The Online Photographer

Do You Still Care About 'Sample Galleries'?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

Book o' the Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hip to be Square

So here's what happened.

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

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

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

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

Circle squared

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never forgotten that.

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

Mike

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

Book o' the Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing Thought (Video Conspiracy Theory)

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

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

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

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

...Whereas to me....

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

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

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

Mike

Product o' the Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

Book of interest* this week:

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

The following image is also a link: 

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

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

Energy and Appetite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Book of interest* this week:

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

The following image is also a link: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group: Dippers

One thing I've noticed, and suspect is true, but can't support with statistics or facts...

It seems to me that a largish number of photographers are those who dip in for a while and then depart. You know the types I mean? Someone who was around for a while, seemed promising or made a splash or who you seemed to be hearing about everywhere, and then, a few years to a decade later, is gone again. "Rises above the waves" is an expression that might fit. The phrase implies the possibility of sinking below the waves again.

One person (I initially wrote "guy," but they're not all guys) might spend a year or two working on a cohesive body of work that's internally very successful...and then that's it; there's not a follow-up body of work and another one after that. Another might publish a book—a very good book—and then that's...their book. There's not a second one five or ten years later, nor one after that. A commercial pro might be hot for a while, and have a distinctive style, pull in the big bucks for a time, then seem to fall out of fashion and disappear. You might know of somebody locally who was cobbling together a career by doing many things, teaching a course here, giving a gallery talk there, having a show at a local gallery or frame shop or restaurant, adding to a resumé bit by bit...and then, ten years later—remember so-and-so? Where'd they go? Whatever happened to that guy?

I think an explanation in some cases is that it's hard work to be a photographer, and there often isn't a lot of return for it. When people find they don't get sufficient reward or attention in return for hard work, they very sensibly stop working so hard. They go do something else, or maybe modify their practice to make it fit into a more balanced life—turn their intended vocation into an avocation, say. Who wants to work for nothing?

And it takes a lot of work and dedication to be a full-time photographer, regardless of whether you want to make a living at it as a pro or create art and market yourself that way. One art photographer I knew said his life was 25% photography and 75% marketing. A husband-and-wife art-photographer duo, both accomplished artists with multiple monograph books to their credit, split the year up evenly: six months for photography, six months for marketing and sales. They weren't shrinking violets about the latter. They crisscrossed the country meeting up with established collectors and museum curators, trying to sell the work they made during the other half of the year.

-

It's hard work to be a

photographer, and there

often isn't a lot of

return for it.

-

Is it any wonder that there are a lot of photographers who work hard at it for a while and then fade away? It's not based entirely on just the vagaries of their skills. We all tend to believe that everyone is trying his or her hardest all the time, and that however they're doing is the best they can do. I don't think so. It takes tremendous dedication to go all-in as a full-time photographer. When someone comes on strong and then fades away, my guess is that, at least in some cases, they just got tired of working hard for nothing, so they went out and got a real job, one that would actually pay the bills, and dialed back their photography.

The time is past when just putting yourself out there is enough to get you noticed. I used to joke that being a professional photographer was like being a professional eater. A whole lot of people eat; but, amazingly, some people actually do earn a good living at it. They travel the world, eating and then telling about it. But those professional eaters are only a tiny fragment of all the eaters in the world. And you can't just decide that you're really good at eating and automatically start getting rewarded for it.

It's hardly a mystery. People do what they get rewarded for. If they're not getting enough money or attention in return for the work they have to put in, is it any wonder they dial back and go do something else? And then some time goes by, and by and by we're saying, hey, remember her? Wonder whatever happened to her.

She was a dipper, is all. Gave full-tilt, full-speed-ahead photography a shot for a while, then sensibly and intelligently reappraised and redirected. I think it happens all the time.

Mike

Book of interest* this week:

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

The following image is also a link: 

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

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

Edward Taylor: "This is exactly what happened to me. Back in the late '60s to early '70s I was a very successful photographer and made really good money too. I was in demand.

"But I noticed that the people who were in demand a few years earlier were the people I was replacing. I started to think it was just a question of time before I was no longer the 'go to' photographer. I felt a little like I was on a treadmill having to keep moving to stay relevant and knowing that I couldn't go on forever like that.

"One of those photographers that I replaced (at a newspaper) was particularly annoyed with my success and made that fact clear in a number of ways. One day he asked if I would get lunch with him. I thought he was going to apologize for his bad attitude and ask me what my secrets to success were. But he didn't. He wanted to warn me. I could sense that he actually wanted to be helpful, so I listened. He said that what he had learned during his years in photography was that photographers were like rock bands. The vast majority have limited lifespan. One-hit wonders at worst, or an album or two, and they are no longer relevant or able to sell their new stuff to anyone. He said, 'Few bands can be The Beatles, and few photographers can be Ansel Adams.' I had two kids at the time, so I made photography a hobby and went to med school."

scott kirkpatrick: "Bill Owens had a hit with Suburbia. It fell out of a job photographing for a South Bay newspaper (remember local newspapers?) He did one more book, but then started a chain of microbreweries, which was just as much fun and paid much better."

Ed. note: Here's the link to the reprint. The out-of-print reprint. A book that I wasn't attracted to when it came out, but that seems to get richer and deeper as the years go by.

Mike Chisholm: "When I first got seriously interested in photography, around 1984, after a decade or so just 'taking photos,' I fell in with a guy I happened to meet, Richard, who was simply the best, most painstaking darkroom worker I have ever known. His selenium toned prints on the old Agfa Record Rapid were truly outstanding: the blacks were so rich they looked edible. He won various competitions, and once exhibited alongside Fay Godwin. Then Rich simply seemed to fall out of love with photography. It may or may not be a coincidence that around that time he met and married a woman who was into more athletic outdoor pursuits, and the next thing I knew he was a dedicated windsurfer, and had sold off his cameras and darkroom kit to finance the new hobby. Last thing I heard, he had become a serious aquarium enthusiast. I have similar stories about, for example, Andrew, the hippie smallholder who became a skilled carpenter, moved to New Zealand, became a financier (!), took up photography, then painting, then [insert various other phases]. Last heard of leading groups in some intense Sufi-style dance meditation.... Luckily these people leave a trail of top-class used kit in their wake!"

Ken: "My wife was a successful photographer and made a decent living for about a decade and change. Eventually, she got burned out from a mix of the hassles of running a business and dealing with unreasonable customer demands; having to always be on top of your game at every shoot; the 'good enough' attitude that spread alongside iPhones; and, not least, the desire to have predictable hours and a steady paycheck with benefits. Plus, if someone isn't self-employed, they might be surprised at how many jurisdictions (municipal, city, county, state, federal, etc.) want to tax a slice of your earnings...add in insurance, advertising, gear, software, and equipment costs (e.g. lights), and it is not easy to make a living at photography. And that's before you even get to maintaining a website and keeping your skills up-to-date.

"My wife went back to school to get her master's degree and is now much happier—and rarely even picks up a camera anymore. Me, I've always been a hobbyist. Good enough to occasionally wow family and a few friends, and anonymous outside that small circle. And that is good enough. I enjoy shooting and looking back at pictures from the receding decades, and will keep doing that as long as I continue to enjoy it."

Bryan: "I remember (dimly) reading about the results of an interesting study a few years ago. It revolved around the consequences of paying someone for making, in this studies case, a nice painting. The study involved children (or teenagers?) but I don’t recall the actual ages. They tested three groups and in all three groups the children already liked painting pictures in class before the study began. With the first group, the researchers started paying the children for every painting. The second group got praise for every painting. The third group were basically left on their own. After a time period the researchers withheld payment and praise for the two groups getting both. In almost every case the children stopped painting when payment or praise ceased. The third group continued happily smearing paint on craft paper without a pause.

"Of course life is more complicated than the study suggests but we as artists aren’t that different from children, after all we are the same species. So perhaps this study may in part explain these disappearances over time."

Nigel Voak: "I suppose I fall squarely into to this category.

"A move to another country and language at the age of 28 gave me the opportunity to try to make photography my profession. I had been passionate about photography since my late teens.

"I managed, with luck, good contacts, and hard work, to make a go of it for a while. I worked mainly with one of Italy's leading opera houses and a leading national dance company. It was an enjoyable period of my life. I even had two or three exhibitions of my work and I was published at a national level.

"But slowly things changed. I was working in an area that depended on subsidies from the national and local government. Slowly public funding was reduced, which meant less work.

"At the same time I had learned the language well, and my skills as a structural engineer became interesting to employers. Family pressures to lead a 'normal life' were also mounting; performing arts photography means working strange hours. Also, I earned far more as an engineer.

"For ten years I combined my engineering job with photography, until seismic changes at the theatre where I mostly picked up photographic work saw me cast out. First the head of the press office was replaced, and the new chief brought in a 'big' local photographer who demanded exclusivity. Then, a month later, the artistic director of the dance company was ousted in favor of a more 'edgy' director. A change of photographer ensued and I lost this gig too, as a fresh photographic vision was required.

"I became totally disillusioned with photography, but also, if I am truthful with myself, I had reached the point where I felt I was going through the motions. I could produce a good competent set of pictures from any performing arts scenario without the tension and curiosity I once had. I suppose I had nothing more to say photographically. I think this might account for the fact that lots of people in the artistic professions shine for a while and then disappear. They just get bored with the whole thing.

"Photography has been a lifelong passion, but I just do it for my own pleasure now. It takes me to some interesting places and I have had some interesting encounters with people thanks to photography."

Sands of Time

I'm back from being away. I stayed in a lovely little seafaring town called Bristol on a peninsula in the tidal lowlands of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, a town my brother likes in the area where he lives. It was built up by the time of the Revolution (the British bombarded it, but bygones have become bygones), and it has many fine, and some grand, examples of Colonial architecture. It's a resort town now, with innumerable boats anchored in its many mooring fields.

To the South, Mount Hope Bridge, a grand suspension bridge lined with streetlamps, is a magnificent sight at dusk when the light from the streetlamps and the sky are in balance. And I can't believe I missed the Herreshoff Marine Museum. I would have loved to see that. Rats. (Herreshoff is like the Leica, or Rolex, or Stradivarius of sailboats.)

Purely by chance, I stayed in a house built long ago by a distant relative! I used the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey method of choosing lodgings, not being picky in any way, but I lucked into a beautiful little bed-and-breakfast in Bristol called William's Grant Inn [sic]—so-called because the first person who turned it into a B&B was aided by a grant from her uncle William. As the plaque on the front proclaims, the house was built in 1808 by a William Bradford—a fellow descendant of the Governor of Plymouth Colony, although not himself a direct ancestor of mine. The house was in the Bradford family for 150 years.

William's Grant Inn, Bristol. Note the house plaque.

The Inn is run by a couple, Liz and Doug Miller. It's a wonderful little place, loaded with historic charm. I was struck by the pure thoughtfulness of the place—it seems to me that the proprietors have a gift for putting themselves in their guests' places and finding ways to make their experience more pleasant. Some people don't like B&B's, but I like them. Tomorrow I'll tell you about one of the couples I met there, as they turned out to have a photography business of a kind I had never heard of (!). (That takes a little doing, right?)

The breakfasts were superb, and they even indulged my quirky food preferences. Not so hard as it turns out, in that their son's girlfriend has a burgeoning business called LivPrepared (her name being Liv). Liv and a legion of friends/employees cook up huge batches of gourmet vegan dishes from Thursday through Saturday evenings and then deliver a week's worth of food to customers all over Rhode Island on Sundays. Liv has so far developed more than four hundred recipes! And to think I'm still working on my first ten.

Liz and Doug. Can you tell I slipped into brochure/promo
mode here photographically, even though it was
just a single iPhone shot? Very good hosts.

Anyway if you happen to be looking for a characterful and comfortable place to stay in New England in a picturesque little seaside town, I recommend William's Grant Inn. It might be geographically remote—there are basically two main roads leading down the peninsula—one named for the son of the Massasoit—but at the same time it's within easy striking distance of Boston, Providence, Newport, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard. Please tell them The Online Photographer sent you. But no quid pro quo here—this is a pure endorsement, nothing more. I liked everything about the place. I feel like I made a discovery.

On Tuesday, my brother was being moved to inpatient hospice and I was left at loose ends, so I wandered around the town with an old camera. My mind was not on it nor my heart in it, but it was a comfort to resort to old habits. Being in need of company but having none, I struck up conversations with various locals. Below is the cheerful Mrs. Nenna, Kate, who was born in Bristol and taught high school math there for 42 years. Her customary companion at the Hope Diner was absent that day, so I became the willing stand-in at the next table over, and learned all about her life in Bristol and her long career. She was that rare thing, a big talker who is also a good listener. We energetically solved some of the problems of the world, and I confessed to her some of the ways I used to cheat in math class (I am not innumerate, but words were my thing, not numbers). She allowed as how she had seen it all. She said she had enjoyed every minute of her teaching career, and woke up every morning happy and enthusiastic and looking forward to each day. A very nice lady, who reminded me of some of my long-suffering but dauntless mathematics tutors of yore.

Mrs. Nenna

I'll let the story of Mrs. Nenna story stand for the others I talked to—the disgruntled antiques store owner who sells half his stuff on eBay but resents the Internet and regrets the changing times; the public works guy with the heavy local accent who helps keep the town clean and well-kept and was preparing to paint an old shore-defense cannon that is now a monument; and the woman with the unicorn on her porch. Actually I don't recall what she said she had on her porch, but it was something odd. A wizard, maybe? A fantasy character? I forget. She keeps a bin of local guidebooks on her porch that are free for the taking, and invited me to go by her house and take one. I somehow missed the house.

But, speaking of unicorns, I did stumble across this inscrutable house plaque with its enigmatic message. I thought it might be some kind of spoof, that "Eubulides" might be a made-up name—it sounds like it, doesn't it? But no—he was a Greek philosopher, a student of Euclid, famous for his paradoxes. His best-known one is the famous Liar (pseudomenos) paradox, "What I am saying now is a lie," of which the house plaque is a variant.

But the one I like best is his Heap paradox. Here's how Wikipedia describes it: "A single grain of sand is certainly not a heap. Nor is the addition of a single grain of sand enough to transform a non-heap into a heap: when we have a collection of grains of sand that is not a heap, then adding but one single grain will not create a heap. And yet we know that at some point we will have a heap." Seems a sturdy basis for the metaphor "the sands of time." Isn't it the way the days, the months, the years go by?

I got to see my brother three times. By the third visit he was having difficulty speaking. Thursday morning I saw him for an hour and a half, alone together in the room at the hospice, as he drifted in and out. Cachexia has wasted him away. He tried to crack jokes, but apart from a few words he couldn't muster enough breath to make his voice sound. But I could tell what he was up to from his so-very-familiar smile. He has a quiet but quicksilver wit, incisive but never mean, so it was easy to imagine the quips in his head were good ones and would have made me laugh.

He asked me to put my weight on his hands and with great effort he levered himself up into a half-sitting position so he could clear his airway...so I asked him if he was about to do a thousand sit-ups. It made him smile. When he was little, maybe eight or nine, he read in a Richie Rich comic book that Richie's butler, Cadbury, did a thousand situps, so Scott resolved to do it too. I tried to explain that it was an exaggeration for comedic effect—I'm five years older—but he said, "no, I'll do it." He did more than 350 on the first try. It took him a few weeks to work up to it, with me helping by holding his feet down for what seemed like hours, but with characteristic tenacity he accomplished it. His life has been like that, in some ways; he was a delinquent student in high school, barely squeaking into his first college and then flunking out, but he ended up with a Masters from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Columbia. Despite the disparity in our ages we were great companions throughout our growing-up years, always playing tennis, board games, basketball, ping-pong, pool, backgammon, foosball, or something, with him beating me more often than not. He was much the better athlete, more canny, more coordinated, more competitive. And I didn't know when we were young that the kid playing head games with me at the pool table was a future psychologist! We had many talks sitting on opposite sides of a room lazily throwing a Koosh ball back and forth, the game being to make it brush the ceiling without changing its arc. We have never been out of touch. I have never had a better friend.

Frustrated by his inability to communicate, he gestured for a pen, and with great effort he scrawled, "just to hold hands." So I held his hand, and he drifted off to sleep for a while. A while later, I had to do what I had come to Rhode Island to do, say goodbye.

Mike

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

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Michael Perini: "Very sorry to hear this news. Saying goodbye to a brother is a most difficult thing. In my case he was my older brother. That was 20 years ago, and to this day, when something interesting happens my brain still wants to call him.... At first it made me sad; now, I just warmly miss him. Peace be with you."

Mike replies: "Warmly miss him." I'm going to remember those words. I look forward to that time. Thank you for that. And, very sorry for your loss, too.

RubyT: "My best friend lost her sister and said the loss was also the loss of the peer witness to her childhood. My deepest condolences."

Mike replies: That's such an interesting thing, isn't it? I would say the loss is of a sympathetic peer witness to your childhood...someone who really understood you and liked you. Scott is a very sympathetic witness for me—he is the peer (he might say "littermate"!) who knows me best—but I have had a peer or two who acquired a negative or judgemental conception of me and in their cases I was actually rather relieved to have the friendship dissipate. Those could be called "unsympathetic peer witnesses." They can sort of oppress you by reminding you of past shortcomings or failures, or by expecting future shortcomings or failures. You can feel trapped in their unsympathetic conceptions. I suppose it's why some people divorce. On the other hand, the sympathetic peer witnesses grow more precious as the years go by and they become more and more irreplaceable.

And by the way, Scott was so wise about subjects like this...I encouraged him several times to put some of his wisdom into a book but he didn't have that interest. As a psychologist he was a gifted and insightful couples counselor and very good at helping people set their lives aright again when they had gone off track. If I had to describe him in two words, the words would be wise and compassionate. I was able to tell him that a few days ago, and he said "I like that."

Martin D: "Thinking of you and your brother Scott, Mike. What you tell us is so sad and also so life-affirming. It is good that you could make that trip and say farewell. It makes such a difference. Loss is terrible regardless. I am thinking of you."

Mike replies: Thanks Martin, and a heartfelt thanks to everyone for the condolences. It helps.

Lists Are Impossible

So (as you might imagine) I've gotten interested in some of the many things people said yesterday about lists, and I've been thinking more about my little off-the-cuff "20 Greatest Male Guitarists" list from yesterday.

Grant said "perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists if you just made a list of things that you like about lists." A good joke, but actually it made me feel tempted to do just that!

I won't, though. Too much work.

False hierarchy and other headaches
Thinking about it more, if I were really making a list of notable guitarists, I think it would have to include about 50 people. Twenty is just the wrong number. Too limited.

These things suggest the scale they need...for instance, I think a list of the Greatest NBA Basketball Players of All Time should be a group of about 15. That's the point at which I start to be comfortable leaving people out. With only 20 guitarists, there are musicians not mentioned who we're simply not comfortable leaving out.

A list of 50 would naturally include female guitarists. (And then, not only could I have Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, I could at least try to finagle a place for Ana Vidović.)

In fact it would have room for representing many things that people mentioned and that need to be represented, such as: a historical figure from before the age of recording; pure virtuosos like Guthrie Govan whose playing is purely about dexterity and speed; and at least one token studio musician. You might consider "token" to be a pejorative, but in fact it's a highly useful concept to a listmaker. In a list of 50, many people could be tokens—each of them representing whole genres, periods, instruments, regions, or styles and approaches that really should be represented. Of course this is only useful if every list item is discussed.

Next, it would be much better if it wasn't titled "Greatest" or "Best." That makes it instantly about status, which opens a Pandora's box. Humans love competition, and our attention is instantly engaged when we make anything into a contest. But art isn't really a contest, cutting contests and "battles of the bands" notwithstanding. So I'd be much more comfortable with a title like "50 Fascinating Guitarists," or "50 Guitarists You Should Know." That takes away not only the Greatest/Best aspect, but also the false-hierarchy aspect, avoiding the absurdity of a list on which the person ranked at number 12, say, is implied to be "better" than the person in the 13th position, which is nothing but false precision.

This is the reason I put my list yesterday in order of birth year: it was a way to abolish ranking.

Balance imbalances
Of course then I ran into another problem...I had inadvertently highlighted the fact that many people considered "great guitarists" were born in the 1940s. Which in turn led me to include Kurt Cobain because I realized late in the process that I needed at least one person born in the 1960s.

This is the "balance" problem you run into in any such list. Balance problems open lists to criticism based on ideas of inclusiveness—as when, for example, Victor Bloomfield criticized my list for not including enough classical guitarists (my list only had one, as a token). And didn't somebody mention that I had shortchanged Spanish and Portuguese guitarists?

You might think there are only a limited number of inclusiveness factors to balance, and that therefore it should be possible to consider all of them, but actually there is an unlimited supply. It all depends on which criteria you highlight. What if a list didn't have a single Latinx guitarist? Or a single left-handed guitarist—what are you, biased toward righties? Or a single blind guitarist—don't you know that there are a number of famous blind guitarists, such as José Feliciano, Jeff Healey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson (whose first name, by the way, really was Lemon)? This "balance problem" goes on and on. No matter how the listmaker struggles for balance, there are still going to be openings for criticism to sneak in.

In this case, I highlighted year of birth, which in turn obligated me to make sure not too many of the guitarists I mentioned were people born in the '40s. Many of the musicians who were most active in the peak decades of "classic rock," the '60s and '70s, were naturally born in the '40s. But as I (and, ahem, several critics) mentioned, my attempt at balance in that regard ended up distorting my list, because I made a stab at balance by going out of my way to find a guitarist born in the '60s. You might call this "overbalancing"...bending too far over backwards to preserve an appearance of fairness.

It's related to quotas, as in, "on a list of 50, at least ten must be women, 20 must be acoustic guitarists, and at least one must have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads."

Impossible
Reader robert e said it nicely: "I think lists are most useful for one's own delectation and education, and possibly to fuel edifying geeky debate if they're not taken too seriously. They're also decent starting points to get into a new topic, again as long as they're not taken too seriously."

That's getting into "a list of the reasons we like lists," and it's a nice starting point. For me, listmaking is a way of engaging with a subject, a reason to get into the kind of research I enjoy doing, which in turn helps me learn. Mostly, I suppose, it's just a way of focusing on something I want to focus on. I do get a bit "obsessive" sometimes. I had fun on Saturday night listening to dozens of guitarists.

Probably the most important thing Robert said, he said twice: don't take it too seriously! That's crucial. Only if a list can stay lighthearted, flexible, and fun does it serve its real functions, which are and ought to be modest.

Finally, Zyni Moë put it succintly (she said it twice too): "lists are impossible."

As the characters in The Wire all say, "true dat."

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Good enough to be matched with Sony's best.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

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It's Nice to be Normal

Have you ever wished you had been better at documenting your own life with photographs? For instance, not counting separate dorms in college, I've lived 18 places in my life, in 14 cities and 10 States. (Just one country, though). At this point it would be interesting to me to have pictures of all those places. But, nope. 

I have two impediments in my life as far as aptitudes go. One is that I'm deficient in organizational skills. The other is that I'm lazy.

As I've gotten older, I understand increasingly how much working hard is a prerequisite to success in anything. One reason I decided to become a photographer is that I found myself working hard at it. Even in my 20s I already knew that I had a laziness problem, so picking a field in which I could work hard didn't seem like a bad idea. (The other reason I picked photography was that it didn't involve computers. We all know how well that worked out.)

Laziness is in part pathological, I believe. I've suffered on and off from depression for most of my life, and I've been impressed by the degree to which episodes of depression can sap away the impulse to keep up. It robs you of motivation. I remember times when small, ordinary normal tasks simply seemed insurmountable. They took energy I didn't have.

Not recognizing this? Those of you with plentiful amounts of energy are probably feeling a little incredulous here (and I hope not too judgemental). Instead, you should be grateful—just having normal energy is a great blessing. Having abundant energy is a key life advantage. It's curious that those who are blessed with it often prefer to denigrate those who don't, rather than being thankful for what they themselves have.

Of course, disparities in energy level can lead to relational problems sometimes. I read not long ago that George, John and Ringo would be sitting around chilling, and the phone would ring, and they all knew it would be Paul, nagging them to come down to the studio and get to work. Whoever it was telling the story—I think it was Ringo—said something like, "you just knew it was Paul—somehow we could all tell his ring."

Twenty seconds to spare
I'm more normal now, and boy do I ever appreciate it. I really do; I appreciate it every day. I get up in the morning; I keep the dishes done. Every household item I use regularly from dog food to razor blades has a backup waiting; I don't run out of things any more. I haven't suffered from debilitating depression for years. I'm definitely in the normal range of the spectrum now, although not on the high-functioning end of normal, I'll admit. It's wonderful, though.

One change is my approach to time management. Decades ago I used to be oppressed by the feeling that I never had enough time to do anything, so why try? That's characteristic of depressives. Now I'm much more likely to think, let's see, I have X amount of time—what can I get done in that time? If I have four minutes to wait for the tea to brew, I'll think, that's enough time to empty the dishwasher. Sometimes I'll even find something to do when I have an extra twenty seconds to wait. This is relatively new for me. Things get done. It's a better way to live.

Something else that helps me is to think of how little time a task takes. When you're oppressed by depression, little tasks seem insurmountable. But the opposite mindset works for me too, come to find out. Now I'm much more likely to think, "it only takes X minutes, and that's nothing, so just do it." It helps a lot to think consciously of how little time various tasks take. And instead of feeling overwhelmed by bigger tasks, I'm much more likely now to think, "just get started." Do a little.

If you suffer from low motivation, the other helpful suggestion I can make is to pay special attention to the first hour of every day. I start every morning with a prayer (as suggested by my 12-step program), and I always try to get something done first thing. It sets the tone for the day. If I'm lazy for my first hour awake, the rest of the day will usually follow in suit, so I try to avoid that.

Coupled
Organizational ability is a more interesting subject. It's curious that many people don't understand that's it's a skill, an aptitude. It's been my observation that people who have it are just as apt to criticize themselves for it as value themselves for it. They call themselves obsessional or neurotic or words like that, perhaps because they recognize that there's a compulsive aspect to being organized. But organizational ability is a spectrum, and the other end of it can be a challenge. Living an excessively simple life is one way to cope with very low organizational ability; surprisingly, joining the army or a religious cult is another coping strategy. Ordinary everyday decisions are too much for some people. It helps if there's a charismatic leader making all their decisions for them or an organizational structure telling them what clothes to put on in the morning.

It's also a good reason why people who are coupled feel less stress—there's real truth to the old expression "two heads are better than one." It's easier to make decisions when you work on them jointly, and it's easier to motivate yourself to do something for yourself and another person than it is to do it for yourself alone. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say they find it easier to cook for others than to cook just for themselves, for example.

As far as being organized is concerned, I think I'm a little out of the normal range on the low end. It can be really hard for me to do things other people take for granted. I don't need to be told how to dress myself, but I can't keep a calendar even when I really try, and this week I missed two medical appointments on successive days (augh), which makes me ashamed. 

I think my organizing deficiency is why I've never written books. It's too hard for me to organize large amounts of material. My attempts to write novels have been unintentionally comical, because I wander so much that the story line literally gets lost. Organized people will say, in clipped tones, "just write an outline." Without realizing that to write an outline you need to be good at organizing! I am spectacularly, appallingly bad at writing outlines. I'm honestly not sure I've ever successfully done it one single time in my entire life. Maybe a rudimentary one as a schoolboy exercise, but that would be it.

I've always thought that I could be part of a book-writing team, however. There are examples in history, and screenwriters and songwriters do it. I'm great at wordplay and I love to rewrite and polish, which many writers don't enjoy. I'm good at subtler details like characterization and motivation and I like to add poetry and portent. But the other person in the duo would have to start the ball rolling with a twenty-page discursive precis of the story from soup to nuts. Without those bones, I'd build a jellyfish. I've considered writing an autobiography, not because I feel my life is worth anyone's especial attention, but simply because that would solve the writerly problem of what comes next.

Lucky
Does it sound accurate to you if I were to claim that being organized and having a high level of energy are two things that are essential to success as a photographer? At least to a professional. Although, sometimes, a professional photography business is a mom-and-pop shop—one person handles the business and scheduling, the nuts and bolts, the other does the creative work and keeps up with the photo-technical stuff.

In any event, if you are highly organized, I encourage you not to be scornful of people like me who aren't. You don't need to pity me, either—everyone has their cross to bear. (Hey, I got through this post, didn't I? That's something.) Rather, be grateful for your own gifts. You're lucky.

Even if I had taken pictures of all the places I've lived in my life, it wouldn't matter, because I wouldn't be able to find them anyway.  :-)

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Eyes Over the World: The Most Spectacular Drone Photography, by Dirk Dallas. The above link will take you to Amazon.

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

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Paul Van: "I can relate. I have several projects on the go, and it can be difficult to keep at them. So, I follow advice you have given here: touch it every day. It has helped me keep going. While my pace may seem intolerably slow to some, work continues. (I am scanning family photographs, going back to my great-grandfather.)

"However the slow pace does allow me to travel down some rabbit holes. Specifically, family history and genealogy. I'm four years into that particular project, and have managed to connect with cousins I didn't know I had in Western Canada and in France. I have no idea where the next steps will take me, but look forward to wherever it leads me. And yes, this has been a challenge to my energy levels and organizational skills. So far, I think I'm winning."

Mike replies: That "touch it every day" advice comes from Joni B. Cole, in her book about writing.

Hil: "The outline remark cracked me up. My head does not work that way at all. But all through school, you had to write one as a good chunk of the grade. So I had to write the report, assignment, whatever, first, and then from that the outline. Same with rough drafts. The good thing is that it forced me to write early, so I could do the earlier stuff later. Always on time."

John Camp (partial comment): "I've written (I think) 54 novels since 1990, which takes a degree of organization and persistence, but my office looks like a windstorm blew through it. I'm often astonished by the things I find on my desk. I recently discovered my chrome Lumix GX8 there; I wondered where it went. I have another (black) GX8 and had been using that exclusively, only vaguely curious about where its near-twin had gone—I knew it would turn up sooner or later. So I really think it's possible to be organized in some things, disorganized in others."

Mike replies: True dat. When I was in photo school, I decided that school would be my oasis of organized calm in the chaos of my life. I kept everything down at school neat and orderly. My school friends were always amazed when they got a glimpse of the real Mike and discovered I wasn't a neat freak.

Terry Burnes (partial comment): "I have thousands of slides from days gone by, mostly mediocre shots of scenery on various vacations. But in among those are pictures of our family and friends. My wife and I have been talking for years now about sitting down and viewing those slides, discarding as we go, to get down to just the ones that have meaning for us now and to leave the whole collection in better shape for our son, who certainly won't care about the discards but might about the slides of people. You've inspired me to get out the projector and set up the screen and get started."

Mike replies: Might I make a suggestion? Making the decision to discard is often too big a decision. I would guess that that strategy would lead to either keeping too many slides or throwing away ones you'll regret losing. Rather than working by discarding, I would approach the task by making selects. Just pluck out the best, most meaningful slides and take a stab at labeling them somehow.

If you want to, do a "1-2-3" with the selects—1 being absolute best, 2 being the probables, and 3 being the maybes. Just set aside all the rest. That will make it easy for your son to know which ones really meant the most to you and his mom, and he won't have to agonize about all the others, but you won't be tempted to "keep" too many slides or risk discarding ones you'll regret losing. 

If you really want to destroy the rejects, wait about a year, make a final pass through all the rejects to rescue anything you think you might miss, and toss the lot away at that time, en masse. Much easier to deal with the loss that way than one at a time.

Something Larry McMurtry said about book collections: culling is hard but makes the collection better.

Ken Bennett: "Interesting essay, Mike, and thanks for writing it. I think I agree that the successful photographers I know (including myself) are both well organized and incredibly driven. Of course, that is often limited to photography, and not the rest of life. It's only in the last few years that I have been more organized in my personal life.

"The best part of Army service for me was the uniform. Get up, put on the uniform, done. No decisions to make. I carried that over to my work life—I wear khakis and a university polo shirt almost every day at work (or a black suit for formal events.) Off work I wear khakis and a black t-shirt. Makes life (and shopping!) easier."

Mike replies: I did something similar in my 20s when I lived in downtown D.C. in a tiny walk-up. I had a terrible time keeping the dishes done, so I got rid of everything I could—kept only a couple of pots and pans and two place settings. It was little enough that I could easily wash part or all of it at any time. It helped me keep the kitchen clean.

Artur: "Mike, thank you for this post. Ironically, I had to read a photo blog with the help of a translator to reassure myself that I also have similar ailments that probably do not delete me as a human being. The consequence of these drawbacks is, for example, that I have never learned the English language and I also write these words using a translator. For me, the best way to get depressed, i.e. to get out of bed on a day off and do something, is even a small photographic trip. As I understand you very well, I wish you peace and good thoughts! Best regards, Artur from Poland."

Mike relies: Dziękuję za przeczytanie Artur! Odbyło się to również z pomocą tłumacza.

Kurt Kramer: "Mike, Thanks for writing this very personal essay. I empathize totally, almost exactly sharing the foibles you wrote about. The inability, the laziness that come with feeling low can lead to self-recriminations that make one go even lower. We are not afflicted to the level that we can’t get through life, but there’s not much joie de vivre. Nice to know I am not alone in this. Now, out to make some good photos tomorrow morning!"

Jim Couch: "This really hit home today. As a fellow depressive I can fully relate. A lot of good practical advice here. THANK YOU!"

Mike replies: Thanks for saying so. After I posted this I felt bad about it—like maybe it was one people wouldn't like. I was relieved to come back later and find positive comments like yours.

Ilkka: "Very good story and good advice. I have found that breaking big projects into smaller tasks greatly helps me into getting them done.

"I have done a book. I treated it like painting a house. I could never paint a house if I think of all the walls inside and outside and ceilings as well. Too many. Impossible. And too expensive to hire an outsider to do it. So I don’t paint the house. I just paint this wall, or this small room. That’s my target, nothing else. Then I get it done. And start planning for the next room. Same way I did a book. One chapter at a time."

Picture o' the Day

I'll just link to it, not knowing if I can republish it here....

Picture of the Day today

Gazing at this made me quite thoughtful. I used to be a freelancer in Washington D.C., and went everywhere in the city in my ratty little Mazda on a tremendous motley of assignments of all sorts, and I've photographed both inside and outside that temple on numerous occasions. It was the location of one of my biggest embarrassments as a photographer (ran out of battery power at the exact wrong moment in a Senate hearing room) and, on a separate occasion, of one of the only times I've been stopped by the police in the process of taking a picture. Of course it has deep meaning to me as an American citizen as well.

I find I'm quite deeply angry about what happened on the 6th. I might express that in written words eventually, but not here.

Thanks to Dave Sailer for mentioning that website in a comment.

Mike

UPDATE Friday evening: Thanks to V.I. Voltz for finding the link again after it temporarily went missing.

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

Book of interest this week:

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Edited by Sasha Wolf
(clicking on the link above takes you to Amazon)

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Open Mike: David and Goliath

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike replies: Good question!

Look Hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, we get to look.

Mike

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

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

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Question....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Steve R.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...And Six Things I Did Right!

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But hey, better late than never.  :-)

Mike

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

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

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

Do-Over

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike + Video = ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Photo by Marshall Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picturehunting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the theory, anyway.

Okay, I'm starting to feel better now!

Mike

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

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

Learning and Looking

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

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

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

Helps to know yourself!

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

Maybe three parts writer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know thyself.

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on the State of Photography

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

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

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

• Almost all photographs are color now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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