The Online Photographer

Power Past Your Defeats

One thing in that Martin Evening video hit me hard. It's the section that begins at 15:10 with the subheading, "A Wasted Opportunity." He tells the story of stumbling on a new technique that he liked, but failing to sell new clients on the idea because they all expected to be shown numerous examples when he had only one.

Wasted opportunities...yeah. Ouch.

[Ed note: Warning, bloviation alert! This one goes on a bit.]

The Best Way to Be a Photographer

The best way to be a photographer might be to not put "photography" first as your main interest.

Better to have an ulterior purpose or outside motivation of some sort—to be interested in something, to have an aptitude that defines you, or be willing to get engaged in things—and use photography as your way in.

The most blatant and obvious example of this principle is: it's better to be interested in photographs than it is to be interested in "photography." Lots of people who are photography amateurs and hobbyists just don't seem to be all that interested in pictures. (Present company excepted of course—all TOP readers are above average.) They care about everything surrounding photographs—the gear, the techniques, the companies, the lore, the history, the communities (er...), the loyalties, the lifestyle, and so on, but pictures might remain sort of an afterthought.

Photographers might ask themselves: Am I interested in photographs? Are you interested enough in photographs that you'd still be just as deeply interested in them if you gave up your own photography altogether? It's possible to be deeply engaged with photography yet not be a photographer. Several great critics and many great curators aren't photographers.

When you're merely interested in photography itself, you can get lost in all sorts of banality. The most common way of getting lost is to shop for gear and never stop shopping. Another way of getting lost is to be a hopeless dilettante in the focus of your attention and your work—you dabble in all sorts of things but create only a jumble, a far-flung hodgepodge of unrelated pictures. A third way is to be too undemanding of your work: you took it, and it's the best thing you got that day, ergo it must be good. A fourth way is to zero in on some narrow aspect of picture-making and get so involved in the details of something—which might include, well, detail, or what we call high resolution—that you don't recognize the real importance or purpose of the thing as a whole..."losing sight of the forest for the trees," as the old expression puts it. I've done that. I've certainly seen others do it.

The question then: Am I lost? If you are, how can you see your work dispassionately enough that you can evaluate where you are and where you want to go with it?

The thing itself
It might be better to have some passion that guides you into your work. It can be something concrete and definable: you love people and take joy in photographing them and their activities, like Eisenstadt; you have a thing for horses or cars or railroads and mostly photograph around those things; you love landscapes; you love sports; you love animals. You might have what are lumped together as "concerns"—documenting something, revealing or promoting something; a cause. I think it's fine, too, to love some aspect of photography that can be brought out in pictures: you love color or B&W or the look of some specific alt process**, or big prints or large-format contact prints; you love control or looseness; you love iconoclastic, offbeat compositions, a certain feeling-tone, or some kind of nostalgia; you want to break or follow certain rules you've defined or recognized. It can be anything. Do you have to know exactly what you're doing? The obvious answers seems to be yes, but maybe, sometimes, not. Some people are after something they can't define in their work and it's left to others to recognize it from the work itself and articulate what it might be.

At the concrete end of this spectrum, you might be interested in one specific subject. Fashion, or residential architecture. People you meet on the street. Roy De Carava, the subject of one of my very favorite books, photographed Blackness.At the abstract end it could also be all sorts of things. It's occurred to me over the years that what I really like is looking. I love to look and to see, and some of that can be photographed and some can't, but I love to see, whether I have a camera with me or not.

The best book I know of that articulates these ideas is Bill Jay and David Hurn's On Being a Photographer. This is available in print and as a download, for very reasonable prices, direct from the publisher. Reasonable people can disagree with me, but I'd say it's not just recommended, it's essential. I need to re-read that. Take notes!

Mike

*John Rewald's History of Impressionism is a good read for anyone interested in visual art.

**A local guy I don't know very well, John Coffer, is obsessed with the 19th century and lives most of his life as if it's 1850, although he does make one concession to modernism, so I hear: he owns three Ford Model T cars. He makes his living selling his artistic tintypes in NYC galleries (one I particularly liked is a tintype of a metal road sign with bullet holes in it, and John then shot holes through the metal substrate of the photograph) and doing tintype workshops. His obsession with tintypes is all of a seamless piece with his antiquarian preoccupations.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

A Curious Thing About a Book

Comments are up to date as of 10:47 Wednesday morning.

...or a photograph, or a painting, or indeed any kind of artwork: not all of what it offers is in it.

Bear with me for a sec if you will. I recently attended a short talk about the 6th and 7th steps of many 12-step programs, which, if you don't know them, go like this:

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

The talk was about the distinction between the terms "defects of character" and "shortcomings," whether they mean the same thing or something different—and, if they are different, how that should be interpreted. Working from a number of sources, the speaker first reported an involved argument that assigned "shortcoming" the meaning of specific instances of a character defect, and "character defect" as the underlying cause or source of these shortcomings. So, in other words, "I knew the leftover cake in the fridge was yours and that you were saving it, but I ate it anyway" is a shortcoming, and the defect of character behind it would be selfishness and inconsiderateness.

But this isn't the case. Many editors and writers, as a matter of policy or habit, simply choose to use different terms to avoid repetitiveness. It's a rule of house style at many publications. Bill Wilson, the author of the original steps, stated on several occasions that he was just using a different term for the same thing. In hindsight, the two steps might have been better written as:

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove them.

In that light, the "defects of character vs. shortcomings" thing is a red herring, not available for insights—at least not according to the author. But here's the interesting thing: even the author of a book isn't the absolute arbiter of what the book means. It's a curious thing about a book. The reason is simple. The meaning, importance, feeling-tone, significance, connotation, and connection to any work of art is forged in the reader or viewer by a combination of two things: what the author or creator put into the work and intended it to be, and what the reader or viewer brings to it and takes from it. So if the reader decides to interpret "shortcoming" and "defect of character" as something different, and work these two steps accordingly, she or he may do so. You work the steps as best you can and according to your own best understanding and your own needs. It's up to you.

A photograph of a gun
Getting down to photographs, here's a simple example. Imagine an obviously old-fashioned photograph of a man kneeling on the ground holding up a large, long rifle which is prominently featured in the image. The landscape looks like prairie. The picture is historical and seems to date from the era of the American frontier. On the ground nearby is a small structure that looks like an "X."

One viewer looks at the picture and sees a brave frontiersman, and imagines him valiantly fighting marauding hostiles with the rifle or setting off on a hunt for bear or mountain lions. This person hunted with his father and uncles as a boy and has great memories of cold mornings stalking deer, and his family have always been responsible gun owners.

A second is knowledgeable about species extinction and has a special interest in American bison, and he recognizes the gun as a long-range rifled weapon for killing buffalo in a particular way: lying prone on the ground and propping the end of the barrel of the heavy rifle on the small gunrest (for that's what the X-shaped thing is), buffalo hunters could target a group of bison placidly eating grass far in the distance, and kill twelve or fifteen of them one after the other before the scent of death from the first one reached the others and they panicked and fled. The second viewer imagines that this is probably what just happened, and that the hunters will soon go to the kill site with their wagon to skin the dead buffalo and leave the rest of their bodies for predators or to rot in the sun. Past the edge of the picture, he can vividly imagine the pathetic sight of the slaughtered buffalo whose lives were wasted.

The first person sees the photograph in a romantic light, building a comforting and noble story around it. It brings up positive connotations and makes him feel good. The second sees the photo almost as a record or at least a reminder of an atrocity, a small detail in the overall destruction of the great bison herds, and it seems a great shame to him and leaves him feeling unsettled and troubled.

Then we come to the caption or explanation for the picture. It turns out the photo was made to display the gun itself, and talks about who made it, why it is superior to other buffalo guns, and what the gun's special features are. The man is not a buffalo hunter himself, but an employee of the company that made the firearm.

So then what is the true meaning of the picture? Strictly, it might seem that we have to accept that it is exclusively about the firearm and is primarily of interest to those who like guns: enthusiasts, historians, collectors. But the two viewers described bring to it very different ideas. It would also seem that their reactions are wrong because parts of their perceptions might be in error: the first person assumes the gun was used in warfare, which it probably never was nor would have been. The second thinks that the man holding the gun has probably just slain a dozen defenseless buffalo from long distance, which is not the case here, although it is the purpose for which the rifle was made.

What is actually "in" photographs? The difficulty of interpreting even a single photograph fully and exactly is best exemplified for me by Errol Morris's investigations into Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death"—here's a brief video introduction at Vox if you're not familiar with it. The three long original articles in the New York Times, when they were published, provoked long and erudite comments numbering in the thousands when they were published. Here's Part One (you'll have to Google for parts two and three, as the links appear to be broken. Not all the comments are archived). The takeaway is that there are some things that are in a photograph, but even exercising the utmost rigor and an unlimited interest in solving the mystery and establishing the facts in evidence (Morris journeys to the Crimea among other exertions) there are limits to what you can know from what's actually in the picture.

But even once you settle the idea of what you're actually looking at, there are all sorts of other things that influence your reactions and, eventually, opinions. Your history, your experiences, your fears, your ideas of beauty, your sexuality, specific memories, all manner of things—the list is long. And yes, one of those things might be your taste, although "it's all a matter of taste" is always such a gross simplification that it's never useful. Or rather, it can be useful for one thing, namely, dismissing work you don't want to engage with or give consideration to. Many people believe that in written descriptions in books, whether you know the subject firsthand or not will amplify or diminish the capacity of the words to transmit a vivid image. When you read "the hot sunlight on her face," the words conjure a feeling because you have felt hot sunlight on your face. You might respond differently to photographs of mountains and alpine climbing if you have personal experience of mountains and alpine climbing. Or the opposite might hold more sway: you might have romantic ideas about mountains and climbers without knowing much about it; certainly when we read books about 18th-century pirates or 1930s gangsters we're not bringing personal experience to bear. Oddly, some people get very persnickety about mythical clichés that don't have any concordance to a verifiable reality—for example, what the clothing of Santa Claus should look like. That's yet another thing that can influence your reaction to photographs: what if it shows something you have an idea of but shows a reality that conflicts with your conception? Even your own work might influence how you experience similar work by others. A landscapist might have an abiding interest in how other people solve the same problems and what they can show her about how to succeed. Or a street photographer might be jealous of others who do work similar to their own. They might respond with reflexive denigration or scorn that has its origins in anxiety.

These days, another dimension is added to every "photograph"—because we're still calling them that—what is real and what was faked? I don't think it's any accident that recent years have seen numerous examples of famous photographs being cynically recast as probable fakes. Our minds are changing. We used to be trusting; now we are not. For example, no one when I was young seemed to have doubts about the veracity of Robert Capa's "The Falling Soldier," at least that I remember. But lately it's been fashionable to think it was staged and is fake. The picture hasn't changed; it's our attitudes surrounding pictures that have changed. We now think we need to start every experience with wariness, a sort of caginess, asking ourselves, first, whether we are being duped. The more that things are faked, the more likely it is that we'll suspect honest things as being possibly dishonest. I personally believe the picture, because I believe Capa. He said it was what he said it was, and I don't believe he would have lied. Viewing old photographs with new suspicion and mistrust is a sign of the changed attitudes with which we approach the experience of looking at created objects.

Collision
The curious thing about a book or any work of art is that we bring ourselves to it. And the resulting event-specific alchemy is what creates the work of art. It's not necessarily contained in the work itself; nor is it entirely about your understanding and feelings. It's the intersecting of the two.

It's also true that with many works of art, we react to them differently depending when in our lives we encountered them. Think of the movie that really changed your world and blew your mind when you were 17—or that just seemed perfect somehow. While you might continue to like it today—memories, sentimentality and all that (every now and then I re-watch American Graffiti)—would it have the same life-affecting power if you saw it for the first time today? Assuming you're an adult and have been one for a while, how about the best movie you've seen in the past two years? Would it have struck you the same way when you were 17? Books are like that too. It's not just age dependent, of course. It's also stage-of-life dependent. We are most moved by what reflects our concerns, interests and thinking when we experience them. I've seen Barry Lyndon three times. The first time I saw it, right after it came out, I was completely enthralled, almost mesmerized; the second time, only a short time later, I was bored stiff, not to mention alarmed that my experience of the film could shift so drastically in such a short time; and when I watched it again a few years ago, when it was 40 years old already, I had read some good critical exegeses about it and deeply appreciated the movie, and enjoyed it as well. I'll probably watch it a fourth time before I go shuffling off to Buffalo.

Another example from movies: think of a movie in which you achieved the Coleridgian "willing suspension of disbelief"—you got into it, and accepted its world at face value, identified with the characters, went along with the action—versus one for which you were unwilling to suspend disbelief. In that case, you kept yourself apart from it, maintained your critical distance, evaluated the mechanics of acting and direction and plot as you watched—very different experiences, no? The first movie you love, the second you approve of. I think of the scene in Goodfellas where Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) is trying to get Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) to go into his warehouse a block down the sidewalk to get herself a nice dress. He's trying to see if she's frightened of him or if she still trusts him. I found myself desperately trying to read his body language and expression to detect his motive, and I could feel Karen's barely-under-control terror. Thinking back on it I realize how completely the movie had drawn me into its world.

Is there such a thing as a great or excellent book? Well, of course—if many people have a positive experience with it, if critics find in it lots to talk about, if it was important in its time, if it was influential, if it's particularly beautifully written, if the author is a household name. There could be all sorts of reasons. And cultures need shared experience in order for them to cohere, although those stories are more often movies, now, than books. And sometimes the stories transcend the books themselves, culturally. Most people know the outlines of Gulliver's travels but haven't ever (and will never) read Gulliver's Travels. Especially, a book can be good if one person's good experience with it is reliably (more or less) transferable to another person, such that recommendations work and are appreciated. But it's not entirely in the book—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress were once considered great books in Great Britain. Does anyone there read them today? (I tried to read them both, once upon a time, and failed.) Despite having eight billion people on the planet, only ten people per decade read Critique of Pure Reason or Remembrance of Things Past. That's my guesstimate and I'm sticking to it.

The bottom line is that with any work of art, the potential is always there for us to have a personal experience with it that is uniquely meaningful to us. And you don't have to have a deep, meaningful experience with art just because it's famous and venerated. And you can have a deep, meaningful experience with something few other people like and respond to (one of my favorite movies is Adaptation, a movie about a screenwriter so conflicted he had to be played by twins, who were played by one actor. It's not a movie very many of my acquaintances knows about). I once wrote something to the effect that "I reserve the right to react to art as if my encounter with it is a meaningful occasion for me." Works of art aren't static. They don't contain one effect that they impart to everyone equally. They aren't necessarily the same work of art for two different people at the same time. They aren't even the same work of art for the same person at different times; the next deeply meaningful book you read might be one you already read before, when you were younger. You were a different person then.

The search for good art is never over, if we're open minded. It's very much like the search for your next great picture. If you get the knack of making your experiences of art into occasions, you never know what occasion is headed your way next.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Dave Miller: "Well said, Mike. There are a few precious books on my shelves to which I return every decade, knowing that something new and valuable will await me. Most of those walls in our house which are not obscured by bookshelves are hung with art works. Although I have lived with them for many years, I still discover something fresh and new in the best of them whenever I take the time to contemplate them."

robert e: "Wow. That's a lot to think about. First of all, I loved Adaptation!

"From another perspective: Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about using the camera to question how he fit into the world. If all artists are doing that to some extent, and presenting us with the results of their inquiries, and if they are skilled, then some of those results are going to resonate with those of us asking similar questions (consciously or not) at some personal or even profound level, if not necessarily in the same way.

"Those moments of resonance or recognition may be my favorite thing about art museums. It's not always deep, or consistent, and it's not always there, but when it is it makes the world considerably less confusing or flat or lonely. (Museums because both quantity and quality increase the odds. Yes, 'quality' in that case is largely determined by professional consensus and that's not the only way, but it works well enough for me, to an extent.)

"I've always thought that one of the things that made J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books great is that so much of the text is devoted to mundanities like food, drink, sleep, hiking, riding or sitting around fires telling stories. It's not wasted space—these celebrations of the quotidian root a fantastical tale of magic and monsters in a reader's everyday experiences; and, interleaved with reminders of how all that is threatened, they bring the story's stakes home, literally.

"Peter Jackson's film adaptations understandably had to take a different tack, relying instead on the immediacy and spectacle of cinema to do that work, but for my money they lost a good deal of the power of the original in the process."

Win G Low: "Since gods do not exist, the start of the article makes the rest a bit hard to swallow!"

Mike replies: At the outset, I asked you to "Bear with me for a sec if you will." But if you won't, then you won't.

Ugo Bessi: "Borges wrote a tale, 'Pierre Menard autor del Quixote,' in which Pierre Menard, after many tries, rewrites the Quixote; Menard's version is identical, word for word, to the original, but its meaning is utterly different, because it's written in another century."

Mike replies: J.L. Borges is the M.C. Escher of literature!

Kodachomeguy: "This disbelief in modern images and the suspicion that AI may have generated them is one reason to use film. If anyone questions your print/scan, show them the negative. It was there on the spot when you took the picture. The actual photons modified the silver/dye in the emulsion. It is a time machine, like tree rings in a 500-year-old log. Film is the real thing."

AN: "I think this idea of the malleability of an artwork’s meaning based on the essential interplay of the author’s literal content and the variable interpretation of the audience is a reason that, for me, works that are particularly driven by an explicit message/argument tend to fail as satisfying art. It’s important when making creative art to leave some space for the audience to make their contribution. I think that’s one of the big challenges: knowing when to guide or direct, to gesture or articulate, to suggest or define. If it’s too amorphous, it won’t be engaging, but if it’s too defined, it prevents the audience from getting swept up."

Mike replies: That's beautifully put, and so true. I remember watching cartoons in the early 1960s(!) in which the "moral of the story" was too obvious, and getting turned off by it even as a six-year-old. And the same thing still happens today.

It seems to me I read a profile of the late Edward Gorey recently in which he talks about not saying too much and leaving space for the viewer's own perceptions and reactions.

In It For Love

Darlene wrote, a few days ago: Regarding your sports stories on a predominantly photography blog, let me level with you—some of the photo stuff bores me to tears. I mean, how many times can you read about gear or techniques that were probably chiseled into cave walls by our ancestors? Reading about gear and beginner techniques feels like watching paint dry if you've been in photography for ages or if it was your profession. I don’t mind the other topics, but can we get more imagery? And not just your photos—though they’re lovely—how about showcasing more of your readers' work? Those posts are always enjoyable to read and view, and they stay very well in the context of a photography blog.

I know most of your audience is male, and they may enjoy gear reviews, male hygiene talks (razors anyone? How about Kotex?), sports, etc., but trust me, more women are reading than you think. We’re just generally in the back, quiet and unnoticed—except for me because my background turned me into this delightful commentator.

Made me laugh. Darlene is a friend. "Some of the photo stuff bores me to tears" was not what I expected to be criticized for in a comment that begins "regarding your sports stories...," but there ya go, you never know.

And hey, Darr, some people in the double-edge (DE) razor community are women. They prefer them for shaving their legs. The buyer of one of my DE razors recently was a woman.

And then, a couple of days later, Sergio Bartelsman wrote:

Nowadays I find camera gear the least interesting topic about photography. I use Fujis because it is what I have. I can't care less about brands. If it feels good in hand, and takes the picture in the precise instant you press the shutter, that is all I ask for. There is no longer any big practical difference other than price and Veblen vanity. The days when you could spot any perceivable difference between Leicas and whatever other brand are over.

I can write all I want to about how camera companies like Canon are adjusting to changed circumstances, but what about how I'm adjusting to changed circumstances? I still assume people like reading about gear. Is it time to adjust to changing times? The above are only two data points, but whaddaya think? Is the siren song of camera gear gone? Or going?

Eight lions
I will admit that for me, the combination of high prices, technical sufficiency, and, especially, the fact that increases in capability don't reward me with obvious visual improvements in the result, are making my former happy camera obsessiveness...soften. To give you an example, I've had a loaner Leica Monochrome here for two years (no, the owner is in no hurry to have it back) and haven't been motivated to try it. Granted, part of the reason is superstition. I bought my Sigma FP and had it converted to a B&W sensor, and if the Leica is "better" I don't want to know. I'm afraid it might nag at my mind. I don't need the discouragement. But actually the inescapable conclusion is that I'm just not that interested. He also loaned me an incredibly expensive Leica lens that I once gushed about, in writing, as being the best lens money could buy. In days of old, wild horses, a squadron of Centurions, and eight lions could not have prevented me from enthusiastically running that lens through its paces. I would have had a lot of energy for that at one time. But now, when you can oversharpen any picture with the touch of a button or by dragging a slider, sharpness in a lens...isn't as exciting as it once was, let's put it that way. The lens is not the determinant of the look of the picture nearly as much as it used to be thirty and forty years ago.

As I asked many years ago, when was the last time you looked at any newish picture and thought, "too bad they didn't use a better lens"?

Also, even if the Leica M9 Monochrome is "better," I don't really care. The Sigma FP-m is good enough for me and then some. What I really need is to get out looking for pictures more often. (And stop driving past opportunities.)

Even if times really are changing, and people just aren't interested in new cameras and better specs as much as they used to be, it doesn't really matter that much. Here's the thing: dedicated photographers are outsiders. I've always looked at us that way. We're not attached to the industry; we're not affected by fashions. We're not driven by mass taste. We go our own way. We do our own thing.

Mayflies and cicadas
If you have the patience for one more, here's a great recent comment, this one from Geoff Wittig (whom I would dearly love to visit—I should talk to him about that). I've edited this very lightly.

It's clear to me that we're in the sad twilight of the era of photography as a serious hobby. It's rapidly heading for the same category as ham radio or model railroading: a quirky, shrinking tiny niche, regarded (if at all) with a flicker of tolerant amusement by the masses. I derived immense satisfaction and not a little joy from several decades spent honing my technical skills, learning how to use finicky gear, and teasing the best possible result from large format inkjets, all in service to a goal. That goal was creating the best possible photographic print. I still love a beautiful print, but it has become a niche skill. To the broader culture, photography now means billions of technically competent snapshots captured by increasingly sophisticated smart-phone cameras flooding the Internet every single day, each with the impact and lifespan of a just-hatched Mayfly or cicada. Briefly seen then promptly forgotten. I recall reading Brooks Jensen's prescient comment about this perhaps 20 years ago, when he predicted precisely this situation: a minute-by-minute firehose of images where each was rendered invisible by the colossal volume. And yet, I can't help myself. I still derive some genuine joy from a perfect print of a quietly beautiful morning on the river, made with my own hands.

There it is in a nutshell. We do what we do. Sometimes the public looks on admiringly, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes the practitioners up near the ceiling have status and prestige, sometimes not so much; sometimes hordes of people get excited by the equipment and want to participate by buying and posing, sometimes they collectively shrug their shoulders and say meh. Meanwhile, the people who are in it for "genuine joy" and the rewards of the results keep soldiering on. They can't help themselves. They love it.

Another thing that's interesting is that photography is unlikely to prove to be a generational phenomenon. Younger people aren't showing any diminished interest in photography—quite the opposite in fact—they just won't be practicing it in the way us older enthusiasts accepted as normal when we were young. But then, we practiced it differently than our grandfathers and grandmothers did, and they practiced it differently than their grandfathers and grandmothers did. You can argue that the cultural centrality of music from halfway through the '50s to the end of the '70s was a generational phenomenon; and Harley-Davidsons are generational (Harley is going downhill, with its biggest competition being used Harleys); and just the other day I got "insulted" in a thread on YouTube by a guy who accused me of having a "guitar collection," which I took to be a lightly coded way of saying "boomer," which in turn is a euphemism for those who are old and in the way—that is, entitled but no longer entitled to be entitled. Model railroading is definitely generational, and I know a little about that because I used to work for Model Railroader magazine. The peak demographic is males who were 11 years old in 1950, when an "electric train" was the No. 1 Christmas gift for boys. That cohort is aging out (sadly! Model railroaders are fine folks, with a few exceptions). Photography never ages out, any more than eating, communicating, or traveling will.

The last 30 years have been a roller-coaster ride. But a roller coaster isn't actually a journey. "Real" photographers* aren't in it for cheap thrills. Photographers who go their own way and do their own thing just need what they need to do their work, and if they don't have it, they'll find it, or make it, or see the creative possibilities in whatever is available. And, really, it's always been that way, for the great majority of good and even great photographers. It's like that alternate or etymological definition of "amateur": in it for love.

Mike

*I mean "enthusiast photographer," "dedicated" or "devoted" hobbyist photographer, or "advanced amateur" photographers (which can also include pros, if they also do personal work and use it as an avocation). I used to define that as being someone for whom photography was in their top three avocational interests consistently over time. I don't think most people have time or energy for more than three big, deep interests outside of work, family, and vocation. God knows I've been on many, many "excursions" over the years of my life; currently I am engrossed with the subject of curved manual treadmills, thanks to an email from a reader that I can't even find now. But that will pass. The three I always come back to again and again are photography (and art), writing and books, and home music listening. Not perhaps the greatest list, but that's the list.

P.S. The other issue Darlene raised was more pictures on the website. That deserves a post of its own, though.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Peter (partial comment): "As a lifelong photographer—I’ve worked for studios, publications, and freelance, earning quite a few bucks along the way—at each fork in the road, I have chosen not to go pro and have stayed a committed amateur. Still, the gear itself is important. It is hard to love my contoured partially polycarbonate Canon R6, but I am gaga over the images I get from it. Appreciation of the technology is part of my passion."

Alex Buisse: "I must say that, as a professional photographer, I take what I can only describe as perverse pleasure in taking barely competent product pictures. It feels wonderful to be allowed to not try to be getting great images, just this one time...."

David Haynes: "I find that my interest in 'gear' articles has greatly declined, although I have no objection when you publish one. I just skip over those that don't interest me. I generally find your off topic articles much more interesting and rarely skip those. I think that showcasing photos by your readers is a brilliant idea (go for it, please). I'm sure that you will receive a wide range of views on what content you should publish, and I'm also sure that you have been receiving those opinions for many years. I expect that you will continue to publish articles on a wide range of topics because you have a wide range of interests, as do most of your readers. Well done, Mike."

Wayne: "My two cents…I’ve always enjoyed your off topic posts as much if not more than your photography posts. Would also like to see more images posted, yours or others. Just saying…."

robert e (partial comment): "Maybe the question is not so much 'Should we talk about gear?' as 'How should we talk about gear?' Sure, it's always been 'to each their own' to some extent, but that doesn't explain why it used to be fun to talk about gear and now it isn't. Every incremental advance in picture quality and usability used to be relevant to many of us. But gear has evolved to the point most of us don't need more such gains, so where's the interest?"

Ed. note: These next two comments came in within an hour of each other:

"[name redacted]: "I used to avidly read this blog/site every day but now I almost have to force myself to look every few days and there have been times when I've thought I might as well delete the link and forget about it. 'The Online Photographer' seems to have lost its way. Such a shame."

Bruce Hedge: "TOP is becoming interestinger and interestinger. Thanks for a great last week or so."

John (partial comment): "[Regarding technical developments] It’s actually a relief that things are cooling down."

Sharon: "I have loved to read all my life. I come here for the excellent writing. I have little interest in gear until I have a specific need but it seems a lot of your readers do. Write about what you love. I love photography but mostly I come to follow your journey."

PaulW: "Although gear reviews are not the main reason I visit TOP, I still enjoy your take on new gear, so I hope you'll continue writing about things I'll never have the chance to try."

David Dyer-Bennet: "While they probably aren't the posts that have most frequently moved me to comment, I think actual discussion of photos (with or without specific examples) are the posts I've benefited the most from and probably also taken the most pleasure from."

Stephen S.: "I don't know if it translates to blogs, but on YouTube, where view counts are public, it's very easy to look up any YouTuber who does a mix of camera gear reviews and artistically-oriented videos, or one that started with gear reviews and then tried to switch to covering art and technique, and see that the view count of their gear reviews absolutely clobbers anything with artistic aspirations. At least on YouTube, reviews of specific gear are the only path to success and viewership in the camera/photography space."

Mike replies: Oh yes, I know all about that, believe me. I've been doing this for going on 20 years.

Dog Bites (OT)

In case you think you might want to live in a rural paradise like the gorgeous Finger Lakes, you might want to think again.

My dog Butters got bitten by another doggie last Thursday. He got a rather nasty deep gash on his foreleg.

I called our vet. What, in the summer? It's the busy season. No dice; no openings. Sorry.

The next day I called several other vets. One said they could start the weeks-long procedure to accept us as a client, but the first visit couldn't be for "acute care."

So yesterday morning I called our existing vet again and wheedled and whined and complained and cajoled. It wasn't strategic; I was upset and frustrated.

They called back at 9:20 or so. I could bring him in at 11:00.

It's a 20-minute drive. We arrived at five minutes to 11:00. They gave us a pager, and we wandered about the parking lot and grounds...for an hour. Pager goes off at five minutes to noon, and we transitioned to a waiting room. 

Where we waited for another 25 minutes. What, were they punishing me?! The thought crossed my mind. Do you ever have to wait so long that you have to make  a decision about how long you will wait? I was getting to that point.

Vet came in. Not a problem: the wound will heal, the treatment is simple. The vet spent two minutes and 40 seconds with us and off he goes. (I was timing everything on purpose because I was curious.)

At checkout, I had to wait for the file, and for the medications to "come down." That usually happens right away, but, of course, not this time. The minutes started piling up again.

Protest bark
Mind you, this is not just me griping for my own sake. Butters doesn't do well at the vet. In fact, he does worse at the vet than anywhere else. He gets all ramped up, anxious, upset, fractious, barking. Can't calm down. When I try to calm him and hush him he has a wild look in his eye and fights me when I try to control his head and his attention. Halfway through the wait for the checkout, there are dogs every which way and he's getting harder to control, harder to calm down. I decided to move him outside to the car. It was safe: his leash was tethered and all the windows and the sunroof were open, and it wasn't too hot, and there was a breeze. He gets anxious when I leave him, though—it's a shame, but he's not a car dog—so he starts into what I call the "protest bark," which is an endless series of short, sharp staccato barks, as if he's saying "No! No! No! No! No!" Lots of anxiety coming through in that bark. To me, at least, because I know him.

From inside, I can hear this continuing out in the parking lot. I waited another ten minutes, getting more and more stressed out, then made a decision. I left. Took him home, where he immediately calmed down and went to sleep. Wish I could do that!

So that's another 40 minute round trip. After I returned, the bill and the medicines are ready. I can use my own antimicrobial spray, so all we have to pay for is the visit and the antibiotics.

Total time invested: 14 minutes on the phone (I didn't count the time I spent calling other vets), 80 minutes driving, 110 minutes waiting: 204 minutes total—three hours and 24 minutes—for 160 seconds with the vet. The total bill wasn't so bad—$102, $70 for the visit and the rest for medications. But still, $70 for the visit works out to about 44¢ per second, or $1,575.00/hr. Seems a bit much when you put it that way.

I wouldn't mind, but for the hassle and the delay. And the uncertainty. Especially the uncertainty. Rural life can sometimes feel like living in a secret little pocket of third-world country in the midst of a first-world one. It wasn't easy getting that appointment. It really wasn't a sure thing that I could get him seen at all. There's a certain amount of stress built into that. And the visit didn't happen until the fifth day after the incident, which stressed me out in the meantime. Then, the extended wait hanging around the practice was unnecessarily hard on the dog.

So that was my day.

How was yours?

Let it go
Part of the reason I left is that I had worked myself into a bad mood. Resentful and troubled. I confess I did wonder if it's even ethical to own a pet where I live, where it's so difficult to get adequate veterinary care. If you live in a populated area where you have a choice of grocery stores and there are actually a few restaurants you want to eat at, where you can find tradesmen when you need them and keep a lawn care service or household help for some reasonable length of time, where the car dealer isn't an hour and fifteen minutes away, where you can count on medical care for yourself and veterinary care for your pet without spending significant lengths of time in doubt—well, maybe just do what a lot of people do in my area, and rent a lake cottage in a rural area for a week or two. Enjoy the country life for some limited reasonable interlude, then go back home.

By the time I got back to the vet's to pay the bill and pick up the meds, though, I had already forgiven. My bad mood was gone. There were good things about the experience. I got to have a nice long conversation in the parking lot with a woman who was also waiting, who had a very elegant-looking four-month-old dog with an unusual personality. We talked animals for twenty minutes. I got to see another killdeer, who had laid her eggs in the gravel at the corner of the parking lot. It was much more fun to observe her now that I know how they act and why. I allowed her to lead me away from her eggs because I understood that's what she wants. The weather was beautiful. I passed a couple of deer in a field who posed for a picture (although all I had with me was the phone, boo-hoo). And Butters' leg isn't a bad wound; it wasn't infected; the vet did get to us in the end; and it's something that will heal—the prognosis is good. There's a lot to be thankful for in all that.

So it's all okay. Just the challenges in the course of a day. You can't concentrate on the bad parts; gotta look on the bright side, and let the other things go.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Tom Duffy: "Sorry to hear about your stressful day. Animal care has been hard hit, much like getting in to see a primary care physician if you don't have one. There were a significant number of retirements during COVID affecting both animal and human healthcare. At the same time, record numbers of people were getting pets for the first time while we all isolated at home. The cost of vet care has increased significantly leading to animal shelters being overwhelmed in many areas of the country as people give up their first pets post-pandemic. Owning a pet should be a lifelong commitment; many people weren't prepared for that.

"In terms of your cost-per-minute analysis, maybe it will make you feel better if you consider that you're really paying for a vet's expertise and experience. You no longer have to worry about Butter's being OK."

Joseph Kashi: "The New York Times had this coincidentally-timely article today about what's driving the change in vet charges. When the excellent local vet clinic that we used for two decades was bought out by VCA upon the owner's retirement, service seemed to degenerate and waiting times for appointments lengthened. Some months later, I happened to mention this to the retired owner, who told me that the supply of licensed vets is not keeping up with demand, causing a national strain upon the delivery of vet services. In our case, we were lucky because our fairly rural Alaska area had another, locally owned clinic that's excellent and already had us on their books as existing clients, so our change-over was easy. I've heard other pet owners, though, tell me of recent problems similar to yours, even for emergencies."

John Nollendorfs: "I think small animal vets have gotten totally greedy. Took our two cats in for their rabbies shots and checkup. 'How about we give them distemper shot too?' Oh, and how about flea and tick control? For the dog too? Bottom line, we were $860 poorer after spending only an hour for our appointment."

IanS: "In the UK, vet bills have rocketed the last few years, so much that an anti-competitive investigation is being launched. It's not helped that so many people got a dog in lockdown, and, after Brexit, so many European vets decided not to carry on working in the UK. Perfect storm!"

William Glokas: "How about seeing a doctor here on Cape Cod? They are all booked and you have to go to Urgent Care for treatment. A friend was having breathing issues and when he went to Urgent Care he was having a heart attack! They called an ambulance and sent him to Cape Cod Hospital."

Dan Khong: "The struggles and pressures in life strengthen one's resolve and personality and point us to the good parts that we often take for granted. If not for the vet visit, you would not have made a new lady friend and enjoyed some pretty deer. I am glad you saw the silver lining at the edge of the dark cloud."

Geoff Wittig: "I'd cut your vet a little more slack. As a rural family doctor I take care of several of the local veterinarians. They're delightful people. It's a hard life; they take night calls just like I do. They have the same challenges with anxious, frightened patients in pain. And their patients probably bite more often than mine do. In a farming area they're not just seeing cats and Labradors; they're also seeing Holsteins and hogs, tending to the herds of local dairy farms and such. Especially in the summer their workload can be overwhelming, and every animal has to be seen right away, today. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

"I certainly appreciate how stressful and aggravating it is to be subjected to a long wait for care with an agitated dog. Or child, or elderly parent. But trust me, the people on the other side of the counter are stressed too. Every time we squeeze in another patient, it means we get further behind and all subsequent appointments run even later. And those folks are even angrier. No good deed goes unpunished."

Kye Wood: "Cesar Millan, How to Raise the Perfect Dog. It will transform Butters. And your relationship with him. If you apply it. I have a free-range choccie lab who does whatever she wants but is still able to go out on full voice control. It's never too late to stop them being fearful, which they get from their owners' anxiety. It's a crappily written book. But the information and technical explanations are worth the effort."

Pictures Come First

Funny. Thanks to James Boykin for finding this, and to the cartoonist, Adam Sacks, for giving me permission to publish it.

I don't know about you, but, personally, it both amuses me and also makes me feel a bit skewered. I'm its target. In that way it's like that humor book you might have heard of, Stuff White People Like. If you don't know it—it's a book made from a blog—you can get a good handle on the vibe by reading the Amazon sample. Some of the entries just make me laugh, but others nail me just a little too hard and it hurts a bit. Like this one, for me:

Okay, ouch. Got me there.

Serious thoughts about the funny cartoon: I've always thought of myself as caring more about pictures than I care about cameras. Cameras are appealing and cunning little devices, and I've always liked them, but I could never be interested in them if I wasn't using them. Pictures always come first. If it doesn't give me the results I want, I can cool on a camera fast. Would anyone be interested in guitars if they didn't play the guitar? I suppose somebody somewhere is, but I can't get interested in stuff I can't use.

When I was young there was a camera store on Wisconsin Avenue in D.C. owned by a Hungarian immigrant named Andrew Heller. As I recall he had been a photographer in Europe, and had led an adventurous and honorable life. His shop was largely a store-sized display for his enormous Leica collection. That store with its endless high shelves stuffed with rows and rows of Leicas caused me some serious cognitive dissonance...obviously he couldn't use all those cameras—there were thousands of them—but why else have them? What was the point? I couldn't escape the feeling that he was just taking them all out of circulation and keeping them out of the hands of people who would get some use out of them. This was influenced by the fact that young penniless me wanted one. (Mitch Hedberg in the jar of jellybeans joke: "Aww, come on, man, lemme just have some!") Weren't pictures the point? Mr. Heller probably planted the seed for my tolerance policy. I was brought around to realizing that everyone enjoys photography for different reasons and in different ways. He enjoyed collecting Leicas, and wasn't it enough that he enjoyed it? It wasn't up to me to judge.

As for people making fun of you, well, it happens. And if the shoe fits, well....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Tom Burke: "Here in the UK one of the main 'missing' brands would be Praktica. They were made by Pentacon of Leipzig, which during the era that I recall was in East Germany, of course. They made a long-running range of SLRs that used the M42 screw mount. One of the UK's main photo dealers—Dixons, who had a shop in every town in the land—did a long-standing deal with Pentacon and they sold Praktica SLRs for 25 years or more. I had one—an MTL3 of one version or another—and it did me well. They weren't badly made, to be honest. They were solid (they weighed a ton) and very largely mechanical (so they could be adjusted and repaired). I'd wager that during the 1960s, '70s and into the '80s a lot of UK amateur/enthusiast photographers cut their teeth on a Praktica. The lenses were a mixed bag—the Pentacon lenses weren't bad (by the standards of the time) but of course you could mount other manufacturers' lenses, from Pentax down to no-name Japanese knock-offs, and the quality of these varied enormously. During the mid and late 1980s they seemed to vanish. First, the leading Japanese companies starting producing AF SLRs—Minolta Dynax (in the UK), Canon EOS, etc.—and the enthusiast market went for these in a big way. Secondly there was the collapse and disappearance of East Germany itself. But for some decades, Praktica cameras were everywhere in the UK."

Robert: "Other brands gone, the last of which I at one time lusted after: Topcon, Miranda, Ricoh, Kiev, Yashica, Plaubel Makina."

Mike replies: You might have dodged a bullet. I briefly used a Plaubel Makina 6x7 at one time (it was a 6x7 cm collapsible rangefinder, for those of you who don't know it), and I have a friend who bought one. He had repeated problems with the film advance, necessitating long and frustrating sessions in the repair shop. The third time it broke he was so incensed that he decided to put it in his closet and forget it was there, because otherwise, he said, it would drive him crazy.

Bruce Walker replies to Robert: "Whoa! Ricoh is very much alive, and the GR series of 'street' compacts is their current hit. Their other famous property is Pentax, which is also very much alive. Much to the surprise of many 'YouTube photographers.'"

Chris Bertram: "I used to read the Stuff White People Like blog, and much of it was very funny and shrewdly observed. It included, for example, things like 'black music black people don't listen to any more.' True, or true-ish. I don't know anything about the race or ethnicity of the people behind that site/book, but it was no more racist, as such, than Chris Rock's jokes about black people, which black audiences laugh heartily at."

Andrew L: "It's a real moment of reckoning for me to be confronted with the fact that every white person has at least one chapter of a novel or memoir stashed somewhere. And here I thought my single chapters of all my ideas meant I was really a writer. I guess I need to press on and finish all my chapters two.

Mike replies: Mon semblable, mon frere. 

Sean: "Economists would say the chap in the illustration is holding a ‘costly signal.’ It suggests he wouldn’t invest in that high-end gear if he didn’t take photography seriously. This doesn’t mean he’s a good photographer, of course, but it’s reasonable to assume the ‘non-trivial cost’ reflects his level of commitment."

Gerry Hiatt: "Many years ago, I took a test designed to show whether one is left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant. Given my training and profession, I expected strong left-brain dominance; I was therefore surprised that my results showed a 51:49 split. Thinking about the results, I realized that is likely why I love photography—it is a fusion of technology and art. Now, after a 30-year career as a scientist, I spend virtually all of my time as a photographer."

Ed Wolpov: "Thanks for bringing back memories of Heller Camera...that's where I bought my Leica M6 back when I worked in the Air Rights Building. Now it's a Fuji x100F (my digital Leica)."

Open Mike: Own Work

When I asked for suggestions for topics yesterday, Todd Scholten wrote: "Get out. Go take some photos. Come back and write about them and why and how you took them. Inspire us to do the same." Several other people similarly suggested I should write more about my own work.

Perhaps I should, and perhaps I will, but this is actually a traditional issue, and there's a long history to it, as I shall 'splain. But a few ancillary points first:

Long ago I was invited to give a lecture on photography to a high school. I spoke about the photo scene in Washington D.C. in that era and drew three circles on the chalkboard, of different sizes, partially overlapping to the degree I thought was vaguely accurate, and labeled the circles "professional photography," "photojournalism," and "art photography," representing the three main kinds of photography in that town at that time. I had intimate connections to all three of those separate worlds at the time, as I was an assistant at a professional advertising studio, a recent graduate of art school, and was doing dribs and drabs of work for newspapers and acting as a custom printer for local photojournalists. In my lecture, the three circles served as a window for explaining what those three groups did, and how they practiced, and what markets they served.

A hand went up from the back of the room. "What kind of photographer are you?"

I thought for a minute and answered, "I'm a writer."

So there's that. If somebody wants to pay me to be a photographer, that would be nice, but, like most photographers, I've tried and failed to make a living doing exactly what I please, and my present employment (writer) seems to be about the best I can manage as a compromise. There is actually surprisingly little actual photographing involved in the great majority of photography-related jobs, including for a lot of people who are nominally full-time photographers.

Secondly, I actually publish a lot of my work here. You just don't notice because it's not presented...densely. For example: This post includes a casual illustration taken with my iPhone. Then, here's a portrait I did of a doctor friend for her professional use with my Fuji X-T1. I wrote several posts about that. And then here and here you can find examples of the work I do with my B&W camera. There have been lots and lots of my pictures posted here over the years; just not, as I say, densely.

Furthermore, I didn't do a lot of B&W photography in 2023, for two reasons. First, the cost of gas (petrol) was rather alarming. Going out for a drive three to five times a week to find a picture was effective, but it was sucking down even more gas money than life here usually requires—and it already requires a lot, because almost everything in this sparsely populated rural region is far away from almost everything else. I admit I also had a slight but non-trivial amount of guilt about polluting the atmosphere merely to add varying amounts of electrical signal to millions of photosites, mostly to no purpose. (This would be an absolutely perfect use of an electric vehicle as a second car, come to think. I could sign up to get my electricity from solar fields, and toodle about the countryside to my heart's content, guilt-free. Of course the car would cost way more than the gas money I'd save, but I'm never going to get to do it anyway so it's a moot point). Also, you have to bear in mind I was basically in heart failure last Fall, and doubtless suffering some effects of heart disease before that, culminating in my getting a pacemaker implant on January 23rd of this year. So although I had high hopes for the coming year when the calendar clicked over to 2023, I wasn't in the finest fettle during that year, the way things turned out.

I also have a Flickr site of some of that work. It sort of morphed from test pictures to real work, so there's a bit of both; it's not very well "curated" if you will. Despite which, lots of those photos got lots of views: for instance this one, which has 68,013 views as of today, and this one, which got an improbable 77,813 views (why, I have no idea. Perhaps some larger forum somewhere was discussing the resolution of converted sensors and was using those two shots as examples?). But unfortunately all those views didn't do the blog any good at all, so I've kinda slacked off on that. I sure enjoyed doing it, though. (Remind me to write another post on what I'd need to keep that project going. And another on how to bestir one's sludgey self and get up and get out and get cracking.)

The history
There's a not-so-grand tradition in photography, going almost all the way back, of using nuts-and-bolts instructional writing as a sneaky way of getting your own work published. I hasten to add that many people who wrote in an instructional way were also top-flight photographers and it was, and is, perfectly natural for them to use their own work to illustrate their points. For example, P.H. (Peter Henry) Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889); or Ansel Adams's Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935), which was later expanded into the Basic Photo Series which then went through several editions and adaptations (I still recommend The Negative as a book every photo enthusiast should have, even film virgins); or Paul Outerbridge's Photographing in Color (1940) which had tipped-in plates of some of his more inoffensive work. Outerbridge was a master carbro printer and primarily a fetish photographer. His execrable middlebrow wife, one of the villains of the history of photography if you ask me, destroyed most of his work after his death "to protect his reputation," thereby dealing a grievous blow to his reputation. And I say that as one to whom sexual fetishism is foreign and inscrutable. More recently and blog-relatedly, our friends Kirk Tuck's Minimalist Lighting and Gordon Lewis's Street Photography come to mind.

But apart from such positive examples, there's also a longstanding pattern of people publishing "instructional books" merely as a pretext for publishing their own work. Or submitting articles to magazines for the same reason. As most people reading probably know already, I was chief editor of a photography magazine for a while. One of the things I always had to be on the lookout for were people whose motives in submitting manuscripts were not earnest or pure. I recall one wealthy gentleman who hired a public relations firm to write a plausible article which could then be illustrated with many examples of the gentleman's own work. Of course the text was peppered with lavish praise for the pictures, and that was a bit of a tip-off, on account of I'm so canny and not entirely immune to the obvious. Another such gentleman actually paid to create a bricks-and-mortar art gallery to feature other photographers but most prominently himself. I received not only a torrent of press releases about his shows, written as though the gallery were independent, but also articles reviewing his shows at his gallery. I forbore from publishing any of that, reasoning that he already had provided for his work a more generous amount of exposure than most amateur snappers are privileged to receive.

When the rain comes
Another aspect of this is the issue of editors publishing their own work. Howard Moss, who was the poetry editor of The New Yorker for a short eternity, published his own poems sometimes. I don't know how often he did so, and I don't know the circumstances under which he did so, but, when I attended a lecture of his at Dartmouth College, there were a couple of students who brought umbrellas to the lecture. When Mr. Moss spoke about this issue, they deployed the umbrellas in silent protest. I talked to one of them later. In animated fashion he communicated his displeasure at the editor for taking up space in a magazine that already allotted very little space to poetry. (The New Yorker at the time supposedly paid far and away the most for poetry of any publication; I have a bad memory for numbers, but I think it was $5 a word, when the next-best publication paid $2 per word.)

The Editor of small magazines also holds the purse strings, and one editor I once worked for would publish one of his own photographs in every issue along with a brief paragraph about it, and pay himself a sum for the contribution that was many times what he paid for much longer and more substantive content. The Group Editor was evidently a chum of the publisher and owner of the company, and my boss's little scam evidently flew under the radar of their oversight.

Bob Shell, the longtime editor of Shutterbug magazine, was notorious for publishing in his magazine copious numbers of his humdrum and inexpert "glamour photographs" of amateur models. These were usually unknown young local women of average appearance in whom Shell was widely suspected of taking a prurient interest. My memory is that some or most of them were pictured in their underwear in the woods. Shell was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of one of those models, and has been in prison for it ever since. The details of the crime were extremely lurid. One of the "true crime" television programs was reportedly scheduled to do an episode about it, or so it was said, but ended up passing on it because the details were too shocking for broadcast television.

I seldom published myself at the magazine I edited—just the occasional picture here and there—but I did have a portfolio published by a different magazine that I wrote for.

Elbowing to the front
Meanwhile, there's a concomitant tradition, long settled in print media at least, for editors and writers of integrity to be appropriately restrained about putting their own work forward. This might not even apply to the online world, but then, my values were not formed by the online world.

I took as my model my onetime mentor Phil Davis, the author of Beyond the Zone System and Photography, an excellent general textbook which has fallen into obscurity because it hasn't been updated since Phil's death from prostate cancer in 2007. Phil actually came in for some contentious criticism online because he refused to set himself up as a know-it-all guru. He wouldn't promote his own photography like he thought some other such gurus did. I tried to talk him into accepting the title of Technical Editor of Photo Techniques, but he resisted because, even though we were the most scrupulous magazine in print at the time about technical matters, he didn't want to be held accountable for what he saw as other authors' lack of rigor. He was actually a prolific and skilled photographer, and an accomplished one, and had retired from a lucrative professional career as an advertising photographer for the Detroit automakers. I saw some dye transfer prints of car ads he made in the 1950s that were stunning.

When my article "Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece" was published on the New Yorker's website in 2022 (the pinnacle of my life as a writer toiling in the trenches, by the way), a goodly segment of the text discussed a single picture, and I thought it would have been appropriate to publish the picture itself. The magazine, however, first proposed to provide a drawn illustration of the picture, and then decided that the written description was enough. I accepted that decision without complaint—and without any private resentment, either. Editors know best.

So I'll try to post more of my own work if the discussion about it seems like it would be interesting. But I'll close here with one more observation: despite my increasingly self-centered blats in recent years (because a blog is voracious and relentless and everything has to become fodder), the "online photographer" in this site's title is you, not me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Tolerance and Patience Toward Each and Every

Speaking of DoF, a little story.

A long time ago—well over a decade ago—I met with a photographer who brought to the meeting not a portfolio of photographs for me to look at, but notebooks filled with figures. He gave me a very valuable gift as well: he changed my thinking.

Perfectly nice guy as far as I could tell: thoughtful, intelligent, friendly enough. We went for coffee. The figures were the calculated DoF ranges for his zoom lenses at every focal length and aperture. Page after page. Whole stack of notebooks, IIRC. He was a little sheepish about it—just a little. It became apparent quickly that it was a pretty big part of his hobby. It was how he enjoyed photography. And while I didn't see the need for it, it wasn't up to me. It was up to him. It was what he had decided to spend his time doing. And what he had chosen to bring to the coffee shop to show me. As though I would be, you know, interested.

I believe that was when I gave up came around and formulated my principle of tolerance and patience toward all and every. I decided that as far as I'm concerned anybody can enjoy photography however the heck they want to. (With one caveat—as long as it isn't hurting anybody. Remember the Two Commandments of the Hopi: "Try to understand things," and "Don't go around hurting people.") Other than that, who am I to tell anyone they can't collect Japanese Leica copies, or learn all the different ways of doing the same thing in Photoshop, or scrounge "found" metal for tintypes, or test lenses at a half mile distance for out-the-airplane-window aerial photography, or take pictures with pinhole cameras they made themselves, or collect old Kodachrome slides from estate sales and thrift shops, or optimize extreme resolution, or take a photo every day, or worship all things Leica, or own 5,500 photography books and move them from apartment to apartment, or devote themselves to LF, or visit all the National Parks, or use only JPEG, or make YouTube videos with a phone, or scan old glass plate negatives, or...

Or...

Or...?*

I don't judge. Their hobby, their rules. "You do you," as they say. We do us.

Sometimes, having people specialize in various arcane little sidelights of the hobby is valuable. I published an article back in the old times by an author who bought and tried nearly every early digital camera that came out; another who researched how Kodak went about researching image quality in the 1930s; and another who had tested every print developer known to Man. One guy, whose name I should remember, retired from a career as a chemist and scientist, and devoted his retirement to testing claims made in various places about photo processing, with an aim, I believe, toward reducing the amount of crud in that field built up from cant and nonsense. He wrote a book about his investigations and conclusions. It's nice to be able to benefit from the expertise of people like that.

Richard Henry. Just remembered.

The guy who showed me those notebooks with all the DoF tables went on to make and market high-end interconnects and speaker cables for stereo systems, if I recall correctly. I believe he was a success.

Mike

*All those examples are actual people I know, or once knew, or encountered online, or read about.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

MikeR: "Re 'Two Commandments of the Hopi': Where is this from? I asked the oracle (Google) but found nothing even close."

Mike replies: From William Least Heat-Moon, the author of the book Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, a minor classic published in 1982 and still in print. As usual, my memory isn't as specific as I would like. By accident I attended a talk he gave at a bookstore on Dupont Circle in DC just after the book was published—I was in the store looking at records when a crowd gathered—and got to talk to him for a while afterwards. I bought the book at the signing, read the book, and I believe it's in the book, but I don't remember it there but rather from the talk.

Moose: "I have an ebook of Blue Highways, so a search was easy:

We watch what the Kachinas say and do. But the Spider Grandmother did give two rules. To all men, not just Hopis. If you look at them, they cover everything. She said, 'Don’t go around hurting each other,' and she said, 'Try to understand things.'

"Excellent book!"

Mike replies: It is! And thank you for that, Moose. Thanks for all your comments.

Thomas Rink: "I remember that when I was still a graduate at university, I used to share the bus ride to the university with another graduate. Since we met every morning, we soon started to have a chat to make time pass on our commute. It turned out that he was a physicist, a very bright and sympathetic guy. One morning he told me that he made up his mind to buy a camera, for 'all the nice features a camera has.' He admittedly didn't have any prior experience with photography. Maybe it was still too early in the morning, and I hadn't had enough coffee yet—I didn't get his point. I thought he wanted to take up photography, and suggested that he would be best served with a simple, mechanical camera with a prime lens—something like a Nikon FM2. Why would anybody purchase a camera in the first place? No, he insisted on his point—it was about the features of the camera. After a while of talking past each other, we changed to another subject.

"This was 30 years ago; the world wide web offered not much more than a live stream of a coffee machine. Nowadays, in a similar conversation, I'd be rather surprised if my conversation partner was actually interested in taking up photography, and not in cameras."

All There Is to See

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

                              —William Blake

There's one more little point that needs to be made with regard to those three mystery pictures I posted two days ago, and the brief explanations of what they are. Most of you will know it already, but it bears articulating once in a while.

It's this: As long as a photograph is an accurate and truthful report of the lens image, with the usual sensible and expected connection to the world of visual appearances (i.e., not faked, fabricated or fudged), and if it was made thoughtfully and perceptively by a human being who is trying to show something or simply see "how something looks photographed," then most photographs—many, let's say—not all, but many—will have facts behind them. They will have meaning of some sort. There'll be a story there.

This is sort of a long and careful way of saying they're "of " something.

It's very easy to look at photographs and simply dismiss their implications. Oh, a guy with sticks on his back, what's he doing, collecting firewood? Oh, a woman in a weird costume. Where are her legs? Oh, some guy in a clown suit. Wait, is that the McDonald's logo? And then...closure. As in, we close down, slam the door, move on. Nothing more to see here.

Nothing? Actually, there's usually something more to see, if only we could know what it is.

Hit man
I wish I could find this, but I can't, so I'll just describe it. I have (somewhere) an old B&W 8x10 glossy that came from a newspaper archive that was being sold off on eBay. It's a simple picture—there's a middle aged man in a trench coat and a fedora hat standing by the back of an old car that has its trunk lid open. In the background is a grassy field, and there's an overcast sky.

But because it was a newspaper photograph, though, it has its caption pasted to the back, some notations and so forth. I was able to look up the story. Amazingly, the whole story was online, in a very long "enthusiast" account that took me a while to read. Turned out that a mob boss had ordered a hit. The hit man had done the job, but in removing identifiers from the body (including, if I remember correctly, the guy's head and his fingertips), he had left the label inside the victim's overcoat. It was a custom-made coat, and the haberdasher had a record of who bought the coat. The police were then able to identify the victim, and from that, detectives were able to deduce the identity of the mob boss who had ordered the hit. They didn't have enough to convict the guy, but the incident brought down a lot of heat on him, which he resented. So, to get the point across to other hit men, the mob boss had ordered the original hit man to be murdered, and then had his body left in the trunk of his car—stark naked. The message was, when you kill somebody for me, you'd better remove anything from his clothing that might help identify him. The picture was of a detective standing next to the hit man's car, in the trunk of which the body (which had been removed by then) had been found.

So the picture doesn't have a lot of information in it, but there's actually a lot of significance behind it. Sometimes the meaning is not contained in the photograph, but only adjacent to it.

Beauty and mystery
At the other end of the spectrum you can have pictures that are so mundane there seems to be no possible reason to look into the meaning of what they show. For example, as I look out my window right now, I see a little circular garden bed. There's a spheroid bush about three feet high. Next to the bush is a boulder. In front of the bush and the boulder is a a wire rod with a red reflector at the top, and in back of the bush and the boulder is a young, medium-sized deciduous tree with no leaves. What can you possibly say about that? It does form a sort of "composition," but there's nothing specifically interesting about it. No real reason to look into it. Nobody who's sane would have time for such a thing anyway.

But of course there are still facts there. The tree and the bush are of particular species, and you could identify them. Somebody planted the bush, and you might be able to find out who and when. The lawn is used for parking, and it's possible that the bush, boulder, and reflector were placed there to protect the tree when it was younger and smaller.

Just because the facts, the meanings, are trivial doesn't mean they're not present.

Trivial content is sometimes purposely pursued by photographers. This is evident in the "rocks and trees" genre of subject matter. Rocks and trees are just...pretty, and they're pleasant to look at. We're not intended to think "what species of tree is that?" Or "what type of rock is that and what is its composition and origin?" Or "where was this taken?" You're supposed to look at its beauty and mystery, its detail or color or tone, and take from it a feeling, and you're supposed to accept it as if its meaning were trivial and not worth pursuing. As if the subject were generic. And that's OK. The tree stands for the idea of tree. The rock stands for the idea of rock. But...drawings and paintings can be generic, but honest and authentic photographs almost never really are. Even if the photographer wanted you to look at them as though they are.

A famous rocks-and-trees photographer (whose work really is beautiful and pleasant to look at, so he succeeds) once submitted an article to the magazine I edited that featured a picture of an odd sort of whirly, figured, ridged formation in rough flat rock. He titled it something similar to "Family Crest" if memory serves, and it did kinda resemble that. I didn't think twice about it. But then, three weeks later, I received a letter from a reader. He was a geologist, and felt put out by the fact that we didn't understand what we had showed a picture of. He spent two pages explaining what it was called, how it formed, where they're typically found, how rare they are, who studies them, etc., etc. It was all very interesting. And of course it had gone right over the heads of both the photographer and myself.

The doors of perception

It pays, I think, to be alive to the fact that every picture at least contains the germ of its story, its facts, its meaning. We don't always know what any of those things are, but that doesn't mean they're not there. That's all. What I'm saying is, don't accept complete closure; always leave the door cracked; never assume you're seeing all there is to see. Because you almost never are.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

John Camp: "And sometimes, the complications of even straight photographs take you all over the place. When I was a reporter for the St. Paul newspapers, a photographer was sent out to take a photo of a fairly inane event—perhaps a fender-bender. For some reason, there was a shoe lying near by, and in a kind of silent protest against the inanity of the assignment, he tossed the shoe in the photo, which added a kind of mystery to the thing. Then, thinking that this bullet was not entirely spent, he put the shoe in his car and took it back to the paper. Thereafter, photographers being hurried off on inane assignments (of almost any kind) would sometimes take the shoe with them and subtly insert it into a photo. It became known simply as The Shoe. If you have nothing better to do, it's mildly interesting to contemplate the meaning of The Shoe. Those photos were (some of them anyway) moved online, and if a super-AI sometime in the future begins scanning those photos and finds an identical shoe in many totally unrelated photos, I wonder what it will conclude?"

Speed: "Since you were unable to find the photograph that is subject of today’s TOP post, I asked Midjourney to create several based on your description."

Mike replies: From today, photography is dead!  —Mike "Paul D." Johnston

Terry Burnes: "We moved to our current house about 20 years ago and had it landscaped. When that was done I took some rather mundane photos to document the finished project. I recently came across those photos and was struck by how much things have changed. I'm glad I took those mundane photos and, though not intended to do so, they did in fact end up telling part of a story, about our life here and how it has evolved, a story that continues for now."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I love this post and the types of photographs that is speaks to. My favorite photographs are those that evolve over time because the story evolves. The location changes, the people age and all of the 'information' in the photograph evolves and changes in unpredictable ways. I remember Jay Maisel speaking of the 'information' in a photograph—I had never thought of it as that. In many ways it changed how I view and photograph scenes, trying to be more mindful of not just the visual elements of a scene, but what information is in those elements."

Stuff Breaks

My kitchen faucet broke. What a PITA (pain in the ['nuther word for "donkey," one syllable, three letters, starts with "A"]).

My wonderful neighbor Ilene came over not once but twice to fix it for me! The second time, I wasn't even here to help. I never knew she was a plumber, among with her limitless other talents. She knows eleven ways to use eggplant. One great neighbor to have.

Complicated little house
It's been a big problem with my otherwise nicely restored little house: everything breaks. There are more things in this house that have broken than things that haven't. I think the rehabbers, who were tasteful and thoughtful, were also excessively clever in acquiring or purchasing stuff that was "good enough" without spending a lot of money. But the problem with that is that everything they put in was just too cheap. They got carried away with optimizing value-for-them. They didn't think enough about value-for-me. I've only been here since August of 2015, but so far: the pump on the water system broke, and had to be replaced twice at $600 a pop; the water heater broke and had to be replaced; the garage door broke and had to have a new mainspring installed; the on-off button on the washing machine broke and the repair, which should have been simple, cost two-thirds of the price of a new machine; the knob or lever or whatever you call it that turns on the water in the shower broke, and I had to drive all the way to Auburn to fetch a part for it; the whole-house generator broke and had to be bypassed for $500, and I still need to have the bypass made permanent and have the generator removed, which will cost God knows how much (not looking forward to that); a recessed ceiling light fixture broke; the lock on the back door was broken when I bought the house and I finally got it fixed just recently, which cost only $15 but entailed a drive to Geneva and a wait; the well pump broke and had to be replaced for $1,200+, and then it broke again a couple of months later (one broken wire) and had to be pulled out of the ground (it's 250 feet down) again and serviced for another $250; the furnace broke in the middle of winter and I almost froze; the air conditioner has broken twice; and the dishwasher started leaking early on, despite being nearly new, and had to be replaced. The new one is very cheap, because I am, and the installers were toweringly incompetent—think "two random teenagers with 45 minutes of training"—and didn't even attach it. You can pull it out from under the counter with your hand. But so far it has worked like a champ. Knock on wood.

I don't mean to complain. Well, yes I do. But I do love my house; it's my favorite among all the places I have ever lived in my life. But it's a complicated little house.

The dishwasher will probably break soon.

Off to Victor
Why can't things just work?

This is from Wikipedia:

In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence... is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as 'shortening the replacement cycle'). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.

Anyway, this morning I am off for Eastview Mall in Victor. I have to go to the Apple Store. Victor is about a ten-hour drive. I exaggerate: I have to leave before noon for a 1:25 appointment. All that driving time is time wasted. The computer is...well, not broken exactly; clogged. My Mac Mini has gotten stuffed with doghair and dust and it's overheating. It has happened before. This is probably not Apple's fault. Last time it happened the "Genius" (that's what they call them, don't look at me) was actually impressed by the level of dirtiness inside my computer. And I do not mean smut. Butters sheds enough for any three normal dogs. He is a doghair-generating factory. You have to give in to it or it will drive you crazy. God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change....

Apple now makes exactly the computer I always used to think it should make, the Mac Studio, which has very effective ventilation. I dream of owning a Mac Studio. I am going to own one someday—I hope just not today. I cannot afford the expense right at the present moment. The Mac Mini must keep going! Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Did you know that keeping lots of browser tabs and pages open increases the work your computer has to do? It's updating all those pages in the background. It's good to try to minimize the number of tabs you have open at once.

Pleasure in the purchase
It's not actually the expense that makes me hate it when things break. It's that the expense doesn't get you anywhere except back to baseline. You spend a bunch of money on the well pump and then you're right back to where you were before the old well pump broke. You buy new brakes and the car just continues to work like it used to. There's no pleasure in the purchase. That's the biggest problem for me with stuff breaking.

The new kitchen faucet arrives tomorrow. I tried to buy a nice one, so that I might at least be able to take some pleasure in it, at first.

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Mark Sampson: "As long as you're dealing with your house, may I recommend a book? It won't help you fix things but it's a wonderful read. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, by the great thinker Stewart Brand. Full of illustrations too."

Mike replies: That's right down my alley. I'll read that. Thanks. And by the way, right after I wrote the "Stuff Breaks" post, the toilet seat broke. Of all things. Guess how? The steel screws holding it together disintegrated with rust. Max possible age: 11 years. Who builds a toilet seat with screws that corrode? I bought a new one, then replaced all eight screws with stainless steel ones.

Joseph L. Kashi: "Most of the cost of building/renovation is in the labor. Using top quality materials instead of cheap 'good enough, I hope' materials only adds a few percent to the overall cost but definitely results in a much superior, more reliable product. Cheaper materials are very much false economy. I'm not referring to gold-plating but rather just getting genuinely better quality materials, sort of like the old Sears 'Best.'

"I've done a lot of defective construction litigation over the years and an ungodly high percentage is simply due to trying to go cheap, which is always more expensive in the long term."

Mike replies: I wish every builder ever would read what you just wrote!

Benjamin Marks: "I often rail at the impermanence of things, particularly those things that comprise our home. The structure apparently started out as a 1760s creamery for a nearby dairy farm, and it has had several generational iterations. Each renovation has raised alternating questions of competence and compromise, resulting in the current agglomeration. The place has what my wife calls 'character.' But really its purpose, other than keeping the rain off our heads, is to remind us of the second law of thermodynamics: that the universe tends towards entropy, and its painful local corollary, which adds to the law the phrase, 'this means you, bub.' My wife gently reminds me not to get upset when another piece of the structure fails—one might as well complain about the weather. Then again, it is somehow my job to fix those broken things, not hers, and so I am unable to reach the sense of philosophical detachment that she has so easily obtained.

"Bon Courage, Mike. You've only pitted yourself against time's arrow, after all."

Hobbies (IWTH)

"IWTH" (remember it as "with" with the first two letters swapped) stands for an "I-want-to hobby." These are things you absolutely don't have to do, but you do because, well, you want to.

Xander on the wall

Of course, most hobbies are IWTHs to some extent. My nephew makes knives. My son climbs artificial cliffs at indoor climbing gyms. Another friend is a semi-professional stained-glass artist. If you don't have a market for knives or stained glass and don't make any money doing what you do, there's no reason to do any of those things...except the best reason, which is that you want to. Recently, as you know, I looked into shaving as a hobby, and being your own barber with old-fashioned razors is definitely something you only do if you want to. Every pharmacy in the land carries a selection of electric razors and multi-blade cartridge razors and foam shaving cream in cans. That's what everyone uses. It's the standard. Being your own barber, using shaving soaps and restored mid-century razors, owning many samples of everything and using them in rotation, and all that? Well, it's pointless, but why not? If you want to do it, there's the reason. It's its own reason.

Photography is an IWTH only for some people. It also falls under the category of CBAPs..."could be a profession." (I'm just having fun with these initialisms here, by the way. Don't take it too seriously.)

There are all kinds of specialties you can get into as a photography professional. I'll name just a few—real people, who I know or know of—to give you an idea of the range: an aerial photographer who pilots his own small plane; a "stringer" (independent photojournalist who gets irregular assignments from publications); wedding, food, fashion, boudoir, headshot and real-estate photographer / architectural photographers; and I know of photographers who specialize in each of the following, maybe in among a few other things: racehorse conformation portraits; portraits of sailboats for the boats' owners; and motorcycle racing. That's just the tip of the iceberg. All the way down to people who have YouTube channels or, um, write blogs. There are also degrees of professionalism: they can go all the way from very successful businesses with very high income ceilings—photographers like Annie Leibovitz (a name I always misspell, so that's probably misspelled) and Morgan Norman have net worths in the millions—to people who only occasionally do a job for pay or sell a few prints on weekends at community art fairs. 

But for most of us, photography is an IWTH. And in that case, you do whatever you want to, for whatever reason you choose.

Some hobbies fall into the category of "you have to do it anyway." Shaving, cooking, driving, your clothing, and so forth. You can make a hobby of any of those things—but for most people they're not hobbies, just chores or necessities. Some hobbies revolve around a nominal "vice," as is the case with wine, whiskey, or cigar aficionados. I knew a guy once who worked at a garden center whose hobby, with his wife, was to eat one meal every month at a very fine restaurant. They would save up for it and drive as far as 200 miles away for the monthly gourmet treat. Many hobbies revolve around some kind of gear connoisseurship: watches or laundry machines (really) or fly-fishing can be that way. Some photographers are primarily devoted to a single marque or brand of camera, for example. And we all know which one.  :-)  Some hobbies are pastimes: movie-watching, reading, or video-gaming. I know a family that does large, difficult jigsaw puzzles together at their summer cottage, a pastime hobby that's traditional for them. The puzzle stays on a table on the porch for days or even weeks and people work on it when they feel like it, individually or together. When it's finished they admire it for a few days then start on another. They really enjoy it. 

Many hobbies center on collecting. One of the most amazing things I've ever seen was Mark Noyzewski's basement, fastidiously and beautifully organized but absolutely stuffed to the rafters with comic books, toys, posters, and pop-culture merch, with a special interest in everything Star Wars. (By the way, the difference between a hoarder and a collector is organization. If it's organized, you're not a hoarder.) Another was the apartment of Arnold Crane, a retired divorce attorney and lifelong photographer who collected many thousands of art objects of all sorts and whose spacious high-rise apartment on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago was like an intimate museum. (I edited Arnold's book for him.) There are several ways that a photography interest can be centered around collecting: you can collect cameras, prints, or books, to name just three. And come to think of it, isn't the activity of photographing itself sort of a form of collecting? You go about the world taking pictures of things, every now and then getting something you like, and those go into your "selects" in some way—added to the "collection." When I first met Ctein, he was a dye transfer printer, and his principle of collecting, in this sense, was that when he got a good shot he liked, he would make a 16x20" dye of it—a very involved process, as you might know—and it would go into the master portfolio. After half a lifetime of hard work he wasn't yet up to 100 prints at that time. That's not exactly "collecting," but it's not far off.

Status
I would guess that hobbies tend to have more status the more rare or difficult or risky they are, and the fewer the number of people who have achieved some sort of mastery in that area. Chainsaw sculptors, sailboat racers, polyglots (people who speak many languages—are any of you out there?), and sleight-of-hand magicians are examples of things that few people master. But scrapbooking, walking or hiking, currency collecting, and board games are hobbies that have a low bar to participation, at least at the entry or beginning level.

Maybe what's been happening to photography in the last two decades or so is that it's become something that far more people can do satisfactorily without specialized knowledge or experience, so its status is starting to decline. You no longer need years of experience and involved knowledge to take a beautiful picture or even make a beautiful print (just pay for it). I've said before that saying "I'm a photographer" these days is inching ever closer to saying, "oh, I'm a person who eats meals," or "I'm a person who breathes air." Who isn't a photographer these days? But when you get into the weeds, of course, and get obsessive about it, it's still a great IWTH.

Hobbies can be purpose-driven. Maybe your purpose is to find good side-hustles and make extra money. Maybe you love beer and want to learn to make craft beers to participate in tastings or just give as gifts to your friends. Maybe you have a life-list of something—states you've visited, bands you've seen live, birds you've "watched." Photography can be great for purpose-driven goals: you can collect destinations, for instance, photographing in Iceland and Prague and Death Valley, in which case you organize your travel experiences around it; or you can use it for meeting people; or for the documentation of an intersecting interest, as train photographers do. Jim Lager, whose purpose was to be a Leica expert, decided early on to collect pictures of Leicas rather than Leicas! As you know if you know his wonderful three-volume set of books. Life lists are possible in the photography hobby too...I've always thought it would be interesting to see how many sites of famous photographs you could visit! The Flatiron building, the Mission Church of Rancho de Taos, and Canyon de Chelly might be my first stops. Jamie Livingston took an SX-70 photo every day for decades; a British photographer I know of had it as his goal to take at least one decent photo with as many vintage cameras as he could.

There is one last category of hobby that few people think about: those that are the most deeply satisfying. Yoga, gardening, baking, and ballroom dancing are all hobbies that tend to rank high on the satisfaction index (I read an analysis once that claimed gardening is No. 1, although you couldn't prove it by me). One way to think of the central challenge of being a photography enthusiast in the IWTH category is figuring out how to make it as satisfying as possible for you personally.

All good
I've been working for photography enthusiasts since 1984, when I got a senior internship as a teaching assistant at Northern Virginia Community College. I'd already become the unofficial darkroom manager at the art school I attended. My loyalty throughout my career has been to photographers. Their interests come first. That was certainly true when I was a magazine editor—I conceived of my loyalty being not first and foremost to my employer, the publisher, nor to the manufacturers who advertised in the magazine, but to the readers first of all. It was the proper, principled structure of the job, just as a lawyer is supposed to give her all to the interests of her client within the boundaries of the rules. "The business side" and "the editorial side" were supposed to be separate but equal. So I butted heads with the advertising director a lot. So my attitude has always been that however anyone wants to find interest and satisfaction in photography is fine with me as long as they're not hurting anybody. The range is truly breathtaking, so much so that it seems almost perverse when you look at it altogether.

And young photographers today are extending that range greatly with internet and social media activities and concerns. It's all good!

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.)

Featured Comments from:

TwoShoes: "Although I've never commented before I feel strangely compelled now to add my two bobs' worth. I've long believed that all worthwhile hobbies should occupy vast amounts of your time, require the investment (ha!) of much of your disposable income and perform no other purpose than to delight the hobbyist. Ideally, they should also involve the research and acquisition of expensive arcane gear along the way which ticks several of the previous points. If the hobby does have a practical purpose, e.g., coffee, it should be performed on an eye-wateringly expensive machine that makes your friends think you are deranged. To which you reply, 'It's not just a drink it's hobby.' All understood."

Mike replies: Many times I've thought that my life has revolved around hobbies. And thinking of them as hobbies definitely takes a lot of the pressure off. Great comment; you should contribute your two bobs' worth more often!

Mark: "Very good shot of your son. Handsome lad. Surprised they allow that without a safety harness. As for hobbies, when I gave up my camera gear some years back and now only use my iPhone, I was a bit adrift. I built a garage gym during the pandemic that I’m in 2–3 times per day. But about six months ago I got my CCW [stands for "carrying a concealed weapon" —Ed.] and have been purchasing firearms and taking at least a class a month, sometimes more, and am at the range practicing twice a week. Not sure if you consider it a hobby but it sure is interesting, challenging, and keeps me busy. May even be lifesaving one day."

Mike replies: I should have mentioned this in the post: the picture shows Xander on a bouldering wall, which are on average three meters (15 feet) high. And only your outstretched hand has to go to the very top of the wall. There are thick pads below in case you fall, and for when you jump down. Xander will complete a route, touch the top, climb down a few feet and then jump off. I don't think ropes are even allowed on bouldering walls; I should ask him. It's definitely possible to get hurt on a bouldering wall, but much less likely if you have experience. Xander has a good sense of self-preservation and uses ropes on higher walls, and good practices in all sorts of climbing.

David Brown (partial comment): "I always thought it ruined the hobby to try and make money from it."

JH (partial comment): "When it comes to photography as a hobby, it often combines with other hobbies. [...] If any hobby crosses over into other hobbies more than photography, I can't imagine what it could be."

[Ed. note: You can read the full text of "partial comments" in the full Comments Section.]

Aaron: "Maybe a difference between most people who take photos (which is pretty much everyone with a cell-phone now days) and photographers is that most people don't engage with photography as a practice. By practice I mean taking photographs as an intentional long-term project or set of projects. This includes practice in the sense of doing it a lot to try and get better. But more to the point it's investing time and attention in the craft and art of taking photos. My two daughters probably take more pictures than I do. But, they have no interest in learning about taking pictures, either the technical side or the art/composition side. They have no interest in their pictures as pictures or as art. That's not a criticism. It's just a difference between them and me. I'm a photographer (in this sense) and they're not."

Mike replies: In fairness to your daughters, aren't they still very young? (Note to others: Aaron and I met over Indian food in Peoria, Illinois, when I went out to the Midwest to meet my grandson.) Maybe their seriousness will deepen when they get older. The most talented student I ever had could not have been less ambitious about photography—she was very breezy and dismissive of it as a high school student. I was never in touch with her again, but I understand she later became a professional photographer! I was very pleased to hear that. She really did have a remarkable eye.

The Secret of Happiness?

Idle thought this morning: maybe the secret to happiness, or at least to a good attitude through the day, is to enjoy the things we have to do anyway.

Have to brush your teeth? Enjoy it. Have to go somewhere to do an errand? Try to enjoy the drive. Have to cut the grass? Might as well enjoy it. Do you have the knack?

There must be a corollary, too. Stop concentrating on what I can't do. Don't regret the past—I can't change it. Stop wishing I were wealthy—I'm wealthier than a whole lot of people. Stop wanting to do all the things I once thought were attainable aspirations—no one can do everything.

I used to go through the day grumpy and resentful about chores. But some people I know enjoy keeping their kitchens neat. Some people enjoy cooking (how, I have no idea, but I'll work on it.) I learned to enjoy laundry, even, after our discussion of washers a while ago, when I learned, thanks to a reader, that it's a way sociologists measure privilege in the world! So now I do laundry and feel lucky. (Weird, I know.) And there are some things I enjoy mainly because I did them as a kid and remember fondly the feeling of accomplishment I felt when I finished—from yardwork to cutting green beans, which for some reason was always my task in the household.

Anyway, I'm learning to enjoy more and more of the things I have to do anyway. To bring this back onto topic, maybe in middle age and onward, a simple calculation of enjoyment is the best way to measure whatever we're doing in photography. Enjoy it? Do it more. Don't enjoy it? Stop. Or do less of it. Maybe we should evaluate the various things we do and rank them according to how much we simply enjoy them. Shopping? Going on hikes with the camera? Printing? Forum discussions? Photoshop editing? Learning? Organizing? Shooting? Interacting with people? Making money? Whatever we enjoy the most, do that. And whatever we have to do along the way, learn to enjoy that, too.

You think?

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.)

Featured Comments from:

MikeR: "Yes!"

James Pilcher: "This is one of the most profound posts you've ever made Mike. I've copied it into my iPhone notes for future reference. It's more than a small bit of genius."

Clay: "I teach a handful of alternative-process photography workshops every year (polymer photogravure and platinum-palladium), and inevitably during these two or three day affairs a discussion will arise about why the hell would anyone want to make prints with these weird, difficult, and old-fashioned methods.

"I don’t have any quippy concise answer, but I always provide one rubric to evaluate one’s workflow: Break down all the steps involved in producing a finished result and for each step, decide if it brings you joy or irritation? Keep the joy and do whatever possible to minimize the irritation.

"I call it ‘reducing friction.’ For me, and only me mostly likely, there are really two parts of the process that really race my motor: ‘Seeing’ and securing the image, and getting involved in a hands-on way for the final print.

"Once I recognized this, I made the gradual move to mostly digital capture of my images—understanding how the camera works and how the lens sees makes them tools to aid that first part of the process. The tools become invisible helpers when I am trying to find an image.

"And I love making a handmade print—understanding all the nuances and factors that are involved allow me to ‘lose time’ when I am deeply engaged in making a print. For me digital negatives are a lifesaver, because it allows me to invest a little time upfront and then never have to sweat the negative making part again. I know how to make traditional enlarged negatives in a silver darkroom, but for me it was always a tedious pain the butt that I couldn’t wait to finish so I could finally make a print.

"But I have friends who really, really enjoy the craft and knowledge required to make great traditional enlarged negatives, or carry around 12x 20" view cameras to make enormous negatives in the field. But for me, this always represented a necessary evil, and was not something I particularly enjoyed doing.

"I now try to apply this thought process to other parts of my life. I don’t really enjoy doing laundry, but you can be sure that am trying to optimize it in a way that it takes the least amount of time and provides the least friction to my day-to-day existence so that I can move on and to the things I do enjoy."

Ben: "I tell my students this all the time. It’s worth learning early and repeating—find satisfaction in the small, necessary things. Not only those, of course but if we follow small resentments around, they’ll work their way into the rest of everything. Clay's comment is great as well—this idea of reducing friction or increasing efficiency. And I’d sure love to learn how to make a pt/pd print from a digital negative; that sounds like the perfect way (for me) to do that!"

Calvin Amari: "'You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.' —Metaphysician, Life Coach, and General-Purpose Wiseacre Andy Warhol."

Grant: "Inspired by your words of wisdom, I decided to try to increase my happiness by mowing the lawn. The mower wouldn't start; there was water in the gas. I went and got fuel stabilizer and eventually the engine started, but it ran rough and didn't cut the weeds evenly—there is no grass on my lawn, it picked up and moved to my neighbors place. Then I had to hunt high and low for the battery for the trimmer and the blower. Just then one of my sons showed up and told me to sit down and he'd take over. Right at that moment his girlfriend called and asked to be picked up from work. Guess who did the trimming and blowing?  After I finished that I sat down to rest and I noticed that one of my rear tires was low. There was a Phillips head screw comfortably residing in the tire. I'm too tired to take care of it now; maybe tomorrow I'll plug it.

"I imagine that you're thinking that your words have inspired me to look on the sunny side of things.

"Not a chance!

"However being able to rant to you has made me absolutely giddy.

"Thanks Mike, you're the pal we all need."

Mike replies: "Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't." —Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins, in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man

On Naming

Naming stuff is hard. I have a friend who'd like suggestions for a name for a vending machine company. I thought of "Venum," Latin for "sale," but it's already taken. It's a French company that makes martial arts equipment. Technically my friend could use it, because you can use the same name as long as the companies do something completely different, but it would just cause confusion. No one would be happy.

My uncle Smokie (Dr. Albert Ferdinand Polk, Jr.) bred thoroughbred racehorses, and he once asked me for suggestions for horse names. I gave him a list of ten possibilities. Of those, eight had already been used! Racehorse names can't be re-used, which is why they can sometimes be so strange, like the horse "Two Phil's" [sic] in this year's Derby. One of my suggestions was the name of an historically famous horse. Oops. That shows you one weakness when you're trying to think of names: it's better if you have some familiarity with the field of endeavor you're working in. That's a problem in genre fiction as well: you need to be familiar with what's already been done so you don't re-invent the wheel. Or a bunch of wheels. Or accidentally crib stuff.

Speaking of which, I watched the WWII propaganda movie Mrs. Miniver over the weekend. A weak movie—programmatic—and one that has aged poorly. I didn't really enjoy it. But I did learn that Julian Fellowes and his writers stole a major plot point from that movie for his series Downton Abbey! Just lifted and repurposed it. Stop, thieves. I guess they thought it had been so long since 1943 that they could steal the idea and contemporary audiences would be none the wiser.

Then again, Shakespeare pulled that sh*t too, didn't he?

Three wins
One of the the two valid horse names I came up with, "Montana Blackfoot," was given to an actual racehorse. Foaled in 1976, he raced in 1978 and '79. He won three times and placed second four times and third twice in 26 starts. He earned $21,111, about $90k in today's money. Not the big time, but not too shabby. Anyway, I thought it was cool. How many average Joes—er, average Mikes—have gotten to name a racehorse? Yet another split-second in my 15 minutes of fame.

If you can think of a cool name for a vending machine company, let me know.

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Martin Q.: "You ain't kidding. There's an old saying in software developer circles, which Tim Bray attributes to Phil Karlton: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

Dan Mongomery: "The editor of the Virginia newspaper where I worked asked newsroom folks for ideas for the name of his big new boat. As everyone knows, underpaid minions love to help their bosses with all the little problems that arise from having excessive disposable income, but putting that aside, I suggested 'Fnu Lnu.' This is police-report shorthand for 'first name unknown, last name unknown.' A fill-in weekend police reporter had recently taken it for a person's name, and 'Fnu Lnu' made it into print as such. Our subsequent correction didn't go viral, exactly, but it traveled far and wide. The reporter and editors involved were not the first or last to make this mistake, but our paper was briefly famous, and lessons were learned.

"The boss put 'Fnu Lnu' on his stern, and he loved, loved, loved explaining it to strangers who asked about it."

Kent Phelan: "When I had my business back in the '90s, I bought a couple of vending machines for the company break room. I started a separate company for this purpose, and named it 'Soda Jerks LLC.' I gave the profits to the two women in the accounting dept. who managed the machines."

s.wolters: "As a designer of corporate identities, coming up with a new name for a company or organization was often part of my job. There are methods for that and it was never difficult to develop long lists of proposals. Getting the right one accepted, often by many people involved, is something else. Before presenting your ideas there should be a general agreement on the criteria so the names can be judged objectively. Names should be unique. If possible they should already explain what the activities of the organization are. Standard Oil, TotalEnergies, Tomato Bank Ltd., et cetera. Being a visualizer, I often suggested names where name and trademark express the same thing. As is in case of Shell, Penguin, or Domino’s Pizza. At its best there should be some verbal or visual association with the activity too. So if someone came up with a name like Twitter for a social chatting network I would think that this was brilliant. On the other hand if someone suggested for that purpose the letter X, that is already used by almost half of the world population, I would think this person had a bug in his brain."

Mike replies: I thought exactly the same thing. To take "Facebook," one of the most recognizable names on the planet, and ditch it for "Meta" is like dumping "Coca-Cola" in favor of something like "BrownDrink," or even trading "Kleenex" for "Paper." It strikes me that "Twitter" is the perfect name—it aligns with the term "tweet" (as a verb with associated tenses as well as a noun for the actual communiques), and features a bird as a logo, which associates very sensibly. How are you going to replicate all that with "X," never mind the incalculable loss in name recognition alone? It seems to me that Mr. Musk might have some sort of psychological problem—lately he acts like he's doing all he can to lose more money than any human ever has before. Just a thought; IANAS. [I am not a shrink.]

richardp_london: "My father-in-law had a connection with the UK Channel Islands, one of which is called Sark. He had a whim to get his boat registered there. By convention the place of registration appears below the boat name, on its rear transom. Name of his boat? 'Noah.'"

An Interesting Thing About Workmanship

Here's an interesting thing about craftsmanship, courtesy of David Pye (and of one of my favorite little books): You can't pay someone to do better than their best. All you can do is get them to do their very best (which itself isn't often easy, but that's a different discussion). Beyond that, you're out of luck. That is, if you pay £1,000 for someone to build you something and do the very best they know how to do, you can't get them to build it twice as well for £2,000. In fact, you can't get them to build it twice as well for £200,000. "The best they can do" is the limit of their skill and ability. All you can do if you want something better than that is go find someone else who knows how to do it better.

This is how craftsmanship segues into the realm of art, or the realm of the artisanal. At the highest level, the craftsperson is the one who determines the quality of the result, not the client—and not the client's wallet.

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.)

Featured Comments from:

How I Can Know So Little About Photography

Photography resembles something Carl Jung supposedly said about psychology: everyone thinks they understand psychology because they understand their own.

I love to learn, and, to borrow Thomas Jefferson's famous bon mot about reading, for a long time I had a canine appetite for learning everything I could about the science, history, and culture of photography.

I'm not saying I know, or knew, everything. Far from it. Kodak scientists—I knew the developers of the T-Max films, of which I was an early beta-tester—could tell you I know very little about emulsion science. Professional critics would easily detect that I didn't have a truly deep grounding in the fundamentals of art criticism. Master photojournalists would say I wasn't that talented or experienced a shooter. Optical physicists would immediately have reservations about my understanding of lens design. Historians recognize pretty quickly that I'm a dilettante in their field. I've only shot two weddings, ever. I took a job in a frame shop to learn how to frame my own photographs, but, compared to a master frame-maker who used to read TOP, the late Bron Janulis, I know very little about that. Camera repairpeople knew there were many limitations to my knowledge of the innards of cameras. Museum curators could find fault in my education about conservation, and I've only ever curated one show (of the work of six photographers), in the Park Service gallery in Rock Creek Park in D.C. My friend who was one of the world's foremost experts in photographic densitometry teased me because of my willingness to be subjective about tone and not rely sufficiently on sensitometric data (which he wanted me to gather myself. I did, but only once). I'm not that well read in the philosophy of aesthetics. Enthusiasts of alternative processes have been disappointed that I don't know firsthand about their favorite process, whether it be cyanotype or tintype or gum bichromate. (Thinking of specific people there.) I don't know everything there is to know about digital cameras, although I'm met the guy who invented them. I knew one guy who knew more than anyone about paper developers, and sometimes he had to explain things to me like I was a child. Specific friends know much more than I care to about the photography industry and all the companies, major and minor. (Hobbyists on the internet know all there is to know about that, with the caveat that a lot of what they know is wrong.) Any professional worth her salt knows more than I do about running a professional photography business. I can run a critique, though. I can align an enlarger. I can write a syllabus for a photography course. But I can't get an inkjet printer to work. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours at the Library of Congress and at a local D.C. gallery looking at original prints, and for a long time I would travel up to hundreds of miles to see shows at museums and galleries. I have an unusually good visual memory, and can usually tell if I've ever seen a specific picture before—although I figured out how to test that, and found my memory for specifics isn't quite as good as I imagined it was. I've taught students all the way from rising high school sophomores in the summer program at the Corcoran to grandmothers in the continuing education program at a Virginia community college, but I'm not a career teacher. I was all set to be hired for a teaching position at a college in Ithaca, New York, until they found out I didn't have an MFA. That was the end of that. Q.E.D.: my education is lacking. I don't really know all that much about Apple Macs, even though the first Apple Mac I ever used was "The Apple Macintosh," the very first Apple Mac, in 1984. And I don't know everything there is to know about Photoshop, even though I've been using it since version 2.5 (not CS2, version 2.5—CS2 was version 9) in 1994. Camera collectors think I don't care enough about the ins and outs of what they're up to, although I can talk their language. (One thing I could see that they don't: each of them has a different sub-specialty that they each consider the most important sub-specialty. Or at least the most interesting.) Ditto photograph collectors, whether the collection is demotic or esoteric, small or large, public or private, valuable or not, famous or personal (thinking about specific people again here). I have only one item on my photographic "bucket list": I would dearly love to see Elton John's photography collection. Fat chance. And all this doesn't even mention the world of photo magazines, about which there is a lot I don't know about.

And so on. I could go on. As we all know, I do go on.  :-)

And you call yourself...
But the proof of my ignorance I remember most fondly came from a parent when I taught photography at a prep school. The students provided their own cameras, and one girl showed up with an ancient 1960s Zenit from behind the Iron Curtain. I suggested she was probably going to have more trouble with it in the class than might be good for her. A few days later she appeared sporting a new Pentax K1000, as was suggested in the syllabus.

It wasn't the last I was to see of the Zenit, however. (Or Zorki, or Kiev, or whatever it was.) On Parent Night, a man came up to me, and out came the ancient Soviet-era camera.

"My daughter tells me you don't even know how to work a simple camera."

"I think I do," I answered. Taking the camera, I showed him how to operate it.

"And what's this?" He asked, pointing to a particular button. I told him. "And this button, what does it do?" I took the camera, tried one thing and another, and couldn't get anything to happen. "I don't know," I answered, handing it back to him. Maybe it was broken.

But he had me. His face brightened and grew stern at the same time. Taking the old camera back, he declaimed, in a loud and accusing voice, "And you call yourself a photography teacher!"

And so it goes.

Take my word for this: there are a million ways to know nothing about photography. And I think I know every one of them.   :-)

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Bear.: "Love it and has application to many aspects of my life! May I suggest an expanded and polished version for a certain magazine you've been known to write for?"

Mike replies: The thought occurred to me too late. They don't accept previously published pieces.

David G. Miller: "And that, Mike Johnston, is why I read your blog faithfully. Your ignorance in all things photographic being only slightly less profound than mine, I can usually reach out and pick up the semi-precious gems you scatter so freely. Our opinions differ just enough to add more sparkle to the process."

Ed Otten: "I smiled all the way through this post Mike. You appear, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, to be suffering from a classic case of imposter syndrome. Trust me when I join the thousands who visit you daily, to say that you are very good at whatever it is you do.  :-)  "

James Weekes: "It takes a lot of effort to be as ignorant as you are.  ;-)  "

JoeB: "As I get older I realize how much I don't know. I was much smarter when I was younger.
Or so it seems to me now."

Mike replies: I have certain further complaints along those lines, about the way things are now. For instance, the older it gets, the harder my car is to get into and out of. It is deteriorating in this respect every year. Also, my shirts continue to shrink, despite being, for the most part, more than five years old already. When I was young, shirts shrank only for the first two or three washes, and then stayed the same size thereafter. But these pale beside my judgement of the weightlifting and aerobics equipment at the gym I recently joined—boy, have those ever gone downhill. The machines we had when I was, say, 30 years old, were so much smoother, more effective, and easier to use. The ones they make now are all crap!

What Would You Do If You Had Money?

I mean...I guess I'm speaking to people who don't have money. Obviously this question doesn't pertain for people who are wealthy. The interesting part of this post is at the end, so skip ahead if you want to, to the header "Photographically speaking...."

This much is interesting: I find I don't want much these days. Believe it or not, my strongest desire is to get rid of stuff. I have a lot of stuff around the house that I don't want or need but am having trouble letting go of. (Camera, darkroom, and stereo gear for starters). I would like it to be gone. But as far as things to want, there's actually not a lot, once I sift out and separate the daydreams from reality.

I really like my car. I just bought new tires (had to; the old ones weren't going to pass inspection), ran it through the fancy car wash in Geneva, and cleaned out the interior. It looks and drives fine. It's the only car I've ever had that I like more now than I did when I first bought it. It has 113k miles on it. My plan is to try to drive it to 250k miles, which, at my current rate of adding miles, means I won't need a new car till the beginning of 2032. That next car will probably be my last one, as I will be 75 then.

I tell myself that I would love another Miata, and if I could have one I probably would. But do I need it? Not in the slightest.

I have a pool table, which is my choice of recreation. While it's possible to daydream of a much better-built pool-table shed and a nicer table, even in my daydreams I'm at war with myself, because I go back and forth between thinking of something nicer and thinking that what I have is just fine. 

Bookshelves. I think I need bookshelves, but do I really? I read on the iPad now if I'm honest (right now: Ferry Pilot: Nine Lives Over the North Atlantic by Kerry McCauley, a nonfiction page-turner which is making my exercise hour fly by every day at the speed of a small Cessna. Up next is the 1991 bestseller and Pulitzer-Prizewinner Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart, about the misdeeds of the American financial predators of the 1980s and their eventual comeuppances). I've quickly learned that my daily exercise is almost completely dependent on having a good book to read. Exercise time = reading time and reading time = exercise time. The fact that I'm on an exercise machine is coincidental. What I'm really doing is reading.

(The artist Peter Milton, when he decided to be an artist full time, forced himself to get up in the morning and "leave" for his studio as if it were a 9-to-5 job, even though his studio was upstairs in his house. His rule for himself was that he didn't have to work, but he had to stay in the studio eight hours a day. And listening to music in the studio was so important to him that he said that sometimes, when work was going slowly, he felt that he was going to the studio just to listen to music.)

Speaking of exercise machines, I no longer covet any. Just the treadmill that I use at the Community Center retails for nearly $7,000. I would never spend that much to have one at home—and there are four other machines and a rack of dumbbells that I use at the gym. Plus—being totally honest here, at the risk of sounding like a male chauvinist pig—there are beautiful young people at the gym. I know full well that people do not like to be ogled when they work out (surveys have made this quite clear). Even half of the women who doll themselves up in sexy outfits don't actually like to be stared at. So I'm very strict with myself; I never stare, often don't look at all, and if I do it's just the lightest, most casual glance. But, even so, let's just say it's nice having other people around when I work out. At home I'd have nobody to look at but a dog. Whom I love, but still.

Plus, I see some friends at the Community Center, and socialize a little.

But bookshelves for my photobooks—there is no acceptable digital equivalent, yet, for photobooks—yes. I could work on that. But do I need to keep all my photobooks? I could probably get rid of half of them and never miss them.

As far as a house is concerned, I've been very interested in house design literally since childhood. And I still am. But hey, I'm 66. Would I build a house now even if I could? It's getting so that I wouldn't have all that much time to live in it!* And I love my current house, the main drawback of which is that it's too far from my son and his family. Also, "building a house" is a conventional sign of status and prosperity in this culture, like an American Indian warrior in 1870 having a lot of ponies. And I'm always suspicious about giving in to standard ways of expressing status just because it's what everybody is supposed to want.

But the freedom to travel to see family and friends is another thing on the sparse wants-list.

I didn't pay much for this house by the inflated standards of today, and my interest rate is extremely low. If you subtract the principal I pay every month, the rest of my mortgage payment equals the rental cost of a mid-level apartment locally—and local rents are on the low side nationally. And the principal I pay is the best thing I've ever invested in: just the equity I've invested in this house so far has more than doubled. That's in the current market, which can always change, of course. Still, there just aren't very many opportunities in the entire country for housing that gives me so much for so little. It's true that the maintenance costs are significant, mainly because of my vast and complicated yard as well as the age of the house (built 1888). I could live more cheaply, but I wouldn't be living as well. For the future, a smaller house with a much smaller yard that is closer to a hospital will start to be desirable, but I'm not there yet.

The only thing I would really like that I don't have is financial security...first, enough money to meet my expenses without agonizing over it (this winter and spring have been really painful, with big hit after big hit), and—this is currently in daydream territory as well—enough set aside for retirement. Realistically, I might never get to that. 

Well, no, there are actually two things I would want money for—security for myself, yes, but also the ability to help Xander and his family! Or, expressing the same thing negatively, to not be a burden on him in my old age. That is high on the wants-list.

However, even in daydream territory, I wouldn't want but so much money; I feel like it would be too much responsibility. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that large amounts of wealth would be a headache. You have to curate it, so to speak. And worry about people taking it. And this is just me, but I'd have to worry about myself doing foolish or impractical things with it. (Every time I do something stupid or rash I think, "good thing I'm not rich." Because then it would have been worse.)

One more thing: at a certain level of excess, wealth becomes an illusion, because you're still a mortal body and your happiness is still tied to your spiritual and emotional states. Obviously massive wealth engenders and encourages feelings of power, superiority, and entitlement, and it permits self-indulgence, but those things aren't as conducive to contentment as most of us assume they are.

Looking at the it the other way, though, it's possible that I'm not well-sustained financially, because I can't afford to maintain what I have with ease and lack of stress. Really, to be well-off in the best sense, you should be able to sustain and support your present lifestyle without strain or worry.

Photographically speaking...
How about cameras? As I was taking pictures yesterday the thought crossed my mind that when my current Sigma expires, that will be it for me and photography. I like using it, it does what I want, it's fun and satisfying to use...and it's totally unique and absolutely won't be replaceable if it's discontinued by the time it breaks. So when it goes, I'll probably be done with photographing.

But let's look at that the other way around: over the years, I've heard from a great many of you about your cameras, and a strong current in what I've heard and observed has been people saying something along the lines of, "this is it for me; I'm done, I'm never getting another camera"—and that is almost never true. Everybody always gives up their "forever" camera sooner or later in favor of the next one. So now I'm the one saying that. Is it true when I say it? Experience would imply that it is not. So maybe "I'll never buy another camera" just means "I'm happy for now with what I have." And yet...I'm happy with what I have.

There might be one thing I would do with photography that I'm not doing now if I were significantly more prosperous. No, two things. First, I would collect prints. Not just photographs, prints.

I go back and forth on this, but I believe I might restrict myself to photographer/printmakers who are working right now, making new, contemporary work. It would be a challenge to find them, and a greater challenge to select pieces that I believed really had merit and deserved preservation. But that's an old idea of fun that's been hanging around in my head for a long time.

Of course, in no sense do I "need" to do such a thing, not even for my happiness. And I wonder if I could pull it off in any event: my friends Jay and Mary are significant "normal people" art collectors, but they are extremely organized, thorough, and fastidious with their art and their records. I can't even be organized if I try. So maybe having lots of fine art would not be good for me after all.

The second thing is that I would organize my own photographs, both my personal work and the family photos I have. If I do it myself, I estimate that that would take two years (4,000 hours) of full-time work. It would probably take a sensible person about 1,000 hours of work, so 4,000 hours is probably about the right estimate if I have to do it.

An exercise
I took a workshop with Hal and Marilyn Shook in the Shenandoah many years ago, and here is their exercise concerning money:

• Imagine you are given ten million dollars. Half you must give away, and the other half you must spend on yourself.
• First, make a list of ten things you would buy or spend money on for yourself. Then make a list of ten charities, causes, or people you would support.
• Order these lists, from most to least important.
• Cross out the bottom seven things on both lists. If there's something you really hate crossing off, reconsider whether that thing ought to be in the top three.
• Once you have your top three in each list, consider whether there is a way you could satisfy your intentions on a smaller scale, without needing to be rich. For example, if one of your causes is to help dogs, perhaps you could give a couple of bags of dog food every month to a shelter. Or, if your desire is to help a grandchild, perhaps you could give "starter" money to the child's parents to start a college fund. On the list of things for yourself, if one of your goals is to travel the world, perhaps you could save up enough to go on one overseas vacation every three years. If your goal is to eat in the finest restaurants, perhaps you could resolve to eat at home to save money and then once every month or two splurge on a fine dinner at a famous restaurant. If you want a Ferrari, perhaps you could find a place that rents exotic cars and occasionally treat yourself to a day with a fancy car.

You get the idea. There are ways to indulge your fondest wishes short of throwing large amounts of money at them.

I was young when I met Hal and Marilyn, but I'm still glad to have known them. I learned a lot about myself at their life-planning retreat, which was a memorable experience, in many ways.

Sorry about the long post today; to paraphrase Mark Twain Blaise Pascal**, I didn't have time to write a short one.

Mike

*Have you ever known anyone who built their "dream house" in late-middle- or early-old-age and expired promptly thereafter? Or was forced to leave it for some other reason? I've known several such. It could be tempting fate to build a "dream house" too late in life.

**Thanks to Sean for the correction. It's a popular joke attributed to many people, but Twain never said it and Pascal evidently said it first: "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte," "Lettres Provinciales," 1657. Source: Quote Investigator.

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:

V.I. Voltz: "My father, who was an optical engineer, bought a Zeiss Contaflex III in 1957 and has used it ever since. Günther Leitz, who dad knew well, gave him a beautiful Leica IIIg and collapsible Summicron when my parents got married in 1959, but it’s still in the box at their house. When Kodachrome was discontinued dad got me to buy him a pile of Portra. He doesn’t take many photos, but at 93 he still uses that Contaflex. He is the only person I know who photographs even semi-seriously who really did settle for a 'last camera.'

"I knew a couple who built their ‘forever home,’ a concrete, steel and glass monument on a cliff overlooking the Southern Ocean, but the wife got so obsessed with the build that she became remote from her husband (and children too). They split up just after the house was completed and it was sold in the divorce. As my son used to say when he was two, 'happened!'"

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.)

Featured Comments from:

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.