The Online Photographer

Sunday Support Group: My County 'Tis of Thee

The county where I live, Yates County, New York, is more unusual and interesting than I gave it credit for at first. We are the third least-populous county in the State, but the largest wine-growing county in the United States outside of California, with more vineyards than any other New York county. Although landlocked, the county has a large amount of shoreline—no resource seems to be able to tell me how many miles exactly—on three lakes, Keuka, Canandaigua, and Seneca.

How many waterfalls do we have? You know I have one in my backyard. Like the islands of the Philippines, which are hard to count because some of them appear and disappear with the tides and the seasons*, many of our waterfalls come and go, materializing after heavy rains and disappearing in dry times. So the county has uncountable waterfalls.

Nationalists, I suppose, might say we have an immigrant language problem—but it's not Spanish, spoken in the home by 1.5% of the population, it's German (and Pennsylvania German and Dutch), spoken in the home by 5.5% of the population**. They're Wenger Old-Order Mennonites, and they've been here for hundreds of years, although most in Yates County have been here no longer than 50 years, having come by way of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania starting in the 1970s.

I originally thought little Mennonite kids were shy, but it's more likely they didn't understand me—they don't begin to learn English until they're around five, I've been told. Tidy and thriving Mennonite farms dot the county, and their horse-drawn buggies and bicycles (in any sort of weather), are a common sight on the roads. There are two telltales of an Amish or Mennonite farmstead: washing out on the line to dry, or no cars to be seen.

I'd love to do a project on the Mennonites, but they don't like having their pictures taken. I'm more concerned with being respectful of people's wishes than I am about getting pictures. I'm sure if it were a certain photojournalist I know, I'd make a forthright appeal to the ruling body of elders, talk a good case, and in no time flat come away with blanket permission to photograph everybody in the congregation, and then in another month be friendly with 20 families around the county and before you know it have 30,000 exposures in the can. But he's him and I'm me, and you know what they say: Oh well. 

One of my first experiences as a wannabe photojournalist was photographing a Vietnamese refugee camp in France. The photographer I was with went around amiably snapping pictures everywhere, but multiple people requested we not take pictures. When we went ahead anyway, some responded with hostility or disapproval, and others would hide their faces, or their children's faces, if they saw the camera pointed at them. It was highly uncomfortable for me. I couldn't do it. After trying for a while, I put the camera away.

As with many things, you're kinda stuck with who you are. (I've always felt that most photographers gravitate to subject matter that's comfortable for them to shoot given their individual personality and psychology. Not everybody can shoot everything.)

I went to town early this morning and saw three Mennonite women all dressed up in their good go-to-meeting clothes, dark blue full-length dresses and bonnets, on bicycles. They were pedaling determinedly between one stoplight and another, side by side, with a car in front of them and a truck behind. From where I sat in my little sedan, going the other way, I was looking up at them as they approached, so my viewpoint made them look slightly imposing, in the way that a lower viewpoint when taking a portrait is meant to make the subject heroic.

It was quite a picturesque sight; but the picture got away.

Mike

*The number is somewhere between 7,107 and 7,641.

**Of course it's not actually a problem, and neither is Spanish. As with all non-English speaking immigrants throughout our history, older newcomers tend to keep speaking the language of their youth, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, German, Spanish, Polish, Mandarin or whatever, but their children born here speak English, whether they also speak their parents' and grandparents' language or not.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: Catch Fire

I know, it's not Sunday, it's Monday. But I couldn't get down to work yesterday.

It comes as a surprise to some of my readers (all of whom are wonderful and above average) when I mention that not every post is for everybody. For example, only 79% of TOP readers are vitally interested in pool. (Estimated.) It may be shocking to people of good sense that as many as 21% of readers could be indifferent to that great sport...and still be above average; but I know they're out there because they blast me with the firehose every now and then.

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "how can anyone not like pool?" I share your bewilderment! Cue sports, as they're collectively called, are my sports. But some people prefer other sports, which I have to say is somewhat incomprehensible. 

Well, life is full of mysteries!

So...what follows is not for everybody.

And I did not come up with this. It was mentioned by a commenter the other day. (Readers make all the good contributions around here). But I can't find it. Yr. Hmbl. Jgglr. (moi) does not keep as many plates in the air as formerly. It was part of the discussion about subject matter somehow. Might have been a private email.

Artist statements...
But (he says, finally getting to the point), here's a simple exercise that can be remarkably clarifying:

Write your artist's statement.

An artist's statement (you're playing the artist in this scenario, and don't worry about the implications of the word) is a short but serious statement of what you're about, what you're doing, what you're trying to accomplish, what your concerns are. It describes you as a creator to somebody who doesn't know you. It also (sometimes not so subtly) indicates how you would like your work to be seen by others.

Write it from the perspective of the photographer you want to be, not the one you happen to actually be.

As an illuminating exercise, it will probably be more useful the younger you are.

You don't have to show it to anybody, so go ahead and be a little conceited if you wish. This is one of the rare occasions when being a tad egotistical might actually help.

...And why we won't write them
As I was mulling this over, realizing that very few readers will actually do this, and wondering how I could encourage or inspire a few more of you to take pen to paper, it occurred to me that I should take a gulp of my own medicine and do it myself. So I've been meaning to. For two days now. Seems simple enough.

But have I done it? No.

Well, I haven't yet.

So if you don't do this, well, me neither. So I can hardly blame you if you don't.

Believe
Still, I believe in the possibilities of the exercise. For the right person in the right circumstances (see above about this not being for everyone), it could even change your whole direction as a photographer and ignite your enthusiasm and your commitment. And help your work catch fire.

I should really try it....

Mike
(Thanks to the as-yet unidentified reader who brought this up)

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Kirk Decker: "A few years ago I took a business development class for artists and photographers. A lot of time was spent on writing elevator pitches, grant proposals, budgets, artist statements, and bios. The language in a good artist statement shouldn't be much different than the language you’d use to explain a new project to a good friend over lunch. Galleries, magazines, exhibitions, and art shows are going to want an artist statement, and probably a bio, when they consider your work.

"I have a Google drive folder called 'Artist and About Me statements.' In that folder are several statements in about 15 different lengths and flavors. Lengths range from 99 characters, for art shows, to 300 words and up, for galleries and grant applications. I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I apply for something. I just go to my folder and copy/paste the length and style they ask for.

"Here’s an excerpt from a statement I display at art shows. It's written specifically for those who come to these shows. It invites conversation, and people will frequently ask to photograph it.

I use Film, Digital, and Infrared cameras in my photography.

When I use Film I'm not looking for some sort of Ultimate Quality in film. I'm looking for an aesthetic quality that incorporates the Japanese ideas of beauty as a part of impermanence and imperfection. I embrace film now, for the very qualities that when we shot film (back then) were considered qualities to be avoided.

Shooting With Film is about the realization that perfection is not beauty and that it is our "flaws" that make us beautiful; realizing that our censoring has been self-censoring, all our restraints and hesitations have been self imposed based on our misconceptions of what we see in ourselves. It is about being beautiful in the moment now, never waiting to be beautiful later.

"'Shooting With Film' is capitalized in this statement as it is the name of one of my Instagram accounts."

Steve C: "I think it's a valuable and clarifying exercise. There's value in the attempt whether the attempt produces a successful or useful statement or not.

"A successful statement depends on being able to find the words. And working with words is not often like working with pictures. All artists—which is to say, all people who express themselves creatively — respond to the world around them and to the world within them. The statement is a stab at helping to shed a little light to help orient the viewer.

"The most powerful example I can think of was an exhibition I went to that included found pictures of two children, portraits, landscapes, soundscapes and found objects. It was evocative, and clearly about family and identity, but I couldn't put it all together.

"In the her statement, the artist explained that her sister had been murdered when they were in their early teens, that the story had caught the attention of the media and her sister's image had become the face of a public conversation about predatory violence. This work was about reclaiming her sister and her image as someone real, with shared memories, joys and relationships."

"In that light, the work became immensely powerful in a way that I don't think it could have if the work itself was direct enough to 'speak for itself.'"

Sunday Support Group: Ah, July (OT)

A quote for you. The usual disclaimer here—I'm not an expert on this subject. Just talking about the latest book I'm reading. It's by a gastroenterologist and it's about gut health. The study of gut microorganisms is a new field that's really only gotten going in earnest since about 2005, and one stated aim of the book is to bring laypeople up to speed with what's been going on in the field. Here's the quote:

Diversity of plants is the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiota
At this point, you probably don’t need me to explain why the Golden Rule of plant-based diversity matters. You’ve heard it throughout this book. This is our anthem. Our core philosophy. We no longer need a laundry list of food rules, we only need to remember to eat a diversity of plants. When you walk into the supermarket, remember: “Diversity of plants.” When you’re at the salad bar, trying to figure out what to add, remember: “Diversity of plants.” “Diversity of plants” should cross your mind whenever you’re thinking about what to eat.

—Will Bulsiewicz MD, Fiber Fueled (p. 181)

(The heading is part of the paragraph from the book.)

The Hadza tribe, a modern hunter-gatherer society in Northern Tanzania whose members eat no processed foods and not even any foods originating from farms, might not have a lot of wealth in the way some of us think about it, but they have something very precious that most of us Westerners don't: they enjoy very good gut health. The typical Hadza gets an average of 100 grams of fiber a day, eats thirty different kinds of plants in a day, and has 30 to 40% more different kinds of microbes and bacteria in their guts than average Brits or Americans do. (More being better.) That's versus a paltry 15 grams of relatively poor-quality (i.e., low-diversity) fiber daily for Americans on average—38 grams being recommended daily for adult males.

Here's an interesting thing I learned from the book. It turns out that when you think you have an intolerance for some variety of plant food, you're right—you actually do. But you're very likely to draw precisely the wrong conclusion from that.

Let's say you think you can't eat beans. Beans make you bloated and gassy. Your stomach burbles and gurgles, and you're uncomfortable. So you very logically think, whew, beans! Bad for me. Never eating those again.

Wrong conclusion. What's really going on is that you have an unhealthy gut—your gut bacteria are depleted, starved out, limited, and your system lacks the flora needed to digest beans easily and comfortably. Why? Because you never eat bean fiber and you have a low level of microbial diversity in your gut. But the solution to that is not to avoid beans...that's what led to the problem in the first place. The solution is to go "low and slow to grow" in Dr. Bulsiewicz's words, and steadily reintroduce bean fiber to your diet to repopulate your gut with the microbes that are missing.

So you get a can of organic beans and dole out just a teaspoon of them on to your salad each day. Start with a very low dose, go very slow, and begin to build up the variety of your gut flora again.

Eat them regularly—a big problem with food intolerance is that we never eat something and then we eat a large amount of it all at once, bombarding our system with something it's not used to dealing with. Go slow and go steady.

After a few weeks you'll be able to digest beans comfortably, and your gut will be that much stronger and healthier.

So that's what people mean when they say "we're all different" when it comes to diet and food. In fact, we all are: it's because we all have a different profile of microorganisms in our intestines.

Enthusiasm
As a read, Fiber Fueled starts rather awkwardly and tentatively. But as soon as Dr. Bulsiewicz gets to the science he perks right up and all but overflows with enthusiasm. He works with patients who have serious gut issues of all kinds, so naturally he goes through all those issues. He makes a convincing case that most of us have guts that are badly damaged by antibiotics, alcohol, and our number one type of malnutrition, namely the critical shortage of fiber in our diets. (The majority of Americans think there's fiber in steak! No. All fiber comes from plants.)

Diversity of plants is his mantra for gut health. Although in 400 pages he goes a little further into it than that. For the most part, I was already doing a lot of what he suggests. For quite a while now I've been in the habit of adding all sorts of different plants to whatever I cook. Little of this, little of that in everything. When I read that part about the Hadza eating thirty different kinds of plants a day, though, I heard that little voice in my head go, thirty! I'll never get to that. So I actually counted. If you allow specific spices to count, as well as different kinds of greens in a salad, I actually ate 28 different kinds of plants yesterday. So I might be doing better than I thought.

Of course, it's high produce season here in the Finger Lakes, so eating plant-based is easy right now. Not to mention very pleasurable. (It's kind of weird to be eating all I can stand to and still be losing weight.) Even though I was already full, I gorged myself on a bowl of locally-grown raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries for dessert a few hours ago—all high in gut-friendly fiber. They melted in my mouth. Heavenly. And there are more for tomorrow.

This season actually makes me a little sad because I can only eat so much. I stuff myself to the scuppers until I can't take another bite, and there's still a cornucopia of fresh produce lined up waiting its turn. I had yellow squash and mushrooms in my salad today, along with about a dozen other things, but the fresh peas are going to have to wait till tomorrow.

So much plantatious goodness abounding, so little room for it all. Ah, July.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: The S/G Index

You know, it struck me the other day that my "satisfaction/gratification index" in photography hasn't been particularly high lately. I been planning to try some film portraits last Spring and put the project off because of COVID-19, which was a bummer.

There are, of course, all sorts of ways that any particular interest can be satisfying and gratifying. I've heard of a lot of them over the years where photography is concerned. One guy I knew liked getting in his little airplane and going up in the air to take pictures. Another loved testing lenses. Another collected old view cameras. Some people take pictures, but that's far from the only way people enjoy photography.

Such things can be functional and purposeful or trivial and superficial—heck, I like "window" shopping, even (the window these days being the Internet, mainly)—that's one of the things I can find gratifying.

What I'm saying is that it's not really even connected to anything serious...necessarily. It's more like, are the old endorphins firing up? Are you getting the juice? You jazzed? Getting what you need?

I tried this: I stuck a number on it. From one to ten. I don't know if that would work for anybody else, but I seem to have little problem coming up with the number. I seem to have a sense for what I'm getting out of something. I know right where I am. Pool, for me, was up to a 9 earlier this year—I was playing a lot with friends, playing in a league, watching a lot of pool and snooker matches on YouTube, getting some coaching, practicing a lot, and just enjoying the heck out of it. (And I distinctly remember thinking to myself that nothing could stand in the way of that continuing—and then COVID-19 hit and that was that. Funny how we really can't anticipate what the future might hold. No matter how much we might imagine otherwise.)

Music just went from about a 5 to an 8 for me just by starting the free trials of Roon and Qobuz on my computer. I'm loving Roon. I've been getting to bed late because I can't drag myself away from the music.

Jazzed and juiced
As far as photography is concerned—always one of my top interests—if my S/G Index is at a 7 or higher, I'm fine. If it's a 6 or lower, something's gotta be done. That 6-to-7 juncture is the tipping point. A 6 or lower on the S/G Index means my hobby needs a B-12 injection, a little caffeine, some kind of infusion of interest. A pick-me-up.

Lately I'm fine—I shot a lot with the Panasonic GX9 (which I'm going to write about soon) and that did it; it got me out of the house and looking at the world and hunting that elusive next nice shot. I didn't do particularly well, but that kept the Index high enough. The GX9 has to go back to B&H tomorrow.

And looking at readers' prints for the Print Crits is also raising my S/G Index. I enjoy prints.

So I'm okay. Just gotta keep it above 6, which is the level at which the doldrums start to intrude. Whenever one of my main interests gets below 6, it's time for some kind of action.

Hope you're doing well with your own S/G Index in photography these days. If not, time to do something about it.

Mike

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JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Great timing on this post for me. COVID-19 has me at a bit of a crossroads at the moment and it relates to this post. This lockdown has provided me with the opportunity and time for personal photography. I have really been enjoying documenting my world for personal pleasure—home, neighborhood, town, Boston and various places of interest as they look at this moment. My S/G Index for photography is very high: 9+.

"But there is another side that is quite scary. Commercial photography, at least the particular types of photography I do for my clients, has all but disappeared. Up until a couple weeks ago, I sort of kept the concern for the financial peril on the back burner because I was very optimistic that a great deal of the work would return in the fall. I am much less optimistic now. I'm 49 and this may indeed by a life-changing event in terms of my career in photography. I may need to reinvent what I do and how I derive revenue. That's a bit daunting."

Sroyon: "I also go through cycles on all my hobbies, but right now photography is about the highest it's ever been. I've never made any money from photography—even the idea didn't really cross my mind—until recently I sold a print (my first and only one so far) and ran a film developing workshop (pre-lockdown) as an Airbnb experience for which two people signed up. From this month on I'm getting some money to write for two film photography websites. It's only a small amount, but I used it to buy a used Minolta Autocord this month, and next month I'll buy some more paper for my makeshift home darkroom. Earning some cash, however little, to take photographs and write about it—something I like so much I would happily do it for free—is incredibly gratifying. Then again, you probably know all about it.  :-) "

Stephanie Luke: "I cheated and acquired two kittens! Since the heat of local summer has descended on us, I stay inside a lot at this time of any year, even before the pandemic. But having these two furry critters to watch is endlessly fascinating, and getting decent pictures of them as they race around and tussle with each other is a delightful challenge. I am shamelessly besotted, and I don't care what anyone else thinks! They have easily raised my number to an 8."

Mike replies: Cool. Kitty photography is not disreputable, merry jokes I've made about it in the past notwithstanding. Case in point, a famous little book called Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir by Tony Mendoza, a highly unlikely bestseller in both its printings. Tony set out to capture the character of his girlfriend's cat, and distilled a lot of work (play?) into a remarkable document. Thanks to Tony there are at least a few cat pictures in the permanent collections of august institutions such as MoMA and the Met. 

Aaron: "I've noticed that 'window shopping' for photography gear actually tends to lower my S/G index for photography (and I should know as I've done and do way too much window shopping for my own good). I think it gets me focused on what I don't have rather than being attentive to the amazing equipment and opportunities that I do have. And I also think that it allows me an unhealthy imagination about what will 'fix' my photography—the next camera or the next lens will do it! Except, of course, it doesn't."

Mike replies: An excellent thing to know about yourself! So you know one of the things not to do when you're trying to revitalize yourself.

Sunday Support Group: A Peculiar State

I've been reading at a rather ferocious pace during the shutdown. No telling how long isolating is going to last; in my county of 25,000 we've had only 41 cases of Covid-19, and six deaths, and many people here are starting to feel that the pandemic might as well be disregarded. Six deaths is more than we normally have from the flu (that figure in a normal year seems to be zero), so it's statistically significant, and it's 24 per 100,000 people so it's not trivial on a per capita basis either, but...let's just say it doesn't threaten people. It's not unknown for a bad car accident to kill six people. Consequently, a lot of people here are deciding unilaterally that the shutdown should be over.

But back to books. Straight Life, Art Pepper's autobiography as reified by his wife Laurie, led to Malcolm Braly's On the Yard, a hardboiled, naturalistic 1967 prison novel informed by Braly's time in San Quentin. That led to "new journalism" pioneer Gay Talese's interesting but (I thought) overlong 1971 bestseller Honor Thy Father, about the real mafia family that the book The Godfather was partly based on—there are echoes of Honor Thy Father in "The Sopranos," too, once you account for television's tendency to exaggerate.

My brother Scott, after seeing the movie version of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, rechristened it "the unbearable longness of movie." The older I get, the less patience I have for longness in books. My Amazon review for Honor Thy Father says, "Like the old joke about a baseball game—that it's '20 minutes of action crammed into three hours'—this is a very good 280-page book crammed into 549 pages." I emailed to a friend (another editor):

My current book is frustrating me! "Honor Thy Father" by Gay Talese, a profile of the decline of the Bonanno crime family. It's been interesting in parts but I'm rather amazed at how lackadaisical the editing is. At page 361 of 549 Talese has devolved into describing what people wore, whether the ravioli was cooked enough, mundane money troubles in excruciating detail--and he's just spent a page and a half describing how Bill Bonanno, the main subject of the book, stopped in at a travel agency owned by a friend he hasn't seen in a while, and the friend isn't there so he leaves. That's it. No point to the action whatsoever that I can discern, no reason for it to be there. A page and a half?

The book opens when don Joseph Bonanno AKA "Joe Bananas" is kidnapped by gunmen, but what I want to know now is WHERE IS THE EDITOR??? That's the bigger mystery if you ask me. :-)

Once an editor.

I had nothing on deck after Honor, so I started reading Sidney Lumet's Making Movies after Scott Kirkpatrick found that Kurosawa reference.

Movies are like magazine covers. One thing I noticed when I was editing magazines was that everyone and his uncle has an opinion about magazine covers because everyone feels they understand them perfectly well and that the great cri de coeur of anti-expertise therefore applies: "all a matter of taste!" The same is true of movies, oddly. Everyone understands movies and feels they could probably participate in one way or another if given the chance. Me, I don't get it. I don't understand how a single movie is ever made. Even a bad one. It's amazing that humans are able to cooperate to such a degree. How a great movie ever emerges from the stew of difficulties known as "filmmaking" is a wonderment of nature. My hat's off to anyone who's ever helped pull it off.

I watched a ton of movies when I was young but hardly see five a year now. (As you might imagine, I have distinct tastes in the kinds of things I like to see.) The only negative of Sidney Lumet's book is that I haven't seen very many of the movies he references. It's interesting nonetheless.

Relaxing in confinement
One thing I took away from Honor Thy Father didn't show up until the Afterword. The book ends as Bill Bonanno, son and heir of the original Godfather, Joseph, heads off to jail. What the afterword informs us is that jail functioned as a sort of vacation for him—the only time in his life that he he was free for months on end from the stresses of being a mob boss and the pressures it put on his home life. He was free from harassment by law enforcement*, lost weight, slept soundly, and didn't have to hide out.

JPEG of a platinum/palladium print by my mentor in photography, Steve Szabo

The parallel with the present lockdown (you were wondering how I was going to get back to that, weren't you?) seems apparent, in a much milder sort of way. I'm not in jail, but I pretty much haven't been anywhere but the grocery store since March, and I haven't been to a face-to-face social function since then either. My AA meetings are all online, which, sadly, I have not gotten used to. My pool skills are rusting like a DeSoto or an old Hudson abandoned in the woods. As it's Father's Day (and Happy Father's Day, too, to all you dads), I can mention that my son tested positive for Covid, and as he was making his way through quarantine my anxiety manifested itself as absent-mindedness and lack of focus to a remarkable degree. I couldn't concentrate on anything. A peculiar state. I'm slowing down anyway, but during those weeks I could only function with difficulty. It was like I was existing underwater some of the time. He appears to be fine now, and has been counted among the statistics for the recovered. I'm getting my feet back under me now as well.

I'm struck by the fact that this has been in some ways an interesting time of my life. It broke a number of habits, has overhauled my thinking in a number of ways (during the worst of the scare, at the beginning, I made preparations for dying alone, which was a startling new perspective), and although it's boring and sometimes lonely, it also somehow feels like a respite of sorts, a time for reflection and regrouping, for sorting out the important from the trivial.

So I'm curious. I naturally exempt anyone who has been sick (and especially anyone who has lost someone to the disease—dreadful) from this question, but for the remainder of you, is there anything about this experience that has been positive? I know there are negatives, and difficulties, and I know nobody wished for this nor wants it continue. I'm just wondering if anyone has been able to make anything good of this time of our lives, to go with the bad.

At the very least, I'm reading a lot more. I think next I'm going to try Grand Hotel, a big bestseller written in German in 1929 by Vicki Baum that was made into a movie in the US not once but twice, long ago.

Mike

*If you are a law-and-order person and don't think enforcement agencies would stoop to such things, the book recounts an extended episode during which a renegade FBI agent in Tucson bombed(!) various mob targets—with dynamite(!!)—apparently to try to simulate a gang war and stoke public outrage.

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:

Michael J. Perini: "I hesitate to write this because I am acutely aware of how unusual my experience is, and of how many people are enduring severe hardships including loss of jobs, businesses, and illness and the death of loved ones.

"I live in a semi-rural area of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, more gentrified now than it was 32 years ago when I built the house. I have four adult married children and two grandchildren, one three years old and one two weeks old. Three of my four children live within five minutes of my house; the fourth, with the new baby, lives half an hour away in Princeton, New Jersey.

"So the three closest were part of a strict shelter in place(s) with us. No contact outside the family. My son is an executive chef and was able to have provisions delivered from commercial suppliers. So we cooked and ate commune style, opened the pool early, did lots of gardening and working in the workshop with my grandson. We also made no-contact deliveries to my daughter in Princeton. We are of course worried about keeping us all safe, and are aware that we have been very lucky. We've taken lots of pictures, eaten marvelous meals together, built a sailboat for the pool, and put an emphasis on enjoying the enforced time together. It has reminded us of what is truly important.

"We have made it a point to stay busy with productive things—to 'accomplish' a list of things worth doing inside and outside our homes. I set up a gym for all to use, including me. The three-year-old now asks, 'what's our project today, Pa?"

"We of course want it to be over as so many people have been hurt directly or indirectly by the repercussions of the pandemic. So have we, but it has brought my family closer than we have ever been.

"My Mom always said, 'look for the good.' We have, and we found it.

"Today we were all together for Father's Day."

Mike Ferron: "This whole mess has been anything but a joyful experience for me. A late-in-life job has me working for an essential retailer that has not only remained open but has been beyond thriving through it all. Yeah, they pay us extra, but approximately a third of the customers refuse to wear masks or respect social distancing and the rude ones get vocal when you ask them to back off. So as one who has firsthand direct experience with all this? Here is what I can report. The good people of this world open up and ask others how they are doing. Those who are not so nice? It brings out the jerk factor big-time. I was called to the office yesterday to be informed two co-workers have tested positive. This is all so much fun."

Jerome: "I feel a bit guilty to admit it, but to me the lockdown has been wonderful. All of a sudden—silence. No glass shards, no trash all over the place. Just me, doggo and a few souls. No tourists defecating in the park, no drunks chanting in the night knocking over trash cans and smashing bottles. Nothing. People were suddenly polite, carefully keeping distance. Wonderful. Life got so much simpler, as everything slowed down and came to a halt. There were new smells; it felt like the countryside. Amazing. At night, the only noise were birds singing! And when I walked alone through the streets, billboards announcing events that were never going to happen.

"Yes, I am worried. I have a lung condition, and would likely not survive COVID-19. Same for my elderly parents. I live in a distant city, and if anything happened, there would be no way to see each other ever again. I started to think of my death, and how I could make it easier to those close to me. Not pretty thoughts.

"Life got back to normal in Berlin. Loud, crazy, crowded, obnoxious people bumping into each other. Tourists are defecating in the parks again, and everything is littered with glass shards. It was an exceptional time. I miss it. Oh, and COVID-19 isn't gone—I'm still at risk of dying...."

Robert Fogt: "Mike, I share your wonderment at the art and craft of filmmaking, particularly when it comes to lighting. During my thirty years as a museum photographer, I have often spent hours manipulating bits of light around a single object that does not move, in front of a camera that does not move. When I see multiple characters in motion, in front of a camera that is also moving, and the lighting does not call itself to my attention, my common reaction is, 'how do they do that?!'"

George: "Thank you for acknowledging the chaos and stress of making a movie (or television). It's 12–16 hours per day of anxiety about whether you're making the director/client/producer happy, balanced against what artistic compromises are you making yourself. I'm a cinematographer and run this gauntlet frequently. Many of us DPs [directors of photography —Ed.] fantasize about shooting fine art photography as a career instead: No one to tell you what to do, no divas to deal with on set (actors or producers). If only there was a paycheck in photography to support a family...."

Sunday Support Group: Doggie End-of-Life Decisions (OT)

[A day late! But not a dollar short. —Mike the Ed.]

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Several readers have asked recently about Lulu the Elder Dog, noticing that I seldom show pictures of her.

Here's an interesting thing about mutts: you really don't know what to expect with them. If you get them as puppies, you don't know how big they're going to get. And while you have a range of reasonable expectations for life expectancy if you buy a purebred dog—for example, a St. Bernard usually lives eight to 10 years, while a normal lifespan for a Jack Russell terrier is 13 to 16—you really don't know how long a mutt will live. You might get lucky, you might not.

Gray girl

Some time next Fall Lulu will turn 14, which is getting up there for a mid-sized (~60 lbs.) dog. She seems to be changing fast as she ages, which has caused me to continually adjust to her changing needs. For example, she went largely deaf over about a three-month period last year (she can still hear a little). I had a stone step built for her a couple of years ago—cleverly disguised as a step humans might use!—when she could no longer jump up to the deck, but now she can't always manage that, so I patiently "herd" her around to places where she doesn't have to negotiate changes in level of more than a few inches. (Even that much causes her to fall down now and then.) And I no longer toss treats to her, because she can no longer see well enough to catch them in her mouth. I throw them on the ground in front of her, in places where she'll be able to see where it lands. There have been lots of little adjustments like those.

Of course she has a nice soft bed, where she spends a lot of time sleeping. Nobody sleeps like an old dog.

Tough choices
We're charged with potentially—okay, probably—having to make end-of-life decisions for our animals. The question is how to hit the proper balance. You don't want to extend their lives needlessly if you're only prolonging suffering, but you also don't want to give up on them too soon. I'm aware that there's no such thing as a perfect decision, so I've already forgiven myself for making a less-than-perfect one. At the same time, I want to do the best I can for Lulu, so I'm reading articles about doggie end-of-life issues. I'm preparing myself to make the best decision I can when the time comes.

Lulu was a rescue, a foundling from a park in Chicago, and we learned something of her history. She escaped from a man who was probably engaged in breeding fighting dogs; her most likely fate if she hadn't escaped by leaping his cast-iron fence would have been to be a "bait dog." Look up the term if you have the stomach for it, but beware—it's a nasty, brutish business. I always figured she needed to live a good, safe, cared-for life to help make up for what might have happened to her poor littermates, who I suspect did not end up in loving homes with caring owners. "A dog's life" is not automatically a good thing.

The thing I'm most worried about is her hind legs. Lulu was prodigiously strong as a young dog, and she had an amazing vertical leap. She was not naturally fleet like a whippet or a greyhound but she ran with great heart and determination, pounding the ground like a horse. She had a TPLO operation at about five years of age, in which a steel plate is used to stabilize the stifle joint after a rupture of the CCL (a ligament analogous to the ACL in human knees). It was a hard pill to swallow at the time—it hit me during a nadir in my fortunes, and the nearly $3,000 the operation cost was a very large part of all the cash I had in the bank at the time. But the logic was persuasive. If a dog has a torn or severed CCL in one leg, they naturally put more weight on the other leg, increasing the chance of a CCL rupture in that leg as well (Lulu had CCL tears in both legs). And while a dog can get by on three good legs, it's in big trouble if both hind legs are compromised. For one thing, it makes it much more difficult to recover from an operation on one leg if the other one isn't functioning (and the recovery is arduous anyway). There was no way I could have paid for two TPLOs, but I had to find a way to pay for one. I'm glad I managed it.

But the vet told me at the time that Lulu would have arthritis in her back legs when she was older, and that prediction has come home to roost. She manages, but I suspect she's in a fair amount of pain sometimes. It takes her a long time to "get her legs underneath her" when I roust her for "last outs" at 9:00 or 9:30 every evening. I continually admonish myself to be patient with her, knowing that dogs instinctively seek to hide their pain. If she doesn't want to move, I don't push her. So far, surprisingly, I'm doing a good job of being patient. It's a quality that, in general, is becoming more natural with practice.

The boss
Beyond that, the most important thing I can do is take time to give her love and comfort every day.  I take time with her every day to give her affection and tell her I love her. Her stepbrother the attention hound gets jealous easily, and tries to horn in, but I don't let him distract me when I'm giving Lulu her fair share.

And whenever I take Butters out to play, Lulu comes too. Often she doesn't want to stay out for very long, and all she can do is bark for a few treats, but still, she gets excited at the prospect of venturing outdoors and I don't want to leave her out. I think it's important for her to have something to look forward to. We have to be careful now, though. Her legs are so weak that she occasionally spontaneously collapses, and it's usually worse when she gets excited. Maybe she momentarily forgets she's not young and strong any more.

She's still the boss come feeding time, though, same as always. At dinner time, she's the one who gets to come to the barn to get the food with me. It's the one thing she and I do alone together. We leave Butters in the house despite the blow to his ego. It's not always easy for her to cope with a rambunctious younger dog; sometimes I separate the two of them so she can get a respite when I sense that Butters is getting on her nerves.

Look at the individual in front of you
Mostly I try to observe, be patient, and look for clues. With both kids and dogs, general rules are just that—what's most important is to look at the individual in front of you and try to divine what he or she needs. I'm trying to be aware of changes in her behaviors and her physical state so I can adjust. At her age you can't make assumptions.

I've never seen a dog through to end-of-life before, so I'm on uncharted territory. But then, so is she. I'm just trying and hoping to be up for the challenge. So far, so good.

And Summer is a good time to be a dog. It's warm, it's light, life is easy, and there's plenty of lazy time for an old gray girl to zonk out, sleep, and dream.

Mike

P.S. All three of my favorite pictures of Lulu can be seen in this old post.

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:

Brian Chambers Photography: "As a Veterinarian and someone who just went through this with our dog this certainly is an all too familiar story. If you haven't tried yet I strongly suggest you call your vet to discuss arthritis medicines. There are tons of good options with strong evidence of effectiveness ranging from antioxidant fish oils, NSAIDS, to stronger narcotics etc. The change can be dramatic and many times dogs that seem at the bitter end can rebound and have excellent quality of life."

Nigel Ladkin: "You have done the best for her until now—why should anything change at the evening of her life? The decision is agonising. But let it come to you and you will make the right decision at the right time and be at peace with the decision when it comes."

Jnny: "We are struggling with the same issue in our household, almost to a T. The big difference is our pup is 120 lbs. So when we assist him to his feet, it puts our musculoskeletal health at risk too. We've decided that when he can no longer walk unassisted, that the end has come. It will break us, because his loving heart is at least 110 of those pounds."

Jim Arthur: "The only dog I’ve known as an adult was one I helped rescue when my brother’s rental neighbor lit out in the middle of the night. My brother knew the owner so we walked over to check out the house and found that it had been trashed and a note taped to the door stating that the pound would pick up the pup at noon. We didn’t know the dog was there until we saw the note. She never made a peep even though she had been penned up in a small courtyard for days with no food or water.

"Sandy went home with us that day and turned out to be an amazing dog. My brother did a great job of training her and she quickly became part of the family. One of my favorite shots of her is a 140mm grab shot made with my very first digital camera. We were hiking in the mountains at 9,000 feet (as we often did) and I was carrying my Olympus C-8080 set to shoot JPEGs when I saw Sandy the Wonder Dog jumping from boulder to boulder along a ridgeline. I turned, fired from the waist, and got a great picture. The compression of the distant mountains makes it look like she's on top of the world.

"As the A Team used to say, I love it when a plan comes together. While I didn’t plan this shot, I was ready for anything with my newfangled digital camera. Sandy lived to be 12, so I have many RAW files of her taken with more expensive cameras that are not extreme crops and which are technically better…but this shot shows her in her prime doing what she loved best. It really captures her spirit."

Sunday Support Group: Judgement Practice

Picture by Mike, processing by Stan Greenberg

A big part of photo printmaking is what I call "judgement." It's well and good to have the equipment and the software, but ultimately you're left with the decision: which way are you going to go with it? I always smile an inward smile when commercial marketing of all sorts uses phrases like "flexibility" and "customizable" and "gives you choices" and "you're in control" and more verbiage like that, et cetera ad infinitum. As if all we need to be happy is limitless choice. But that just means you have more choices to make. And making the choices is the hard part. No one ever tells you what choice to make.

Reader Stan Greenberg of Western Galilee, Israel, took two of my JPEGs from the "Evening Walk" post and tried to reinterpret them. You can see his efforts at this link, and one of them is above. Funny thing is, several other readers sent me the same: their interpretation of my pictures.

Ned Bunnell's take

That's not only perfectly fine, I also think it's a good thing to do. I do it: I'll take someone else's JPEG off the internet and post-process it to my liking. In fact, that's how I learned to convert to B&W—with other peoples' pictures. I don't show such things, because they're not my pictures, and in fact I don't even keep them, although my hard drive is such a hodgepodge that doubtless some of them survive here and there. It's play. But it's good practice. It hones your judgement, and allows you to exercise interpretation on pictures you're not personally ego-involved with. It helps you develop an opinion about the way you like photographs to look. And because they're small JPEGs, you don't need to fuss and fret about perfection; you're just deciding on aesthetic effect.

I think it's a good thing to do. It's good for your own judgement. It can only help in developing your own...sorry for the overused word...vision. And it's fun.

Another really nice mix from DJ Kim this morning: It's called "Good Times," a quixotic title even by KK standards. I think of Kim's mixes as short radio shows. The music on offer in "Good Times" is ambient, quiet, and reflective. And, as he says, still interesting—Kim once quit a job because of the standard "classic rock" that was piped in over the intercom, the kind of thing normal non-musical people just tune out. I would have laughed, except he was out of a job. Anyway, perfect late-night listening. I just let myself float along.

Art
Speaking of music, the book I'm reading right now is Straight Life, the autobiography of Art Pepper that's the result of a collaboration between himself and his wife Laurie, completed not long before he died of a stroke at age 56. It's apropos of current events, because prison turned him at least temporarily into a bitter racist—the book is so unvarnished and politically incorrect it probably couldn't even be published now. Pepper was a criminal and a pervert, a neglected child and a drug addict, as well as a lovely, limpid, liquid, fleetly fast alto saxophone player whose music was beautiful and flowed like water.

Laurie and Art Pepper

The accomplishment of the book really belongs to Laurie, who is a photographer. Some of the great "autobiographies" are actually put together by de facto ghostwriters. They're his words—he spoke into a tape recorder—but she gathered the material and shaped it into a book over seven arduous years of work. The great jazz writer Gary Giddins, in The Village Voice, called Straight Life a better book on the topic of addiction than Junky, William Burroughs' famous debut novel, and better on prison life than Malcolm Braly's classic On the Yard. Which just made me want to go read those other two books, but never mind.

I'm also curious about Laurie's photography. She wrote her own autobiography after Art's death, which is called Art: Why I Stuck With a Junkie Jazzman. I tend to read books together with other books relevant to them, because I think they amplify and add to each other that way, so that one's most likely next for me.

If somehow you do not know Art Pepper, try Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section, recorded with Miles Davis's group. Pepper was already playing with a nationally famous band when he was 17, and he never studied, never practiced, and never tried to mimic famous players. The opposite, in fact. He didn't want to be like anyone else. And despite a hard life, a fearsome drug habit and multiple stints in prison, the quality of his alto playing stayed at its peak from beginning to end—even when he was high or had the shakes onstage. (He resembled Charlie Parker that way. Bird's mood, troubles, and physical state never seemed to affect his playing.)

For both Straight Life and Art, you should go to Laurie's website for the book links, so she will earn the Amazon spiff for sales. She deserves them.

Pass the test
Still on the topic of music, but even more tangentially, Amir at Audio Science has reviewed the Audioengine 5+ powered speakers that I recommend from time to time for desktop listening. Improbably for a pair of powered computer speakers that retail for $399, they got a recommendation.

The Panasonic GX9 arrived and I took it on my walk on the hill today. I'll add a sample to this post later—the sun is too bright to really see my monitor at the moment.

Have a nice day. It's gloriously beautiful here—hope it is where you are too.

Mike

UPDATE as promised:

Looking up the hill—red-winged blackbird on a wire!

Looking down the hill

Looking down at my feet

All taken with the Panasonic GX9 and 12–60mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 kit lens.

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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Weekes James: "Art Pepper was a sublime musician. Such a shame that the rest of his life was such a train wreck, and ended so early."

Jamie Pillers: "Had a listen to the Art Pepper album...bought it immediately. Thanks yet again for an intro to new sights and sounds."

Sunday Support Group: Diet Experiment Update (OT)

[Ed. Note: This week's "Print Crit" will appear tomorrow, and I'll be moving that feature to Mondays from now on. "Sunday Support Group" has been something of a hodgepodge, not very well planned or thought out, but I like it, and I'd like to continue writing it on Sundays.]

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Some while back I promised an update on my experiment with "time-restricted eating." This is long, so I'll tuck it behind a page break so those who don't want to read it won't have to scroll past it. You're welcome!

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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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!

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Featured Comments from:

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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Featured Comments from:

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)

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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Featured Comments from:

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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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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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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."