The Online Photographer

Sunday Support Group: Music at a Higher Level (Off-Topic) (Music Notes)

We look where we can for consolations in isolation: reading or looking at books, projects like organizing and printing our photographs—and of course, music.

Just wanted to register how very happy I am that Robert Pillow mentioned Amazon Music HD (AMHD) in the comments section the other day (see the Featured Comments to the "No More Vintage Audio" post). I'm sure various mentions of it had flown like darting swallows through my field of view since it came on the scene, but none had penetrated my consciousness until Robert mentioned it. Anyway, I signed up for the free trial and and have been happily listening to CD-quality and higher res files since.

I'll note that implementation matters more than format with recorded music—I'd rather listen to a well-recorded and transferred CD-quality file from a 1940s original (check out the Lester Young playlist, for example, which I had to listen to all the way through before turning in last night) than a poorly recorded, compressed modern file at 24 bits/96 kHz, the highest resolution my aging (but lovely) DAC will decode*. AMHD goes all the way to 24/192**.

If you don't know what those numbers mean, there's a very good explanation of the basics of digital audio from Mark Furneaux. He originally recorded it for a particular friend, but later published it for everyone. As you may know, I think that targeting content as though you're doing it for a friend is an effective stance for presenting information and opinion.  :-)

Note also that there are various ways to stream AMHD to an existing stereo system without it coming directly from your computer, but in all such cases I can decipher, it downrezzes the files to CD-quality 16 bits/44.1 kHz. Although Amazon calls CD-quality "HD," for high-definition, because no other streaming services have it for all their offerings, most other humans call higher-than-CD-quality files "HD," and you give up those high-res capabilities if you use Bluetooth or something like the Echo Link.

However, just replacing MP3 and MP4 with 16/44.1 in my desktop system makes a decisive upgrade—I re-sorted my system and reset the sub, and have been enjoying music even more than usual in recent days. One discovery: Rejoice, the swan song of the late South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekala and the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Fela Kuti's former music director. A lovely tribute to the two friends and a superbly good-sounding recording too.

Amazon says AMHD has over 60 million cuts in CD-quality 16/44.1, and millions more in higher resolutions and bit depths. The cost is $12.99/month for Prime members or $14.99/month for Amazon customers. Existing Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers (Individual or Family Plan) can upgrade to Amazon Music HD for an additional $5/month. I can't quite suss this out, but I believe the AMHD trial period is 30 days if you're already an Amazon Music subscriber and 90 days if you're new to Amazon Music altogether. Go to this page and be sure to click "Learn More" to explicitly see the duration of the free trial period you're going to get.

My lifetime fave classic-rock musician, despite being the quintessential hippie and an old folkie, is also an outspoken champion of high-resolution audio***. Neil Young says this of Amazon Music HD: "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."

Good by me. Highly recommended! Try it for yourself.

Mike

*There are better DACs for less nowadays. Again, I try not to recommend things I haven't actually heard, but you might want to investigate the Topping brand.

**There's a strong strain of "you can't hear a difference" people in hi-fi—all amplifiers sound the same, all wires sound the same, loudspeakers are identical as long as their response curves are flat, etc.—and not only can they not hear a difference between Redbook CD resolution and anything higher, but they say, with the conviction available to True Believers, that no human can. I say those folks are damn lucky, because they can buy any old amp and any old wires, and also, please shut up. [Edited later to: ...please have more tolerance for people who don't share your beliefs.]

***He even launched his own crowdfunded high-res streaming service, Pono, in 2015, but had to pull the plug on it in 2017.

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Sunday Support Group: Catastrophizing

"Catastrophizing" is the tendency to make a catastrophe out of any eventuality. I have that tendency.

In the time of COVID-19, it's surely bedeviling people everywhere. A correspondent from Italy said the virus is like a sniper. What if it draws a bead on you? What if a loved one falls under the crosshairs—worst possibility of all, one's child?

They say "worry is wasted emotion." You're spending energy fretting about something that hasn't happened yet, and might not! So what's the point of all that worry if the thing you're worried about never comes to pass? You've bathed your brain in stress 'n' strain over naught.

Catastrophizing in its elemental form is embodied for me in old New Yorker cartoons. The New Yorker will turn 100 in 2025, and was old when I was young. When I used to go visit my grandparents, in their elegant 1920s French Provincial mansion in Indianapolis, I would sleep in "the office," a charming and protected corner room which was apparently never otherwise used. Maids changed the sheets every night, and there was a mother-of-pearl button on the wall by the bed in case you needed to call a servant in the night. For the amusement of potential guests such as my wee self there were several bound volumes of old New Yorker cartoons on the nightstand, and as an inveterate reader of comic books I read them all several times over. One trope that recurred was the bearded and long-haired crazy fellow dressed in flowing Biblical-style robes standing on the busy city street corner holding a sign that said, "THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END."

Catastrophizing!

Chicken Little is another paragon, of course. A scant page and a half long, and overly repetitive even so, it's a horrifying little tale about murder most fowl, and bears rereading. At four my eyes widened when poor Henny Penny's squawks and feathers came from the fox-hole. Awful.

Mind control
Catastrophizing is the perfervid, even fevered belief that something is worse than it really is. Empirically, we must admit that humans are remarkably poor at predicting the future; so why do we believe we know in advance how things will end? On the other hand, humans also have their heads in the sand, and sometimes realists simply more clearly see the truth. For instance, with those New Yorker prophets of doom, the old men in robes on the streetcorners with the placards, even my pre-teen self had the wit to think, well, of course the world is coming to an end for you—you're old and you're gonna croak. What's the point in worrying? The world ends for us all, save maybe for one wandering Nazarene rabbi two thousand years ago. Although there are rationalist skeptics of that account too.

I can't claim to have enough control of my thoughts to not worry when worrying things happen to me. But one of my antidotes to my catastrophizing tendency is to think of Stefan Zweig. The most translated writer in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, born to great wealth, he shifted himself hither and yon as if he never felt quite...safe. "A friend once remarked that, no matter where you met Zweig, his manner suggested a half-packed suitcase in the next room," writes Leo Carey (in, well, The New Yorker).

Stefan Zweig (standing) in 1900

Despite having escaped Hitler, despite fame and fortune and a beautiful young wife, Zweig was so shaken by Hitler's evil and so beset with anxiety at the carnage rampant in Europe and the world in 1942 that he ate poison in that year, taking his beautiful younger wife with him—and so, in effect, played the fox to his own Henny Penny (you might call Nietzsche his Chicken Little). One writer (I can't find the citation) noted that by the act of his final decampment, Zweig deprived himself of the opportunity to witness Hitler's downfall and death and the slow restoration of Europe to a state of orderliness and normalcy. It was a catastrophe, absolutely. But things pass. Zweig last saw the world when all was upended, and he could have lived to see things put right again, his Nietzschean fears allayed.

CATastrophizing—get it?
When I was in my early twenties, I lived on a horse farm in Vermont, and aside from helping with riding lessons and trail rides and writing short stories for hours on end, I had little to do. The tenant of the farm (her father owned it, but I never saw him with my own eyes) had five cats, one of which was a gentle and superbly athletic short-haired grey female called Tweedles. She was the Simone Biles of cats—capable of astounding feats of agility. She was easily three times as adroit as Coach, her boon companion, a scruffy amber tabby male. We devised a game together, Tweedles and I, that involved a large cardboard box that was open at the top. I'd put her in the box, and wiggle a finger over the edge or through a hole in the box; she would leap or pounce at my wiggling finger, and I would withdraw it just in time. Or not; sometimes I wasn't quite quick enough.

Some time after that, I discovered a large lump under my armpit. My mind immediately leapt to one word—cancer!—a word which was even more of a death sentence then than it is now. Set my heart to thumping. Convictions of catastrophe flooded my brain. I was so convinced I had cancer that I glumly refused to go see the doctor for a week. What was the use? During that week I stewed in my own doom, certain I was soon to die. Finally, though, I did go to the doctor, who scoffed at my worries and diagnosed something called "cat scratch fever"—a swollen lymph node caused by all the tiny wounds inflicted by Tweedles with her lightning quickness. He told me to put a hot washcloth under my arm three times a day and stop playing with the cat.

I did not, on that occasion, perish. But I can still conjure the needless feeling of dread, and the great but pointless grief over my imminent loss of the whole world, that I inflicted on myself during that week.

And I still struggle with my tendency to assume things are worse than they are. We joust, my worries and I, and sometimes, like recently, it gets the upper hand. But then sometimes I do. I'm making progress. I see the tendency now as merely a character defect, a habit of mind I should shed.

Try not to worry until you know you need to. It's a tall order, but a worthy goal.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

JimF: "Don't watch, listen to, or read any news. Their business seems to be catastrophizing everything."

Mike replies: Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I'm quite sure our attitude used to be exactly the opposite of what it is today. To name a trivial example, I distinctly remember when I was a kid in that we took snowstorms in stride and only grudgingly closed schools. A really big snowstorm, like a foot or more, could close things down, but not for very long, and, to your point, nobody made a big deal of it. Decades later, if a weather system is coming, the news will work everyone into a froth of dread and alarm over it...and then we'll get six inches, or sometimes three. I saw this happen more than a few times.

Sunday Support Group: Anybody Wanna Play a Game? (OT)

Hope Friday's second post didn't strike too many people as over the, er, "top." It's true that I'm a health food nut. I have become one. I admit it. But that's only because I feel so damn good. I feel great. I can't get over it. I was experiencing not one but a number of sundry deteriorations of mind and body that I simply assumed were the inevitable consequence of aging, and thus utterly unavoidable, and they have simply been lifted. Got up and got gone. I can't get over it. It's wonderful. There are two things of which I've become convinced: one is that my body needs a complex variety of phytochemicals in order to maintain itself in good fettle, and the second is that I need to give my body a good solid consistent break from eating on a regular basis. I quit drinking and I quit smoking, and both those things were probably very good for my health, but trying out early time-restricted eating is the best diet-related thing I've ever done for my health. I knew it on about Day 2, and today is Day 123. I love it and I'm sticking with it for the rest of my life.

I'll go into this further when I do that diet-related post I promised in May or June. Meanwhile, if I get a little evangelical on this topic once in a while, I hope you'll smile and be tolerant.

All Capture One all the time?!
Second thing...I'll try not to become a "nut" about Capture One. That's one problem with photography as it's practiced these days—you can get way into your camera or your processing program or your printing strategies, and all those things can be deeply interesting to you as well as to other people who...use the same camera or the same editing program or the same printer you do. But all of those subjects become deadly dull to people who don't use the same stuff. Who wants to read twenty detailed posts about ON1 or DxO—or oh, yes, right, Capture One—if they've never tried those programs and have no intention to?

This, at least, was something that was better back in the days of film! Heh heh (jus' tweakin' your tails, digital babies). But you know what I mean. When I got on CompuServe in 1991 or so, there were no brand-specific forums. We weren't segregated like that. Canon and Nikon and Pentax and Olympus and Minolta and Contax people mingled about on the same sub-forums together (gasp!) and talked about this or that or the other thing and it didn't matter which camera anybody used. Get into a discussion about a different film, and all anybody had to do to get on board with you was just buy a couple of rolls of it. Most of us had tried many films and could talk about it and identify with them and had a least a little experience to share. These days, you can't exactly just jump over and try out somebody else's whole camera system/post-processing/printing setup on a whim or a lark, or just for camaraderie. It's like asking somebody to learn a different language so they can chat with you for twenty minutes. Anyway, suffice it to say I'm enjoying learning Capture One. But I'm not going to drone on and on about it like an anti-smoking crusader—or, you know, like one o' them vegetarians.

Idle daydreams
Switching topics to sports (because Sunday used to be a pretty big sports day in the week, and will be again someday), just curious. You know how every now and then a person comes along whose skills in some particular sport or game are on a different level, almost...otherworldly? The ones who are sometimes referred to as "transcendent." There's a kind of glory and wonder in that when it comes around. It's like that person was born to play that game, or like the sport was invented for the player. Here in the States a good example was Michael Jordan in basketball. All possibilities came together in him and his game. I understand Pelé had that reputation in Brazilian soccer. Michael Schumacher or Tazio Nuvolari behind the wheel of a race car. Babe Ruth with a bat. Roger Federer. I had a relative who was so good at regatta sailing that you'd see a race that was half over and there would be a big clump of boats all more or less together, with a few straggling behind to various degrees. And then you'd see Cam, all alone, way, way out in front of everybody. Not five boat lengths—more like thirty. He just knew how to get more speed out of a boat than almost anybody he competed against.

I know this is the kind of question you talk about when you're at a slow keg party in college and half-drunk, but purely for the fun of it let me ask: if you could have—or could have had, in your prime—the talent and skill of any one athlete or sportsman or gamesman, whose skills would you like to have had? I don't mean you'd have to "be" them—you'd still be you, you'd just have their skills and abilities. If you're feeling like it, maybe tell us why, too. It's a sunny lazy Sunday. Anybody wanna play?

Either way, happy Sunday. May you walk through today with a light step and a cheerful heart.

Mike

ADDENDUM Monday morning: What inspired this question was watching the German youngster (he's 22) Joshua Filler play. He still has some maturing to do as a player, but, watching, I just thought, what I wouldn't give to have had that much talent at pool.

Although he's the world number 2 at the moment and has been number 1, he's not the most transcendent cue sports player active now—that honor goes to this guy—but you can't want to be Ronnie; that would border on the sacrilegious, somehow. There's only one Ronnie.

I know this is a minority choice! But pool's my sport (or game, as you will). I've missed it during the lockdown.

Regarding the post, I was surprised how many people picked surfing as the thing they'd most like to be good at. Didn't see that wave coming!

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

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DavidB: "Gerry Lopez at pipeline."

Mike replies: See, I knew this would be an interesting topic. Never heard of Gerry Lopez, and I would never have thought of pipeline in a year. (Didn't even know what you meant by it if I'm honest! I thought first of snowboarding.) But I found this—photographer Jeff Divine talking about his famous photo of Gerry Lopez. Notice how much he talks about surfing and the occasion and how little about gear and the shot.

Curt Gerston (partial comment): "For me, Lionel Messi. I grew up playing in the soccer-mad city of Seattle, long before Messi was even born, but when I watch him play now I have crazy sense memory of how to move on the field, the ways I’d use my feet. I literally can’t sit still on the couch when he has the ball; it’s like I have to move a little with him. I was of course no Messi, but somehow his game is my game, just times 100. So yeah, I wish I could’ve somehow found a way to be that good."

Mike replies: Watched a highlight reel of Messi and yup, he's the type I meant, for sure.

Do you think it's the case that we need to have played the sport ourselves to fully appreciate and identify with what we're watching? I swear I get some kind of endorphin headrush when I watch Jayson Shaw play one of his bold and perfect position shots. I always react like, 'watch it, that's trouble!' and then I get this sense of release when the cue ball rolls right up to where he would have placed it with his hand. You're right that it's a physical sensation as much as just observing.

Curt: "It’s a great question. I can certainly appreciate the athleticism of a gymnast or hockey player, even while never having done either. But watching soccer and basketball, games I’ve played all my life, is a much more visceral experience, and I do feel I can appreciate the greatness of some of those players at a different level. I can just 'feel' it."

Mike: With tennis and golf I think I'd make an even bolder claim, which is that in some cases I've done it. I've only made about three really great golf shots in my life, and yes, they might have been largely flukes, and top pros play that way all the time, but of course I vividly remember playing those great shots. Same in tennis—I might have ripped a backhand down the line on a dead run only a few times in my life, and Rafa might do it a few times in a match, but I do know how it feels. I know I've made fantastic pool shots perfectly worthy of my heroes. I just don't do it nearly as often as they do, or under the same pressure, or on the difficult tables they play on. But I have the "sense memory." In fact I half think that's what keeps people coming back to sports—our moments of greatness are rare and top pros do similar things very consistently, routinely—but we really can relate.

John Krumm: "When I was young I followed Motorcycle racing pretty closely, especially road racing. 'Fast' Freddy Spencer was a young upstart who dominated for a few years racing for Honda. Both he and Honda were kind of admired and hated at the same time, spending big dollars to win championships. But he had super skills. If I had even a tiny fraction of his skills, I would not mind."

Mike replies: Another name I never heard before. But I watched a highlight reel of him too. Personally I never understood why every motorcycle racer doesn't die in every single race—it just looks madness to me. :-)

Ray Maines: "Re 'We weren't segregated like that. Canon and Nikon and Pentax and Olympus and Minolta and Contax people mingled about on the same sub-forums together (gasp!) and talked about this or that or the other thing and it didn't matter which camera anybody used.' That's how I feel about AM radio in the 1960s too. I enjoyed listening to all kinds of music that I wouldn't choose to listen to if, in fact, I had a choice."

Mike Ferron: "NHL hockey player Bobby Orr. Played for the Boston Bruins in the late '60s into the '70s. Just 18 when he started playing in the big league. Bobby won two scoring titles (understand he was a defenseman not a forward) and several MVPs, and is in the Hall of Fame. Mr. Orr was the only player I ever saw that could circle the back of his own goal, skate past and around every opponent on the ice and score. Unfortunately Bobby developed serious knee problems too early in his career maybe minimizing his legend a bit."

Eli S. Burakian: "Kilian Jornet. The best mountain runner and ultrarunner ever. Just look him up. Kind of like a mountain goat on speed. And I know this isn't part of the exercise, but I value personality, and he's as genuine a human being as it gets. Kind and thoughtful. Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady—spectacular examples, but I look up to them in sports only and they would not be role models for my kids."

Dan Gorman: "John McEnroe. I loved playing tennis back in the day, and wasn't half bad (in my own immodest opinion). I grew up watching Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, and Bjorn Borg; I've since admired and enjoyed watching Pete Sampras, and Federer among many others.

"But in my opinion, McEnroe had more pure tennis talent than anyone I've ever seen. He had the subtlest sense of tennis tactics, the quickest feet, the most creative use of angles, and softest hands of any top player in my lifetime.

"His success was all the more remarkable because he played the bulk of his career with an old-school T.A. Davis racquet, strung with cat gut. A couple of friends of mine had similar Davis models, and I tried playing with them a time or three. I could never master hitting even basic groundstrokes with a Davis—the frame was so flexible, and the sweet spot so microscopic that it felt like playing tennis with a ping pong paddle strapped to the end of a fly swatter.

"I've always thought it was a shame that McEnroe didn't win more major championships than he did. Most people remember his on-court temper (with good reason). I have always ascribed it to his having taken his talent for granted, and being too stubborn to change his approach when the other top players were clearly outperforming him. If I recall correctly, he switched to a composite racquet late in his career, but by then the game had passed him by.

"I once played on a grass court, and loved it. My sweetest tennis fantasy is to have played any of the great players named above, on a grass court, and with McEnroe's skills. Absolute, over-the-top, take-me-now-lord tennis nirvana!  :-) "

Mike replies: That's a nice evocation of McEnroe's magic. Thanks for that Dan. You'll appreciate this: my brother Scott got to play with Don Budge, the only male other than Rod Laver to ever win the Grand Slam. (He attended Mr. Budge's tennis camp as a kid.) I told the story here of getting to hit with Chrissie Evert when I was 15 or so. But I never got to play on a grass court. Too late now!

NavinU: "Sachin Tendulkar. Cricket is not a global sport but tends to have a large following in the Commonwealth countries and none more so than India. For our generation, Sachin was the epitome of a person born to play the game, and carried the hopes of millions of fans for the 24 years he played the game."

[Some fantastic comments in the Comments Section, but check out especially Joe Kashi's paean to General Jimmy Doolittle. Great stuff! —Ed.]

Mani Sitaraman: "Donald Bradman, in the sport of cricket, is my nominee. In a twenty-year career, Bradman's batting average of 99.94 in test (i.e., international) cricket remains near supernatural, because it is so far above any other career average in 149 years of the game.

Highest Career Batting Averages—Top 7

1. 99.94 Donald Bradman (1928–1948)
2. 63.43 Marnus Labuschagne (2018–2020)
3. 62.84 Steve Smith (2010–2020)
4. 61.87 Adam Voges (2016–2018)
5. 60.97 Graeme Pollock (1963–1970)
6. 60.83 George Headley (1930–1954)
7. 60.73 Herbert Sutcliffe (1924–1935)

"You do not need to know the sport to understand the significance of Bradman's achievement in the stats above."

Mike replies: You're right about that—seeing the best of the rest in such a tight cluster and then one individual way, way out in front. I'm no baseball fan, but I recalled that one hundred years ago, in 1920, Babe Ruth hit more home runs than any other team in baseball save one, so I looked it up. He hit 54 and the whole Phillies team had 64. He also hit more homers than all the rest of the players on his own team combined, 54 to 42. Bradman's accomplishment looks like that kind of far-out and way-ahead dominance.

Babe Ruth in 1920. Photo by Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin, with facsimile signature.

rp: "Greg Maddux or Pedro Martinez. I would love to be able to throw 90+ MPH, put the ball exactly where I wanted it, and throw incredible breaking pitches. They were magicians, not pure power pitchers blowing 98-MPH fastballs by the hitters. (Although Pedro could dial it up when he needed to.) You could argue that they were the McEnroes of baseball."

Patrick J Wahl: (partial comment): "Tiger Woods probably. Golfers get to play at beautiful resorts, warm weather parts of the country in winter, they don't get clobbered like some of the other sports, it would be a great life."

Jeff1000: "Federer, no doubt. Roger might not end up with the most Grand Slam titles but to me he is obviously the GOAT [greatest of all time, that means. I can't get over the fact that 'goat' to me always meant the opposite of 'hero,' someone who blew it. —Ed.]. Sometimes genius is not easy to discern, but watching Federer play, his genius is blatantly obvious, like seeing Einstein's equations. He's invented all these shots that only he seems to be capable of hitting, like half volley squash shots from the baseline, and exquisite low velocity pushed passing shots, also from the baseline. He has every shot plus all the shots he invented that no one else can hit. How much fun must that be!

"Speaking of fun, I remember well the CompuServe Photo Forum days. You, Ctein, and Roger Hicks would occasionally elevate the conversation to levels I never imagined existed. Very humbling, but tons of fun. I learned so much too."

Mike replies: I'm pleased you recall it that way. Thanks. And Federer is indeed a wonder, richly deserving of being in the "transcendent" category.

Rip Smith: "Bobby Fischer—chess...."

PacNW: "P!nk the border collie: It's hard to imagine what it may feel like to be that athletic, but I know that my border collie reveled in it."

Mike replies: What a wonderful performance! Wow.

Maris Rusis: "Possibly the most dominant player in any sport ever was Walter Lindrum in the grand and ancient game of English Billiards. But he also effectively killed the sport through his relentless, repetitive, mechanically perfect world record scoring that would often keep his opponents away from the table for several hours. Potential rivals, like the previous four times world champion Joe Davis, declined to waste their lives practicing just to come second. Joe Davis instead changed sports by embracing and popularizing Snooker. Ronnie O'Sullivan, bless him, is a illustrious heir to this newer and noble tradition."

Mike replies: Yes, every great sportsman needs either a great rival, or an Achilles' heel (note how even Superman has an Achilles' heel, in the form of Kryptonite). No rival or vulnerability, no legend. Even Affirmed had Alydar!

Sunday Support Group: Readings (OT)

A few reading suggestions for those who are dutifully sheltering...

The first one is just a few paragraphs long. I tried but couldn't secure permission to reprint those paragraphs, so here's what you'll have to do if you want to read them:

First, go to Amazon and look up The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett; then click on the book cover to "Look inside"; then scroll down to the Preface, and read down through the paragraph just before the one that begins "Laurie Garrett has written a pioneering book." I was particularly struck by the opening sentence: "We always want to believe that history happened only to 'them,' 'in the past,' and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it." Got that right.

What will be sobering is the book's date of publication: 1994. The short Preface was written by Jonathan Max Mann, MD, a disease researcher who died, with his wife of only two years, when Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic southwest of Halifax International in September of 1998. Trump's dawdling, downplaying, dissembling and diverting for two months are not the only tragic squandering of time so terribly affecting the fix we're in—clearly, we wasted time in a general sense, too. For years. And now we all get to suffer for it.

Next up: The book I'm reading currently was written by Daniel Defoe, most famous for Robinson Crusoe...who some of us might feel kinda like right now! (I can feel marooned in my house.) The publication date of that one is an interesting story too—although presented as a first-person account, Defoe himself was actually only five years old when the events he writes about occurred. The book was published in 1722 about events that took place in 1665. The narrator, identified as H.F., might represent Henry Foe, Defoe's uncle, whose journals might have been one of his nephew's sources. Although scrupulously researched, it's not exactly nonfiction; yet it's not exactly fiction either, because Defoe went to great lengths in the service of verisimilitude. You might call it well reported historical fiction.

Whatever section of the bookstore it belongs in, most agree that it's a remarkably vivid portrayal of life in London during the last great visitation of the bubonic plague, also known as the black death. The parallels to the present contagion make its themes, and the narrator's dilemmas, all the more immediate to present-day readers.

Lastly, a book I've always meant to read, and soon actually might...Giovanni Boccacchio's Decameron. Also written in a plague year, the structure of the Decameron consists of stories told by a group of young people, seven women and three men, who are "sheltering in place" from the black death in a villa outside the city of Florence, Italy, probably during the epidemic of 1348. To amuse themselves, each in turn selects a topic for the day, and each tells the others a story on that topic. They do this five nights a week for two weeks, making 100 stories in all.

So it's essentially a collection of short stories. "Collection" has another meaning, too, because, following the tradition of the time, many of the tales are retellings, and Boccacchio collected these from far and wide, from many lands and many sources. Some of the tales were believed to be centuries old even at the time. The Decameron is considered a masterpiece of early Western literature and was an influence on Chaucer, Shakespeare (who based All's Well That Ends Well on Boccacchio's Tale III, 9) and many others.

In one of those strange little coincidences, in the first picture in Part I of our "Baker's Dozen" the other day, the one by Benjamin Kelley of his little daughter in front of a dramatic painting with sunlight falling on it, the painting is by John White Alexander and is titled "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." It illustrates a poem of that same title by John Keats...and Keats based his poem on Tale IV, 5 of The Decameron.

When we read Defoe we simply read the original but with modernized spellings and punctuation, but for English-speaking people reading a book written in the vernacular Florentine of the 14th century, translations loom large. I surveyed the ones I could (meaning, I read the Kindle samples for a bunch of the ones available on Amazon), and preferred the translation of Wayne A. Rebhorn as being the easiest to follow. Wayne, who is 76 and lives in Austin, is Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas, where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation came out in 2013. Seeing as the tellers of these tales were also sheltering in place, it seems a perfect time to finally read this. I've got it on deck.

The Decameron is said to be uncommonly bawdy, too.

Cheers to you, and stay safe this Sunday. I'm too stuck in my own head, so I'm going to get out for some exercise.

Mike

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

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Frank Booth: "Another book concerning our present situation is The Great Influenza by John Barry. The Afterword written in 2018 is especially interesting."

Q: "For anyone interested in an hour's worth of Laurie Garrett's take on the current situation, she's the guest on this week's Radio Open Source. She's not the type to mince words and the conversation gets a bit political, but it also has a lot of intelligent perspective on what we can do and what we should have done to prevent a local outbreak from becoming a pandemic."

Sunday Support Group: How Often Should You Weigh Yourself? (OT)

Topic this Sunday: weight loss.

Here's an odd thing. I'm sure if you've tried to lose weight you've seen various recommendations for how often to weigh yourself. The main one used to be (I'm not current with the Zeitgeist) that you should weigh yourself no more than once a week. To avoid discouragement.

Turns out that's wrong. When put to the test and looked at statistically, the people who lose the most weight are those who weigh themselves twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening.

So I've been doing that. Started it very reluctantly, I must say. But...

Evening weight, December 18th 2019: 250.2
Morning weight today (102 days later): 221.8

That's pretty encouraging!

I have a good scale, which Amazon tells me I bought on Sept. 21st, 2013—that would have been right about at the apex of TOP in terms of popularity and income. You can tell from the price of the scale I had money burning a hole in my pocket. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the thing, but it's certainly consistent—when I was testing it, weighing the same test objects weeks apart never varied by more than 0.2 lbs. And even that much seemed to depend on where on the standing pad the objects were placed.

But here's the really weird thing: who knew that your weight varies so much from evening to morning? My weight last night before I went to bed was 225.4. And this morning it's 221.8! That's a 3.6 pound variance in less than 12 hours. It's not like my net weight loss every day is 3.6 lbs., but it's very consistent that I weigh two to four pounds more in the evenings than I do in the mornings.

Turns out one of the characteristics of plant-based eating is that you have a higher metabolism when you sleep. That might account for some or all of it. It still basically mystifies me that these differences could be so great, however. (I certainly don't pee away 3.6 pounds' worth in the night. That would be 55 fluid ounces!)

I'll delve into more detail about my current experiment in a future post. I just thought this was interesting.

Crisis = dangerous opportunity*
Oh, and by the way—in case you're sheltering in place and working from home and you've wanted to try adding more plants to your diet, this could be an opportunity. The greatest impediment for many people who would like to try plant-based eating is their work schedules. So if you're at home and temporarily don't have to commute, this might be a convenient time to give it a try.

Unfortunately, you can't really switch to a plant-based diet whole hog (wow, pardon the expression!)—it takes your body time to adapt, not to mention the fact that you have to work out what you want to eat, find and test new recipes, etc. The best advice I've seen is to switch breakfast first, then give yourself three weeks to get used to that, then switch lunch, and so on. Beans can be problematic because they can cause flatulence and digestive disruption. The trick is to start very slow—a spoonful of canned beans on a salad, for instance—and then eat more or less the same amount every day, increasing or decreasing only gradually. I eat beans every day with no gas or gut problems.

So how many times in your life have you not had time for a good breakfast because you're racing around trying to get out of the house? You make do with something that's convenient but bad for you. Now that you're at home, you might have more time to develop one, two, or three good go-to plant-based breakfast meals that you can eat going forward.

Don't look to me for specifics. I eat a salad and a berry-and-kale smoothie every morning, varying the ingredient list of both. Most people would not naturally consider that to be breakfast food, although I have learned to love it (yes, really love it). But remember, no dairy, no meat, no oils, and no cheese.

There are lots of good plant-based cookbooks that might give you a start, but I'd rather not give cooking advice—I'm doing much better, but I'm a novice cook. (If you're worried about shopping and deliveries during the coronavirus pandemic, this might make you feel better.)

Bon appétit, but much more importantly, à votre santé—

Mike

*"The Chinese word for 'crisis' is frequently invoked in Western motivational speaking as being composed of two Chinese characters signifying 'danger' and 'opportunity' respectively. While the original meaning of wēijī is 'danger at a point of juncture,' and many linguists and native Chinese speakers highlight the errors in its Western reinterpretation, the term's 'danger-plus-opportunity' meaning has been so widely used by politicians, businesspeople, and in popular culture that its alternative etymology has been picked up all over the world, including by some native Chinese speakers." (Wikipedia, lightly edited)

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Jamie Pillers: "When my daughter prodded the family into going vegetarian about a year ago, I needed to find some recipes to get us started. By luck, we found Meatless by Martha Stewart Living. Easy recipes, no hard-to-find ingredients, relatively small amount of prep time. And everything we've tried from the book so far has made a vegetarian diet seem pretty much like what we'd been eating previously, at least with regards to tastiness."

Dan Khong: "Mike, I am one of those obsessive-compulsive types who weigh themselves twice a day, and I am able to keep my weight to a 67–68kg range +/– 1kg (BMI <22). Once I'm over, I keep my mouth shut."

Kirk: "Check your weight once a year. The waist band on your trousers or the notch on your belt should tell you when you are erring to excess consumption. Weight is secondary to fitness. I weigh myself once a year. It's always 160, 160, 160, 160. When it hits 161 I either swim harder or run longer. Then it goes away. I eat a vague vegetarian diet. I'm never too strict. If I am too strict the temptation to throw it all out is too strong. A burger a month is just about right...."

Mike replies: But Kirk, you and your buddy Rip are beasts and I am naught but a couch potato!  :-)

Rodger Kingston: "Mike, For quite a few years I've weighed myself once a day, nude, upon getting up in the morning. That's the only time each day when everything is the same. I record my weight once a week, and have been doing it since I had a stroke in August of 2016. I've lost nearly 60 pounds since then (75 pounds down from my highest weight), and kept the weight off within a range of five pounds or so during more than three and a half years. It's the first really successful weight loss in my life. I didn't do it by going on a diet, but by making a deep down life change.

"And by the way, I also have a Health O Meter 349KLX, which has been the best—the most reliable—scale I've ever owned. I bought it in 2011 when it was $145."

Mike replies: Good on you Rodger. Impressive.

Sunday Support Group: Last Day

I have a nice post I'm in the middle of, but I don't have time to finish it because I'm off to go play pool with my friends.

Today's the last day I'll be playing pool with them, and the last day I'll be attending an in-person meeting of my recovery group—New York's latest restrictions take effect tonight at 8:00 p.m.

Not everyone I know is planning to follow the directives. However, I usually process decisions like this by considering what I am going to have to live with in the future; I know I have to live with myself. I just don't want to look back and feel that I contributed in any way to what's likely coming. So I'm going to isolate at home, apart from "alone" activities. That might include practicing pool alone, but we're being asked not to gather in groups of any size, so I won't. (I do think it's more than a bit ironic that liquor stores are on the "essential" list and recovery meetings aren't, but this is no time for new resentments.)

Remember: according to the models, the more people there are who minimize person-to-person contact, the better off everyone is. So everybody counts. Your efforts, my efforts, every single person's efforts—they're all meaningful. (And finally, everyone's being required to do something that we introverts are already good at. That doesn't happen very often.)

I can look at the bright side—more time for TOP, more time for working on my book, and more time for roving the countryside alone in my car taking film pictures! I'm going to use this interlude to get down to doing some work.

Blubber, Bub
Before I go galivanting off I wanted to mention, as far as the "Sunday Support Group" is concerned, some good news for me related to diet—on standard body mass index (BMI) charts, I've officially descended past the line between the "obese" category to the "overweight" category. Yay, I guess. Hey, it's progress. Still have a ways to go before I can be considered "normal," but some people will say that's nothing new! Rimshot, please.

I really like this way of eating. After almost seven long years of reading, researching, and self-experimenting, I feel like I've finally found the key to what's right for me. (Here are the detes again: video 1, video 2.) Even if I don't lose another ounce I feel like I'm going to keep eating this way for the rest of my life, which I hope will be closer to 30 years than three months. More about the details in a future post.

I'll finish that other post, about a photographic virtual visit, later in the day. In the meantime, how about a weekend virtual visit to TOP World Headquarters? Here's a nice video about the Finger Lakes. (Again, I don't know who will be able to see this and who won't—apologies to anyone who gets blocked.) I've personally been to almost all of the places they show—except I didn't know about the Tiffany church in Bath. Gotta get there someday, once it reopens to the public.

Mike

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Jim K (partial comment): "Congrats on your reduction of blubber! Me too! My BMI is down to 27, I'm down roughly 35 lbs., I'm enjoying my daily vin-'n'-tonics, and I have a healthy obsession with roasting Brussels sprouts. Like you, this new way of eating has really been enjoyable. I don't count calories, I don't obsess if I do a rare cheat, I'm enjoying what I eat, and I look and feel great!! Keep it up, and thanks for the motivation...."

Mike replies: It's amazing, isn't it? I've been eating salads and green berry smoothies with loads of additives in each for breakfast each day since December, plants other times, and I realized with a shock the other day that all my joint pain is gone. I was coming downstairs in the middle of the night, which used to hurt all over and a lot in several places, when it hit me—no pain anywhere. During the next two days I was hyper-aware of it, and yep, it's gone—joint aches and pains I thought were age-related and inevitable have just plain disappeared.

hugh crawford: "After consulting the BMI chart it turns out that I'm a little short for my weight."

Sunday Support Group: So Nice to See

I yam what I yam and dat's all what I yam.

—Popeye the Sailor Man, my favorite
cartoon character when I was five

Followup on the film question: I've finally gotten up to date with all the comments from Thursday. That took a while—not because there were so many, but because there were so many good ones. Thank you for all the thoughtful and interesting responses. I'm sure I got more out of that post than anyone else did!

I agree with the commenters who suggested that it might be a matter of printmaking (I don't currently print black-and-white). As the issue has sorted out in my mind, I've provisionally decided that it comes down to whether I want to a.) make B&W prints the old fashioned way, with an enlarger, or b.) commit to mastering B&W digital printing. I don't want to do both. (Well, maybe when I retire. But "my retirement plan is to keep working.")

I need to let it percolate some more in my brain. In the meantime, I accept the advice I got that getting out and shooting is critical at this point. I need that input. Recall the Mark L. Power Principle: "Think, Shoot, Think." That is, you first conceptualize your working method and your ideas or project (think); then get out with the camera in your hand and engage with the world, guided by your ideas (shoot); then appraise your results and edit and redact and shape the work you actually got (think again). Rinse and repeat.

Mindless random shooting alone doesn't work. But "think think" all by itself doesn't work either.

Thank you for your support: I only make a direct appeal for support once in a while. My birthday is coming up, so here goes. Skip this part if you like. No, actually, please don't.

I guess we all go through life with the aspiration or ambition to be someone else, or to be ourselves, only better. But we are what we are. I'll never write novels. (Every kid should want to be an athlete or a dancer when they're young, so they can learn how to give up unrealistic ambitions. It's good practice for later.) What I do is serve photographers and photography enthusiasts by writing for you, attempting to entertain or inform or enlighten you or at least be thought-provoking. That's who I get to be. In 2005 my ambition was to write something almost every day for one whole year, and that ambition seemed preposterous, far-fetched, highly unlikely—as unrealistic as many of my other idealistic pie-in-the-sky notions. And I've been doing it ever since. Not too shabby! I've written the equivalent in word count of 15 full-length novels here since 2005, and published countless wonderful comments from you and your fellow readers. That's a lot of words in virtual ink on screens. It requires a certain doggedness from me, and an interactive, responsive audience in you.

If you'd like to support me and these efforts, you can start a recurring donation through Patreon, or increase the amount of your current donation. Would you consider the price of a Starbucks coffee every month, or a magazine subscription, or a pack of cigarettes a day? That would be extremely kind of you. This whole shebang would sink like a big rock without you!

Me. New glasses again. February 2020.

Sight and other miracles: I got a birthday present!

I'm excited. My newest glasses just arrived—in time for my birthday (number 63), so I've decided they're a birthday present. They're real old-fashioned glass; I guess my prescription is too wacky for Trivex. My old prescription from six and a half months ago had been drifting so far from accurate that I didn't know whether to leave my computer glasses on while I worked or take them off. Either seemed uncomfortable, but in different ways, so I would continually take them off and put them back on all day long. My one eye has continued to improve (and the other has continued to deteriorate) since I got those last August.

These new ones are AMAZING. At reading distances everything snaps into perfect crispness! I can see each pixel on my monitor. Reading an actual printed book is a joy. It's the clearest and cleanest and sharpest I have seen the world in many a year. 'S wonderful.

There's a small fly in the ointment I guess...suddenly everything rectangular is a trapezoid. And not subtly, either, but emphatically enlarged at the right side. It will be interesting to see if that goes away as my brain adapts to it.

But (as long as I'm deploying old aphorisms) I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Not only do I no longer need glasses for driving, even at night, but with my right eye, my surgically fixed eye, I can see the beautiful optical viewfinder of the old-fashioned Contax RTS II perfectly with no glasses and no correction. How lucky is that, to have young eyes as I'm getting old?

Very lucky. And I'm very grateful, too—to God, science, Obamacare, Dr. Holly Hindman MD MPH, the deceased person whose cornea I get to use (God bless your soul, anonymous friend), good fortune, all of you who have supported my writing and this site...and anything else that might have played a part.

It's so nice to see.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Dave Hodson: "I wonder if digital killed the art of photography. Must be something about the age. I hit a similar funk at 65 (I'm 69 now). I still have my digital stuff but managed to scrape together a darkroom and some large and medium format film cameras. Turns out I like learning new (old?) processes a lot more than actually taking photos and it didn't take long to discover alternative processes like kallitypes and salt prints, glass plate negatives, homemade paper and film, pinhole cameras...there's no end of re-discovery and every day's a new gem. Amazing what we used to be able to do and how many people are out there doing much of the same. I don't think I have the time left to master any of this but I'm happy to get at least to a functioning level. Good luck with whatever you do."

Bruce McL: "I think most people here want to see you deeply committed to your own photography, not just to photography in general. For you to write about photography without writing about what you are doing in photography is not enough, in my opinion. If what you really want to do is to shoot with an Instax SQ6 Taylor Swift Edition camera, then embrace it and tell us about it."

Clay: "I've been thinking about this dilemma for a while, and to me it boils down to analyzing the image-making sequence and determining which part brings you the most satisfaction. In my specific case, I decided that I really liked to deep dive into the end-product of the print. More specifically, I love to make ink and paper photogravure prints with polymer plates. So I have attempted to streamline all the intervening parts of the imaging chain to allow me to maximize the time I spend either making images or printing them on a press. From there it was a no-brainer to decide to go almost all-digital at the front end since it shortens the shoot-instantiate-evaluate-shoot-again cycle and keeps the inevitable deceleration from occurring quite as rapidly as it might if I were bogged down in intermediate steps that bring no joy."

Sunday Support Group: Roger Angell

I've been on a reading kick lately.

Some while back I read a book called The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead, by David Shields. The book is a vigorously morbid catalogue of all the possible predicaments of being trapped in a deteriorating infrastructure. It's chock full of interesting facts about aging and the ages and stages of life. I can't say it was good to read, but it is good to have read it, turns out. Aside from being a bit of a horror show, it's very interesting and engaging, and I still remember and regurgitate many of the facts, which are fascinating. You've got to look at it the other way, though: you should be grateful if you've lived long enough to suffer some of the insults of aging and still have the wits to complain about it. Shields was cheating on that account, it turns out. He's only a year older than I am, and the book came out almost exactly 11 years ago, meaning he wrote it before he was 52. That's not that old.

I've got some great counterexamples in my life. The other day I was playing pool with some friends, and, as he sometimes does, Kenny hit the cue ball so hard on the break that it flew off the table, rolled across the floor, and landed in the corner of the room, way back under a triangular table that supports a big screen TV. Our friend Norm went to fetch it. Norm leaned down, supporting himself on one hand and, like a contortionist, reached way back under the table with the other hand and came up with the ball. No groaning, no moaning, no complaining—just reached way back under the table and popped back up. Nothing to it.

Which would not be remarkable except that Norm just turned 95. He's the guy I told you about who can still drive a golf ball 200 yards and score less than his age. I want to be Norm when I grow up!

I thought of this because of an essay by a writer I admire that I wanted to point you to. Roger Angell is the son of Katherine White of The New Yorker and of Ernest Angell, and the stepson of E.B. White, the essayist and author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Back when he was only 93 he wrote a lovely essay about life in his nineties called "This Old Man." And you know what? In it, he says he was more obsessed by death when he was David Shields' age, when David was writing his book I mean, than he is at 93. Hmm. Maybe death is more of a big deal in midlife than as it approaches. The essay is long, but it's better the second time through. It's a bit spiky on the first pass and flows better the second time around. Good reading for a lazy afternoon.

Roger will turn 100 this coming September 19th. I hope he's here to celebrate it. I hope I remember to. I want to be Roger when I grow up, too.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: Be Prepared...For Any Old Thing

I was a Boy Scout when I was young. It was a valuable experience; I was besotted with the Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars and all things related to antiquarian wars and soldiery when I was a boy (I loved C.S. Forester's Hornblower books particularly, and read the whole series through twice), and a fortune teller gazing into her crystal ball might have presumed I was headed for at least a stint in the armed forces. The Boy Scouts demonstrated conclusively to me, however, how peculiarly unsuited I am to a military way of life. I surprised myself by being more or less a total f---up in the Boy Scouts, with no patience whatsoever for the rigors and the conformity the organization strove to impose. I remain grateful for the lesson. A joke in earlier years was that I had to give the Boy Scouts their due, because I never earned a single merit badge, and if anyone ever could have finagled an unmerited merit badge out of the Boy Scouts it would have been me. Pah-dum-pah.

Anyway, the Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." By intention, those words have the same initials as the last name of Robert Baden-Powell, the British officer who founded the Boy Scouts for the paramilitary training of boys. (His sister founded the Girl Scouts.) When Baden-Powell was asked the question "prepared for what," he answered, "why, for any old thing." This is the reason I have aspired to have a backup camera for virtually my entire life in photography. You keep a backup because any old thing can happen. If and when it does, you're covered.

Lots of snow
We had a fine snowstorm a few days ago, and any old thing actually happened. Snowfall is highly variable across my area, so I can't speak generally, but in my back yard I measured 8 1/2 inches on the top of the picnic table. It was the Winter's first...well, Winter. This brightened my spirits—this area is so grim and gray in the Winter when there's no snow on the ground. I agree with the young Mennonite girl at the local market, who said, "I like a lot of snow, or otherwise I just prefer it to be warm." A thick blanket of snow transforms the landscape from something bleak and depressing into a thing of beauty everywhere you look.

But...

Ruh-roh

Not only did my snowblower fail to work yet again (snowblowers are deficient, insufficient products as a class, in my opinion—is there such a thing as a good one?), but my snow shovel broke, too. Seriously. Just snapped right off. I've had the thing for years and it never failed to fulfill its brief before. Can't say I ever thought about it twice.

Somewhat to my amazement, though, I had a backup. An older snow shovel I like less well. It has a scooped shape and a metal leading edge that scratches surfaces like the planking of decks. But there it was, slumbering in a corner of the barn, so I pressed it into service and got the front porch and the pathway to the garage shoveled. Backup to the rescue!

As for the defective snowblower, although my friend Eric had been up since 3 a.m. plowing—one of his many businesses—he came by after dark and got the driveway cleared for me. With his truck. We don't need no stinking snowblowers.

Backup body
For once, I own a backup camera, too, albeit sorta by accident. What I now call my main camera is the X-H1. But so far I haven't sold my 2014 X-T1. Haven't gotten around to it. (And I'm still, well, attached.)

I only pursued professional photography for about seven years, and during that time I did have a backup. After a false start for a year with an F4, I used two Nikon N8008's for the remaining years (that shows you how long ago that was). I wore one out and was on my third when I quit the business. But not once did one of those N8008's ever fail. I do recall that one of the reasons I migrated away from Leica (my next camera after the Nikons) was that I couldn't foresee being able to afford a second M6 as a backup. Did I really need one? I just assumed I should have one. But actually, aside from my seven years as a workerbee pro, I've very seldom had a backup camera body. Always aspired to one, always agreed with the reasoning, always thought I "should"—just seldom have. On the occasions when I've bitten the bullet and bought one, it never seemed to stay in the inventory for very long. When you're either cheap or poor, it's excruciating to have a valuable camera body sitting around doing nothing.

When I think back on it, there's actually not one time in forty years that I've ever needed a backup camera body and had one. There have been times I've had one, but I haven't needed it; and there have been times I've needed one, but didn't have it.

So it was kind of nice to have the principle of the backup play out with the snow shovels. Not sure how much credit I can take for it, but I was prepared. Shades of Baden-Powell.

So I guess I might keep that X-T1 around after all. You never know when any old thing might happen.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

James: "You would be nuts to let that X-T1 go! As someone who must have a backup because I can't trust myself to change lenses in the desert or a snowstorm, my backup gets used almost as much as my main camera. Usually two Nikon bodies."

John Krumm: "This year we had a deep and wet snowstorm that took the city a week or so to dig out from. It gave me time to order a better shovel. Now I kind of look forward to tackling the pile the snowplow leaves at the front of the driveway. For light snow the cheap push ones work well, but this high quality scoop shovel should last a lifetime."

Carl Weese: "Sometimes you need a backup without knowing it. Back in the '80s, doing industrial location and Shelter magazine work I always worked with a pair of Nikon bodies. Every subject or 'set' was always shot with both bodies. Sometimes with different lenses, sometimes switching to keep the same lens. The two camera bodies were unloaded into two different film bags which were then processed separately. More than once a roll of Kodachrome or E-6 was damaged in processing, but there were always backup chromes from a different roll. Once the shutter on one camera failed without giving any sign of trouble (the film advanced normally and of course there was no chimping) but the chromes from the other camera carried the day."

Rob L.: "Well, I've used some of your lessons as inspiration for teaching Photography merit badge, so, we'll claim you—Once a Scout, Always a Scout!

"As for backups, in film days I agree with the above comments that a second or third body was as much about saving loading time or different capability as well as redundancy. Especially when the lenses I could borrow were of a different mount than my primary camera! But shooting for just me, I hate to see equipment unused, which leads to having a 'backup' camera that's IR-only or some other incredibly useful all the time scenario, because I can only justify keeping the stuff that's unique."

Mike replies: Thanks Rob—I did give a pretty one-sided view of my Scouting experience. I went on numerous hikes, biking trips, and camping trips as a Scout, and a number of those were a lot of fun and quite memorable, and I did learn a lot. I grew up thinking of myself as an outdoorsman, which is something I have not been as an adult. I'm very grateful I had all those experiences in my younger years.

It's also been my observation that being an Eagle Scout does indeed carry over into adult personalities, for what that's worth. Although maybe that's confusing cause with effect.

John from Australia: "What is this ‘snow’ that you speak of?"

Luke: "A backup camera is an excuse to buy another camera when you know the one you have is perfectly suitable."

Joe B: "My backup camera is located on the back of my car. Shows me what it looks like when I'm going backwards. Progress is like that sometimes."

Music Notes: Do You Have a Favorite Musician? (OT)

I suppose a lot of people don't. It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person. Nobody who loves music likes everything. Their likes are strong, and their dislikes are strong too—they have what we call opinions. The only way everything can be equivalent is if one doesn't have much discrimination, which is another way to say taste.

I have a friend who has devoted a lot of his life to his love of music, and he once had to quit a job because the background music they piped in over the intercoms annoyed him so much. He'd mention it to his co-workers, and they'd say, "what music?" They weren't even hearing it. My friend couldn't not hear it.

Hank Jones in 1985. Photo by Brian McMillen, CC BY-SA 4.0.

There are two ways we come to things that are central to us in life—by birth (meaning, through the culture in which we are raised, which doesn't always apply just to the values of our immediate families), or by volition or conscious acquisition. I can never remember who it was—some French intellectual, I think—who said that when he discovered Buddhism for the first time, he realized he had been a Buddhist all his life. It became his religion by volition.

I was born in 1957, was a child through the '60s, and grew up on what's now called "classic rock." The first record album I owned was Something New by the Beatles (which included "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand," which was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sung in German—in both mono and stereo, no less). In my 20s I taught myself to like classical music, which had figured very little in my upbringing, although my mother professed to like Chopin and had a lot of Chopin records, which I never knew her to listen to. My father bought a Philco console for the kitchen / breakfast room. He liked trumpet music—Al Hirt, a popular trumpet virtuoso, was a particular favorite. He also liked what's sometimes called "schmaltz"—one name I remember was a band called the Percy Faith Strings, which I did not like at all.

Radio radio
My life changed when I discovered FM radio. My father had a beautiful radio, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic 3000-1, which he let me listen to but not commandeer; it was self-casing and had an antenna in the handle, a really beautiful thing. I had a little Japanese portable transistor radio that was a little larger than a pack of cigarettes, a dull orange in color. No memory of the make or model. I used to fall asleep every night lying on my side with with it balanced on my ear, listening to rock and pop at low volumes on the local FM stations.

But I came to realize late in life that although many of my musical touchstones are rock and pop, and rock and pop accompanied me through much of my walk through life, I don't actually really like it all that much. Yes, there are many things I love. But I would pick and choose among bands and musicians and then pick and choose among their work, and I finally realized I was never really engaging completely except in fastidiously choosy ways (for instance, I loved Neil Young's music but certainly not all of Neil Young's music). I usually felt a little apart from it. I have some friends now who are really into rock, and they're much more wholehearted about it than I ever managed to be.

My brother Scott, in the 1980s, introduced me to my real love—jazz. Specifically, American jazz centered on the years around my birth—call it 1955 to 1959 give or take. Although I'll listen to any jazz from the earliest beginnings to the present day, and have great favorites scattered throughout the canon, there is something very special about late 1950s hard bop that just hits me where I live. It's a halcyon period, an historical high point in my opinion that's the equal of the high baroque or the classical period of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. The great albums released in '55 to '59 (and many of the albums released in years before and after) includes a cornucopia of masterpieces, and the standard in general is very high. 

If I had to exclude any of it, I'd be very unhappy. But as for favorite musicians—among all musicians, not just jazz musicians—I have two. Hank Jones is one and Coleman Hawkins is the other. Both lived long lives and were remarkable in their sustained artistry.

Hank, a pianist of surpassing mastery and impeccable taste, was active from the late 1940s (he was Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist beginning in 1948) until his death in 2010. You could base a whole record collection around his solo albums (more than 60!) and the albums on which he played, which are innumerable. His Great Jazz Trio records with Ron Carter and Tony Williams are especially treasurable, although my favorite is Bluesette. (My only problem with Bluesette is that I have to dole it out to myself, listening no more than once a year, if that, because I want to keep it fresh.) Much of his original material and master tapes were destroyed in the catastrophic 2008 Universal fire. But we have a great deal of it on existing recordings.

Coleman Hawkins, who was known as "Hawk" or "Bean," played mainly tenor saxophone. He was active starting in 1921 and was enjoying a spectacular autumnal flourishing late in his career in the late 1950s, recording Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster and The Hawk Flies High (with Hank Jones on piano) in 1957. He had a great interest late in life in new styles and younger musicians, and adapted to the changing times when many older swing-era musicians couldn't or didn't want to. A prime example is that he played on Thelonious Monk's great masterpiece Monk's Music with Wilbur Ware, Art Blakey, Gigi Gryce, and John Coltrane, a high point not just of of Monk's catalog, not just of jazz, but of the music of the Western world. Hawk's solos on the record (coincidentally, Riverside's first stereo jazz album) are sublime.

As for Hank, here's a nice little introduction to hm, recorded late in his life, with some rare interviews:

It's curious that neither of my favorite musicians are singers. That must be relatively uncommon. How about you—do you have a particular favorite musician or singer?

Mike

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Soeren Engelbrecht: I have been a music fan for longer than I have been doing photography. So when the opportunity came around to shoot an album cover, I was over the moon. Here's the result: 

"For non-Danish readers: The lyrics of the title track has elements of two nursery rhymes, one of which has the line '...his head facing the wrong way round.'

"To answer your original question: My favourite musician is a Scottish singer called Fish (http://fishmusic.scot) who split with his band Marillion (http://www.marillion.com) in 1989. Since both are still very prolific, I now have two favourite acts.  :-) "

Henry Rinne (partial comment): "I rarely think in terms of 'favorite' player. These artists have all made great statements in their music, and I feel that I can listen and accept them without worrying about whether I like them or not, much less trying to decide which one is my favorite. I would always tell my students to leave the 'like' question at the door. Don't even ask it. Open your ears and try to understand what the artist is trying to say. I would approach visual arts the same way. I can learn from so many photographers and painters. The ones that speak to me the most (or the clearest), I will try to internalize and allow their work to influence my own. Great post and as always much appreciated."

mike plews: "Tried to pick a favorite and I just can't. Doc Watson or Jim Hall, just can't do it. But I can drop in a link to seven of the nicest minutes ever seen on network TV:"

Mike replies: That's wonderful. Oscar was a TOP reader, did you know? He was quite a photography enthusiast. Michael interviewed him on L-L.

Dave Millier (partial comment): "What is it about certain genres of music that leave some people rolling orgasmically on the floor in thrall while utterly turning others off? It is idly dismissed as 'taste,' but what does that really mean? Is it what you heard when you were young? (I dismiss that line in my case.) Is it what you've grown used to? (I find that dubious, I grew up listening to a type of music that was all I heard and it left me fairly cold and uninterested in music but the first seconds of hearing early Blondie tracks instantly changed everything about music for me.) Some people get snobbish about it and claim it's to do with musical virtuosity and complexity but that is nonsense for me: I could never stand Led Zep or Deep Purple and they were far more accomplished than the music that moved me). It's a deep puzzler for me: why do some styles of music drive you insane, while others are manna. 'Tis a mysterious thing, musical taste."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "For me the answer is simple, and in many ways, very important to me. In 7th grade, age 12, early 1984, I succumbed to my cousins' intense personal fandom of U2. They were one and five years older than me and had been fans since the 'beginning'—the Boy album in 1980. (I'm going to play that right now!)

"We were still 3–4 years from Joshua Tree and the band's explosion in popularity. For those years, it still had the cultlike feeling of 'my band.' As kids in their formative years often do, I attached myself, and my brand in a way, to that band. I can still recall where I was and how I listened to many of the later albums, especially Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

"And I can honestly say that my 'relationship' with U2 changed the course of my life. I read the U2 books. That got me interested in Irish history and Ireland. One thing leads to another and I'm attending the University College Cork for the 1991–1992 school year. In the fall of 1991, I ride my bike down to HMV in Cork City at midnight on a Tuesday evening for the release of Achtung Baby. I remember listening to it exclusively for months. For me, it rendered all other music outdated.

"Now 36 years later, some 50+ concerts attended, mostly with my cousins, they are still very important to me in that strange way. They were/are one of the few constants in my life. That music has always been there. When I hear it, moments and experiences from decades ago just appear. And to me, that music was just bigger than other music. It was more important. It was important to me in a way that is difficult to describe as an adult? And I have many friends and acquaintances with whom that is the primary thing we share—our mutual 'relationship' with U2.

"In 2015 the story came full circle to an amazing climax. I am at the Boston Garden show in July with my cousin Mike and his family—maybe Mike's 80th show. Bono pulls Mike's 13-year-old son Brian on stage to play guitar for a couple of songs. When I looked at Mike, he had tears streaming down his face. At the end of the second song, after playing side by side with Edge, Bono and Adam, Brian took off the guitar and handed it back to Bono. Bono hesitated—and told him it was his to keep. Here is the sequence of images from that special moment.

"Very happy I had a camera! In this case the Olympus OM-D E-M1!"

A. Dias: "Stunning Hank Jones video/performance!"

Nigel Voak: "I was born in 1957 too, and before I joined the herd listening to the all-conquering Rock of the seventies, I loved the Glen Miller records that my father had. My musical tastes eventually headed back towards Jazz thanks to Pat Metheny. Pat Metheny is my favourite musician. I can still remember vividly the moment in my squalid London flat, listening to a radio program where Phil Collins was playing his favourite music, hearing 'San Lorenzo' by Metheny. The beauty of this track just left me spellbound. The next day I had that record and subsequently all the others too. It also started a musical voyage of discovery concerning this genre.

"Perhaps his later discs do not have that same magic as the ECM recordings, but they are still head and shoulders above much of the music that passes for jazz that gets put out. Of his later productions the two solo guitar albums stand out as does a strangely inspired disc he made with a Polish pop star. I had the chance to speak to my musical hero in Ravenna some years ago when I managed to wrangle a photo pass to a concert. I only had the courage to ask if I could photograph the rehearsal. What do say to one of your heroes? When he plays here in Italy, I always try to catch a date, as his concerts are always wonderful."

Sunday Support Group: It Is Hereby Resolved...

Well, 2020 is off to a notably disastrous start, what with Australia aflame and now Trump's militaristic misadventures. What a way to launch a decade. Maybe I'll join those who insist that 2020 is the last year of the twenty-teens, rather than the first year of the '20s, so we can try this over again in 2021.

Anyway, I know I said a few years ago that my New Years Resolution was to stop making New Years Resolutions, but I have one this year: to stop taking "real" pictures with the phone.

Yes, it's handy, and yes, visual note-taking is certainly a valid form of recording and communicating. I won't stop doing either.

But I'm recalling Warren Buffett's advice here. Buffett said you should write down the 25 things you're most interested in and most want to do, then rank them in a hierarchy, then concentrate on the top five. But not only concentrate on the top five: actively and deliberately avoid all the rest, numbers six through 25. Those, he said, are your distractions: the things that you will waste your time and effort on and that will keep you from accomplishing anything.

I do know many artists, and others, who can't stay away from their distractions. They think they have to travel down any road that beckons. "Ferdinand 'Ferdie' McGurk is an artist who works in intaglio etching, stained glass, fabric, and performance art 'happenings' staged in empty buildings. He is also a published poet, plays the flugelhorn in a regional symphony, races kayaks, and competes in hog-calling contests where he is two-time State champion. In his spare time he is a gourmet cook specializing in recipes that use naturally-growing weeds such as dandelion and purslane, makes knives, umpires Little League, and builds electronics from circuit diagrams. He is currently working at learning to speak Navajo and has joined an activist organization working for the preservation of blight-stricken chestnut trees." Many such cases are tinged with sadness: legitimately gifted people can't gain traction on the world because they've diluted their own efforts voluntarily.

(The same can be said of many photographers, who make themselves into jacks- and jills-of-all-trades rather than concentrating on what they're best at. Even if you can't say what kind of photographer you are, you should be able to list many kinds of photographer you aren't. But that's a different post.)

I did consider an OC/OL/OY with the X-H1 (discontinued now) and 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens for this year, and I'd love to. But it's just not practical for me. I have to write about different cameras and lenses.

I want a better file of that
Anyway, I can't think when it was that my comments about phone cameras prompted readers to challenge me to get to grips with phoneography. Which I did—and I had to force myself at first. Now, for a couple of years I've gone too far the other way. I've been traipsing around with the idea in my head that I'll make a portfolio of phone photos someday, so it's okay when everything magically comes together and I get a picture I love with the phone. But that might be a mistake for me. It has justified taking pictures with the phone that I should have made with a better camera. Put more bluntly, it has justified laziness.

Keuka in the Rain, a picture I love...and really wish was a better file.
(This is the lake where I live.)

Because, of course, when you get out and about in "picturetaking mode" with a phone, then you will find a few great pictures with the phone. Because that's how photography works—the elusive good pictures come, you never know from where. Nothing at all wrong with portfolio-worthy phoneography, of course...unless what you find yourself doing later is wishing you had made those shots with another camera and had a better file to work with.

So that's my New Years Resolution: to start treating the camera in the phone as a distraction, and stop acting like it's okay when I come across a prize picture with the wrong camera in my hand.

Coming up
...Tomorrow morning: Photobook of the Year (and it's in short supply).

Mike

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Mark Kinsman: "I have made it a deliberate daily habit to always carry a camera with me when I leave the house. Whether it’s the X100F or one of the other Fuji or Micro 4/3 bodies depends on the intended activity. It has paid dividends many times over with some wonderful photographs."

PaulW: "Re 'It has justified taking pictures with the phone that I should have made with a better camera. Put more bluntly, it has justified laziness,' I could not agree more, but I'll go one further and say that for me, image stabilization has the same 'laziness' effect. I'm mostly a landscape photographer and I feel like the quality of my photography went quickly downhill when I bought my first image-stabilized camera a couple of years ago. I've now returned to using a tripod, no matter how inconvenient, and find that my photographs are much more considered and much better crafted."

Charles Rozier: "I agree in principle of course. But on the other hand, for some scenarios very common in my pictures, like back light or light sources in the frame, my iPhone 11 (way improved over its predecessors) shows astoundingly better dynamic range than my GX8 by instantaneously merging many exposures. I often end up preferring limited file size over severe clipping. I sure wish the traditional camera companies could offer even a fraction of the computational power of today’s best phones."

Clay Olmstead: "Clay Olmstead is a painter who takes photos when a painting isn't feasible, and reads The Online Photographer when he should be painting or taking photos."

John Krumm: "You know, I think I might just do a one camera, one year, one lens thing with the X-H1 and 35mm ƒ/1.4. Just got back from a trip to my wife's parents in Alaska, and mostly used that lens, and I think they qualify as some of her favorites ever. Plus, it's a good excuse to pay down other bills instead of buying more lenses. Here's the gallery with mostly Fujinon 35mm ƒ/1.4 shots...."

Mike replies: Nice work, John, very evocative. Your pictures have a strong sense of place and the people and made me almost feel what it was like to be there.

Ger Lawlor: "Happy New Year Mike—I wish you more luck with your resolution than I have had with the very same aspiration. As it's New Year, perhaps we have a little time for some Robbie Burns:

'But, Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!'"

Darin Boville: "Until the iPhone 11 Pro I would have agreed with you. The iPhone advantages over a real camera had primarily to do with convenience (laziness). But I upgraded my iPhone 6s to a iPhone 11 Pro last fall…oh my. My reaction to it was giggles. I used to know, more or less, that the phone cameras were doing—that is they were doing complicated stuff that I could do by hand but doing it by hand would be very time-consuming and difficult. With the iPhone 11 we’ve crossed into some new territory where I don’t even know what the camera is doing anymore.

"It’s a little like magic and will get more and more that way, I think, as machine learning and other technologies advance.

"Sometimes it makes errors but those errors can be revealing of the underlying magic. Here’s an example. I’m on the Kelso Dunes a few months ago, in the Mojave National Preserve, the moon is rising over the mountains. I shoot the iPhone in Night Mode for 30 seconds on a tripod. I expect the Moon to look one of two ways—either as an over-exposed white, fuzzy ball or as a bright Moon with a little detail of its surface discernible. What did I get? A golden yellow sun. There was no golden yellow in the scene. It appears that the camera misinterpreted that bright thing in the sky as the Sun. And if it is recognizing the Sun and treating it specially it is surely recognizing faces, tress, skies, and more and treating them each differently in terms of coloration, contrast, sharpening…the resulting files are fascinating."

Mike replies: That really is interesting. Thanks.

Sunday Support Group II: Belly Fat

(Sorry, I meant to get this posted yesterday but ended up playing pool all afternoon.)

Just a little tip. My latest dietary experiment has been to try a natural remedy for excess visceral fat in the abdominal area (the dangerous kind, associated with poor heart health). It's simple—two tablespoons of vinegar every day. 

What? Sounds crankish, doesn't it? Did to me. If you'd like the scientific explanation of why it works, it's in the chapter "Amping AMPK: The Fat Controller," starting on page 295 of the new runaway bestseller How Not to Diet. (The author donates all the book's proceeds to charity.)

I've been drinking vinegar in a "tonic" consisting of a 12-ounce can of cold seltzer water, two tablespoons of unfiltered apple cider vinegar, and a teaspoon of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. The lemon juice cuts the vinegary taste. I also sometimes add a tablespoon of cranberry juice concentrate. (Might sound like sour on top of sour, but I like it. Then again, my favorite drink is any kind of carbonated water, which I used to replace soda many years ago. Many people don't care for that plain.)

[UPDATE: Multiple dentists among TOP's readers have written to warn me that such an acidic elixir as recommended here could soften tooth enamel. (Plain seltzer is also not as good for your teeth as clear water.) Following Dr. Greger's recommendation, I drink my morning fruit smoothies through a glass straw (to minimize contact with teeth) and rinse out my mouth several times with plain water after finishing. I'll adopt the same habit with the drink described in this post too! —Ed.]

Alternately, you can put your vinegar on a salad or in anything else you can think of. 

To the point: after two and a half months of vinegar every night, even though my overall weight has gone up during that time because I eat out a lot, my belly has gone down—I've lost an inch and a half of girth around my waist. It's noticeable in the mirror. To you that's just a sample of one, statistically insignificant, but to me it's significant because I'm the sample that matters the most to...well, me. Anyway, I'm impressed.

Doesn't hurt to try it. It's just vinegar.

If you could afford to lose an few inches around the middle, I thought you'd like to know about this.

Mike

P.S. If you try this experiment too, I'd be interested in hearing about your results in three months time. To measure your waist, use a tape at the level of your navel with your stomach muscles relaxed. Take measurements at a consistent time of day.

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Tony McLean: "Will diluted stop bath work too?"

Mike replies: Ha!

Stop bath is 1–2% acetic acid and white vinegar is 5% acetic acid. So white vinegar mixed with some water does make a serviceable stop bath substitute in a pinch. In my darkroom, I had a gallon jug of glacial acetic acid (which required careful handling, and keep out of the reach of children!) which lasted for years. I cannot remember now exactly how I diluted it—something like 1+3 for a concentrate and then further for a working solution. As I recall it ended up being much cheaper than starting with vinegar. (Most of my darkroom procedures were arrived at with economy in mind.)

David Lee: "I’ve been drinking the vinegar soda since you posted about it about a month ago. I use regular cider vinegar and a full lemon. I think it works. And I like the taste."

Zaan: "But vinegar has alcohol in it though...."

Mike replies: Food vinegars are made from fermented ethanols and there is usually a trace of alcohol that carries over, conventionally .3 to .4%. That's less than a tenth of a milliliter in the drink I described. This drink can certainly be avoided by any alcoholic who wants to avoid any alcohol from any source.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Blech! Much, much healthier (and more pleasant) to maintain a moderate exercise plan that includes planks."

Mike replies: Not bad advice either. Consider for instance the Scientific 7-Minute Workout, if you're healthy enough to do it.

Dave Van de Mark: "Re '...or in anything else you can think of': I make a smoothie almost everyday as a meal substitute (lunch). I'm gonna see if two tablespoons negatively affects any aspect of taste—hopefully not. I'm game...."

MikeR: "Been doing the AC vinegar thing for over 40 years, after reading Folk Medicine: A Vermont Doctor's Guide to Good Health. I saw an immediate drop in cholesterol numbers. However, there's the inexorable effects of aging on metabolism. So, I'm looking forward to Fix It With Food."

Sunday Support Group: Thorny Issues (*Added: Sale Update)

[Ed. note: This is my second-to-last post until December 27th. I'm taking a few days off for Christmas. The problem with that is that this is what I like doing, and I don't particularly like not doing it. But our year-end holiday break is traditional!   :-)  ]

-

A few supportive recommendations this Sunday, some reiterated:

Confused about food? How Not to Diet is out, and it's utterly wonderful. An encyclopedia of diet demystification. I've been reading it since two weeks before it was published (thanks to the publisher for the advance copy). Michael Greger (and team—I refuse to believe any one man could do all this on his own) gives an exhaustive rundown of the latest state of the science of what to eat and why demonstrably poor diets (keto, paleo, low-carb, etc.) are so popular. Michael goes through every single scientifically validated strategy for weight loss, all of them "put to the test" to use his catchphrase.

Here are his latest two fascinating videos, which I'm putting to the test myself: "Time Restricted Eating Put to the Test" (watch this one first) and "The Benefits of Early Time Restricted Eating" (this is a continuation of the first). I just love eating for health, and I find this stuff fascinating.

Keep yer nose clean: Blackheads...um, seriously, Mike? But sure. If you have blackheads—those little black dots on your nose (they're clogged pores) try Bioré strips. They work so well it's quite astonishing. Made me marvel at the cleverness of us humans. We really are clever; I could wish we were more wise instead, but we truly are clever.

Problem with alcohol, and/or curious as to whether you are an alcoholic or just a person who likes to drink? Under the Influence is a landmark in my life, and my latest run through it was just as rewarding as the earlier ones. Really wonderful, clear book about this most mysterious of maladies. Just the chapters about the stages of alcoholism (chapters 4, 5, and 6) are worth their weight in gold. A brief, practical, plainspoken, disburdening read.

Sleeper lens: A lens I keep forgetting to talk about is the Sigma 45mm ƒ/2.8. Small, portable, reasonably priced, of a natural focal length, with nice bokeh...what's not to like? For Leica L mount and Sony E mount.

Suffered trauma? Arguably the world's leading authority on trauma is Bessel van der Kolk, who is going through (ahem) his own trauma right now (he's been fired from the institute he founded, for undisclosed reasons); but let us not throw the bathwater out with the baby. (We should have a discussion of this sometime—do questions of personal integrity invalidate works? Certainly pertinent to artists. I first confronted this years ago in the case of Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote a wonderful book called The Uses of Enchantment that I liked (a Freudian look at fairy tales) but who was later beset with personal and scholarly accusations, including that he borrowed the ideas of others too liberally in that very book. The question of whether it's still a good book is thorny*. Most recently I confronted the issue in the case of photographer Fred Herzog, who was accused of being a holocaust denier on the basis of an awkward answer in an interview. I studied the issue considerably, even hearing from some of Fred's personal friends, and have decided—just for myself—to forgive him. I do think he was struggling with the issue in his mind, which he too freely revealed; I imagine he was looking for plausible explanations other than the obvious one, and did not want to believe the worst of his countrymen (Fred was born German); but in my judgement he was doing so in the spirit of inquiry, and was very far from having taken the sorts of hardened positions that should rightly tar a man's character.)

But back to Bessel. The work in this case is The Body Keeps the Score, a summation of a lifetime of work in the field. I'm a good reader and reasonably sharp, but this book was tough. It's just a difficult and complicated subject, and the ideas are challenging, the writing weighty. But if you have suffered traumatic experiences (or suspect you have—trauma memory is not processed like normal memories), this difficult book may open your eyes and might even alter your life.

Stuck with a project? An excellent book on creativity and how normal people can succeed at artistic pursuits is Art & Fear, which lays out useful strategies for overcoming roadblocks and getting your creative juices flowing.

I'd like to thank all our readers collectively for their book recommendations over the years. I think half the books I've read in the last five years have been recommended by TOP readers! Thank you.

Mike

*I think yes.

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

LL: "How did the big sale go?"

Mike replies: Really splendidly. Big success, lots of happy customers. In $, second only to Peter Turnley's first sale here—and barely, at that. Really helped my year. Ctein writes:

"Two-thirds of the orders are shipped, but not much will be happening for the next week because of the holidays. Then shipping will resume. Everyone who placed an order should have gotten an email from me confirming their order OR an email indicating that their order has shipped OR their prints. There will be no communication from me between confirming the order and shipping it, but anyone who has not gotten at least one of those things should contact me."

The only reason they're not all shipped yet it because it was such a success! Big thanks and best wishes to everyone who participated.

David Dyer-Bennet: "The question of the author's belief system is particularly important for artists, arguably—art communicates in many ways, and I'm not sure I want to allow a piece of slime (some hypothetical artist whose positions I don't like) that great an access into my head. I find this in many ways more important than the question of 'giving my money to some evil person'; there are so many ways for me to experience the art without giving money, many of them even legal (especially for books, the thing I really care about: libraries, borrowing from friends, used copies, etc.). For a chemist, on the other hand, it hardly matters what they believed, since anything important they worked on, if it's going to remain part of chemistry, is being or has been verified by others both explicitly and by building on the old work (the tower will collapse if the lower stories are unsound). Philosophers and even political scientists and to some extent historians are closer to artists for the purposes of this distinction, though."

Jack: "I already bought the Sigma 45mm via your B&H link this past summer. It’s a wonderful buy. Let me add a book recommendation. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. If you like stories about Indians, the American West, and photography, you will be enchanted. You last promoted it October 21, 2012, but it’s worth reminding readers."

Mike adds: Has it been that long? Wow. That ebook is free if you have Kindle Unlimited, or you can buy a used hardcover for as little as $2.68. Still recommended. Here it is for the rest of the world.

Sunday Support Group: Health Bomb Soup

This Instant Pot stew has loads of what's good for ya, like ginger, kale, lentils, and turmeric—plus it's rich and tasty, and hearty enough to be a meal. I thought it was a standout, hence the urge to share. Makes one meal for six or six meals for one. Very easy to make. The Instant Pot is now just $49, thanks to their popularity—I think they cost $179 (?) before they became all the rage.

Adapted from a recipe by Lisa Le, the Viet Vegan. Her version is spicy, with peppers. This is the Mike-tested variant, so Lisa gets the credit but not the blame.

Ingredients
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
2 medium cooking onions, diced
3–7 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. ginger powder or 1 inch ginger root, peeled and finely minced
1 tsp. ground turmeric or 1 inch turmeric root, peeled and finely minced
1 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. ground coriander
1 or 2 shakes of chili powder (substitutes for Lisa's peppers)
1 tsp. tomato paste
4 cups (1 box) organic vegetable stock plus 1 cup water (five cups liquid in total)
1 cup red lentils, rinsed and drained
1/2 cup pearl barley, rinsed and drained
1 large 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
4 cups kale, finely chopped
1 bunch cilantro, leaves and stems chopped (about 1 cup)

Instructions
1. Prepare and chop the ingredients. Put the ginger and garlic in one bowl and the dry spices in another.
2. In the Instant Pot, sauté onions with vegetable oil until translucent and starting to brown.
3. Add the garlic and ginger and cook until fragrant (1 to 2 minutes).
4. Add ground turmeric, onion powder, garlic powder, ground coriander and chili powder and stir to cook the spices (about a minute, until fragrant). Use a splash of your stock to loosen the onions from the bottom of the pot.
5. Add tomato paste and stir to coat ingredients.
6. Add the red lentils, pearl barley, and diced tomatoes and stir to break up any clumps of lentils/barley.
7. Add the remaining vegetable broth and water.
8. Add the kale and cilantro
9. Pressure cook on high setting for 15 minutes.
10. Manually release pressure 15 minutes after cooking is done.

Doesn't really need salt and pepper when fresh, but might need it after reheating from the fridge. Add salt and pepper at the table. I just polished off the last of my first batch! Yum.

To your health,

Mike

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

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Jim McDermott: Aargh! You Americans and 'cups.' Big? Medium? Small? Teaspoons are fine—they're fairly precise, so what's wrong with ounces/grams for the other stuff?

Mike replies: We get blamed for everything.

First of all, a cup is eight (8) fluid ounces or 250 milliliters. Two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart.

We got this measurement convention from the English. It came into widespread use in the 1200s, probably because of the natural convenience of its "half and half again" nature. Henry VII instituted it as a standard, and Queen Elizabeth I thrice enforced her grandfather's standard, in which era it became known as the "Imperial" system of weights and measures. It was most likely not used in North America at all in the 13th century, and very little known here in the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509).

So blame the Tudors.

Sunday Support Group: Salad for Breakfast (OT)

There's a highly anticipated, eagerly awaited book coming soon that you're going to want. How Not to Diet by Michael Greger will be published on December 10th and can be pre-ordered now. It's almost certain to be a bestseller.

The title is a clever (cute?) takeoff on his bestselling title How Not to Die, which outlines what is currently scientifically known about nutritional solutions to fifteen different common causes of death, from breast cancer to suicidal depression. Note that the author donates 100% of his profits from both books to charity.

Highly recommended.

You've probably noticed that information about nutrition, when you first approach it, is very confusing. There are a couple of very good reasons why that's true:

1. The weight loss industry. In the USA alone, the weight loss industry is worth only slightly less than the global digital photography industry (~$72 billion vs. ~$77b). It dwarfs traditional categories such as, say, book publishing (~$4b). The weight loss industry depends on you being confused, so it's constantly stoking public ignorance. This isn't because of any evil centralized conspiracy, mind you. It's just that individual actors spread falsehoods for all sorts of reasons and collectively it muddies the waters.
2. The influence of the existing food industry on politics. The food industry isn't actually evil; they're just trying to maximize profits. If they have to kill you and your children to earn profits, that isn't because they actually want you to die. However, a lot of the things you probably believe about food have been bought and paid for by the food industry. Even the USDA is deeply conflicted. It has a stark conflict of interest baked into its mission: it supervises food safety and recommends to the public what's healthiest to eat on the one hand, and on the other hand it's supposed to do whatever it can to support US food producers. Those two functions are often at odds.

An example of one of those bought-and-paid for beliefs? Well, ever heard the one about "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"? True?

Nope. There's nothing wrong with eating breakfast if you're hungry at that time of day and/or if you enjoy breakfast, but there's no scientifically valid evidence that it's any more important than any other meal. The happy myth is promoted by the makers of breakfast cereals. Which, for the most part, are decidedly unhealthy foodlike substances!

It's worth mentioning that the public is complicit in the confusing of itself, too, because it wants to be told to do all the bad things it likes to do. This can be tracked over the years; there are always fad diets that flourish and fade that tell people what they want to hear. This is another big reason for the confusion...because we want to be confused, if it's going to allow us to feel okay about continuing our bad habits.

Tips
One tip I read in WFPB lit somewhere is that you should eat your salad first when you sit down for a meal, while you're still hungry. Makes sense to me because I don't like salads much, and they're sort of a bother to make (at least I used to think so for some reason—now I'm in the habit and it seems easy), but edible greens are the probably the single most important thing we eat regularly. They contain hundreds and hundreds of phytochemicals, many of which are essential for cellular functioning. They're one of the most nutritious foods we eat. Your daily salad is the last thing you should delete from your daily diet.

I'm not hungry in the mornings, so I start my day with two large mugs of white tea, with lemon added. Then, I just apply that advice about eating salad first...but I apply it to the whole day! Sometime around 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., I "break my fast" with a green salad. It's not just the first thing I eat at my main meal—it's the first thing I eat every day.

Here are a few random tips I've learned about recently:

1. Most fruits don't have much in the way of anti-cancer properties, but two in particular do: lemons and cranberries. So you can guess who's been eating a lot more cranberries recently. They're very bitter, and I don't like bitter taste, so I eat them in clever ways. I base my berry smoothies on a small amount of cranberry juice concentrate, or sometimes I use frozen cranberries in the smoothie; I eat whole organic cranberries from a bowl along with black or red grapes, so the bitterness of the cranberries can cut, and contrast with, the grapes' sweetness, and the grapes' sweetness can mask the cranberries' bitterness; and I mix about one-quarter of a glass of pure cranberry juice with my glass of pure Concord grape juice, which is the last thing I consume in the evenings. Oh, and I routinely sprinkle my salads with a few dried cranberries. (Dried cranberries and cranberry juice are only half as loaded with antioxidants as whole cranberries, but both are still excellent.)
2. Very strangely, a daily vinegar drink does a lot to cut belly fat. Start with 12 ounces of unflavored seltzer water. Add two tablespoons of organic apple cider vinegar and about a teaspoon of lemon juice—the lemon juice is my own addition, just to take the vinegar-y edge off the taste. You might not lose any weight at all, but drink that once a day for a month and see if your belly isn't flattening. No idea how that works, but it does. (After a month you'll get accustomed to the taste, too. I liked it well enough right away, but for others it could take a little getting used to.)
3. You don't have to buy organic for everything. But there are some things that are much more likely to be contaminated by pesticides. You might want to familiarize yourself with the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. The advice is to be sure to buy organic strawberries, but you don't have to worry so much about avocados...and so on.
4. Brazil nuts (which are actually seeds) aren't good for you in large quantities—they're high in selenium, and eating too many can cause selenium toxicity. But a recent study suggests that just four Brazil nuts per month can lower your bad cholesterol significantly—and they start working faster than statin drugs! And more than four doesn't work any better than four. Four Brazil nuts a month, check.

That last is—forgive me—nuts.

Speaking of cranberries having anti-cancer properties, I eat lots of garlic, too. I have to—the Mennonites peel them for me, but only if I buy them in bulk! (About thirty cloves in a plastic container.) I have to use them up as quickly as I can. But then, garlic is good against cancer, too.

Get in line for that book. I've requested a PDF as a review copy—think they'll believe a photo blogger is worth an early bird copy of a book about nutrition? Maybe not, but it's worth a try. Either way, I can't wait. [UPDATE Monday: The publisher is restricting copies of the PDF to combat possible piracy, but is sending me an advance hard copy. It's only a few weeks before publication, but look forward to a future Sunday book report!]

Mike

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

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Trevor Johnson: "It worries me a bit when you get onto the healthcare stuff. OK, so I'm an editor at a Cochrane Group and work part-time at the medical school, running research, etc. And here is the problem. The research from well conducted trials, and systematic reviews, are poorly understood, even by healthcare professionals. So with all due respect, I am afraid that your observations, though interesting, are just that. Subjective."

Mike replies: Well, I'm just parroting what I have learned from WFPB doctors for the most part, so it's not entirely me. It's true that I like to use myself as a guinea pig and experiment to see what works for me. Kicking off the day with a salad laden with goodies and a berry smoothie is working splendidly, which is why I thought I'd share.

But I'm a layman, and only partially educated. I also tend to be an empiricist by intellectual temperament, and (God forfend!) intuitive by psychological predilection, and I have strong opinions and tastes...a recipe for crankery and crackpottery if ever there was one. If that weren't enough, I could also be under the influence of confirmation bias, since I suck up WFPB books and vids like they were black grapes. So your skepticism is well placed.

Then again, the topic is food, and I have no control whatsoever over what you choose to put into your mouth. So the potential damage I might do via my crankery, if crankery it be, is firmly constrained. Even Dr. Greger departed from his usual ethics in recommending four Brazil nuts a month, on the excellent basis that it cannot possibly do harm!

On the other hand, approximately 75% of American medical schools do not teach nutrition at all, and the majority of medical doctors have never taken a nutrition course, much less a nutrition rotation in medical school. The people I listen to and trust (Michael Greger, Joel Fuhrman, Neal Barnard, John McDougall, Kim Williams, T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Ellsworth Wareham, etc.) are all medical doctors, but ones who have spent their lives and careers studying nutrition and working with patients' diets. My empirical, anecdotal observation (subjective, I know!) so far has been that almost all of the doctors I come in contact with socially or professionally—the ones who have never taken a nutrition course and whose specialties might be very far from anything having to do with nutrition—think they know more about the subject than their colleagues who have made the study of it their life's work. Why that is, I don't know.

I'll put forward a challenge to you. Anyone who is able to a.) feel their bodies and be minimally conscious of how the food they eat makes them feel, and who b.) can somehow contrive to eat a 100% strict whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet for only THREE WEEKS—purely as an experiment!—will, I believe, be convinced. If you can get a checkup and have your blood work done before and after it will be an additional "convincer."

Of course, such an experiment has impediments—it's not as easy as it sounds. It usually requires time and effort to adapt to a WFPB diet. God knows I have not done very well myself, and not for lack of trying. You have to work out what foods you are going to eat, what you find palatable, what you can cook, and what ingredients you have available to you; you have to get over the four days or so it takes your gut to adjust to a normal amount of fiber; and for at least a few days and maybe as long as the whole first half of those three weeks you might suffer cravings for the sugar, alcohol, oil and grease most Americans are used to.

If a person were rich, he or she could kick such an experiment off with a stay at Dr. McDougall's 10-day live-in program, where they will feed you tasty chef-prepared WFPB food, fill your head with WFPB info, and monitor your body's response. But that costs like five grand and a plane ticket, not to mention ten days free, and almost nobody I know can afford such a thing. More's the pity.

But this is kind of amusing. From pages 305–306 of How Not to Die:

"[Dr. Neal Barnard] often uses what's called an 'A-B-A' study design. Participants' health is assessed at baseline on their regular diets, and then they're switched to a therapeutic diet. In an effort to make sure any health changes participants experience on the new diet aren't merely a coincidence, they are then switched back to their regular diet to see if the changes disappear.

"This kind of rigorous study design improves the validity of the results, but the problem, Dr. Barnard related, is that sometimes people improve too much. After a few weeks on a plant-based diet, sometimes people feel so much better that they refuse to go back on their baseline diet—even though it's required by the study protocol. Since they didn't complete the study as planned, their data have to be effectively thrown out and may never make it into the final paper. Ironically, healthy eating can be so effective that it undermines its own studies of effectiveness!"

James: "Just keep it up Mike. As someone who is still living because of diet intervention in 1982/3, I am always happy you give us 'reminders' occasionally. You will always get someone saying that you are not an expert after every post. We know that you aren't. Maybe you should add 'hey, it's just what I have found' after each nutrition post. Food for thought?"

Kirk W: "I’m with James on this one. I learned of Nutritionfacts.org through one of your posts from early in 2019. It’s making a difference in my life and I thank you for that. Plus, Dr. Greger’s humor suits me. I can’t walk through the produce section without thinking about 'Big Broccoli' competing against the pharmaceutical giants!"

Kirk: "Seeing a whole lot of sugars in your diet (Concord grape juice, cranberry juice, etc.) Sugars seem to be the emerging culprit in just about every disease in the west. Also not seeing nearly enough fun food that you enjoy eating. There is a psychological component to the enjoyment of food that is as important as the basic chemistry. If you hate the taste of cranberries then why torture yourself? I get the whole vegan theology but I always go back to 'moderation in all things.' The brain is a tricky thing. Its response to deprivation and forced eating of foods it doesn't like could sabotage all the 'good' effects of another lifeless bowl of oats and grains.... Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Absolutely. Sugar is my particular Achilles' heel. I'm a sugar addict, which is about 1/10th the intensity of alcohol addiction but on the same spectrum IMHO. Sugar is the reason I fall off every diet after I'm successfully on it. I despair of ever controlling it. But I'll keep trying.

Peter Nigos: "I'm with Trevor Johnson on this one. There are opinions on what we should eat, and there is nutrition science. These two universes are not necessarily the same. It is peculiar that blogs on photography seem anxious to tell us what we should or should not eat. Both Lloyd Chambers (diglloyd) and this blog have promoted doubtful nutritional advice. I have not noticed any comments on photography of food on either site. At least you have not offered us promotion of your paranormal experience, like Steve Huff."

Mike replies: Again, I don't have any control of what you eat. And what is wrong with Michael Greger's knowledge of nutrition science? His schtick is, "Every year, I read through every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the World so busy folks like you don't have to." He's been studying nutrition science intensively for 25 years. So do you know more about the subject than he does? (Here's the source of the quote—in the video starting at about 2:10.

I agree with one of the YouTube commenters that he has "...one of the strangest speech patterns I've ever heard in my life. It's like if you took a clip of Mr Rogers speaking and randomly tinkered with the speed lol."

Jim K.: "I'm a scientist who has spent his career in the pharmaceutical industry working on treatments for a variety of diseases. I've been regularly exercising for the last few years: what I found was that my body had reshaped itself pretty nicely (well, I still had the belly fat), but I didn't lose weight. And my vitals (blood work, blood pressure) were not particularly good (200–220 total cholesterol, blood pressure ranges 125/78 to 140/90). Thanks to Mike's blogging, I started WFPB dieting at the end of August (so coming up on month three). My diet had been typical standard American (SAD); I love meats, eggs, dairy, other tasty sweet stuff. I ate my veggies too...so while I wasn't eating horribly, I certainly wasn't eating 'right.'

"Into this journey, I've had a couple sets of blood work and a physical. My weight is down 20 lbs. (weight loss is tapering off to a more reasonable two lbs./week). My cholesterol is down from 200–220 to 140. Triglycerides are still a bit high (150–160). Blood pressure is down to 110/65. And as an scientist, I've observed that my skin and nails have gotten much better (on my feet, mainly).

"Most of the dietary strategies used in WFPB dieting are evidence-based: there are scientific studies (sometimes with placebo-controls). It can be hard to tease out cause and effect in population studies, but not impossible. I've been very thankful that Mike has blogged about his experimentation on diet, and I can confirm that many of these strategies are working well for me.

"I'm looking forward to trying his vinegar and lemon seltzer—I bought the vinegar a while ago, but hadn't figured out a vehicle for ingestion (other than salad). And I pre-ordered How Not to Diet a while ago—how can you not with that title?

"PS: I give myself forgiveness for cheats. I know Mike loves sushi—he got me hooked on that too (years ago). I have a weakness for pizza, and I'll do that with my finacée once a month or so."

Sunday Support Group for that Rare Darkroom Rat: Enlarger Dealz

You're not looking to buy a brand new B&W enlarger.

Know how I know? Because no one is looking to buy a brand new B&W enlarger.

But consider this. For people who want to practice old-fashioned, obsolescent film / analog / traditional / opto-chemical B&W photography (whatever you want to call it) from soup to nuts, start to finish, it's not the film or the chemicals or the cameras but the enlarger that might well be the bottleneck going forward.

The reason is that an enlarger is one of those devices that need to be serviced and supported by the company that made it. You might need different accessories as your needs change (different lamphouses, negative carriers, lensboards, etc.); parts might break and need replacing; bits that wear out or age (bulbs, electronic components) might wear out or age and require service. It might seem simple to buy a disused enlarger on the secondary market, but you'll probably have to choose among dinged-up, dusty devices more or less in pieces in a box, which could turn out to be missing who knows what part or accessory that you will end up needing to get the danged thing up and working. 

So why not just buy new then? Several companies are still selling new enlargers. One—one of the best (I've always been a fan)—is LPL of Tokyo, which here in the United States always sold its products rebranded by importers. Saunders or Omega, principally. You can buy one new.

...But there's a hitch. They've become shockingly expensive. In 1983, the condenser version and the dichroic (color head) version of LPL's mid-line 670 model, a.k.a. the 7700, sold for $289 and $459 respectively. (Source? A page that includes a review by none other than Ctein!) B&H's current prices (and these aren't much higher than the factory-direct prices from Tokyo) are $2,473.95 for the condenser model and a rather eye-widening $5,595.99 for the colorhead model, without lenses (the significance of that last comment will become apparent below). That's not for LPL's best enlarger, mind you. That's for its mid-line good-enuff everyday meat-and-potatoes medium-format / 35mm model. I don't know about you, but in my area pretty decent used cars fetch those prices. Unless you're rich—not wealthy, not well-off, but rich—it would be silly to pay that, considering those enlargers will very soon have a residual value of a few hundred dollars or pounds if you're lucky.

So if you're not rich, you're pretty much forced into buying used. New is out.

Easter egg
Or is it? Maybe not absolutely, at the present moment at least. Should you happen to fall in that fraction of a fraction of a fraction of Photo Dawgs who might actually consider buying a new B&W enlarger, here are two opportunities for you.

One is that Freestyle is closing out the Kaiser VP 9005 condenser enlarger. That one's for printing B&W with manually-inserted gelatin VC filters, but it's made in Germany, it's beautiful, and if you're a home hobbyist you won't be the least bit inconvenienced by having to use gelatin filters. And you can get it right now for only $759.99. That's without a lens. How great a deal is that? Great enough that I'd write this post on TOP about it even though none of you are in the market for it! Just on the off chance of making one fellow Dektol-breather out there blissfully happy. Fingers crossed.

And if you want one of those highly inflated LPLs? There's something for you too. An overstock outfit in Brooklyn has nine LPL 670 enlargers—again, the plain-jane condenser version—brand new in sealed boxes, for $849 or best offer.

That sounds maybe a tad dear compared to a used one (remember, new they cost $2,474), but there's an Easter egg in the box. These are kits—each of the nine enlargers comes bundled—packaged—with a lens. What might be easy for anyone but darkroom rats to miss is that the lens is no ordinary lens. It's Rodenstock's very best lens for 35mm, the Apo-Rodagon-N 50mm ƒ/2.8, a lens that alone sells for $671.99 new (and can be used on your digital camera too, by the way). Even on eBay they go for $300–400. You might have heard of legendary enlarging lenses for 35mm such as the Apo-El-Nikkor 105mm and the Leitz Focotar 40mm, but I know people who have compared them directly who say that the Apo-Rodagon-N 50mm can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those legendary paragons of yore. It's the 35mm enlarging lens that graced my last darkroom. I chose it by buying three top enlarging 35mm enlarging lenses and pitting them directly against each other in careful tests. With those nine enlargers now on eBay, it's in the box.

Enough of this now, this fine Sunday. You might think this post is off-topic (!) since so few people do their own darkroom work now, and even fewer don't already have their own schtuff. But while it might not be of practical value, it's fun, for me anyway, even if in a nostalgic sort of way.

Mike

"Sunday Support Group" is an eclectic series of discursive digressions on topics random and sundry, offered in the hope they might help various subsets of our readership in their work and their ambitions, or that they might contribute to our mental, spiritual, psychic or physical contentment. It appears, as the title suggests, on Sundays.

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

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Patrick Medd: "Eccentric as it may seem I'm currently in the process of building my own darkroom. This will be the fourth time that I have had access to a darkroom but the first time that it will be a dedicated room in my house. I have more than one enlarger lying around in bits but this time I need to be able to print 4x5 and so I'm looking for an enlarger that can do that.

"Here in the UK the original manufacturers of De Vere enlargers are still active in some form (www.deveresecondhanddarkroom.com) and will supply you with a refurbished enlarger which they can still service (for the moment—I don't know how many young people starting out in life these days are thinking 'I know, I'll train to be an enlarger engineer—a job for life if ever I saw one'). So that's the route I'm heading down. Obviously it all costs money, but it's a sound investment and there's no doubt in my mind I'll always be able to get my cash back out of the project  ;-)  ."

adamct: "The interesting thing for me is that unlike others who may have wanted an enlarger in the past but don't want one now, I don't want one now, but am likely to want one in the future (when, of course, a new one in good condition will be impossible to find)! I got started in film photography, but I got in just as digital was taking off. I was a young lawyer, working long hours at a law firm. I never did my own printing—after using labs for a while, I eventually bought a film scanner and did the hybrid thing for a while. But I've always wanted to try analog printing myself, and it is exactly the kind of thing I can see myself getting into...when I retire. At that point I will have the time and space to do whatever I want. But now? Even I can't justify buying one now (and I can justify just about any foolhardy purchase related to my hobbies!). As a certain photo-blogger is prone to say: 'Oh well...'"

A certain photo blogger replies: At the various darkroom magazines I worked for, I always identified a healthy subset of the audience as what I dubbed "re-entry photographers," borrowing the term from what used to be called the women's liberation movement—a re-entry woman was a woman who re-entered the workforce after her children were grown and had left home. Re-entry photographers were just what you're talking about: people (mostly guys of course, but a significant number of women) who had maybe taken a photo course in high school or college and had always appreciated it and wanted to do more of it, but had to wait until retirement to do so. The magazines always fretted about the average age of their subscribers—it was very high, in the 50s age range—but that was because advertisers have a knee-jerk preference for younger audiences. I never worried about it because I understood that darkroom work as a home hobby was much more viable for people who had both money and time (not to mention homes!), and that meant retirees to a large extent.

It's fair to say most people didn't like darkroom work. From my own audience here, my rough estimate is that one out of ten photographers who had to do darkroom work in the past enjoyed the experience and the craft of it, and the other nine thought it was a chore and are glad not to have to do it any more. But I was one of the 10%. For people like me, it was enjoyable, relaxing, and rewarding. But we were always a minority, and now very much more so. Still, I continue to think it's a viable hobby for the few people it suits. The fact that it's difficult and involved isn't a drawback if you enjoy it and are satisfied by it; my brother facets gemstones, for heaven's sake—he taught himself to do it when he was 14—and I know a guy who makes fine knives. Neither of those things are easy or convenient, and neither are necessary in order to end up with jewelry or a knife!

Bill Bresler: "Buying a new enlarger? It's tough to give them away. Nothing sadder than the sight of a 23C with color head sitting at the curb on garbage day. The college where I taught a photo class or two for 16 years shut down their darkroom. Fifteen Beselers and a couple of 4x5 Omegas went into the dumpster."

Curtis: "Dear Mike, If I remember correctly, you first recommended the Kaiser enlarger a couple of years ago. And, you are right, it is indeed a wonderful piece of kit. I bought one earlier this year and set up a tiny darkroom in the back of my wife's studio space. It's just for fun—really, I just play around trying to channel my inner James Fee and enjoy having the chance to make art in the same space as my wife. So, thank you for these niche recommendations!"

Mike adds: Interview with the late James Fee by Dean Brierly. (Note that in the picture of James he's standing in front of a Beseler 23C as mentioned by Bill above.)

Steve: "Mike, I’ve been reading your blog for years. I loved the Leica challenge and ended up with an M3 with a 5cm Summicron Dual Range lens. My situation has changed after several years of digital and I’m ready to get back in the game. I bought the LPL enlarger. I’m looking forward to a long Wisconsin winter in the darkroom. Do you have any suggestions for a darkroom instruction book? I’m that 50 something year old guy who took a few college photography classes. Thanks for all your posts."

Mike replies: Big question! I learned from David Vestal's The Craft of Photography, and was pleased to get to know David personally in later years and to enlist him as a columnist for Photo Techniques magazine. The standard (and simplest) instruction book back in the day was Henry Horenstein's Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual (third edition); Henry was at Harvard back then and is now at RISD (pronounced "RIZZ-dee," the Rhode Island School of Design). A personal favorite was Jack Coote's book for Ilford, Ilford Monochrome Darkroom Practice: A Manual of Black & White Processing & Printing (third edition). I used Ilford's fixing technique (and Ilford papers) and found Jack's discussions of variable-contrast paper and practices helpful. There are books that take you much deeper into the arcana, but save those for later. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter There.

By the way, you didn't ask, but I'd recommend starting out with Ilford RC papers. They're very good, they have excellent permanence, and they're much easier to use than fiber base papers that you have to run a washing routine on and that really need to be flattened in an expensive drymount press after drying. After washing you can immerse RC prints briefly in a bath of distilled water and a few drops of Edwal LFN (four ounces will last you till about 2050) and hang them from their corners with wooden clothespins to dry. I'd also recommend liquid film and paper developers...saves you the chore having to mix powdered chemicals. Aside from that, the best advice with B&W film is something John Szarkowski himself once said in my hearing: "expose enough and don't develop too much."

Sunday Support Group: Enjoy the Music

Rogers LS3/5a speakers. They're 305mm (12 inches) high.

Bear. [sic—his handle includes the period] wrote: "I have a friend who is a professional (certified, etc. etc.) food taster and critic. He has amazing palate sensitivity and gives consistently correct answers on all sorts of tasting subjects in double-blind conditions from tasting the same wines vs. different wines served at different temperatures to identifying different flour brands in otherwise identical cakes. Even more amazing to me is his palette memory. Not only can he give the correct result double-blind, he can repeatedly identify the same tastes many weeks and months later solely from his memory of prior tastings.

"After I watched him demonstrate under test conditions and offered congratulations, I said something like, 'Wow! I wish I had your palette—it must be wonderful to have that level of discernment and recollection.' His answer: 'Yes, it is wonderful. I can identify and remember all the wonderful taste differences in fabulous foods. But it's also a curse. I identify and remember all the crappy tastes too—I don't get to pick and choose—and there are many, many more of those.' I'm pretty sure there are people out there to whom the Leica look or CaNiOlyJi look, or whatever, is bleedingly obvious, and, given a decent frame or print, can tell you with which lens or at what f-stop it was taken and so forth."

'Mongst audiophiliacs this is known as having "golden ears." I'll give you an example: I was getting a nice audition from the owner of a prestigious high-end audio salon in Chicago once. We were alone in an audition room and he had just hooked up some new speakers for us to listen to. "Nice," I said, "but you've got them out of phase." He checked, and insisted they weren't—he had connected them properly. We listened some more. "Still out of phase," I said. Something wrong somewhere. Seeking to please (or maybe just to appease), he began checking methodically through the whole chain—and, to his surprise, discovered the mis-wiring at the preamp. Mumbling an apology and promising to pillory the underling responsible, he asked, "how did you hear that?"

But the problem is worse than that, like Bear's friend said: how can I not hear it?

Because, seriously, I want to not hear it.

I can hear standing waves, too. Took me an afternoon to figure out what that was, but now that I know how to recognize them, if they're there, I'm going to hear them and it's going to bug me.

Sigh.

It also bugs me that audioskeptics love to bring up "blind listening tests" as if that proves that "golden ears" audiophile are full of it. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The skeptics get the time-frame all wrong. They want to play a snippet of music with one piece of equipment and the same tiny snippet with another piece and challenge the audiophile to immediately identify which is which. When he or she can't, what that proves is that even golden-ears listeners can't parse differences from thirty-second or three-minute samples—not that they can't parse the differences. It takes maybe three days of listening with many different pieces of music to get a proper handle on what a component is doing. Set up "blind listening tests" with three-day sampling periods, and I have no doubt that seasoned audiophiles could pass blind tests consistently. Ask any of Stereophile's or The Absolute Sound's reviewing staff whether they agree with me here. I'll bet they will.

I've experienced this many times—great enthusiasm for the lifelike richness of a new component at first, followed by the gradual denouement of figuring out just what it's doing and how it's doing it a few days or a week later. Repeat the process a few times with different associated equipment, and I have a handle on how the thing sounds. Drop it into an unfamiliar system in an unfamiliar room and of course I'm not going to be able to identify which amp or preamp or whatever is in the chain, and I'm certainly not going to be able to do it quickly. That doesn't mean I don't know how a particular piece of equipment sounds.

It's been the same way with lenses for me over the years. I was at a point once when I could identify certain lens designs from the properties of their bokeh. Crazy. Field curvature was the worst—once I learned how to see it, I couldn't unsee it. Think you can't see the difference between a coated and uncoated lens even when there's no flare in the picture? I could, if I knew the film. The specifics of a lens doing its thing unmask themselves pretty quickly for me—or did at one point. I've been trying hard to reform, by not paying too much attention to it.

Bear. continues: "But really, who wants to be able to see things that well? If a lens produces images that you—i.e. the photographer—either intended to make or are so close that you either can't tell the difference or don't care, or even if you just enjoy using the darned thing (in my case, a tiny 40mm Voigtländer stuck on the front of a Nikon D3), isn't that enough?"

Exactly. That's my ideal. The more relaxed I can be about my "golden eyes" syndrome affliction, the better I like it. My late friend Dick Schaus, who owned Audio International in Georgetown D.C. and imported many different brands of British hi-fi into the USA at one point, including Spendor and Musical Fidelity, had been all the way to the deep end of extreme audio. But near the end of his life he simplified to a little class-A integrated amp and some small Rogers LS3/5a two-way speakers and just enjoyed the music.

That's the ticket.

Mike
(Thanks to Bear.)

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

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Featured Comments from:

James: "I trained baristas some time in the past, and one day we had a guest roaster bring some coffees. We set up a blind triangulation tasting where each set of three had one different coffee in it, and the baristas had to pick which one was different.

"I did the tasting blind too. Since most of the coffees were different origins, it wasn't that hard. I got them right. Then as a bonus, I said what I thought the country of origin each coffee was. I was pretty sure I was right, which I was.

"There are levels of refinement up from that. The Specialty Coffee Association of America does a certification called Q-grader, where you only get certified if you can distinguish between different lots of coffee on the same farm."

Robert Harshman: "Ah yes, the special senses beyond normal range that probably most of us have in some area or areas. Mine is sensitivity to light. I first became aware of it when I took a astronomy class in college. One of the lessons was a trip out of town to a very dark area to view the night sky. One of the questions asked to all was to gauge the relative value of brightness of various stars. My professor was completely shocked as I got within .1 on the scale of all stars. It was clear he had never had a student do that before. I guess that's one reason why I became a photographer."

Andrew Molitor: "Perceptual testing is heinously fraught. One might, for example, formulate the notion that lens X has superior microcontrast to lens Y. One might, in fact, be able to identify this improved microcontrast in suitably blinded tests. However it might well prove in further, more careful testing, that you are not in fact seeing any effect reasonably described as 'microcontrast,' you are in fact identifying the lens by some other, unrelated, quirk. And here is the habanero: you then perceive improved microcontrast. You really do. Despite the fact (perhaps) that there is literally no measurable effect present that in any meaningful way could be called microcontrast. Both hearing and seeing are the result of massive amounts of post-processing by our brains, massaging the output of astonishingly poor physical apparatuses. The result is as much a hallucination as anything else, differing only from a true hallucination in that, where it can be spot checked against reality, it matches more often than not."

Peggy C.: "I call them super powers. I too have one. I spent 25 years as a professional pet groomer. Early on I found that I could not only feel a mat or snarl in a pet's coat while brushing, but I could hear it! I also could hear it from across the room when anyone else was brushing. In all those years I never found another groomer that could hear it. As I learned my trade I began teaching new want-to-be groomers. In all that time I was unable to teach that skill. It's a skill I still enjoy even now in my retirement. When I groom friends and family's pets. I teach them how to brush their pets between grooming sessions. Still haven't found anyone that can hear the snarls and mats."

Timothy Auger: "A spot of tinnitus, as well as normal age-related loss of hearing at very high frequencies, will save you a great deal of money when it comes to audio equipment. One of the benefits is that you focus on the music. Eyesight slightly compromised years ago by a detached retina imperfectly re-located paradoxically makes it easier to distinguish between an interesting photo and a boring photo at an exhibition. I don’t recommend any of these afflictions, but they do force you to concentrate on content, rather than technical details of presentation."

David Elesh: "I make no claim to have golden ears. My audio point of reference is simply how closely the gear gets me to what I have experienced live in decades of listening to music in concert halls with excellent acoustics. For about 30 years, the speakers that, for me, came closest in my home and with my associated equipment were Quad 63's (my musical tastes do not require deep bass). Friends who heard this setup often asked for advice in purchasing equipment, but few were willing to pay the costs I paid. In the 1980s I often recommended the Rogers LS3/5a as a deeply musical speaker. Almost all who bought them were delighted with their sound and have never seen a need to replace them. It was and is a marvelous design."

I Just Sent...

...Today's "Sunday Support Group" post to the Patreon subscribers by group email (I'd been meaning to experiment with that functionality), to thank everyone for putting me over the initial goal of 750 supporters. As I explained, I only picked the 750 number in the first place because I thought it was out of reach. How nice that it wasn't.

Ironically, the newest supporters, the very ones who put the number over the top, might not have gotten the message. (You'll have to tell me—I'm not absolutely sure who did and didn't get the group email). In the Patreon system I think I'm only allowed to message people I have "financial relationships" with—that is, who have actually sent money. Don't blame me, I don't make the rules! So new signer-uppers who haven't yet made their first payment might have gotten left out. Not your fault.

So, to them—you, if you're one of them—a big thanks, the same thanks I sent to everyone else just now. You're very kind.

Warm thanks too to those existing subscribers who increased the amount of their existing contributions! And don't think I've forgotten about you, Eric P. Still mulling that over.

And wow, I should email my supporters more often—the messages I'm getting back are so warm and generous and friendly it's making me verklempt. Thanks, truly.

Mike

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

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Kjell: "I just got the message through Patreon telling me how you just now reached your goal of 750 patrons. I myself have made a small donation of $3 each month for a while now. I think it is about half of what your content is worth, but being cheap, I always love it when I get a discount. I would highly encourage everyone to donate a small sum. Think of it this way. If don't, you're kind of stealing it, but if you donate $1 a month you get a huge discount on the best photo content on the web. Also keep in mind that this blog is the only photo-related site on the Internet that never, ever writes anything about pool (or other related sports). And that is really worth something."

Mike replies: Yes, you're absolutely right, and people really need to keep the value of that in mind. For example, I never post anything like this amazing break by Jeffrey DeLuna of the Philippines at the 2019 WPA Players Championships in Las Vegas. Because, duh, it has nothing to do with photography. Most people will probably never see a break like that because I don't link to it, but that's...wait for it...the breaks.  :-)

Kjell replies: "I'm so glad I never had to see, or even know anything about that break. I can only imagine it would have blown my socks off, and I really enjoy wearing socks in the winter."

Keith replies to Kjell: "Not to nitpick, but I would like to point out that there are actually two photo-related sites that routinely write about pool. You might check out Kirk Tuck's blog, where he frequently posts...oh wait, that's a different kind of pool."

Sunday Support Group: New Lens, New Eye

"Sight is the soul's perfect delight."

—A medieval Pope, although I can't find the citation

Well last week was weird—it was like TOP in slow motion. Wednesday's post took till Friday to complete, and then it took another day to get the comments done. Pace that old joke about baseball*, I crammed into four days the work I usually complete in one. Still, it was pleasant. I love books. I was all set to begin a career in rare books when I was diverted into photography, a course change which turned out to be permanent.

Fear fear itself
Time now to say a few words about being a big baby.

I'm a big baby when it comes to strangers carving, grinding, cutting and piercing bits and parts of me. I've had a bonafide phobia about dental work for years; knowing the phobia is irrational should, but doesn't, make it easier to deal with.

But everything else pales before the terror I felt contemplating an eye operation. The idea of someone attacking my eye with blades, needles and lasers undid me. I couldn't face it. I put off the operation approximately two years longer than I probably should have.

The operation I had was a DMEK, a partial cornea replacement, and I got a new lens for cataracts at the same time. The cornea replacement was a transplant, a part of another human's body; the new lens is an implant, manmade. Big thanks are due here to Jim Schley, my "friend of long duration" (we were best buds in second grade) who came here to help my with my recovery.

If you take only one message from this post, let it be this: If you ever need similar surgery, don't fear it. It's certainly easy to fear it, and completely understandable if you ask me. But it's just not bad at all, turns out. You have no nerves in your eye, so you don't feel much pain. You feel some pressure and see bright lights and odd distortions, but at worst it rises to the level of mid-level discomfort, with nothing that can be described as pain; most dental work is worse, frankly, because there's always the possibility of a zinger or zap of pain with a tooth. Like any operation it's tough on your body (operations are roughly similar to being wounded in battle when it comes to recovery, at similar levels of corporeal insult). But at this point I actually have a rather hard time recreating my prior fears in my memory. I know I was fearful but I no longer know why. I no longer feel it. Sometime in the next few years I'll have to have the other eye done. And I shall not fear.

Better and worse
In fact, I'm looking forward to that! Having the other eye done, I mean. My new/right eye has been healing fine; my only treatment now is Prednisolone eyedrops three times a day to prevent rejection. It can continue to heal for up to a year, so it hasn't stabilized yet. At my next appointment I'll get another interim prescription for glasses. I already had one interim prescription made into glasses corrected for 18 inches, for working on the computer. When I get the newer prescription I'll replace those.

 In the month after the operation I felt dependent on my driving glasses, which mainly improved my "old" left eye, being not corrected for the "new" right eye; but gradually, as I got better and better, the penalty of being deprived of my new/right eye was no longer offset by the improvement the glasses made to my old/left eye, so I found myself no longer putting on my glasses when I drove. And sure enough, according to the ophfthalphlaphmologist (that word that cannot be spelled**), my eyesight is now adequate for me to legally drive without eyeglasses in the State of New York.

The new/right eye is certainly a huge improvement already. My old right eye wasn't useless, but, if it was all I had, I would not have been able to either read or drive. It was like looking through a strong soft-focus filter, and it flared badly. Looking at a person's head across a restaurant table with a window in behind them, the flare was such that I only saw a silhouette and could see nothing of their expression. My old/left eye was my "good" eye. Now, my new/right eye is better than my left.

My sight in my new eye is still far from perfect, and it still fluctuates. However, a very interesting thing has happened. The sight in my new/right eye is much more contrasty and has much better color purity and saturation, but not particularly good resolution, especially up close. The sight in my old/left eye has much better resolution, but lower contrast and an overall yellowish or tan cast caused by the aging of my natural lens and a slight degree of veiling or softness. When I look at the world with both eyes, however, my brain has learned to combine the best information from each eye, so I see things with the contrast and color purity of the new/right eye and the resolution of the old/left eye. It's quite amazing actually. I'm really impressed with the degree to which we see with our brains. The analogy to what smartphone manufacturers are doing with the data from minuscule sensors in software to mimic larger-sensor cameras isn't far off. (Humans anthropomorphize technology.)

Purer, stronger, whiter
Best of all? The world is amazing and enjoyable to look at again. Repeatedly, I'm struck by the beauty of the what I see through my new eye, especially in vivid, clear air with strong sun. Colors are purer, stronger, more saturated; whites are white; and the contrast is similar to that of a mint Commercial Ektar (a lens type that was optimized for contrast at some expense in resolution, following empirical tests conducted by Kenneth Mees and Loyd [sic] Jones at Kodak). There are times when the effect is just beautiful, almost mind-blowing. To say I really appreciate it is an understatement. 

All in all...the current state of eye care is one of the great things about being alive at the present moment of history. My grandmother, who became all but blind at the end of her life, was afflicted, at each stage of her decline, about ten years too early for the cures that would have helped her remain sighted.

Thanks are due to my surgeon, Holly B. Hindman M.D., M.P.H. and her team at the Eye Center in Canandaigua. This has been a great experience. (And, I must confess, a big load off my mind.) I can't wait to have the other eye done. Even if the new/right eye never improves to the level of resolution of the left, it's possible the future new left eye will "turn out" even better than the right.

As it is, I'm still getting better, but, even now, I'm fine. I see well. And, as you can surely appreciate, that's a big, big blessing.

Mike

*A baseball game is fifteen minutes of action crammed into three hours.

**Ophthalmologist. I have to look that dang word up every time, and I'm an excellent speller.

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Sunday Support Group: Older You, Younger You

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["Sunday Support Group" is about personal projects, mine or yours, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]

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Looking for a little help here. Doing a little research for the book.

There are a hundred ways to succeed at photography and a thousand ways to enjoy it. Assuming you've been along for the ride for a while, what would you say are the things about the pursuit that have been the most rewarding for you?

It can be anything, not just the obvious things. For example, my current top three are:

• Discovering the work of other photographers through books and museum and gallery shows
• "Obsessing" over lenses
• Mastering traditional darkroom craftsmanship

Ask me next week; they might change.

But anyway those are just my own "fer instances."

What are the things you've most enjoyed about your pursuit of photography and wish you'd done more of, and what are the things you wish you hadn't wasted your time on? For example, I actually wish I hadn't spent so much time and energy obsessing over lenses, even though I enjoyed it. If you could speak now to your younger self, what would you emphasize? What would you caution yourself against?

Mike

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

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[Ed. Note: Unusually, I will not be posting Featured Comments to this post, to avoid even the suggestion that certain enjoyments and regrets are more important than others. It's your photography—you own it, and you can do anything you please with it so long as you're not hurting yourself or others, and that's okay by me. Please see the Comments Section to hear what readers have to say.]