think?

These two keys are important to success in photography as much as anything else.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Our link to B&H Photo

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

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

darlene: "I would add a third key: if you work hard at it, it is usually because you love it and cannot see yourself doing anything else."

Albert Smith (partial comment): "...For me time management is most important. Time is the one thing that can't be regenerated or increased. If you waste it, it's gone. [...] I'm retired now, have no urgent deadlines to be met (unlike my pre-retirement life), but I don't go to bed without having my 'to do' list filled out. All my activities that require me to leave the house are mapped out ergonomically so that I don't duplicate effort or retrace steps, thus getting more done in less time. Old habits die hard."

Mike replies: When I was young, I had the persistent feeling that if I didn't have enough time to do something, it wasn't even worth getting started. This got worse and worse, until, if I didn't have a block of hours free to do something, I wouldn't attempt to even get started. Then I read a book about time management. And now I'm the opposite. However small the chunk of time I have free, I'll think, 'what will fit in [x] minutes?' So if the tea has two and a half more minutes to brew, I'll unload the dishwasher. I can take a shower in twelve minutes. Sometimes, even if I have 30 seconds, I'll find something I can do in that time. A bonus has been that I use time to motivate myself. When I'm feeling slothful and don't want to take out the trash, I'll think, c'mon, it only takes three and a half minutes. That makes it a lot easier to do.

I'm not saying I never waste time...I waste a lot of time. But I no longer think I need a lot of time to get anything done.

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): " In my opinion and experience the strongest ability toward universal 'success' that anyone in any walk of life can develop is reliability. That means being reliable to yourself as well as to others on matters big and small. If you say you’re going to have that article ready by Friday, do it. If you say you’ll finish construction of a building by December 15th, do it. If you promise yourself you’re going to accomplish something by Saturday, do it. Make your word golden and always be as good as your word in whatever fields of endeavor you call home. [...] Flakes are plentiful and worthless. Reliable people are relatively rare and very valuable."

Mike replies: My father had an employee who was later a U.S. Congressman. He said the most remarkable thing about the guy was that "you only ever had to ask him to do anything once, and you knew it would get done."

Kirk: "In my experiences over the last six plus decades I find that discipline is the most important asset for success—in everything. Showing up every day ready to work or swim or parent or save or whatever. That's the difference between 'meh' and 'yay!' Talent is overrated."

Geoff Wittig (partial comment): "The smartest human being I have ever met was the late Frank Oski, the brilliant head of Pediatrics at SUNY Upstate and later at Johns Hopkins. He once suggested that medical schools should alter their selection process to favor diligence and integrity over book smarts. His argument was simple; 'Most errors in medicine are due not to stupidity but to sloth; hence students of merely high average intelligence who work harder are preferable to intellectually gifted dilettantes.'"

Andrew (partial comment): "Another quality that I would put on equal footing with organization and work ethic is resilience. It might be related to the inner self-belief you describe, but resilience is different. The ability to overcome challenges and recover from mistakes is necessary."

Malcolm Myers: "I am middle-aged now (53) and I've reached a kind of happy medium in life. I wasn't as successful in my career as I wanted to be, but I have a wife and two children, (seven and 10). We have just built a lovely new house that we owe nothing on, and I work for myself, mostly at home, and earn a reasonable amount. Much like my photography, I never amounted to much, but I have an enjoyable record of my travels when I was single and of my family growing up. I have a stress-free life and I am extremely content with that. Sometimes, less is more."

Scott Abbey (partial comment): "I would add 'showing up' to the list of critical life skills. This is related to working hard, but a surprising number of people seem to not even try to be successful (not judging; whatever rocks their boat). When the boss asks for volunteers for a tough project, the ones who raise their hands are showing up. When I think about my many failings in developing myself, I realize I often never even showed up to try."

Mike replies: My cousin Liz applied to the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a famously intensive six-week summer course in publishing (now called the Columbia Publishing Course). She was waitlisted. So she showed up on campus (from Kentucky) three days early and simply told the school that she was there. There ended up not being a place open for her, but they let her in anyway...just for showing up. She ended up getting a job at ArtNews and working there for seven years.

Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "Rather than 'working hard' and devising 'workarounds,' think about it this way: you want to work effectively and efficiently. Effective is doing the right thing and efficient is doing things right."

John Camp: "Perhaps your thought is a little too broad. I work hard in an organized way for a few hours most days, but that's it; the studio where I work looks like a tornado went through it. I can't even find my cameras half the time, and two broken, obsolete computers have been sitting on a desk for six months since I pulled the hard drives out of them, but I can't get organized enough to drop them off at Best Buy for recycling. You seem to be the same way—you're organized enough to write a blog most days, but maybe not so much in other stuff, and that's fine, because with the main thing you do, you are organized and work at it. Frankly, I don't trust people who are organized in everything. Reeks of fascism."

D'Oh! Saying No (iPhone 13)

I'm kind of a dope, I think. I have an impractical streak. I like the idea of being someone I'm not, so I keep coming up with these notions that appeal to me somehow, that get the endorphins firing—and I make big plans. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. But then when the excitement fades and the enthusiasm wears off, I just don't want to keep going. So, because I'm lazy and not determined, I don't. I probably also don't keep going because it was a dumb dopey idea in the first place, rather than something that made sense in my life.

For instance, last year I got all gung-ho to collect watches. I happily prepared myself by buying two watch cases, each of which holds ten watches, and I bought a few watches to get myself started. Well, I ended up buying eight watches (most used, all quartz), and a kind reader sent me one as a gift. I decided to only collect quartz watches because I was very interested in the technology when I was a boy. (Quartz was brand new when I was 14, and I was into it).

Then I found the one I like. I wear it every day, and seldom if ever wear any of the other ones. I bought it used. It's a Seiko, it's comfortable, it's legible, it's the right weight, it's nice looking but not flashy, it's special (one of Seiko's 140th Anniversary models, although it's not on the 140th Anniversary website because Seiko is officially suppressing its own Essentials line now) but not flashy. That's my watch, in the inset.

I didn't make a decision. It's just that I hardly ever wear any of the other ones. Which means I don't need any of the other ones. Not only do I not need any other ones, I wish I hadn't bought any of them in the first place. (Want a watch? Or a case?)

So just recently, I also thought, hey, here's what I'm going to do—I'm going to take one good picture with the iPhone every day. A "PAD" (photo-a-day). For a year.

Well...no I'm not. I'm not going to do that.

That one lasted only five days. Sheesh. How lame is that?

The file you need when you really need the file
Here's the problem with a phone PAD project. Unless the phone files are exactly what you want for the finished work you envision, as is the case with Mark Hobson's phone project, the problem is that you'll get good pictures with the phone.

How's that again? Well, two days ago my PAD picture was a beautiful landscape/skyscape...and the technical quality is, well, turrible. It has a lot of that "paint daubs" effect I wrote about the other day, low resolution, and the color as it came out of the phone greatly "improves" nature, which I do not want. (If you haven't noticed, what DxO calls "color depth performance" is a weakness on phone cameras—basically, not enough colors. So correcting subtle colors is less than satisfying. Part of the reason they goose colors up so much is to hide the poor color depth performance: we cannot give you subtle, so we'll give you splashy.)

Any camera you photograph with will give you its gifts. That is, every now and then you'll get a picture you really like. It's important that when that happens you should have the kind of negative or file you really want. Phones are fine for most pictures. But for the occasional really good one, the occasional really lucky one, you'll probably wish you'd been using a better camera.

My friend Kim (of C60Crew) taught photography at the Smithsonian for many years. Once I was walking across the Mall with him after his last class, and noticed he was looking intently at the ground. I asked him what was up, and just pointed out that he didn't have his camera with him. I asked him to explain that, and he growled, "this is just the kind of light I like. I don't want to see any pictures." No gifts right now, please.

Bail sooner
Here's the good thing about growing older and more mature where those dopey "resolutions" of mine are concerned. One, I bail sooner. (Didn't take me long with watches or the iPhone 13 PAD). Two, I don't beat myself up about it as much as I used to. It's "characterological"—part of my personality—what AA calls a "character defect." Just something I do. I'm not likely to change; I don't have enough time left on this pretty little globe for change to matter that much anyway, at least in that regard. (I'm changing in other ways, for the better.)

So, just accept it, wise up, correct course, and move on.

Here's the moral of this story: always photograph with the camera that's going to give you the raw material you want to have in case you get a great shot. Even if it's a pain to carry or a pain to use. Because if you photograph regularly, you will get a great shot once in a while. Even if you're not trying. And you need to be ready for that.

Mike

P.S. Thanks very much for all the kind and thoughtful comments about my New Yorker article. It's still on the front page of the website, although it's moving down. I apologize for not answering all the private emails I've gotten. It's been a whirlwind few days.

Book o' the Week

Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Our link to B&H Photo

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

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

Geoff Wittig: "I now do my absolute best to make sure I have a competent camera within easy reach at all times, after a painful experience. In early June 2021 was on a solitary 'COVID hike' along the Genesee River gorge before sunrise on a foggy morning. As I crested the trail, the sun broke through and I witnessed one of those transcendent moments. Glowing 'God-beams' illuminated the river as the clouds parted. Incandescent back-lit leaves, golden banks of fog, rim-lit canyon rock...and all I had was the iPhone 11 in my pocket. I took photos, of course, but they're...just...adequate. Nothing I can print from without apologizing for the result. So now I always have at least an XH-1 around my neck. Sigh."

Grant: "I don't know about the rest of your readers, but I like coming here to find out what 'dopey resolutions' are bubbling up from the shores of QKA Lake. It eases the remorse I get from the crazy ideas that percolate here on the north shore of Lake Ontario."

Bill Bresler: "I had to laugh at your PAD story. I've never been big on photo projects. I worked for newspapers over 40 years and shot too many assignments daily for all that time. Who the heck had time for long-term projects? I had to hustle.

"But every now and then I'd be reviewing my work and suddenly realize that I had a project. At that point it was a matter of editing. So I've backed into three or four good-sized projects during my career. I'm retired now, but it's still working like that.

"The last project is very personal. When Covid hit, my daughter and son-in-law began working from home. Not easy with kids. So we watched my three-year-old granddaughter for over a year. I was going nowhere, of course, so I photographed my granddaughter nearly every day, in all situations and moods. She went back to preschool last fall. 'Alice's Year' was born. It's the project that really gets me in the feels."

[The following two comments came in one right after the other. This happens from time to time, and I always enjoy it when it does. Asked and answered! —MJ.]

Chris: "How good are the iPhone 13 RAW files?"

Mark Levison: "I used my iPhone 13 Pro extensively on our recent vacation. (My daughter mostly took over my Olympus). I shot exclusively RAW files and thus far they hold up still in post-processing. I’ve done a bit of tweaking of colour and light. I’m not getting the splotchiness that I would expect from JPEG/HEIC. Caveat: I’ve not had time to print yet. For what it's worth I also tried Halide and find the UI too fussy."

[As regular readers know, I recently had a sale of iPhone prints so people could see for themselves what such prints look like. But of course that was only a "snapshot" in time—those files were taken with an iPhone 4s, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPhone 7 Plus, not with the iPhone 13 shot in raw. And of course you really have to try it for yourself anyway. It's very difficult to "test" a phone without buying it, though! I've tried to take pictures in the Apple store and mail the files to myself, but they have email and texting on the demo phones blocked.  —MJ]

This Time of Life

You know, apart from the fact that I'm growing old and the finish line is on the horizon (I'm coming up on my 65 1/2 half-birthday), this is actually a pretty great time of life. I'm still a very imperfect human, but I understand myself pretty well now. I'm more stable. I don't have significant health problems yet. I'm not rich, but I have only a couple of debts (what's left on my mortgage, plus $8,936.26 left to grind out on the pool table shed). I don't have day-to-day worries—none that are too pressing, at least. Work is still engaging, especially because of this wonderful new opportunity I've been given. And the best thing about that? I'm learning—learning a new way of writing, which is good for me, and interesting. I'm thankful for it. I've been observing the decline of my brain, but it's still hanging in there; with luck, older people actually do make up in wisdom and knowledge what we begin to lack in mental flexibility, agility, and stamina. I put things in context much better than I ever did before. I don't "live by hate" as some of my countrymen seem to do now.

Most notably, I'm happier now than I ever was before. Not for the reasons I once hoped, but still. I've come to terms with a lot, as they say. My appreciation for the little things in life has definitely increased. I appreciate the world more; I value my friends more. I'm more spiritual. I'm still self-centered, but I'm able to focus more on others. And I know a lot of little tricks to turn my setbacks, large and small, into learning experiences. My coping skills are better than ever.

I once read (appropriately, in a magazine in a psychologist's waiting room) a description of the mid-life crisis. It said that sometime in your forties you start to think, "is this all there is?" And it sets off a troubling decade or so. And then, sometime in your fifties, you begin to realize, "yeah, this is all there is, but it's pretty great!" I think that was true for me, although I came late to both stages. (I've always thought I'm developmentally about ten years retarded because of the decade I lost to the worst of my drinking.)

Like I say, apart from the whole getting old and gonna-die-one-day thing—which was never not the case, when you think of it—I like this time of life. It's good. It's a cliché, but I do kind of feel like I've finally learned how to live.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

The Beatles: Get Back. The story of the band's last year, coinciding with the release of Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Here's the link to B&H Photo

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

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

Dillan: "I'm looking 50 in the face, so an article like this is very timely. Thank you Mike. "

Sumanta Mukherjee: "Mike, I just read it out loud to my wife. I am 54 now and have been reading your posts for 5–6 years now. You are my inspiration, you are my friend. Through your eyes I have learned many things in photography. Thank you for being there."

Aaron Cary Greenman: "I highly recommend the book The Happiness Curve by Jonathan Rauch. It really helped me to understand what I (and others) are going through in the 45–55 age period, and most importantly (hopefully) what there is to come thereafter."

Johan Grahn: "Good to hear Mike! I am all with you. First, hitting 50 was so much better than I thought. And then hitting 60. Even better. Yes, I am more tired than before. Yes, I don't have the stamina I used to. But I don't get so upset about all kinds of small stuff anymore. A big win in my book!"

robert e: "What a wonderful post. I'm glad to hear of your contentment, Mike, and pleased to recognize a couple of good things about my own aging self in your reflection. Thank you for sharing!"

Lesley T: "It's funny, 30, 40, 50. 60. 70, none of those supposed milestones had an impact on me. But 75, three quarters of a freaking century!!! That one kind of startled me and made me take stock. Of course the fact that it happened in the middle of a pandemic, when life contracted in so many ways, made it seem more momentous than it might have been otherwise. There are now more things that I won't do than I will, but even so, my husband (who is 81) and I will sit reading in the evening and one of us will look up, sigh, and say to the other, 'aren't we lucky!' And indeed we are."

The Stolen Camera Bag

An old story of my father's: he mentioned once that he had lost not one but two bags full of camera gear in his life, on separate occasions, both stolen out of locked cars. In the second case, the "put the word out on the street" that he would pay the equivalent of $100 (roughly $450 today) to get the empty bag back. He was later approached by a man who returned the bag claiming he "found" it. The camera equipment was gone, but the passport and $1,000 in traveler's checks ($4,500 today) were still there. The finder admitted he had tried to cash the checks but wasn't able to. Dad said the $100 was worth it and he paid the guy without complaint.

That must have happened in France. My father was an amateur photographer who liked to write and take pictures for articles for food and travel magazines—the catch being he usually spent more creating the articles than he earned from them. One trip that cost $3,500 yielded $650 for the article. But it offset the cost of the trips, and the trips were the main thing for him. He loved traveling to France, and at the end of his life estimated that he had spent a year and a half of his life in France, over 31 trips. (He once went for just a weekend, which I thought was kinda over the top).

I don't have any more details of the story about the camera bag. My first-ever published picture, when I was a teenager, was the lead illustration in an article of my father's in Holiday magazine* (I was "second camera" for the shoots, as a failsafe in case something went wrong), but, as was unfortunately rather characteristic of him, my father didn't give me credit for it. He said it would just "confuse things." I don't have the picture or the issue of the magazine. Oh well.

Mike

*I could be wrong about which magazine it was—there were a number of them, with titles like Travel and Gourmet, that all tended to blend together to me.

Book o' the Week:

Inspiration Leica Akademie (English and German Edition). A "group show" of 76 Leica Akademie photographers from 16 countries worldwide, curated by Heidi and Robert Mertens. It looks to me like this is going out of print soon, so act soon if you want one.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you choose to support the site.

Link to B&H Photo

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

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

John Nollendorfs: "Reminds me of the story Brett Weston used to tell. He was out shooting with his Dad, and was having trouble with a composition. Called his Dad over, who looked under the drop cloth, turned the 4x5 back 90 degrees, and claimed the shot as one of his own!!"

Herman Krieger: "Would a bag man in France be called a baguette man?"

Bob G.: "As an early settler in Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, the apartment of my future wife and I was broken into. What is probably a common occurrence today, could have been the disappearance of all my camera gear if placed in average locations throughout the apartment. It was saved by storing it under the kitchen sink."

Mike replies: Very smart. I used to keep my camera on the front seat of my rather messy car, in an old, soiled, tattered brown kraft paper grocery bag with the top rolled shut. It looked so unpromising nobody ever broke the window to check what might be inside.

Thomas Mc Cann: "Years back I had a camera bag stolen from the boot of a hire car in Dusseldorf. While I had the camera and one lens with me, my other equipment, lens, etc., was in the bag but even more important were my wife's and my airline tickets and passports. Didn't discover the loss till we were at the airport. Aer Lingus were excellent but the local police were called because of the missing passports. (They took my wife aside to have her confirm her status and that I was not a white slave trader.) Two weeks later I got a letter from the Dusseldorf police saying my bag had been handed in and if I paid €18 they would return it.It was a good Billingham bag so I gladly paid the €18. Imagine my surprise when the bag returned with its contents intact. Air line tickets, Passports, camera gear etc., the works."

Omer: "Forty years ago all my camera gear was stolen from an apartment I was living in. I knew it had been an acquaintance but wasn't sure which one. The odd thing about losing the gear was the feeling of having been set free."

Dogman: "Years ago, a friend got a job shooting for an annual report. His job was photos at a gas refining plant in a small town nearby. He wanted to borrow a lens and asked if I wanted to tag along. I sat in the car, waiting for him to finish, but I got bored. As the sun came up, I picked up one of his cameras with a 50mm lens and clicked off a couple of shots to occupy myself. The company used my photo. He got paid, I didn't. No matter...pretty good story."

Mike replies: Reminds me of a story (I hope I'm remembering it right) that Richard Avedon was once asked to snap a picture of some tourists with their camera. They had no idea who he was, and he didn't tell them. His comment—I think—was that if he told them who he was he would have to charge them $5,000. What struck me about it was that someone has an original Richard Avedon among their photos and they don't even know it.

Chester Williams: "Had all my equipment stolen while I was at home, at 9 a.m. Funny thing is that my neighbor called me when the thief was leaving my home and told that some guy was trying to break in. I rushed outside, machete in hand, and captured him. Not wanting to go through the police hassle of reporting an attempted break-in, I let him go...not realizing he had all my stuff in two backpacks!!"

Tom Burke: "Apropos insurance payouts following photographic equipment thefts, a friend of mine suffered a break-in of his flat (apartment) and his camera, etc., was stolen. He got the insurance cheque, replaced the equipment, and a month or so later suffered another burglary. The police officer told him that this was quite common—the thieves would know that there was likely to be a set of better, newer equipment at an address they knew how to get into….

"Another point: I don’t know how it works in the US, but here in the UK we no longer get cash settlements for insurance claims (or only rarely). About 13 years ago we suffered a burglary and about £8,000 of various stuff was stolen—cameras, lenses, laptops, and so on. We were insured, but instead of a payment we had a call from an adjuster who discussed and agreed with me suitable replacement equipment: so my Nikon D70 was replaced by a D80, my 12” MacBook Pro by a newer model, and so on. All of it came from a single company. None of it was current model, but it was all new, i.e. unsold. The D80 had recently been replaced by the D90, for example, and unsold examples of D80's had been bought by this company very cheaply, I expect, who then struck deals with the insurance companies to settle claims. I couldn’t object: I was being indemnified; indeed, the replacement was theoretically better than the stolen item—it just wasn’t the latest and greatest. And there was no chance to completely change photo supplier—I’d lost a couple of Nikon DSLRs and lenses so I would get Nikon replacements—no opportunity to say that I’d actually prefer to go back to Canon."

Pak-Ming Wan: "I live in Paris and where I've had my mobile phone stolen twice...and my Leicas, never. People think it is a film camera and wonder why I'm such a Luddite with such a lousy camera."

Mike replies: My teacher and mentor Steve Szabo lived on a houseboat on the Potomac in the 1970s, when two of the current photographic crazes were Deardorff 8x10 view cameras (Steve was at the forefront of that movement) and $5.95 plastic toy Diana cameras. When thieves broke in to the houseboat, they stole the dirt-cheap Dianas but left the much more expensive Deardorffs. Steve's guess was that they recognized the Dianas as cameras, but had no idea what the mysterious Deardorffs, folded flat, might be.

Behinder

When I was at my most impressionable age, there was a fad among upper-middle-class women of my mother's age for needlepoint. My mother was decidedly not a knitting/sewing kind of person. Some of her friends were unabashedly upper class—one family had a very elegant separate house on their property for their full-time servants. Yet for a while they all needlepointed. In the boutiques of the quaint little towns where we summered, needlepoint supplies were common in the gewgaw/fripperies shops, and needlepoint pillows were displayed in some of the windows. My mother successfully completed one very nice small needlepoint pillow (now lost, sorry to say) along with several unfinished starts.

Many of these needlepoint projects took the form of samplers, and I still remember some of the homilies I saw then, writ in needlepoint—"Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart"; "So Many Books, So Little Time," "My Favorite Thing to Make for Dinner is Reservations," "Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful," "The Hurrier I Go the Behinder I Get," and so on.

That last one stings a bit. I am getting behinder as I go hurrier, and I don't like the feeling. With every day that passes I seem to fall a little further back. Yesterday we'd had four wet days in a row and the day broke sunny. I knew I could do nothing but get cranking on the grass, which was perilously close to being out of control.

I feel like I have too much to do. Writing TOP; moderating comments; writing for the magazine (I have a deadline on the 24th); working on my book; housework, which is in a state similar to the way the grass was yesterday; laundry; cooking (which, when you're trying to eat plants, consumes a surprising amount of time, and ditto for the shopping); feeding and exercising and paying attention to the dog; yard work; all my obligations for my 12-step program; exercise; reading; correspondence; research. And, where I live, driving. Up here, everywhere is a drive from everywhere else. Plus all the little quotidian details of running a life, from sorting mail to medical appointments to selling stuff on eBay. I seldom get out photographing.

And I don't even have kids! Or a commute. How do people get it all done? Who has time? I didn't even play pool much yesterday, which is the best indicator of how badly I needed to get to the yard.

Warren and Steve know everything
A pithy quote from Warren Buffet made the rounds a few years ago. I found it on Yahoo Finance, Inc.com, Forbes, Money.com, and so on. "The difference between successful people and really successful people," he (allegedly) said, "is that really successful people say no to almost everything."

Since it appeared all over the Internet, I think we can assume that Abe Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Shakespeare are all nodding their heads in agreement too.

The double whammy, though, to drive the point home, was that Steve Jobs (allegedly) agreed. "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

Oh, well then. If they both said it, then it must be one of the Big Secrets of success, and (not coincidentally at all) wealth. (Everyone wants the secret to wealth.)

"Notice that Buffett said almost everything," explains Forbes, helpfully. "What he is speaking to is our ability to master decision-making and time management. He says we must choose, with intention, what we say yes to and what we say no to. It all comes down to simplifying, prioritizing, and focusing our attention on what matters most."

Well, that's nice work if you can get it. But no one else is going to do my dishes or my laundry. If I say no things get ugly fast. One of the most pressing tasks I need to get to? Making a list of all the pressing tasks I need to get to.

I have 1.89 acres, and if I say no to yardwork it sure gets away from me in a hurry, this time of year. I'm happy to report that I got a lot done yesterday—finished cutting the whole yard, did a lot of raking and mulching, cut some brush, pumped up the tire of the wheelbarrow, cleaned up around the mailboxes, got the two-gallon fuel container for the lawnmowers topped up with ethanol-free gas (ten dollars for two gallons!!), even swept out the shed. I was a goin' fool. And so far, no consequences either (I have to be careful of my back).

As a bonus, the pileated woodpecker let me see him. He was inspecting a number of fallen logs on the hillside, investigating with his powerful beak. He let me walk to within 40 feet or so, hopping around in plain view (him, not me). Then he took off and flew to the backside of a tree. They almost always stay on the backsides of trees from humans; if you look very diligently for a long time at the spot where you know they are, you will eventually see them peeking around the edge of the tree to check up on what you are doing. But once they see you, they nip back into hiding.

Yes!
I do think the Buffet/Jobs admonition makes sense for photographers. Successful photographers either decide what they want to do or determine what they're best at, and then say no to everything else. We used to refer to it in art school as our "personal work." You might do everything, but there was one specific kind of thing you really said Yes to, and you gave that one thing your all, whatever else you did. The way I used to put this was to say "never have one wedding photograph in your portfolio." What that meant was: either specialize in wedding photography or don't do it at all. You're not going to sell a potential wedding client with only one sample shot in your book.

Of course, for AdAms (advanced amateurs), hobbyists, and enthusiasts, the opposite is the case. We happily say yes to whatever we feel like doing. An AdAm seldom meets a picture opportunity he doesn't like. And if you're like me, you take a lot of pictures that aren't even pictures; we pretend there's a picture there because it's fun to go through the motions. It's Yes at all times. Shoot it first and sort it out later. Ralph Steiner once published a book called In Spite of Everything, Yes. And if our work ends up as a motley of different styles and subjects, well then, "It's About Process, Not Results." (I did two weddings in my life, and both were very successful projects.)

Because that's the thing about needlepoint-worthy homilies: For every pithy saying, there's an opposite pithy saying. There's "The Love of Money Is the Root of All Evil," but there's also "Money Makes the World Go Around." There's "Clothes Make the Man," but also "You Can't Judge a Book by its Cover." "Birds of a Feather Flock Together," but "Opposites Attract." I'm not saying they all have the same truth value, of course—for the most part, opposites don't attract. All I'm saying is that you can make the needlepoint pillow say anything you want it to say.

So anyway, saying Yes! to pictures you know you shouldn't take might not be the road to success, but if it's more fun, then, you know, "Follow Your Bliss."

Mike

Another thing I really have to do is pick a new Book o' the Week

B&H Photo is Where It's At

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

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

Keith Cartmell: "Ordinary people sometimes remark how a famous person they happened to meet was so focused on them. They have that luxury because they have staff that will catch their eye and murmur some polite variation of 'your next appointment is in X minutes.' These staff often take care of all the pesky details relating to a particular task so the famous person can concentrate on just the task. Plus, in the crass commercial sense, they can pay someone to take care of the tasks they don't want to do, like several items on your list."

Mike replies: A long time ago, Oprah had an expert on cleanliness on her show. He claimed that the average person cleans and changes their bedsheets just four times a year (which I still find shocking). He detailed a long litany of the microscopic critters, creatures and germies that live in dirty bedsheets, and urgently recommended laundering them at minimum every two weeks, with once a week being much better. But when Oprah mused that she thought fresh sheets every two days was best, the expert dismissed it with a wave of his hand, saying, "real people can't do that." Oprah's feelings were hurt!

Grant: "TOP is to blame for my 'behinderness.' Do you realize how many hours were lost to watching the snooker links? Then I had to spend hours trying to understand the complexities of a game called 'Go.' If TOP is going to go off topic, could it please be about food? That causes my eyes to glaze over and I get up from the computer and go and do something important.  :-)  My needlepoint would say, 'Try, Try and Say No to TOP.'"

Mike replies: How about you just say no to TOP LINKS? That way I won't have to add "go find a job" to my to-do list!

Grant replies: "If you flip my 'Try, Try and Say No to TOP' needlepoint over, you will discover that the back is adorned with, 'Resistance Is Futile.' Now, spend some time researching that quote!"

Mike replies: I did, and here's what internet says: "'Resistance is futile' was the trademark statement of the Borg, an amalgamated race of biomechanical beings determined to assimilate every group of humans it encountered. If the targeted population refused to be assimilated, they were simply destroyed and the Borg moved on to its next target."

Jeff1000: "'Simplify, simplify, simplify!' —Thoreau"

Blog Note: Bash It Out and Up It Goes

So I can't really say much about this, but, a while back, out of the blue, I got invited to write about photography for a major publication. Actually it's one of the most famous, prestigious, and storied publications in the English-speaking world. Not to displace TOP; in fact, the editor specifically said he didn't want to distract me from TOP. The proposition was that I would contribute short pieces to them intermittently.

I've written two things for them and am currently grappling with a third. Nothing has come of it so far. For one thing, it's like skipping from pickup games at the friendly neighborhood sandlot straight to the Major Leagues. My mojo has always been that I'm fairly good at stringing words together—I've gotten praise for my writing since grade school—but that's baseline for them. Even their little throwaway pieces just glitter with writing talent. You don't realize how much until you try to do it yourself. For another thing, my bloggerish habits have gotten pretty ingrained. You'd never use a word like "bloggerish" with them, for example. Based on a 365-day year, I've published an average of 1.6 times a day for 16.5 years, and haven't had a vacation that's worthy of the word since George W. Bush was President. That creates...let's call it a groove. lol.

I would say those bloggerish habits are: first, everything's grist for the mill here, so everything gets tossed cheerfully in, down to those ferocious, human-averse little brown-black fisher-cats lurking in these woods; second, everything's done and up. I bash it out and up it goes. I haven't been able to identify it, but I think there's an old black-and-white Spencer Tracy movie (if I were writing this for them I'd have to go research that) in which he plays a journalist, and in one scene he rushes back to the newsroom, plops down at the typewriter, bashes out a page at high speed, rips it out of the typewriter and has a kid run it down to the printing press. If that scene doesn't actually exist, it should. That's like blog writing.

Except they had rules.

And oversight: editors. I haven't worked with an editor for a long time. Direct and immediate feedback from an erudite and informed audience, however, functions excellently as a form of oversight too—it has matured me, and honed my sense of the way what I say will be received. I've personally moderated over 300,000 comments—imagine a magazine writer receiving that many responses for his or her articles. Without, I mean, being driven around the bend by it.

I think my main weakness, and I hope not my Achilles heel, might be that I get all first-persony. Like I am now. I talk to you as me, and that's sketchy in real journalism. Except perhaps in carefully measured little amounts. When writing for a newspaper or magazine, you do get the byline for the reader to ignore (fact: bylines are magically invisible to the eyes and craniums of all but very few readers), but it's best to think of your writerly "voice" as if it's the publication talking, not you. Keep your triflin' self outta sight, you bum. If you don't, it's like physically inserting yourself between two parties who are standing talking to each other. Rude and awkward. So I'm having to relearn some old...manners.

On the other hand, I'm not 100% sure I should. Writing as myself might not be a deliberate didactic choice, but it's certainly the way my style of writing about photography has evolved organically. Who am I to parade my opinions as if they're objective truths? Who is anyone? I don't think it's justified. No one owns photography. Even though everyone thinks they do. Photography is a huge, baggy, sprawling medium, and saying that you know it is like saying you know the ocean or the stars. It can be used for anything, but it's not even constrained to being useful; there are a thousand paths into it and ten thousand things it leads out to. Consider this: a single human lifetime is no longer long enough to look at as many photographs as are made in one single 24-hour day. Photography and everything it contains is even more subjective and personal than, say, cooking, or clothing, where at least there is a semblance of consensus about what's good and bad within various groups in various cultures.

I had a good chance to become a critic. I took a one-on-one class at the Corcoran in writing criticism from a working art critic, and she was quite taken with me and with what I wrote for her. While I was taking that class I engaged in a broad "tasting" of art criticism from all over and from many eras, sampling writers from Lady Eastlake to Susan Sontag, John Ruskin to John Berger, Vasari to Clement Greenburg. I don't need to go into it here, but my conclusion was simply that I didn't want to write that way. It was a conscious decision. I remember where I was when I made it. I was already being published in local publications in D.C. before I graduated, and then, after graduation, the Washington Post offered to hire me to review local photography shows. I was to write two reviews a week. Visit the shows, talk to the gallerist, interview the artist or artists, brush up on their work and its context, and write it up newspaper-style so that it could be cut to fit space. I suppose I should have accepted, but it would have been about a half-time job and they wanted to pay me $100 a week. That wasn't much even then. I was poor as a church mouse at the time and simply needed a real job, so I turned them down. It would have dovetailed nicely with teaching, more's the pity, but I hadn't landed my first teaching job yet at that point.

Hubristic as it may be to say this, and it does make me wince, but I'm an original thinker on photography, for better or worse. I only mean that I have my own opinions, tastes, values, beliefs, conclusions, and photo-pertinent politics; I decided, again very consciously, that I wanted to write for practitioners, people in the trenches grappling with the problems. It ended up being a replacement for teaching. Writing for enthusiasts doesn't join in the conversation with what you might call the establishment gatekeepers, by which I mean the academics, critics, theorists, cultural commentators, curators—the real writers. Traditionally, enthusiasts got exposed to those people through the writeups on museum walls and in the prefaces and introductions to monographs. And I used the phrase "in the trenches" as though it's close to the front lines, but that's a conceit. I was never in any vanguard. I really only mean that I wanted to live closer to the border between photography and the public. I think (hope?) I developed the way I write about photography because that's the way I think it's most valid to write about it. I want to be a specific personalized individual in my writing. I want readers to see an individual engaging on a personal level with the medium. As if it means something to me and matters to me. I want you to see how I feel about it viscerally and not just what I think and what I can think of to say. I want you to know your opinions and tastes do not in any way have to align with mine, yet I do want to model a person who does have strong opinions and distinct values.

If all that is tl;dr, then put it like this: maybe I'm more of a columnist-type than a reporter, essayist, or author of articles. Someone who'd fit better in an Op/Ed section than in an Arts section. I don't know. In any event, I printed out the latest piece I wrote for that publication, lit up every instance of firstpersony with a highliter, and am currently cutting all the me Mike and I out of it, systematically and methodically, like a surgeon with a scalpel. It's harder than it looks.

When this first happened, I was high on hope for a while. Then, during the long delays, I had to accept that maybe nothing would come of it. Had I failed at something I didn't even ask to do?! But I know my editor is on my side—I've submitted, as I said, two pieces so far and he's consistently said he likes them. So something still might happen. I'll keep you posted.

Bottom line, though: sure is fun. When he approved of something, my late brother's late banjo-playing friend Jimmy-James Rollins used to say, laconically, "fired up!" And this has lit a fire under my katuschka, no doubt. I feel like I'm in it. I like to write, and I consider myself lucky that I get to. (It's thanks to you, too, and thank you again.)

But what the hell was I thinking, turning down the Washington Post when I was a wet-behind the ears newly-struck BFA grad? I had forgotten that. Was I crazy? Who did I think I was? That would absolutely have been worth the slog for six months just for a single line on the resumé! It's quite possible to argue that when it comes to career, I'm an idiot. Really. I'll try my best not to be an idiot this time, but please, keep your fingers crossed for me on that, would you? Because that's always going to be touch and go.

Mike

P.S. This piece: not counting breakfast and not counting my little jaunts out to the pool shed with Butters to rustle my creaky bones: 1,663 words, ~3:45 from concept to completion, ~45 minutes between finishing and posting. That's how that goes, in Bloggerdom.

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

Alex Mercado: "Re 'one of the most famous, prestigious, and storied publications in the English-speaking world': OMG!!! YOU'RE WRITING FOR TIGER BEAT?!?!?!?!?!?! Seriously though, you're a crackin' good writer. I feel confident in saying that's the reason why we all come here. I will be crossing all my fingers for you."

Mike replies: Tiger Beat? Let's not get too carried away. A guy always needs something out of reach to aspire to in the future.  :-)

Dave Levingston: "First, I have to say I do love your writing. That's why I come here every day to see if there is a new post. It's the best writing about photography that I've ever encountered. Second, you reminded me of one of the greatest feats of writing that I've ever witnessed. It was many, many years ago when I was a newspaper photographer. There was a breaking story right at deadline. The best reporter in the newsroom sat down at his manual typewriter and started writing. When he would finish a paragraph he would hit the carriage return several times, rip off the paragraph using the paper bail, hand the paragraph to a copyboy who then ran with it to the line-o-type operator. He then wrote the second paragraph and repeated the process. He wrote the entire story in about 10 minutes without ever being able to refer to what he had already written. And it did not pass through an editor. It just went straight to the line-o-type and on to hot type and the front page of the newspaper. I was awestruck watching it happen."

Mike replies: The real-life version of the movie scene!

Kenneth Tanaka: "I hope this opportunity becomes a thing for you, Mike. I think it would be very productive and constructive for you to work under the pencil of a top large-market editor occasionally. About ten years ago I backed-into doing assigned photo work for one of America's top modern and contemporary art galleries and one of the world's top living sculptural artists. It was a sobering, draining, educational, and exciting experience of self-discovery for a guy in his mid-50s who thought he knew everything about himself. I would chew my left leg off at the hip rather than do any assignment photography again. But I would not trade those experiences for anything. I made life-long friendships and got quite a bit of my work published, too! I think this experience might have similar results for you.

"One more thought; I think writing about photography for a non-shutterbug audience would also be a strong experience for you. It will almost certainly force you past your own tendency toward personal retrospection, past photography's techie-ness, and put you front-and-center with explaining the fundamental essence of a photograph. Cold shower, anyone? Refreshing!"

darlene: "Mike my fingers are crossed for you. I do believe writing is your calling no matter how big the space, the topic at hand, or the argument. You got this!"

MarkB: "If some editor at a publication that-shall-not-be-named-but-can-be-surmised, ahem, explicitly asked you to write for them, isn't that request solely based on what you've written here, in all its bloggerish glory? So be yourself and run it up the flagpole! Editing yourself while you write is like driving a (real) car without using the clutch pedal—just makes noise and smoke and damages the machinery, IMHO."

Mike replies: Well, they certainly allow for stylists. But there has to be respect for the general tone and approach of the publication. The integrity of the publication comes first. Publications have a culture, you might say—history and tradition.

Maybe the main thing I have to relearn is to how to take my time on a piece, let it percolate, and be willing to rework it substantially—you know, what's called "writing" to most people. For example, so far I can't help but organize the piece in my head and then whack out the whole thing from beginning to end in one sitting. Which is a little funny. I don't have to do that with these, but it's almost a reflex at this point.

Chuck Albertson: "I was wondering when the Times was going to replace the Lens blog. Now, if they could just bring back a chess columnist...."

Doing It Well

In private correspondence, Tony McLean re-quoted something quoted in a forum by Andrew Rodney:

"You can do all sorts of things that are fiendishly clever, then fall in love with them because they're fiendishly clever, while overlooking the fact that they take a great deal more work to obtain results that stupid people get in half the time. As someone who has created a lot of fiendishly clever but ultimately useless techniques in his day, I'd say this sounds like an example."

—Bruce Fraser

Bruce Fraser's quote reminded me of something I think I read on a record-collecting forum or something like that...paraphrasing, but it was something like "I've spent most of my disposable cash and an ungodly amount of time in my life chasing down the most unlistenable music ever created by man."

Hmm, do you see the relevance? Goes to "the pointless quest."

When I was young I tried out just about every technique I could learn about, staying late in the Corcoran's student darkrooms in downtown D.C. and walking home in the middle of the night. And sure enough, some of the fiendishly clever techniques I chased down when I was young ended up...being the same as the regular techniques. For example, using two different paper developers, soft and hard, was no different than using one paper developer (two developers did make it a little easier to achieve intermediate contrast with graded papers, but I didn't use graded papers). And printing VC paper with two different contrast settings was no different than printing with the proper setting in the middle. Despite all the high-flown language used to ascribe "special" but ineffable qualities to those techniques, there...weren't any.

I won't even mention the names of the developers that were supposed to be special that weren't, because tender feelings linger out there still.

At some point I realized that everybody was looking for a magic bullet, something to make their work special...even if those magic bullets didn't exist. I finally figured out that if you really discovered something that was special, other people would just copy you anyway. What was the point? I made up my mind to go the other way, and make a principle out of simply doing things the way everybody else did them.

I decided it was foolish to chase fiendishly clever ways of doing things. I wanted to use the techniques that were common and popular and characteristic of my era. At the time that meant what I called "my Photo 101 technique"—35mm Tri-X developed in D-76 printed full frame (sorry) on 8x10 or 11x14 paper. The idea was to just go ahead and use whatever people are using and do whatever they are doing. Be a part of your era. Follow the crowd. But do it better.

Because it wasn't really a special film, or an esoteric developer, or a rare kind of paper, the perfect lens, or a magical enlarger light source that mattered. It was your taste and judgement that mattered. And of course what your picture meant or expressed, what it showed and how it showed it.

Keuka in the Rain

So, then, just...print. I guess since we're right in the middle of a print sale of pictures from iPhone pictures, I'm practicing my old principles again. Doing nuthin' special, but doing it well.

Promises we won't keep
I have to say, though, that I never had a conscious intention to be an iPhone photographer; I did it for the same reason anyone else does, because it's fun and I usually have the iPhone with me. Among my New Years resolutions this year is to stop being lazy and discipline myself to shoot with my better cameras. I'm going to regret admitting this, but, actually, my game plan for 2022 is to try a OC/OL/OY (pronounced oh-co-loy, it means "one camera, one lens, one year," and you can read about it here) with the Sony A6600.

I say that because it's almost the time of year for making promises we won't keep. You can place bets as to how long I'll last. February? March? Maybe I'll have great fortitude and stick-to-it-iveness and last till May. I admit that constancy is not one of my best things, shut up Josh*.

I'll tell you about my other New Years resolutions when the day gets here.

Mike
(Thanks to Tony McLean)

*Josh Hawkins used to be my camera dealer. He has, um, a rather cynical view of my grand pronouncements. And, dang it, that is not exactly his fault.

Book o' the Week:
Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, is the most complete picture of the mysterious governess-photographer yet—and the picture is more surprising than we thought.

the link can be a portal to Amazon for your holiday shopping. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

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

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

John Camp: "This kind of post always reminds me of the various ways and reasons people do photography, and that I'm really not interested in getting contentious about any of it. Shoot B&W? Fine, not for me. Collect cameras to their own sake? Fine, I'm not interested in doing that. And so on. I have no problem with any of it, and I even find a lot of it interesting to read about, even if I'm not interested in doing it. A lot of photographers here, including our gracious host seem to have an attachment to photographs as objects (art objects, important memorabilia). I do some of that, but with my own photography, I mostly want to be able to contemplate for a more or less long time a situation that was fleeting. To see some transitory...event?...and then look at it for a while. Peoples expressions and so on. Then I usually (not always) delete it."

Mike replies: Your first point reflects my attitude about it. I got my first teaching job in 1984 and wrote my first article in 1988, and since then I've encountered an amazing variety of reasons why people like photographs or why they are into photography. Really, the list is as long as your arm, and some of the particulars are highly specific, curious, occasionally even bizarre. So I decided pretty early on that it's not for me to judge why anyone else wants to be a photographer or photography enthusiast, and whatever they want to do is fine with me as long as they aren't hurting or exploiting anybody or committing a crime.

(It took a fair amount of effort to keep this reply so short!)

Do You Still Care About 'Sample Galleries'?

Many things have changed in the digital imaging universe over the past 20 years, and it's been a wild and fascinating ride. One thing I noticed the other day: I seldom look at "sample galleries" in equipment reviews any more.

Not only am I surfeited with the kind of pictures that appear—and I'm just as guilty of perpetrating them as anyone else, so my own "sample" pictures are just as soulless to me as anyone else's—but I just don't get much useful information from them any more. About the only thing I can really deduce from them is that I can get a rough idea (just a rough idea) of the bokeh of lenses, assuming the sample shots show that. Sometimes (not always) I can get a sense of what my maximum ISO would be if I were shooting with the camera.

I no longer look at falloff—that can be changed to taste in post. I no longer look at noise—offhand, the last time I can remember that being a real impediment for me was with the GF1 (2009). I certainly never look at "sharpness"—we've long since passed the point where all cameras and most lenses are sharp enough.

...Well, my iPhone 7 is not sharp enough! But that's not even fair to the iPhone, much less all other cameras. Now that the iPhone 13 is here.

I have a sense that I'm forgetting something, that there is indeed something I look for sometimes that I'm just overlooking. Maybe it will come to me.

One issue: post-processing skill has surpassed the raw material produced by the equipment as the biggest determinant of the quality of the final image. The best fine printer whose work I'm familiar with is Ctein, and he has never bothered to shoot with anything more than Micro 4/3! It gives him the raw material he needs to make perfectly beautiful prints on 13x19" and 17x22" paper. Of course he's a virtuoso, but the point holds.

So the kind of "sample" shots I would most like to see would be...prints. That would be interesting. But of course no online provider can present prints for me to look at. (TOP readers who have purchased prints in our print sales will be well aware of how different a fine original print is from seeing the same image as an online JPEG. And what the heck is wrong with that TOP guy, anyway? Why haven't there been any print sales lately?)

But the telltale in the end is that when I read camera reviews now, I find I seldom bother to look at the samples very carefully. I might click through them dutifully, but I seldom come away thinking I've detected much of anything useful—other than about the shooter's skills in seeing. This is a big difference from 15 and 20 years ago, when I used to pore over sample shots with great attention and study them to see what I could glean from them of a camera's or a lens's performance.

It's not that there aren't differences in lenses and sensors any more—there are. They're there. It's just that I have a hard time getting a handle on them from online samples.

I guess I still do want to see what the bokeh might look like in lens reviews—but galleries that only show bokeh wide open are of limited value too. I've never shot for bokeh as a primary value—it's never the point of pictures for me—so the subtler bokeh of stopped-down apertures are useful to know about for me too. Those can be a little harder to find. (I've always found that to get a sense of a lens's bokeh, you need to look at lots of samples. It's easy to be misled from just a few.)

For the most part, it might be all right with me if reviewers dispensed with sample shots altogether, and just told me in words what they are seeing from the equipment in their own work. But I would need to trust that they actually investigated in their shooting what they are telling me about! Not everyone is reliable about that.

Oh—flare, that's what I was forgetting. That's something I look for in sample shots in lens reviews. But reviewers don't always test for it or show samples.

What about you? Do you still find sample shots informative? Do you still look at them and study them? See if you can remember how you used to look at them and how you look at them now. Any change in that over the years?

Mike

Book o' the Week:

Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958–1987. "Carrying a Polaroid camera from the late 1950s until his death in 1987, [Andy Warhol] amassed a huge collection of instant pictures of friends, lovers, patrons, the famous, the obscure, the scenic, the fashionable, and himself...this book features hundreds of these instant photos." Any book with Grace Jones on the cover has to be cool.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958–1987 at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

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

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

Mark Rouleau: "I do look at sample galleries, but usually for color more than anything else. I find I am very sensitive to the default color palettes that the various camera manufacturers have. Sony colors often seem a little off to me (YMMV). And I know people wax eloquent about the Canon and the Olympus, but I think the new winner might be the Sigma fp models. Odd camera with a ton of usability issues, but the sample images I've seen almost make me want one."

DavidB: "A few of my current lenses are used for astrophotography. It is important to know how well these lenses obtain pin-point star images—especially in the corners. So before buying I often will look at astro photographs posted by others. For all other purposes, no."

John Krumm: "I do look at them, but often find them lacking. They seldom take enough stopped down shots for my taste, and I make most of my shots with lenses stopped down. Despite claims otherwise, not all lenses look the same stopped down. If I had my druthers, there would be a few wide open shots, but many more at different apertures. These days they tend to just take a pile of wide open shots like that's all that matters. It's annoying."

Mike replies: It is. Especially since you have to be careful to know what you're looking at. At times I've been fooled into thinking a lens is worse than it is because most of the samples I saw were shot wide open.

Peter Jeffrey Croft: "I used to really enjoy the sample galleries on DPReview while they were in London. I loved the shots around their offices, with all the details and the candid people shots. But when they moved to Seattle, I lost interest. I just don't find their new location interesting. The samples are dull and boring. Some of their UK based reviews and sample galleries were so good that I've kept a lot of the shots. I remember their review of the Sigma DP series and the SD14 especially, and I still look at the shots for enjoyment. I bought the Fuji S100FS in 2008 much on the basis of their review and samples, and I still have the camera and the images I took on a trip to Europe in that year. I'm still marveling at the images I got. So apart from finding Seattle boring, I think I'd say I do like sample galleries."

Mike replies: Come to think, I actually wrote a post to this effect in the early days of DPReview, when the founder Phil Askey owned it. It might not have been here; could have been at another venue. I did enjoy the cumulative virtual tour of London. Paris gets all the love, but London is even more historic and almost as photogenic. But of course we weren't looking at those pictures as technical trials, but for their content. 

xf mj: "I guess I don’t look at them as a scientist and don’t know if I want them to be scientific evidence. Probably because I don’t know what I’d look for. Instead, once I’m convinced that the camera or lens is probably technically good enough and that I’ll like it, I just want to see that people did good or beautiful work with it. So I try and find personal blog posts showing nice work they’ve produced with the product and see if I approve and like the look. This has gotta be less than objective, maybe useless, but it gets me excited for my purchase, and makes me feel part of the community that uses the product well. The community I’d like to join. And it’s just nice to see others’ good photography. I suppose this is why I’ve gravitated to some brands and products over other equally good brands and products. Oh well.

"Most larger/popular/pseudo-scientific camera sites' sample photos are just dumb and uninspiring. The pictures are so uninteresting, it makes me want to find a different hobby and never lay cash down for a camera ever again. (Same also with their attempt at objective writing.) It’s more fun to feel inspired when I spend my money. Most on-line sites seem instead to want to tell their readers that they’re not making a mistake with a purchase. And then make me feel a year or two later that it actually was a mistake. Must’ve been, because the latest and greatest has gotta be bought to correct that 1- or 2-year old technology that has become a shame to own, right?"

Mike replies: I have felt what you describe! I've gotten enthusiastic about a product only to have the sample images actually dampen my enthusiasm...because, after all they're just more digital images, nothing special, undistinguished and indistinguishable.

Hip to be Square

So here's what happened.

On Thursday I started writing a post about the effect my pandemic experience had on my photography. But I seldom start out knowing in advance what I'm going to say. It evolves, depending on where my mind goes. Alas, as I got into it, I realized it was turning into a full-on gripes-'n'-grievances session, and at some point I thought, wow, this is a downer. I can't subject you to this.

So I just posted the simple question instead. Rather than tell you about my pandemic experience I figured I'd let you tell me about yours.

Several people reported disasters for their business or their motivation, and I don't want to minimize that. I greatly sympathize, as no doubt the majority of us do. And I'm sure the responses were affected by survivor bias: it's possible that some former readers who got out of the hobby altogether are no longer here to comment!

But overall I found I was heartened. Many commenters managed to make lemonade out of lemons, as the saying goes, and it did me good to hear about it.

Circle squared

One thing I've wanted to do is to explore what it's like to shoot square. A while back I set up my X-H1 in 1:1 mode with the XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 and started to see what I could see. I've never actually shot square before; even when I shot with my old Exakta 66 (120 film, 2 1/4 cm square format) for the better part of a year, I ended up cropping everything to verticals, in about a 645 aspect ratio.

Most of all, though, Thursday's comments pointed out to me that my motivation is my own responsibility. I liked what Roger Bradbury said:

I've started and kept with a project, something I've never done before. But the first thing I did, before I took a single photo, was think hard about what I wanted to do until I came up with [a] simple explanation.

Until I had that description of my aims in a single short and clear sentence, I was not ready to begin, for I did not know what I wanted to do. Now I have that description, it influences how and when and why I take every project photo.

Wise words. (Here's his whole comment—worth reading again.)

My former teacher Mark L. Power died not long ago, and it was a big loss to all who knew him—he was a unique and distinctive guy and a great writer and teacher. (John Anderson did an excellent job on the linked article.) But I'm reminded here of something Mark told me many years ago. He had observed over many years that when students complained about their photography or photography in general, it was because they hadn't found a way to get out and work. He said that whenever someone found an idea for a project and got into the work, somehow the complaints and the malaise all went away.

I've never forgotten that.

Surely it's up to me to find a way to work, and it's something that's within my power and ability. Yeah, I've been in the doldrums. But the wind will fill my sails again.

Mike

P.S. The category I filed this post in is "Reflections." Craig Ferguson: "Made meself laugh, and that's half the battle."

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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

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

Robert Pillow: "Shooting square makes you a well-rounded photographer."

Mike Peters (partial comment): "Now, and since 2000, all of my personal work has been shot on square format, while the pro work is strictly rectangles. It makes it very easy for me to shift gears in my head. When I see a square my mindset changes over to seeing the world differently, and with no client in mind. It's very refreshing to be able to make that distinction, and it immediately shifts my intention when I look at the world to a more personal perspective."

Ilkka: "I photograph a lot of architecture. I often crop square, but never in camera. One advantage of shooting square, on a rectangular format camera, is that every lens becomes a shift lens. If you have a full frame camera (24x36) and turn it upright, you have 6mm shift up or down. By using a bit wider lens and cropping a bit more, you easily get 8 or 10mm shift. That is almost always enough. Just keep the camera level."

Passing Thought (Video Conspiracy Theory)

As I've been mulling over the meaning of the Z fc, here's one thing that struck me. As you know, camera reviewers in recent years have migrated en masse from written sites with static illustrations like this one to YouTube videos. Most of these feature either talking heads in homemade studios of varying degrees of slickness, or else the "roving reporter"-style (but still basically talking-head) variant popularized by Kaiman Wong when he was on DigitalRev TV. I like self-filmed ones that concentrate visually on the equipment as the operator adds voiceover, like David Thorpe's, although I do think those need a talking head shot mixed in occasionally, just to anchor us, like old sports broadcasts occasionally cut to the announcers for half a minute.

Most of those are self-produced to some degree, some even shot with phones selfie-style. But of course all of them are videos, meaning the people making them are actually videographers. AKA "vloggers." That word of course is an awkward blend of video and blogger, blogger already being an abbreviation of weblog with the suffix -er added to the stem to form a noun meaning "a person who does that activity." So vlogger means "video blogger"...never mind that videos cannot be, well, blogs in form or format, but never mind.

Anyway, all or most of the people who are reviewing cameras these days spend most of their time making videos. They're naturally interested in videography because it's what they themselves do. Which means the interest of all or most of the people who are reviewing our cameras are naturally biased in favor of the video features of the tools they're reviewing.

Just a thought. I just wonder how much effect that is having on corporate marketing and direction. Remember, the camera manufacturers are eager/desperate to find or invent unique selling propositions, in the face of ongoing disruption in the category, and they do seem to believe that their potential customers think that video production and web conferencing are way up there on the list of things ILCs are good for...which may be because their customers are being influenced by influencers who are video people themselves...

...Whereas to me....

It's no wonder people dedicated to stills get short shrift, such that even a camera meant to be a digital FE2 can't dispense with things like a 3.5mm stereo mini-pin jack for an external microphone, for heaven's sake. Maybe it's just me, but it never once occurred to me that an FE2 with a roll of Tri-X in it lacked a microphone.

By the way, I'm sorry to report that we lost David Thorpe on the 25th of last month. Sincere condolences to Carole, Hannah, and Jonathan. His viewers didn't know David in person of course, but Micro 4/3 enthusiasts the world over miss his words and wisdom.

Finally, I lied—I'll get to that new Nikon 28mm tomorrow. Today is "Open Mike" day, and you know how impossibly rigid I am about schedules.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

Spiffy new Nikon for hipsters young and old! Buy it here and you keep our engine running.

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

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

Crabby Umbo: "If I'm not mistaken, in the early 2000s, the Dallas newspaper required their photographers to shoot video as well as still; and that mentality was picked up by a lot of other newspapers around the country; the thought being that they would use moving footage on the website. Even as late as the mid-20-teens, a friend of mine on staff at a paper was told to shoot the key shots, and then hit the video button and make some lame video, trying to think up stupid stuff for the people to say: this was for their features section...appalling!

"At the time, this sounded ridiculous to me, because you could only concentrate on one at a time. If you're looking for the 'decisive moment,' how are you taking 'movin' pitchers'? I may have even read somewhere that the Dallas paper had written their own software to take high-rez frame captures out of video files, to use in the printed paper.

"Anyone with half an education in imaging will tell you that those two disciplines are like wearing two different hats. 'Cause you're good at one, doesn't make you good at the other, and anyone that tells you they are is lying to themselves and you! I've known doc film makers for years and they'd laugh at the idea.

"My pals will also tell you, that when you have a vid and still camera in one, you have two crappy cameras! None of them are using Canon 5D's to do vid, and all are using video-specific cameras for video. They all say, the cameras work better when they are designed specifically to function as a vid camera, and it uses a lot of the 'known' technical names for functions.

"They also told me years ago, a lot of video editing software uses all the terminology of physical film editing. They can't believe how 'clunky' Photoshop was and is: designed by engineers, for engineers, and possibly pre-press professionals, but certainly not photographers (otherwise density would be in stops and contrast would be in grades).

"Oh Lord, deliver us from the tyranny of video features on still cameras!"

Mike replies: Hmm, maybe I should start calling myself Crabby Mike.

Kirk Tuck: "I have to chime in here to give a bit of perspective from the point of view of someone who is using interchangeable-lens mirrorless cameras to (still) make a daily living in the imaging business. I resist buying any camera these days that doesn't include, in addition to basic photography features, a mic jack, a headphone jack and a V-Log profile. I've made my living as a commercial photographer since the film days and I'm sorry to say that the industry hasn't stood still. It's constantly changing, and the content that clients want now, in 2021, is a mix of video and stills. My point of view will be different from that of a newspaper journalist because commercial/advertising photographers have the luxury of shooting a still image and then setting up the same basic shot and shooting a video clip. Clients want both.

"I spent two days last week shooting video and stills for a wine association in central Texas. The main part of the job (it's an ongoing project) is shooting photographs but the ad agency in charge also wants short clips that they can put up on social media sites to drive audiences to the final website. And as standalone marketing.

"I wore a Panasonic S1 camera, set up for still shooting, on one shoulder and a Panasonic S1H on the other shoulder. Both had zooms attached since I didn't want to take chances with changing lenses in the windy, dusty outdoors. The still camera had a polarizing filter on its lens while the 'video' camera had a variable neutral density filter on its lens. There was nothing to change or adjust between the two ways of shooting. Just put down one camera and pick up the other.

"We would set up a scene or scenario and photograph it until we were certain we had the images we needed. Then we'd go back to the beginning and go again but with the video camera. Since both were set up for specific tasks there was no confusion, or time lost, trying to reset one camera to do both jobs. On this particular project we didn't need sound for the video and that made things a bit easier. And one other advantage is that both cameras are similar now, because of firmware updates, and can be used interchangeably for stills or video, if necessary. The video camera backs up the still camera and vice versa. They both take the same lenses and both take the same batteries and memory cards. And the color science between the two camera models matches up nicely.

"Yesterday I finished color grading the V-Log video files and sent them along to the client. Edited down there were 18+ minutes of high res video which looked very nice. They'll select bits and pieces for YouTube, Instagram, etc. On Monday I sent over a gallery link to 1,800 photographs which I had converted from raw to JPEG.

"In the last year I produced 12 different video projects for clients. In the same time frame we completed about 20 projects using still photography. Most of the projects had a lean one way or the other but nearly all included both video and photos. It was an especially light year because of the pandemic.

"But there's a beautiful synergy in the use of still cameras for video. I have multiple camera bodies and originally bought them as backups and for the times when I wanted to work fast with a different lens on each camera. When we started shooting more and more video I found that having three cameras with the same color profiles, set up to shoot at three different angles/magnifiications, meant we could produce much better video programming and have more angles to choose from in editing. All shot simultaneously so the action between the three cameras would match up perfectly.

"The Panasonic S1H is our best video camera and is approved for making movies for Netflix. It's great as a video camera...but it's equally good as a traditional photography camera. The flexibility makes good sense from a business point of view and a production point of view.

"Finally, one can always ignore the mic and headphone jacks and disregard the Log file capability. These features aren't cost intensive and won't get in the way for traditional photographers. But for someone who needs or want to make money with photography in the current era the flexibility to go in either direction—or both directions—is a godsend.

"I can't imagine that I would have pursued video if I'd had to buy a second set of cameras in order to do the work. Finally, working with the same three cameras for both disciplines is convenient since I have become so familiar with them through everyday use.

"You can be resistant to market changes and walk away from the video part but I guarantee that the supplier who comes in to do the video work will also offer to photograph the job so, in the end, if you stick to your guns you will soon be out of work.

"If you are shooting photos for fun then all bets are off...."

Steve Rosenblum: "I am quite saddened to hear of the death of David Thorpe. I had great respect for him and his work.

"I rarely use the video features on digital cameras with the exception of my iPhone. It's not hard to ignore the video features on cameras and use them for my own still photography purposes. The one aspect of 'hybrid' design that I object to is the trend lately to put 'flip out' LCD screens on most new cameras. This type of screen cannot easily be used as a waist level finder which I find quite useful for candid and street photography. In those situations I like to use the camera like a TLR which both changes the point of view and makes me much more unobtrusive/invisible to those I am photographing. I like the screen on the Fuji X-H1 and dislike the screen on the XT-4 for that reason. I haven't bought the X-T4 because of that."

Dave Stewart: "That video button can be set to perform other functions when you're in shooting/stills mode, as in many other Nikons. I usually set it to metering, so that I can easily change the metering mode by pressing it and turning the rear dial. At least then it has some use!"

Ah, Youth

I mentioned yesterday the occasion (the ice cream walk) when, at the age of about 42, I accepted the diminished role photographing actually played in my real life. At the time I was no longer a professional and I had made not much if any headway toward a career as an art photographer. I was a single parent and working as editor-in-chief of Photo Techniques magazine, and those two things soaked up most of my energy. I still regularly developed film at the kitchen sink every two or three nights.

But what a change that was from my earlier youth! I had a boundless enthusiasm for photography when I was younger. I first realized it could be a job for me when, as a college dropout, I went into the darkroom in the evening and, before I knew it, saw dawn out the window of the basement laundry room where I washed my prints—I had worked hard the whole night and hardly felt the effort. I immersed myself in the culture and literature of the medium, experimented with techniques, haunted used bookstores for good books, saved my money for gear. "Obsessed" is the usual term—"ate, slept, and breathed photography" is another way of putting it. Working during the day as a carpenter and handyman, I took a second job at a frame shop just to learn how to mat and frame my work. Do I wish I had pictures of the odd and very distinctive world I lived in as a handyman, and all the quirky characters who populated it? I'd give a lot for that.

At the frame shop I heard about the Corcoran's photography program and applied. The advantage of art school was mainly that I could concentrate on photography all day long and yet still be doing what I was supposed to be doing! That was heaven for me. I took advantage of it. Although a slob in "real life," I kept everything at school fastidiously neat; although lazy in most things, I decided to work my hardest at school, and I did. I ended up teaching Summer courses, being a stand-in lab manager for the school darkrooms, and frequently worked in the darkroom till midnight before walking the several miles home to my apartment in Georgetown. I kept my camera with me at all times; I made regular circuits of all the museums and galleries in D.C. to look at work. One of my prouder moments was when a guard at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division saw me leaving and blurted out, "Jesus Christ, do you live here?" They let me call up portfolios of master prints from throughout photography's past and look at them up close and personal, sitting at a table, without glass (although for the really valuable old work, you weren't allowed to touch—at first, a member of the museum staff had to stand there and shuffle through the prints for me. It was only a short time before they learned I was reliable and could be trusted, so they dispensed with that requirement). I looked through all of the original FSA prints on file from the '30s—a formidable task, as there are thousands and thousands of them. Of course I saw all of the exhibits at the Corcoran itself and went to all the lectures, and got to meet all sorts of people, from Emmet Gowin's wife Edith (the main subject of his famous first monograph) to August Sander's grandson Gerd, half a generation older than I. Do I have photographs that simply document the people and places of the long-gone Corcoran darkrooms and all the people I knew then? A few, but only randomly. Do I wish I had made a more coherent visual record? Boy, do I ever. All those pictures I made back then, and I don't have the ones I really want.

When I realized it was impossible to go to graduate school, which I really should have done to continue the career trajectory on which I was embarked, I made an ambitious list of 11 things that a photography teacher should ideally know—I figured if I couldn't get a Masters degree, I could at least "master" the subject on my own by working hard independently. A few of those goals proved impossible. One was to work at a photography museum for six months. I tried several times, until the formidable Smithsonian curator Eugene Ostroff explained to me that it was an insolent goal because supplicants worked very hard for access to the positions that I proposed to experience as a dilettante. But I think I actually eventually accomplished nine of the 11. I actually did curate a public show, and publish a book, and assist for a top-level commercial studio pro for six months, and so forth. Alas, the "piece of paper" turned out to be just as important, if not more so, than the actual knowledge and life experience.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention my ambitious and engaged younger years in photography as a counterpoint to my admission of yesterday. I don't want younger readers to think I'm just an old fuddy-duddy whose ambition goes no further than making casual family snapshots on an evening walk. I mean, that is what I am, but that's what I've become...because with age comes hard reality. It wasn't always that way.

About photographing
And here's a question I'll ask myself and answer just for fun. If I had anything to do differently, what would it be, looking back from the vantage point of traditional "retirement age"*? First I should say, emphatically, that I don't regret anything about my current situation. It's an honor and a privilege to write TOP, and it suits me just fine. I've worked very hard at it—one year in the early 2010s I worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, and took fewer than 10 days off in the entire year—but it's always been a pleasure.

I really should have gotten an MFA, though. The lack of it stunted my career in ways I can only guess. In the '90s, A.D. Coleman and I hatched a plan that each of us was going to be the other's graduate advisor, and we were both going to get MFA's under Bill Jay at Arizona, working independently. Bill was amenable to our plan. But then Bill retired soon afterward. I guess it was too late by then anyway—it turned out to be one of those great ideas that got floated but then floats off like a helium balloon you let go of. You need to do things in the proper order in life, each in their sensible sequence.

But, specifically about photographing—my actual practice as a photographer making photographs—I do wish I had been able to do differently, looking back. This might sound rather odd, but what I wish I had done was to continue to shoot 35mm Tri-X my whole life, and make simple 8x10 RC prints myself, and document the times and the people in my life in the quirky, idiosyncratic, go-my-own-way, follow-my-own-muse fashion that I wanted to. I used to call it my "Photo 101 technique." That's what I loved doing the most. I actually have a very short essay or artist's statement I wrote way back in the very beginning of my adult involvement with photography that sets out almost exactly that course. All I needed to do was follow it. I wanted to be like Atget...keep shooting the same way persistently as the technique of my youth got obsolescent and then obsolete, true to the same muse all the way to the inn. Ah, well.

In the '80s, when I was teaching full time, a mentor convinced me I needed make bigger, more imposing prints if I wanted to have any success in the art world, and that I needed to move from one coherent, definable project to another that was distinct from the last. I did that for a while, dutifully. Then came magazine work and reviewing, which obliged me to switch from camera to camera and technique to technique. And then came the (disruptive!) transition to digital, which shook everything up.

But little did I know then that a) I wasn't going to have any art-world success anyway, and b) 8x10 RC prints would have carried me through the transition to the digital era just fine: add an ordinary letter-sized flat-bed scanner and I would have stepped over the divide into the online era as neatly as you please, but entirely on my own chosen terms.

You don't really need to do any particular thing in your work, except exactly what you are driven to do. It will actually serve, as long as you commit.

I'm happy enough anyway. Things worked out. No complaints. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans**.

I think that's enough of these discursive reminiscences! Time to move on to other topics, starting tomorrow. Is there anything you'd like to read an "Open Mike" about?

Mike

*I'm not retiring. Standard joke: "my retirement plan is to keep working."

**The quote is by Allen Saunders, the American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips "Steve Roper and Mike Nomad," "Mary Worth." and "Kerry Drake." The quote first appeared in a 1957 Reader's Digest article. It was made famous by ex-Beatle John Lennon, who used it in the lyrics of the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" dedicated to his son Sean.

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

The following image is also a link: 

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

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

Mark: "And as a famous pugilist once quipped: Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

Mark van der Wal: "Thanks Mike for your article. Your sustained passion makes sense having heard your history, enthusiasm and determination from your youth. So much more to the story as we read of your background and experiences. How does one even quantify the value of viewing so many photographic prints in teaching terms or just mere artistic influence? A regular reader for many years. Thank you."

Blake Andrews: "I found myself nodding along as I read this. Obsessed. Check. Shoot film every day? Check. Develop regularly in the sink? Check. No MFA, check. Career trajectory dormant? Check. Long darkroom sessions leading to RC print piles? Check. I’ve plugging away at film photography for 25 years (half a million frames and counting) and I haven’t lost interest yet. I suppose the obsession diminishes for some. Hope I don’t ever reach that point, but of course the future is unwritten. Thanks for the heartfelt post. Check."

Energy and Appetite

Tom Burke said yesterday: "Here's another thought to add: is it possible that when you stop feeling that you're learning new skills and gaining new knowledge but are instead just garnering experience, the passion for (whatever it is) just drops? Not just photography, but lots of endeavours? The 'Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life?' moment?"

A few thoughts about that. First, golf, exhibits 1, 2, and 3 (I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me):

1. An old commercial: the professional golfer Tom Kite, then at the top of the game, and another golfer are seen getting massages. The other guy asks Kite if he's going to play in an upcoming tournament in Hawaii. They discuss it, sounding glum. Kite, in a resigned tone of voice, concedes that he's being paid an appearance fee to go and he's getting the trip for free, so he sighs and says something like, "I suppose I have to." The joke, of course, was that most weekend warriors would kill to get a free trip to Hawaii to play golf. To me, however, the advertisers' message backfired and an alternate moral was more clear: if you have to do something too much, even a thing that to most people is a special pleasure can become a chore.

2. Once I was out on a golf course with my brothers, playing 18 holes on a regulation course (as opposed to the adjacent par-three course which was more my speed). As the hands on my watch wore past three hours, I suddenly realized I'd had quite enough of golf: I was thoroughly tired of laboring against my own swing and would have quit for the day right then and there if it were easy and polite to do. Had to grind through two or three more holes after that, though.

3. After Vijay Singh won his Masters, tales were told of his epic appetite for practice. Legend had it that after his win, he went to the range and striped the tee until dark. Wikipedia says, "he is known for his meticulous preparation, often arriving hours before, and staying long after, his tournament rounds to work on his game on the driving range and putting greens."

All these things had a decisive effect on me: I never wanted to be a professional golfer. No, let me re-word that: I wanted to never be a professional golfer! Not that I ever could have been—I have slightly more talent for golf than an armadillo has for hacky-sack. But I never had the slightest desire, even in daydreams. No, thank you: I decided I was perfectly happy to blither my way around a par-three course a handful of times a year. That matched my appetite for the game. (I don't even do that any more, although I miss the camaraderie with my bros.) Sink to your level and embrace it!

It's the same way with pool, if the truth be told. I love pool, and I think it's a fascinating game and I'm better at it than most armadillos. But do I have the discipline and patience to run through my "daily" practice routine every single morning? No, sir, I do not. And I know lots of drills, but an hour spent drilling is fifteen minutes too long for me. Would I have wanted to be a pro pool player? Well, the level of skill of Jayson Shaw or Alexandros Kazakis would be great fun to possess, and it's thrilling to watch. (For me anyway.) But even if I were young I would never have the patience to put in the time it takes to get to that level. And I know it.

Be an amateur
I think I first applied this realization to photography following an after-dinner walk with my son, who was then about six, to get ice cream, back when we lived in the town where Groundhog Day was filmed, Woodstock, Illinois. I had along a Contax Aria camera and a Zeiss Contax 35mm ƒ/2.8 lens (still have the lens) and two rolls of Kodak Tri-X. The evening was beautiful and the light was particularly nice. When I got home I developed the film at the kitchen sink and the next day I proofed the two rolls and in my makeshift basement darkroom and made eight or ten nice prints on 8x10 paper using my amateur-level enlarger*. The handful of prints were a highly competent documentary of that particular walk, but beyond that, nothing particularly special.

I decided at the time that that was about the perfect level of involvement in photographing for me.

I like to photograph—it's an essential part of our medium's culture, and the culture of photography is one of my three or four main interests. But do I have the will and the desire to do it every day, all day? I've always been pretty clear that I don't. Note that there are critics who aren't photographers at all—A.D. Coleman comes to mind—so it's not essential to be a photographer to be immersed in its culture or to write about it.

After that, though, when parents would contact me asking if I thought photography school was a sensible investment for their children, it put me in a quandary. I loved photography school: I feel toward the Corcoran School of Art all the sentimental attachment alums are supposed to feel for their beloved alma mater. It was a great privilege to attend for three years and I enjoyed it intensely. Virtually all my experiences there and all of my many memories are good ones. But no, when viewed without rose-tinted glasses, actually art school is probably a particularly poor allotment of resources if what you're trying to do is equip your progeny to deal with the task of making their way in the world. I felt disloyal to the Corcoran in advising against all it had offered me, and I especially didn't want to pour cold water on any kid's dreams, so I avoided the question when it was possible; but on the other hand I didn't want to lie to parents. A genuine dilemma.

My recommendation to anyone who asks is that one simply should have a thick, tough skin in evaluating and appraising what to do for a living. Photography is more likely to be rewarding—and more pleasurable—if one's practice of it is somewhere in the range between dabbling and a dedicated long-term avocation. We all have to come to terms with where our photography fits in our lives.

Chase the dream
And if someone really wants to do it "all in," full-time, front line, do or die, the first questions to ask, and ask comprehensively, would be about a.) their energy level, and b.) their appetite for work. Those are the two essentials that must be present if you ask me. If both those things are genuinely high, they have a chance. In which case, I tip my hat to them.

Mike

*Which did however have a top-flight lens. I still have not one but two, one for each fist when they bury me I guess!

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

The following image is also a link: 

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Featured Comments from:

Richard Skoonberg: "Mike, thank you for promoting Andrew Feiler's wonderful book, A Better Life for Their Children. The story and images describing the legacy of the Rosenwald Schools are both fascinating and deeply moving. Rosenwald was the CEO of Sears in the early twentieth century. He and Dr. Booker T. Washington created a plan to build schools in the rural South so black school children could attend school in the Jim Crow era. To build the schools, the black community put up a third of the money, the local school board put up a third of the money, and Rosenwald put in the final third. These were often one and two-room schoolhouses with one or two teachers with a K-12 curriculum. These schools helped to create a generation that provided the leaders for the Civil Rights movement. Andrew Feiler's book is the first photographic survey of these schools.

"As a side note, Andrew is a member of our local photo-crit group, so we were able to watch this book project from its inception. Currently, many of the images from the book are one display at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta."

Mike replies: Thanks for sending me the PDF sample pages from the book, Richard (downloadable here). I enjoyed that.

Geoff Wittig: "That's a perfect summary of what's necessary to find a calling in life. Energy and boundless appetite for work are prerequisites, but love of the process is also key. I love photography, everything from playing with the gear to image capture to making an excellent print. But I couldn't summon the constant energy and enthusiasm to make it a career.

"Medicine, on the other hand, continues to captivate me after almost 40 years. I was that annoyingly eager student you wanted to slap for being so perky. I loved working 100 hour weeks as a resident for the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of mastering something difficult. I still find myself reading papers outside my specialty because they're so darned interesting. The challenge of being thoroughly competent and continually improving is just as compelling now as it was when I was a newly minted 26-year-old MD. I still love the work, every day. What I did not expect as a swaggering young doc was the emotional toll of seeing patients I've come to know so well aging, becoming frail, and dying. Which is where photography has been a Godsend for me. A chilly morning spent scouting, setting up, and capturing a perfect sunrise panorama grounds me and keeps me sane. So I can keep loving my calling."

A different Mike: "'And if someone really wants to do it "all in," full-time, front line, do or die, the first questions to ask, and ask comprehensively, would be about a.) their energy level, and b.) their appetite for work. Those are the two essentials that must be present if you ask me. If both those things are genuinely high, they have a chance.' You are correct sir. I've been fortunate to have made my living solely by making useful photographs for other people since 1979. The dedication and amount of energy it takes to be even moderately successful for someone without either a trust fund or a hook of some sort is beyond the ability of most people to comprehend. Over the past seven days I worked seventy-six hours covering twelve very important events for my main client. Each event was about two hours long. Then I had another two hours in which I would have to download, organize, rename, edit down from 3–5,000 images (people make funny faces when they speak, and people also blink, and when photographing an event with a few hundred people, having more of a selection is always easier than submitting photos of funny looking people with their eyes closed) a cull of about 120–180, adjust the raw files in ACR, convert to JPEG, and then upload to a web gallery. That gallery would then be linked to a story on their web site. And then do it again that evening, which would get me home at 9:30–10 p.m. after arriving at 8:30 a.m. that morning. The next day, do it again.

"Very few people can grasp the amount of physical work entailed in schlepping the gear, looking for angles, crouching down, hustling from one end of the field to another to get in position, and the level of concentration required to do this both during the event itself and afterward in the post-processing. Amidst all of this, three of the days were well over 90 degrees and very humid. To paraphrase Yogi Berra—photography is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical. You really have to be willing to put in the work that it takes to become proficient and develop a voice, to continuously stay up with the technical challenges and changes, and to always push yourself to do the very best work that you can on each and every assignment. If you don’t, then you’ll eventually find yourself doing something else down the line."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I do not completely subscribe to the vocational prep. I am one of those (old) people who still believes that the primary objective of getting an education is to learn how to learn. Still, one would be foolish to ignore practical economics. Consider that the annual tuition and fees at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this year top $50,000. (And good luck getting accepted at all!) Now consider how many art jobs are likely to pay anywhere near that amount for an entry position (or even after three years). Now consider that an entry-level programmer at, say, Google will likely easily earn $120,000 or more. Yes, attending a school such as SAIC may enable you to make connections that will propel you after graduation. But not that much. Your best shot is probably to land a faculty job with benefits that offers you summers to pursue being that 'artist' you wanted to be. And some top art school grads do exactly that.

"But I gotta say that Mike's suggestion 'Be an amateur' is perfect advice especially where photography is concerned. Attending art school to learn a trade such as print-making or textile design, might pay-off (in 15–20 years). But it's a lotto-class long shot for photography. 'Photography is more likely to be rewarding—and more pleasurable—if one's practice of it is somewhere in the range between dabbling and a dedicated long-term avocation. We all have to come to terms with where our photography fits in our lives.' Truer words were never writ."