The Online Photographer

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group: It Is Hereby Resolved...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike replies: That really is interesting. Thanks.

Sunday Support Group II: Belly Fat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

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

Mike replies: Ha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

A few supportive recommendations this Sunday, some reiterated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

*I think yes.

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LL: "How did the big sale go?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group: Health Bomb Soup

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

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

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

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

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

To your health,

Mike

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

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

Mike replies: We get blamed for everything.

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

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

So blame the Tudors.

Sunday Support Group: Salad for Breakfast (OT)

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

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

Highly recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That last is—forgive me—nuts.

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group for that Rare Darkroom Rat: Enlarger Dealz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group: Enjoy the Music

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

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

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

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

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

Because, seriously, I want to not hear it.

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

That's the ticket.

Mike
(Thanks to Bear.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Just Sent...

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Support Group: New Lens, New Eye

"Sight is the soul's perfect delight."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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Sunday Support Group: Older You, Younger You

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

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

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

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

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

Ask me next week; they might change.

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

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

Mike

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

Sunday Support Group: Make It a Game (OT)

["Sunday Support Group" is hopefully meant to provide support and inspiration for peoples' personal projects, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]

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Humans love games. Toyota used this when it devised its suite of dashboard monitors for its Prius line—Prius owners use the feedback to optimize their mileage in a game they've dubbed "hypermiling."

Lately I've been using a similar strategy with eating: make a game of it.

Backtracking a bit—my eye operation in June derailed my diet. I survived my confinement by eating quick meals of peanut butter sandwiches, which got me back into sugar and bread again, and I have addiction issues with sugar and bread. From there, my healthy eating broke down.

But as I mentioned recently, in my life I've quit cigarettes (1985, age 28) and I've quit alcohol (1990, age 33), and I know how to deal with addictions: you keep struggling until you get it. The struggle with addiction seems endless when you're in the middle of it, but in fact it's not endless—or doesn't have to be—eventually, if you keep trying, try different things, and are willing to go to any lengths to change, you can change. You get it. The new habits "stick." The struggle recedes into history. The trick is to keep trying until you succeed*.

Playing games with the brain
Diet isn't just about food ideology—it's also a lot about behaviorism. The best three beginner's starting points for overhauling disastrously bad eating, for instance, are all behavior related:

1. Don't eat between meals
2. Don't drink calories
3. Stop eating two hours before bedtime

So anyway, my latest trick with myself is also behavior related—I've made a game of my goals. I printed up a sheet with my daily goals on it and then at the end of every day I just tick off the ones I achieve. The total is ten, so I can easily count up my score on a ten scale.

The top third of my daily score sheet

Now, obviously, your sheet would have your goals on it, and would look a lot different from mine. I drink two mugs of tea in the morning, have a main meal in the afternoon built around rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes / yams or whole-wheat pasta and one or two vegetables (I eat as much as I want), and then have a dinner of bean, chickpea, split pea, or lentil soups (I eat as much as I want of that, too). The rest of the things are specific to my own bad habits and the details of my own particular daily life. For instance, there's free popcorn at the Moose Lodge where I play pool, and that's a failure point**. I want to try to limit myself to one serving. (I failed yesterday, but I beat my friend 8–6, so you lose some, you win some.) You'll notice that on my sheet I get two checkmarks if I avoid sugar for the day, that being my major weakness—if you have no "sweet tooth," sugar might not even be on your own list at all. "Didn't eat out" is because I'm making much less money now and sort of in a battle to try to make it to Social Security, so I've been trying to comprehensively reduce my expenses, and eating out is a bigger expense than most people think. Not to mention that there are restaurants that have not a single healthy meal on their entire menus. The last one, "soup made," is just because I need to keep up with the chore of making my homemade soups for the evenings—when I don't have any on hand, I have nothing convenient to eat in the evenings, and for me that's a big failure point.

Make your starting point an automatic success
Speaking of behaviorism, the first check on my list is a free point—I love my tea and never miss it. It's a "list trick" I learned long ago. Let's say you're making out a list of things to do the next day. Well, what you do is begin the list with three things you've already done! That way you wake up in the morning and you can tick off three items right away. It makes you feel like you're already on the right track, and makes it easier to dive into the rest of the list. Try it; it might sound dumb, but it works.

Everything for the week fits on one page. I eat three salads a week and three berry smoothies a week, and I allow myself one serving of meat a week, mainly so I can either partake when meat is on offer at friends' houses or have an occasional meal of sushi.

That's it. Just wanted to share this trick in case you might like to try it with your own goals. Make a game of it! It's surprising that it works, but it appears to be how we're wired.

Sugar is hiding everywhere
Oh, and by the way—you might wonder how peanut butter sandwiches got me back into sugar. Well, the peanut butter I was using has three grams of sugar per two-tablespoon serving (amusingly, the label says "3g sugars including 3g added sugars"), and the bread I bought has six grams of sugar per slice, of which five grams are added sugar. So each peanut butter sandwich I fixed myself during my recovery contained 15 grams of sugar—that's three and a half teaspoons of sugar per sandwich!

There's added sugar in everything these days, including our vegetables, which are being hybridized to be sweeter. I bought a package of celery the other day and look what it says on the bag:

And that "occasional sushi meal" I mentioned? I can't give myself the two points for "no sugar" on days I eat sushi. Sushi rice (and "sushi" is the rice, not the fish) is made with vinegar...and sugar. You have to be careful with this stuff—it's a minefield out there.

Now I gotta go walk. It's not that it's good for me and I need the exercise, it's just that I need the point.

Mike

*This is not advice that I'm a big fan of when it's generalized—I take a dim view of those mindless "persistence" exhortations that are perennially so popular. There are many things you shouldn't persist at—most notably those things at which you consistently fail, or for which you obviously have no aptitude. But addiction recovery is one area where persistence really is the right idea.

**Popcorn is only healthy if it's not cooked in oil and is unsalted. Otherwise it's pretty fattening.

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Lior: "Here's the merciless version. (SMBC is very funny and very, very intelligent.)"

John Daw: "Hey Mike, Prius owners did not coin the term Hypermiling. It came from a guy name Wayne Gerdes. He was getting upwards of 60 MPG with his stock Honda Accord by driving a certain way to maximize mileage. He dubbed it hypermiling. You can use this strategy with any vehicle. Hope all is well."

David M: "I suggest you also keep a second sheet of paper (or an app) that tracks each day you 'succeed.' The pressure to have a successful day goes up substantially when you've done it, say, 11 straight days. I use a Apple (Watch) app called 'Streaks' to keep track of whether I have done my daily push ups. I'm currently on my longest streak of 294 straight days!"

Sunday Support Group: You Don't Lose Until You Stop Trying (OT)

Well, Summer's over. Boo-hoo. Maybe just boo.

It's been a beautiful Summer, but difficult. I haven't been doing a very good job with my various resolutions lately, and it's getting me down. That's awkward to admit, but I need to be honest. I haven't touched my book project since my operation, and I stopped being strict about my WFPB aspirations after the last post I wrote on the subject. It's depressing.

Sunday Support Group: The Meatitarian Diet (OT)

People need to eat plants (hear me out. I'm going somewhere with this). We were evolved to eat plants. Our teeth and intestines are formed so we can eat plants. Our nearest animal relatives eat almost nothing but plants. Our bodies function best on plants. Study after study after study closely correlates the health of populations to the percentages of plant food in their diets. All manner of medical outcomes—from the incidence of diabetes, to the health of our veins and arteries, to sleep, to headaches, to joint aches, to longevity—all improve when we eat plants. Plants contain hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that are important or critical to health beyond youth (they're important when we're young too, but, when we're young, the vitality of youth itself often "masks" the health risks and dangers of dietary foolishness). The scientific evidence is growing fast that cancer cells pop up in your body all the time, and that phytochemicals give it the vital ammunition it needs to crush them. If you aren't eating mostly plants, you are not as healthy as you could be. Most humans can survive and thrive indefinitely ingesting nothing but plants and water—a statement that can be made for no other category of food or "foodlike substance."

But it turns out that on a diet adequate in essential plant foods, you can also eat...well, meat.

Make no mistake, meat is poor food. It has low nutritional value. It is high in fat of the worst kind. Of the dietary essential in shortest supply in the appropriately abbreviated SAD—the standard American diet—namely, fiber—meat has none. (Fiber comes from plants.) People like meat because it's savory and it's got all that fat and, as recently as the post-war era, it was still a high-status food enjoyed frequently only by the well-off, and that status lingers in the culture. But it's not healthy. About the only things meat supplies that are good for you are things that the animal itself got from plants and concentrated in its own tissues—such as protein, a nutrient Americans already get way too much of to the detriment of our liver and kidney health. (One cup of broccoli has only 31 calories but 2.6 grams of protein; spinach contains every essential amino acid; etc. You cannot eat a sensible variety of plants and not get enough protein. You'll just get more, faster, from a steak.)

Pam Popper's latest book

But here's the thing. If you are eating a wide range of plants and vegetables and starches and are getting all of the phytonutrients your body needs, a few servings of meat a week won't kill you. Dr. Pam Popper (she is a Ph.D., not an M.D.) is the founder and President of Wellness Forum Health, "a company that offers educational programs to both consumers and providers that facilitate informed medical decision-making, diet and lifestyle intervention, and improved long-term health outcomes." Dr. Popper, who happens to eat no meat herself, defines "a few servings" as up to four ounces of high-quality, organic, non-processed (i.e., not bologna or sausage or Slim Jims!) meat up to three times a week. People who eat meat in low doses like that, as a group, have about the same health outcomes as vegans and people who eat WFPB (whole-food plant-based) diets.

...Which is a notion that is not very popular among vegans and people who eat WFPB diets.

That's rather an understatement, actually. The idea offends many of them. Well, "horrifies" is a word that also works, shall we just admit. Partly that's because "the V-words," vegetarian and vegan, often define not just a diet but an ethical stance toward animals and/or an environmental position...the production of meat, collectively speaking, being among our poor planet's worst environmental nightmares. There is certainly strong merit in those ideas. Partly, also, it might be because people love being true believer types. Most people who believe in plant diets don't see any sense or sanity in not going cold turkey, excuse the term.

In truth, though, the least worst thing about low-dose meat as part of a plant-based diet is merely that it displaces better foods. That is, the more prime rib you eat, the less spinach you'll have room for. The more pork tenderloin you pig out on, the more likely you are to skip seconds of green beans. The more shrimps you scarf down, the more blackberries you'll be deprived of forever.

But it won't hurt you.

Food by itself is not ideology. If you eat for health rather than ethics or ecology, then you can have good-quality meat in sensible amounts now and then if you enjoy it. It's not ideal food, no, and you could do better for your health just upping your portion of watermelon or watercress or yellow split pea soup. But you'll be fine. Your militant vegetarian friends won't like this at all ("never eat anything with a face!"), but, as long as you get all your plants down, you can be a low-dose meatitarian if you want to, and, at the statistical level at least, your health outcomes will still remain as good as theirs.

Mike

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John Krumm: "Been doing full vegan Greger ( more or less) for a couple months now. Greger takes pains to emphasize that he’s not really advocating veganism, but of course if you make it through the daily dozen you likely won’t have room for much meat. Sometimes in a world where meat and other bad options surround you almost everywhere, it’s easier stick to full vegan rather than always 'moderating' something I’d like to stuff myself with. Same with cheese especially, my true weakness."

Mike replies: Cheese is the #1 unhealthy food. And it's mildly addictive. Check out Neal Barnard's The Cheese Trap. Or watch How to Magnetize a Baby.  :-)

Jim Pilcher: "Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! This may be the most sensible post you've made in eons, or at least this week. I'm a 95% vegan by choice since 2012 (no agenda other than health) who enjoys a bit of king salmon once or twice a week. I feel great, much better than when I ate a lot of meats. I don't begrudge others having their meat; I just don't do it any longer. Thank you again, Mike. I did not expect such a sane dietary post mixed in among the gear, billiards, photographic philosophies and sensibilities, and print talk."

Sunday Support Group: The Class of '69

If you're a regular reader who happens to pay attention to the comment bylines, you probably know the name Dave Levingston. Dave is a retired photojournalist who lives in Springfield, Ohio. He took the last photograph in this post.

Dave and some members of his family visited last Friday, just in time for an epic rain squall that flattened the area and cut power to hundreds. ("Hundreds" meaning "lots"—we're the third least-populous county in New York State. There are hardly any people here.) He showed me several boxes of his work.

My favorite was a group of "environmental portraits" (portraits of people showing their surroundings). He was attending his 50th high school reunion and started making pictures of his classmates. Then he got a good idea, and decided to try to get as many of them as he could, and at that point he titled the project "The Class of '69." Then he got a really good idea, and thought, hey, why limit this to our class?

Since then, he's been finding people who graduated in 1969 wherever he goes.

Isn't that a great idea? It's a very specific project, yet the potential subject matter is functionally limitless. It's a great entrée by which to make contact with people, even strangers, and oh by the way, make photographs of them. It's comprehensible to everyone instantly and most everyone would be happy to participate (you can tell this because all most all of the people in his portraits look genuinely happy and good-natured) and it's a great way to make new friends.

Perfect. I thought it was a little bit of genius.

Great ideas are actually tough to come up with. They have to be flexible but specific, easy for people to grasp but a rich vein to mine, varied enough to keep everyone (subjects, photographer, viewers) interested....and having that entrée never hurts.

The portraits, by the way, were very nicely printed, I'm going to guess about 9x13" maybe? He did the conversions in DxO and took the pictures with a Micro 4/3 camera. I thought they looked like small enlargements from about a 645 film camera.

The beardy guy in the example portrait above is, as you have probably guessed by now, one Dave Levingston of Springfield, Ohio. Self-portrait using the camera's timer. Class of '69, of course.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave)

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Dave was from Canton, Ohio, but that was merely his destination when he passed through here. He lives in Springfield, Ohio. Sorry for the error.

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William Schneider: "Being from the class of '68, I felt a strange tinge of disappointment that I did not qualify. Upon reflection why, I realized that exclusive projects like this have something working for them. Leveraging human nature, they motivate people to become willing subjects. Clever!"

Gary: "I will be attending my 1969 high school reunion in San Diego in September. It was a momentous year: Moonwalk, Woodstock, and great music. The previous year was momentous also, but tragic. Please provide a link to Dave Levingston's project!"

Dave Levingston adds: I can't thank you enough for your very kind words about my Class of '69 project. I really appreciate it. I've been posting this project on Facebook. If anyone would like to see all the photos they can look at them there. But please remember that Facebook does awful things to photos when they are uploaded to their site. The prints I showed Mike were 8.5x11 work prints. I hope to find a venue to do a little show with some of these before this 50th anniversary year is out. I will likely print them to around 11x14 for framing and display.

For those who care about technical stuff, I'm shooting with a pair of Panasonic GX8s and using a 12–60mm Panasonic lens, mostly around 12mm, for these portraits. I use DxO Photo Lab 2 for RAW conversions and black-and-white conversions. I use ACDSee Photo Studio 2 for most other editing tasks. The prints were made with an Epson 4900 on Epson Ultra Premium Luster paper.

And, if anyone reading this graduated from high school in 1969 and would like to be a part of this project, please get in touch.

Martin D: "Class of '69 is a brilliant project idea. It is simple and effective and amenable to all sorts of artistic variations. And as you rightly say, with such simple ideas it is always easy to see their value once you have them put before you, but coming up with them in the first place is where most of us struggle. I will not copy this idea directly, as such transfers never work, but your friendly visitor Dave Levingston has encouraged me to go back to the little black book in which I take notes for potential photo projects...and then to actually pick one and get it started! Really good photograph by Dave in your 2013 competition by the way, of the turkey farmer. I remember being impressed by it at the time, and now there is additional context."

Mike Potter: "That is a wonderful self-portrait. I like it, a lot."

Sunday Support Group: Two Radical Obesity Interventions (OT)

"Change of mind is not inconsistency."

—Cicero

If you see an obviously obese person walking down the sidewalk clutching a jumbo container of soda, you are almost certainly looking at a food addict. It's possible to get addicted to food, especially sugar. The helpless person you're seeing can't even venture out and be ambulatory for a little while without infusions of sugar-water at the ready.

It's not entirely her fault. An industry with formidable resources has entrapped her. As with the tobacco, alcohol, and now (in some states) the marijuana cartels, 80% of their profit comes from 20% of their customers. They're highly motivated to get you hooked.

I seldom drink soda, and never have it in the house, but I'm a food addict myself...

Sunday Support Group: Strange As Fiction

-
An Echo

I never thought I'd be in the demographic for one of these. (Once you get older you start ignoring most trends and fashions, because time has taught you how fleeting and without body and substance most of them are.) But I've ordered an Amazon Echo.

The Echo is the device, the hardware; Alexa is the synthetic humanoid that* listens for your instructions and responds orally. By the way, Echo was originally a mountain nymph in ancient Greek mythology who pines so badly for Narcissus that she withers away until nothing is left of her but her voice.

Really, what could be more perfect during my recovery than, um, a devoted mountain nymph? Hopefully I'll get it set up successfully so that it works entirely by voice command, so I can tell it to start and stop reading audiobooks. Not only that, but I don't even have to buy books—it turns out I joined Audible years ago (I think because my son was an affiliate for a while) and bought a dozen titles that I never listened to. They're still waiting. I'm good.

Mayil in the clutch
When the Harry Potter books came out 22 years ago, I (along with approximately one zillion other people) got the bright idea of writing a series of fantasy/sci-fi adventure books for young adults. I plotted a quadrilogy, four books, and outlined two of them. My stories followed a protagonist named Mayil Daka, who lives c. 2280 in an era that followed 80 years of disasters called The Contractions. During the Contractions, world population had plunged to a mere 20 million souls. Survivors had resumed living and behaving in tribal fashion, retreating into small fortified compounds called "enclaves." As world government began to get reorganized, resourceful individuals, called "travelers," were enlisted to locate and approach these armed and isolated settlements to inform them of the re-establishment of civilization and to try to reassure their leaders that it was safe to venture out and reconnect with the broader society. It was dangerous work, requiring bravery, social skill, and good judgement, and the travelers often became heroes to subsequent generations, as well as founders of larger civilized areas, which are also formally called Enclaves. Mayil (pronounced "mile"), lives in the Praetorian Enclave, formerly part of South Africa.

When the story commences, world population is rumored to be approaching 100 million, and renewed fears of overpopulation are reaching almost hysterical levels among the superstitious; terror of the memory of the Contractions is so strong that parents are allowed to exempt their children from studying it in school. World government, based in the Australs (Australia/New Zealand/New Guinea), has an urgent need to carry out an accurate world census. There is only one octant of the globe that is not served by surviving satellites and is hence "dark"—out of contact with the rest of the world. It's a region that was riven by sectarian violence, dark cults, and strange superstitions in the run-up to the Contractions, and it is known as the lands of the Northams—the former North America. Little is known about conditions there.

World government is mounting a small and most likely doomed expedition to the lands of the Northams to see if a government exists there, and, if it does, whether it has census data that can be added to the projections for the remainder of the planet. The expedition will travel by sailboat across the inhospitably hot equatorial region. Mayil, who is the only great-grandson of the great Traveler Emil Ali Daka, the most legendary of the nine founders of the Praetorian Enclave, has been chosen for the honor of being ceremonially asked to participate in the expedition. At age 14, he is not required or expected to accept; it's merely an honor to be asked, a symbolic gesture intended as a compliment to the people of the distant Praetorian Enclave.

He has every reason not to want to go. He has just entered "clutch," a rite of passage for teenagers wherein 12 young women and 12 young men who have been scientifically selected as genetically healthy enough to have children sort themselves into couples. Clutch is not only prestigious—not everyone is allowed to have children, because of the high incidence of birth defects—it is also very social and great fun.

But Mayil has just lost two of his closest friends. One, Davi Ald, a neighbor boy whom Mayil grew up with, had been chronically sickly and always expected to die. But the other was the apparently healthy girl to whom Mayil had been secretly betrothed since age 10, Mali Ohen, who died unexpectedly of a fast-acting cancer after learning, to her devastation, that she would not be allowed to participate in clutch. Her genetic markers for disease had been just above the cutoff.

Mali's exclusion from clutch had subtly driven a wedge between the two former childhood friends despite their better intentions, and since Mali's death Mayil has suffered from guilt as well as grief. To the great shock of his parents, when Mayil stands in the great Council Hall of the Australs to hear his invitation read aloud, he throws caution to the winds and surprises everyone present—and even himself, a little—by accepting a place in the dangerous expedition to the lands of the Northams.

And off we went. 

Hominids and humanoids
I had fun with it, anyway. The publisher of Harry Potter sent a very nice letter in response to an outline and seventy pages of manuscript: "This almost made it for us! Please keep us apprised of your other projects." Other projects? I didn't have any other projects. I was hard at work on that project. Unfortunately, my next project was to get fired from a job, which threw me into a slow-grinding crisis for several years. Writing was mostly forgotten.

So what's the point of this? I'm sure experts in speculative fiction are well aware of this problem and can limn its dimensions at length, but when the first book opens, in the first scene, Mayil is waking up in his bedroom in his parents' house on the Transvaal plain, and the first thing he does is ask for news from something I called a "conbox," which is voice-activated and can respond to him interactively. The idea seemed at least mildly futuristic to my innocent self in 1999, but my fictional "conbox" was almost identical—in function, but even in size and shape!—to an Amazon Echo. Sheesh.

So anyhow, I got myself a conbox, straight out of the former future.

Mike

*A bit o' grammar: "who" is the proper pointer-word for humans; "that" is the pointer-word for things. Common errors like "the girl that was brushing her hair" or "My friends that have a nice house" are howlers to an ear sensitive to words; should be who both times. But here I think "Alexa" is properly a that, because "she" is not human, but rather humanoid.

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Locked Out!

Dennis Ng wrote a comment in the "Oberon" post about how he is finally buying a used medium-format digital back, something he's always wanted. (And congratulations, Dennis. Hope it works out.)

Mani Sitaraman wrote under the same post that he can't afford high-end home audio speakers. [Note: this post is not about speakers. It's about grapes.] Well, who can? The first three entries under "Class A" under the "Loudspeakers" category in Stereophile's once-useful "Recommended Components" list cost $85,000 a pair, $22,000 a pair, and $40,000 a pair, and it goes on from there. But he said he hopes to find a nice pair of Spendor SP100II's in decent used condition one day, and might even be able to afford them.

Have you ever been locked out of something by rising prices? Something you really wanted that seemed again and again to remain just out of reach, like the grapes to the fox in the famous fable*?

Keep-away
Sometimes even if your situation improves, the target moves. I have a friend who used to own a house in a certain neighborhood of Denver. She sold it, and now she can't go back—property prices have risen so much that she can no longer afford to buy a house in the neighborhood she once lived in. Locked out! You know what they say: Oh well.

The same thing happened to me with cars when I was young. I started saving for a car when I was 14. At that time, Volkswagen was running an ad for what it called the cheapest car in America—a Beetle for $1,919. (That's going to make me seem very old to young people.) I had to buy a new car because my father said he would put me on his insurance policy, but only if I bought a new car. But by the time I was 16 and had nearly saved $1,919, the cheapest new car in America—I think it was a Datsun (now called Nissan, and yep, yep, sonny, I'm ancient)—was $2,800 or so. Two years later I had saved something like $2,400, and the cheapest car in America was midway through the $3,000 to $4,000 range.

And so on. I gave up, and didn't buy my first car until I was 30. Before that I took the bus a lot. There was one advantage to that at least—you could read on the bus. I carried a tiny "Oxford World Classics" volume of Walden in my pocket so I was never without it. Everyone—especially every young person, and by that I mean you 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds—should read Walden**.

Mark II = price hike
Mani reminded me of this by talking about Spendor speakers. For me it's a name that conjures magic. When I was in art school I really, really wanted a pair of Spendor SP1 speakers, and very nearly bought a pair for $850. But they were just a little out of my reach.

Damn grapes.

And just as with that first car, they remained out of reach. Now, you can buy a used pair for $1,200 or even less if you're lucky, but speaker drivers wear out—it's not the smartest move to buy 30-year-old speakers. Fortunately, and rather amazingly, a modern remake is available directly from Spendor, the original maker—the SP1/2 (Mark II, in camera-speak). As you can see from this page, the price had ratcheted up dramatically, to $2,750...in 2002. That is, still beyond my reach at that time.

They're still available, but I don't want to know how much they cost now. I already know they're beyond my reach. They've occupied the same relative position now for more than 30 years, so why would anything ever change?

Aesop's lesson
It doesn't matter anyway (see the fox and grapes fable in the footnote again!), because I don't have a place in my house to set up a traditional stereo, with the equipment on a rack in the middle and two speakers on proper stands situated at the proper place out in the room. Besides, I'm happy with my current desktop system, which sounds marvelous and which allows me to enjoy music just fine. (You can see my system in this picture). So I'm able to be grateful for that, and not have any complaints. "Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

It's just a feature of "life on life's terms," being locked out. And it'll always be something. No matter how good you have it, you can always identify, and focus on, and aspire to the next level, just out of reach. There's always a next level. All we need to do to cure the situation is change our own attitudes, that's all.

Mike

* The Fox and the Grapes

ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour."

"IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."

—Aesop, Sixth Century B.C.
(text from the Harvard Classics via Bartleby)

**It's very much on topic for this post.

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Malcolm Myers: "There is also the inverse of this. Things that were unimaginably expensive to me as a teenager became easily affordable as: a.) I grew older and started to earn more money, and b.) things I desired new became available second-hand. I have found this to be especially true when picking up old film and digital cameras from car-boot sales, charity shops. and camera stores."

Joe: "My parents bought a Volkswagen Beetle about the same time you first started wanting one. My father noted that the car cost a dollar a pound."

Benjamin Marks: "I think, responding as a camera guy, 'Leica' comes to mind. Their 35mm cameras were 'unobtainium' for me in college in the '80s. Oh the pain!

"At some point in the mid '90s I bought my first M—a used M3 double-stroke from a camera shop in Oakland, CA, with a really nice 50mm ƒ/1.5 Summarit. I did finally buy a new M8 in the 2000s and then traded it in on a new M9 three years later. But after that, the prices jumped again, and now it's like watching the tail lights of a faster car receding into the distance. I really like the platform (go on, haters...do your worst), but I am just never shelling out $7K for a camera, period.

"Then again, when I was in my 20s, I had a list of camera 'wants' in my head. You know: a Zone IV 4x5 with a matching dual-tube cold light head enlarger, a Hasselblad 500 C/M, a Leica M6, and so on. I could buy all that and be 'done.' I think the magic number was $10,000 in 1988 dollars. Well over the years, I have owned everything on that list, and then some (or: and then, sum). But I still have a mental list, and the magic number hasn't changed much. On the other hand, I can't think of a single picture I haven't taken due to some gear-related shortcoming that existed at the moment of snapping the shutter.

"It brings to mind Spock's (That's 'Mr.' not Dr. Benjamin) quotation about wanting and having."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I've owned a Yashicamat 124G, and a Graflex Norita 6x6 SLR, and the Fujica GS-645, but I think of myself as having been 'locked out' of medium format from the mid '70s until the 2000s (when I went digital) by prices, which kept rising. What that really meant was my perception of benefit didn't ever catch up with my feeling about the price for long enough for me to act; I could have bought used medium-format gear most years in that period with money I instead used for other things. Another part of the problem was that I had 35mm ideas about the range of lenses needed to have a useful system, which ran up the price of medium format as I perceived it. And I did always know that my primary area of photography was recording and documenting things, often rapidly-changing things in dark situations, which is not what medium format is best at."

SteveW: "Buddhist Economics: Happiness = Wealth/Desires

"The greater the desires the more wealth necessary for happiness. And vice versa."

Dogman: "When I was a kid in high school in the early 1960s, I lusted for the Jaguar XK-E. Of course, to a poor country boy it was an unobtainable dream for its new price of just over $5,000.

"In 1977 I paid just over $5,000 for a new Chevrolet Nova.

"Speaking of that XK-E, just after I graduated from college I made friends with a guy who owned a body shop. Visiting him one day I noticed in the back of his shop something under a heavy, dusty tarpaulin. I asked him about it and he pulled the tarp back to show me a 1960s XK-E. According to him the car and its owner were stranded on the highway when he happened upon them. Being helpful, he offered the man a ride and they later returned to tow the Jag back to his shop. At that point the Jag's owner expressed the frustration he had endured for his entire ownership of the car due to its unreliability and frequent breakdowns. He then made a gift of the car to my friend because of his kindness. Unfortunately, my friend found there were so many things about the car that needed expensive repairs he couldn't justify ever fixing it. But it was a beautiful car and he couldn't force himself to get rid of it."

Dave Levingston: "When I was in high school in the middle of the last century I lusted after two cars, the Shelby AC Cobra (the 289, not the ridiculous 427) and the Porsche 911. Both were completely out of reach at astronomical prices around $7,500. Back when I had a portrait studio I used Mamiya C330s and lusted after a Hasselblad 500 C/M, but could never quite manage to afford one. Today I still feel that lust, and I could afford one, but have to admit to myself that I have absolutely no use for one now. A lovely camera, though, it still is."

Mike Ferron: "Locked out? Sure, on high end photographic gear. I love the good stuff but you won't find me in possession it. I shoot 6x6 with a Yashicamat instead of a Rollei. Thirty-five millimeter rangefinder? Olympus RC instead of a Leica. Digital? A secondhand Oly E-M1 with the Oly 25mm ƒ/1.8 as my premier lens. (not a bad lens at all, by the way)."

Mike replies: I wish I were as smart as you are. I'm being serious.

Moose: "Re 'I really, really wanted a pair of Spendor SP1 speakers.' Change one letter—spender speakers.  \;~)>  "

Timo: "Locked out? Sure. There's plenty of examples: e.g., Leica's M offerings, which I've not yet tried in any iteration, or maybe that photo safari to the Amazon or Patagonia or Antarctica; of course such were probably always pricey. But the 'locked out' that really stings is Apple's Aperture being discontinued. The amount of time I've spent trying to figure out how to move on (while still taking at least some of my edits with me) is probably a larger 'splurge' than any version of a (have to look up the spelling) Summilux."

Mike replies: Fortunately for me, I had already learned about Apple's nefarious and wicked habit of orphaning its software before Aperture came out, and I lashed myself to the mast to help me resist the siren song of Aperture. I never fell for it. I sympathize with you, though.

Thomas Walsh: "Like so many others, I wanted that special car or camera or stereo system. And then the concept of opportunity cost set in. Marriage and family seems to intensify opportunity cost and then one is often left rationalizing that those grapes were probably sour."

Mike replies: Below is the placemat I use where I sit and eat three times a day, day in, day out. Amazingly, I had never consciously noticed the grapes, nor the theme! Talk about blind.

I was just sitting there this morning eating my oatmeal, when I thought, whoa, those are grapes—that's Aesop's fox.

alex-virt: "This post reminded me a toast from an old Soviet movie: 'I want to buy a house but have no means. I can buy a goat but have no desire. May our desires always match our means!'"

Sunday Support Group: OC/OL/OY (and Mike's Camera Decision)

From time to time I suggest little exercises—well, okay, sometimes some big ones too—for people to consider. I love learning, and learners naturally teach.

One of those exercises was called OC/OL/OY—one camera, one lens, one year. Here's a description of it on PetaPixel*.

So...it's January...time for resolutions...which I am notoriously bad at keeping...and I'm thinking...well, that maybe I should take my own advice and do a OC/OL/OY.

I've actually done a OC/OL/OY before, several times. Mainly because there have been a number of more-than-one-year periods when I only owned one camera and one lens. In my first year in photography school I only had a Contax 139Q and a fast Zeiss 50mm lens. In Year Two I made the most momentous equipment change of my life and career and sold the 50mm and replaced it with a 35mm and an 85mm. Whew, big change. Brave new world.  :-)

I actually even did a OC/OL/OY with a zoom lens once, too...I purchased my first DSLR, used, in 2006 I think it was, and it came with the Minolta 28–75mm lens made by Tamron that's still available as a Sony lens. (Buy Tamron's own version instead, available for Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Sony DSLR mounts; it's almost half the cost.) I liked the lens so much on the "crop-sensor" camera (in FOV equivalency it was about a 42–110mm) that I never got another lens for that camera. Note that I can only recommend this lens on APS-C—I didn't care for it on FF at the short end.

Mike's camera decision
I decided to unwrap the G9. And keep it, that means. So I've got a new camera. It's not perfect for me (mainly because, ironically, it's just more camera than I need and prefer) but it does have what I need right now—fast AF and excellent IBIS. I bought David Thorpe's book. I ordered an extra battery and hunted down one of my UpStraps.

I sold two cameras and a lens and covered the cost of the G9 that way. It's expensive, but Amazon still has it at the lowest-ever price of $1,212.49. B&H is only slightly higher if, like I did, you prefer to buy from them. That's what makes it better than the Olympus E-M1 Mark II for me—it costs less. For people who are less price-sensitive the Oly might have a little edge. It has a bigger tribe of users.

So what lens would I use for a OC/OL/OY? I have four Micro 4/3 lenses...the 20mm (an old favorite, but one that triggered this little blat), the Panasonic/Leica 45mm Macro, an old Olympus 12–50mm that came with an early Micro 4/3 camera I quickly sold, and my bread-and-butter 12–35mm ƒ/2.8 II. Again, the Oly version might have a bit of an edge, but I like my Panasonic lens.

I don't really doubt that I could use just the G9 and the 12–35mm for a whole year, but...a true OC/OL/OY would mean no iPhone photographs other than just record-keeping, note-taking, and social-media-communication-type snaps for that year. And that would mean having the G9 with me much more than I keep a "good" camera with me now. Can I do that? Hmm.

Well, I probably should. I'm pretty addicted to iPhoney snappery, not always to good effect.

Mike's new camera. Uh-oh, this picture is an iPhone snap.

But hey, challenges are supposed to be challenging, right?

Unless I really commit, my OC/OL/OY won't last more than a month. And I'm not really committed yet. Just thinking about it.

But I'll keep thinking about it.

Mike

*...Which I had never seen before I Googled "OCOLOY" just now. Thanks, Michael Z. and PetaPixel!

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

Franklin Berryman: "Given your photographic experience, what do you hope to achieve by such a commitment? I mean there should be a goal other than just saying you did it."

Mike replies: Excellent question. I will ponder that, but I think the goal is re-commitment, renewal, re-engagement—a restoration of your involvement; putting gear, GAS, and technical fussing on the back burner, getting out with the camera more, and concentrating on seeing. Sound about right?

Benjamin Marks: "Why not start with OC/OL/OM (one camera, one lens, one month) and see where it goes?"

Paul McEvoy: "On Instagram for musicians (I believe there are other equivalents for other arts) there is a tag #100daysofpractice (and now #1000daysofpractice). I believe the violinist Hillary Hahn started it. Basically practice your instrument every day for 100 days. Generally post a video of yourself doing such every day (the last requirement is sort of loose).

"I’m on day 312 or thereabouts. About 740 hours of practice which very well might be more practicing than I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve gone from an inconsistent 1-2 hours a few times a week to 16-20 hours weekly. It’s been mostly very enjoyable.

"For me the most important thing has been getting offline. I lock my phone in a thing called a kitchen safe for large periods of the day and don’t have other internet access at home. I have another phone I use to make calls. It’s just the damn internet that screws up my brain.

"The other thing is a large wall calendar (now datebook planner for the new year) where I marked down my practicing hour by hour. This made a huge difference in feeling like I was keeping my streak up.

"It’s been life-changing. I have come to just love practicing in a way that as a lifelong musician I never have before. Just consistently sitting with my instrument and exploring, mostly the same stuff day after day and really digging in. Also totally owning being able to record something that’s pretty awful and put it up there knowing it will be better in six months.

"Lately I’m pondering returning to photography a bit with a similar mindset although it’s hard to serve multiple masters."