The Online Photographer

Chroma Information (the Grid Illusion)

This is interesting—it's called the Grid illusion. A color grid is laid over a black-and-white image and, for most of us anyway, our minds fill in solid colors to an impressive degree. Here's the picture on the TYWKIWDBI blog. The red grid over the faces doesn't really work for me, but it's difficult to believe that the yellow, green and blue T-shirts only have color grids laid over them, and that our brains do the rest.

Here's the picture with the grid lines blocked out.

That's how hand-coloring works. A long-ago girlfriend who worked for The Washington Post and did graphics for local television stations was known for her hand-colored B&W photos, and I was always amazed how little detail or precision her colors could have and still work. (She sometimes used colored pencils on matte photo paper and sometimes Marshall's Oils, once a standard for that sort of work and still available from places like dickblick.com.) She was sanguine about colors bleeding over into the wrong areas (or not coloring all of an area), breezily saying things like "it'll look fine." And it did, she was right. I think she knew intuitively how little added color could suggest solid colors to viewers' eye/brains.

The look was that of old colorized postcards, which can have a sort of charm. Of course the colors didn't necessarily have to have much relation to the real colors of the scene, which also bothered me; you could photograph an orange sweater, print it as B&W, and hand-color it green with no one the wiser.

The legend on the grid illusion photo leads us back to some posts by Øyvind Kolås who calls it a "color assimilation grid." His comment: "luminance is a lot more important than the chroma for our visual perception." True, that.

I've guessed in the past that this might be one reason I like B&W more than color...because for some reason my brain is more sensitive to luminance and less to chroma than the way most people perceive things. I know that when I was very young I used to have an innate sense that colors "got in the way" of seeing...no idea how much that might have been due to suggestion or conditioning, but I recall the feeling. When we first got a color TV I was uncomfortable looking at it, and much later I bought one of the last B&W TVs you could buy. In art class and with coloring books I would complain that I never knew what colors to make things (I remember saying to my first grade teacher, when faced with a blank coloring-book page, "but what color is that?"), and I would sometimes complain that there were "only a few" colors...as if all oranges were the same and all blues the same, etc.

And on the other hand I've learned that some other people have a much more visceral, immediate, or emotional connection and response to colors than I do. A clue for me was that Szarkowski disliked Outerbridge because he couldn't stand his colors. In high school art class my bête noire (although we were friendly) was a girl who would churn out paintings at high speed, foregoing detail and edges. Very broad-brush—literally. Her work disturbed me. In retrospect I think she was very sensitive to chroma and what she was doing was putting colors together, because that's what was important to her and it was how her brain saw. And I just didn't get it at the time. It's what Rothko does, only he foregoes all figuration and she hadn't gotten that far. My pencil and pen-and-ink drawings were the opposite: detailed and precise, but monochrome. 

(I do have a strong sense of color harmony. I tend to prefer color photographers who actually actively use color as a primary creative element in their photographs, rather than those who simply photograph in color and don't seem to pay any attention to what the colors are. I should expand on that sometime...but some other time.)

I suspect we each have our individual relationships to color, perhaps even to chroma v. luminance. It's worth interrogating yourself about, anyway.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan B. for the first link, and it's not his blog.)

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

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

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

Albert Smith: "Many people are enthralled with the monochrome-only Leica cameras, and on various Fujifilm sites the wish for that brand to put out a similar B&W model usually comes in near the top when people discuss what Fujifilm should do next. I watch YouTube videos from street photographer Alan Schaller who is a master of black and white shooting. His advice video, '7 tips for black & white street photography with Alan Schaller,' says that you should go 100% mono, you can't get good switching to color at will. So this philosophy would add validity to the mono-only cameras. But try as I might, stalking the streets with my Fuji set to Acros, I'm always seeing color even when my EVF is showing black and white. A bright red car parked in front of a blue wall forces me to switch over to color, I can't just accept grey on another shade of grey. I don't think I'd be able to go out with a mono Fuji if they made one. And I was happy when I could afford my first color TV."

Mike replies: Ctein and I disagree about this, but I agree with you and Alan Schaller. I see how the camera sees. So if the camera sees color, pretending it doesn't doesn't work for me. But I had no problem at all shooting B&W exclusively for two decades. Ctein claims it doesn't matter to him, that he can shoot either one at will—at which point in such discussions, I usually remind him that he's not a B&W photographer.

Bob Keefer: "I've made hand-colored black and white photos for more than 20 years. In the beginning, I carefully colored within the lines, sweating every fluttering leaf in a landscape. But I soon realized those photos looked less compelling than the looser ones, usually on throw-away prints, that I did while experimenting with various color combinations. Soon my work became more painterly—and much more convincing. As the photo on the TYWKIWDBI site shows, our eyes do a great job of matching hues with natural boundaries."

Geoff Wittig: "There's a well-known saying in the world of representational painting: value does all the work, and color gets all the credit. Value is the light to dark scale, or black and white. Viewers (and buyers of paintings) often respond emotionally to a painter's color palette, but it's the light to dark value structure that determines how a painting 'reads' from a distance, and that draws a viewer in for a closer look. Emotional mood, sense of atmosphere, the illusion of distance and deep space in a painting? All are largely determined by value, not color. In fact, within surprisingly broad limits, a wide range of color choices will work just fine to create a realistic-looking painting, if the value structure is correct. The one property of color that is important for paintings to read as authentic is color temperature, meaning warm to cool, roughly from the red/orange warm end to the icy cold cobalt blue end of the visual spectrum. This will be immediately familiar to photographers used to employing warming filters for pleasing portraits, or photographing a landscape in the warm light of a setting sun."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "The way the human brain works in fascinating. Just look up the homunculus fallacy.

"I can recommend Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. B&W and Chroma vision are processed through different parts of the brain. B&W vision / outlines / edges etc. came first, and chroma is a later evolutionary adaption for animals that are active during the day—I think for identifying plants etc to eat or avoid. Night vision has little to no need for colour.

"She outlines many visual effects that trip the differences in processing—including that colour does not need to fill the boundaries. She explains the science known at time of publishing, and notes her speculations as such too. Thanks to Geoff for his comment, eye-opener to me (boom boom), noting value is discussed extensively in this book. But the way Geoff framed the point is very illuminating (sorry, on a roll).

"I'm on my second attempt to read the book. It's not a light read. By the end of a day's work from home, my mind is usually numb / mush. I need something lighter to 'distract' my mind and give it a chance to defrag from work, before tackling something else of substance. I no longer have the commute home, during which time I would usually peruse my favoured photography sites and the news—not that I'm saying TOP is lightweight.  ;~)

"I'll stop there before I dig myself in any deeper."

Mike replies: No offense taken. TOP is not lightweight enough. I'd get more readers if it were more so.

Will: "The Gird Isiollun msot rmednis me of the wlel konwn fcat taht msot rdaeres hvae no dltfifiucy raindeg a ppgararah of txet wtih asbrud sllepnig as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltreets are crerctloy paelced. The brain is a fascinating machine indeed!"

Actual Black Friday!

So finally it's Black Friday. It didn't start last Monday, and it certainly didn't start at the beginning of November. Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm old school and I think Black Friday should be Black Friday and that Christmas doesn't start until after Thanksgiving. And that means the day after, not the afternoon of. Shame on retail businesses that make their employees work on Thanksgiving evening.

Soapbox again? I'll quiet down now.  :-)

Anyway, it's shopping time. Here are a few of my favorite purchases over the past few years—things which made life better, or that solved a problem or exceeded expectations. Many were originally recommended by readers and friends. Plus, a few new recommendations are mixed in. A couple of readers wrote whole lists, so I'll publish theirs separately eventually (I like "other voices"). This one's a general grab-bag, not photo-related.

Dusk-to-dawn lightbulbs. I knew there were fixtures that will sense the light levels and come on when it gets dark and turn off again at dawn, but I didn't know there are now bulbs that can be screwed into any ordinary light fixture that can do the same. I had an issue because the two lights on my barn are only switched from inside the barn—which does little good, since the primary time you want the light is when you're going out to the barn in the dark. For years I worked around the problem by keeping the front light perpetually off and the back light perpetually on. Then my friend Mike Santelli told me about dusk-to-dawn lightbulbs like these 6-watt Bluex Solray LED dusk-to-dawn lightbulbs. They come in white-light versions too, if you insist—I use yellow bulbs outside because they're kinder to the bugs and birds. The sensor is inside the bulb itself. Now the barn lights turn on automatically when it gets dark and turn off by themselves after dawn. Perfect.

WFPB living. I'm 11/12ths finished with the latest in a long line of diet experiments I started in about 2012—this go-'round, a whole year on whole-food plant-based (WFPB). I'll do a proper wrap-up this coming December 19th when my year officially ends, but I've loved eating for health and it's made big differences in my life that I'm grateful for. If you're interested in a food-for-health approach, start by watching Forks Over Knives. It opened my eyes and got me kicked off down a path that's been "tasty" in many ways.

Griddler Deluxe. So as not to be doctrinaire and give equal time to meat-eaters, let's include this Cuisinart Griddler Deluxe, which Frank Goforth calls "one of the best kitchen appliances we've ever bought." And, as Hugh and Dan pointed out in the comments, it looks like a drymount press!

A good drill. Not to be a broken record about a tool (I've recommended this before), but a drill is a tool that most homeowners have even if they're not into improvement projects. A purchase I'm happy about every single time I use it has been a good-quality cordless drill. I suffered for decades limping along with a motley of cheap, inferior corded "afterthought" drills that were weak and frustrating and had separate chucks that I was forever losing. A proper cordless drill with an easy-to-use built-in ratcheting chuck is so much easier to use and so much more effective that it's a positive relief compared to using all those drills that were barely good enough. This 3/8-inch DeWalt Xtreme 12V MAX cordless drill/driver kit is the current version of what I have. I imagine any good modern professional brushless cordless drill will serve, but even if you just use a drill for household upkeep and occasional projects, buy your last drill (or, if you're young, a drill that will last). I'm glad I did.

Monitor arm. Rob L wrote that a "surprise payoff" among his recent finds was a Vivo Vesa monitor arm. "Getting your displays up just a tad more and making them mobile makes for a tremendous difference in comfort when you're in front of them all day." (Here's a deluxe version.)

'Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door' (folk saying derived from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson): This is something you can't buy, but I've been researching humane mouse traps and this one is ingenious. It's in the prototype stage so far. It's the "Sudden Earthquake Mousetrap" by a guy named Axel from Berlin, Germany, version 8. Take a look at the video starting at about 6:50. You just put a little peanut butter out on the end of it and when they move over the sensor, that black strip, down they go. It can be either a kill trap or a humane catch-and-release trap depending on whether you put water or shavings in the five-gallon bucket it's designed to be mounted on. (That's a pet mouse in the picture.)

Zoom-cam: Not THAT Ross Cameron from Down Under recommends the Logitech C925-e Webcam with HD video and built-in stereo microphones. "On the off chance anyone is looking for a webcam," writes Ross, "I’ll put a plug in for the Logitech C925-e. It’s not top shelf / top price, nor bottom. I wanted something decent quality for audio (there are no speakers) and video, for work meetings from my home office. It works well with Zoom. A nice touch is the little privacy shutter that slides over the front of the lens. And in Australia, I could claim it as a tax deduction (came in under our cap so no need to depreciate over time). The webcam sits neatly on top of either a laptop screen or monitor, making it easy to flick between looking at the screen and at the camera."

World's nicest freestanding kitchen trash receptacle:

Brother Scott recommended this beautifully engineered simplehuman 40 Liter / 10.6 Gallon stainless steel butterfly-lid step trash can—he likes elegantly engineered products of all sorts—and I've had mine for five years now. The dedicated bags fit perfectly and are easy to change, and the butterfly lid lets it fit most anywhere. It's gotten so I adjust my step when I walk over to it so my foot naturally lands on the step opener. The lid is soft-closing and silent. Simple to operate but not intuitive, so read the instructions, and alert helpful family members or housekeepers as to how to change the bag.

Excellent non-sacrificing surge suppressor: The Furman SS-6B-Pro and its predecessor model are beloved of gigging musicians and are widely used, I'm told. It's a surge-suppressing power strip that doesn't sacrifice itself in "extreme voltage" situations such as lightning strikes: it keeps on working after the voltage stabilizes again. Solidly made with metal casework and a beefy 15-foot cord.

Eddie Bauer Mens Superior Down Parka: I hesitate to admit this, but I will anyway: this is the third different parka I bought in succession when I was shopping for a new winter coat after 25 years with my old one. I actually bought two others and found both of them...well, inferior. The first was a very expensive North Face that couldn't even keep the wind out as well as an ordinary windbreaker—despite being almost too large to strap myself into the car when I was wearing it, the sleeves were virtually useless against cold moving air. I'd hate to be caught on the north face of anything in that! I swallowed hard and donated it to charity, all but brand new, and took the loss. This one? It's there in the name: Superior. Third time's a charm. Love this. It's as close to a warm hug as I get, it's not too bulky for the seatbelt, it's well made, and it's nice and toasty in my 5–6 (seriously, my county is right on the border) climate zone. You can remove the fur trim but not the hood. This one gets the nod from me.

Finally, do you have your Vitamix and Instant Pot yet? I've recommended each one about five times. Both are vital to the TOP World HQ kitchen laboratory, and I suspect will become even more important in the coming year, given my upcoming New Years resolution. More about that on December 19th.

I'd go on here, but you know what? I'm slowing down. Literally! It took me an embarrassingly long time to build this post. I used to be able to whack something like this out in a torrid four-hour work session. No longer. Now it takes me a day and a half. I guess it's true what they say.

Mike
(Thanks to Rob L, Dan S, hugh crawford, Mike Santelli, Frank
Goforth, Not THAT Ross Cameron, and Scott Johnston)

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

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

Speed: "Re: Monitor Arm, I have the dual monitor version and it is terrific. One additional benefit: Because the monitors are suspended from behind, the formerly wasted desk space under them is now un-wasted."

Gerard Geradts: "Another 10 hours of wasted time thanks to TOP. This time all the mousetraps of the world. Hilarious. I really enjoyed it all."

xf mj: "I gotta confess I can be buoyed by any TOP posts that mention a camera or lens choice I've made. I like the validation, probably more than I ought to. Who knew I could feel the same pride of ownership for my garbage can? I am a total fanboy for that little steel flip-top guy there, though I happen to own the Mark I model without the dual lid. My girlfriend hates it, though, and prefers something a little less fussy to dump the trash in. So it goes with my TOP choices!"

Why Desaturation Doesn't Work: Tim Soret

Ever wondered why simple desaturation is so unsatisfying as a way to render a color original in monochrome? Tim Soret explains, in a Twitter thread. With nice example illustrations.

Tim is a 31-year-old French art director, cinematographer, and tech artist living in London.

Good stuff.

Mike
(Thanks to Phil Gyford and Tim Bradshaw)

ADDENDUM by Tim Bradshaw: There's a comment at the end of the Twitter thread that our eyes are most sensitive to blue so none of it makes sense. I thought I would explain that, because it's right in an interesting way, but also wrong. As you can tell from the length of this comment, I haven't got enough to do right now. The physics below is right, but the details of how eyes work may not be (but they are, obviously, constrained by physics).

First of all, blue light is relatively short-wavelength and hence relatively high-frequency, as wavelength, λ and frequency, ν (that's lambda and nu) are related by ν = c/λ. The three kinds of cone cells in our eyes have sensitivities which peak at around 560nm (red), 530nm (green) and 420nm (blue), corresponding to frequencies of 536THz, 566THz and 714THz respectively.

Well, a famous person, whom I'll call 'Albert' because that was his name, worked out in 1905 that light comes in little chunks we call photons, and that the energy of a photon is given be E = hν, where h is a constant, Planck's constant. Interestingly Albert is much more famous for doing something else, but he won his Nobel prize for this work.

What that means is that the amount of energy per red, green and blue photon is in the ratio 1, 1.06 and 1.33 respectively: blue photons have about 33% more energy than red photons.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to understand how the cone cells in our eyes work in detail, but there are two things which anyone who has done B&W printing in a darkroom will now immediately understand.

Firstly, safelights mean that the detection of light at all depends on its photons having enough energy—of them having a short enough wavelength, in other words. Safelights are generally red: the photons they emit have energies low enough that the papers we use don't detect those photons, at all. In particular, anyone who has worked in a darkroom in recent history will know that LED safelights (just buy the LED stoplights for cars) are a wonder: because they're LEDs they have a very non-thermal spectrum which means they can be both really bright and also have no high-frequency photons at all, which makes working under them both easy—you can see—and safe—they don't fog paper, at all.

(Incidentally, this effect—photons needing to have enough energy to be detected at all—was what Albert explained so brilliantly in 1905.)

Secondly, some detection mechanisms require the reception of more than one photon to trigger a detection. Film photographers know all about this as well, in fact: many (perhaps all) film emulsions require the reception of more than one photon to register anything at all (really, for the chemical change that is part of forming a grain to happen). And they also tend to 'forget' each photon after a while if they have not seen enough yet. So long as photons arrive fast enough, everything is well; the emulsion just sits and counts '1, 2, 3, 4: OK, seen enough now!'; but if photons are arriving too slowly the count goes '1, 2, er, 1, 2, er, 2, 3, er, 1, 2, er, 2, 3, 4: finally I've seen enough now!' and you need a lot more photons arriving. This is why reciprocity failure happens in low light: photons are arriving slowly enough that the emulsion has time to forget they've arrived.

(As far as I know Albert did not work on reciprocity failure.)

OK, so now we're ready to explain the whole blue light thing.

First of all, in very dim light not many photons are arriving. The energy, and therefore frequency and therefore colour, distribution of the photons may be the same as it is in bright light (it may not be, but this is not why very dim light seems to be blue), but there are hugely less of them than there are in bright light: we're now definitely in the regime where photons are arriving at cone cells one at a time.

Now we can infer that red and green cone cells need to see multiple photons before they register they've seen anything at all, and they also have this 'forgetting' property (I think this is just that the chemical process which happens in the cell has to get reversed because things have to be 'reset' so they can count another photon: you would not like your eye to be like film and only able to see something once!). So in very dim light, the red and green cone cells simply start forgetting fast enough that they stop registering.

But the blue cone cells are detecting significantly more macho photons: they're a third again as macho as red photons. And these photons have enough energy that you need to see significantly fewer of them for an event to be registered.

So in very dim light, the blue photons are still triggering the blue cone cells, because they have more energy, while the red and green cells are not getting triggered as they need more of the lower energy photons, and they're forgetting fast enough.

So very dim light seems blue to us. Or, to be precise, the last colour we lose in very dim light is blue: very dim light has no colours to our eyes at all, as even the blue cone cells then have time to forget, and only the rods are seeing anything at all.

But this behaviour in dim light is nothing at all to do with the behaviour in bright light, where there are plenty of photons for all the cells to register and the whole forgetting thing stops being a problem. The relative brightness of colours we see in bright light has nothing to do with the relative brightness in very dim light, which is dominated by the ability of our eyes to register very tiny numbers of photons, and hence by the quantum mechanical properties of those photons. So, yes, our eyes are 'most sensitive' to blue in the sense that it's the last colour we lose as the light gets dim, but this is nothing to do with the properties of our eyes when the light is bright.

(As a final note: I believe that the dark-adapted human eye can detect—that is, we can notice—around 10 photons. Cats can notice individual photons. Cats, as always, are better than us.)

CRITIQUE by Frank Gorga: "I agree that Tim Bradshaw's physics is spot on as far as this retired biochemist can tell. His knowledge of the biochemistry of the eye is, however, as he admitted, lacking. The defect in his argument is made at the juncture of switching from physics to biochemistry. The fact is that the primary photoreception event in cells that respond to different wavelengths of light is exactly the same. The same compound (retinal, a form of Vitamin A) absorbs a photon and undergoes a light-induced change in its shape (a photoisomerization) to initiate the process. The retinal is bound to a protein (opsin) which is slightly different in each of the three types of cone cells. The sightly different slightly forms provide different environments for the retinal and thus 'tune' the absorption of a photon to the three different color sensitivities. The rest of the process by which that primary event (the absorption of a photon by retinal) is converted to a neuronal (electrical) signal is the same in all three types of cone cells.

"What happens next in terms of how the brain processes these signals into what we perceive as color is nowhere close to being fully understood. However, it is clear from work beginning in the middle of the last century by many folks, most notably Edwin Land (yes, of Polaroid) that color is mainly constructed in the brain and not by the retina.

"One last correction...another commenter asserts that 'the photosensitive pigments in animals' eyes are close chemical relatives of chlorophylls and other phytochemicals in plants.' This is simply not true. The structure of retinal is not related, at all, to the structure of chlorophyll, except maybe that they are both organic molecules."

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

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

Craig: "Well, sure. This is why lighting for B&W is very different from lighting for color. In color, you can trust something red and something blue to be visually separated. In B&W, you have to be careful about the values, and you use lighting and filters to ensure things of similar value are separated as you want them to be.

"This was at the heart of Roger Ebert's criticism of colorizing B&W movies back in the '80s. The process inherently ruins B&W movies that had been carefully lit to get exactly the effect that the creators wanted. Simple desaturation is kind of like colorizing in reverse. You take an image that you originally saw in color (because that's how our eyes work), composed with that in mind, and you reduce the colors to grayscale according to a simple algorithm that has no artistic understanding of the image you're working with. This is unlikely to produce a good result.

"When I want a B&W image from a color digital image, I carefully adjust the color sliders in Lightroom's B&W mode to get just the effect I want. It's not really a perfect solution (the ideal solution would involve lighting, at least if you're in a studio, and filters, which people don't often seem to use with digital) but it works acceptably most of the time. The core point is that you need to think about how you want the image to look in B&W, and then you need the tools and the skills with the tools to reduce your color digital image to B&W in a way that achieves the look you intended."

Mike replies: If anyone were to colorize my B&W photographs—I don't see why they'd care, but never mind that—I would consider it vandalism!

Christopher Mark Perez: "Hah! Brilliant, this. As an aside, I have very much enjoyed your series on digital black and white photography. Following this latest post I took a group of color wheels gathered from around the 'net (including pastels and subtle color variations—not just prime colors) and did two things. First, using the Gimp I added a black layer over the color wheels and set its blend mode to LCh (Luminosity Channel). Perfect! Second, using RawTherapee I enabled the 'Black and White' module, and selected 'Method—Luminosity.' Perfect! Both are Open Source Software programs and they seem to implement the color math correctly."

Patrick Murphy: "Seriously? The best way for Tim Soret to get this information out was with a series of tweets with 11 (!) GIFs that have to be individually clicked on?"

Patrick Murphy: "For example, couldn't this information be put on a blog (like Mike's!) as a single article?"

Patrick Murphy: "And instead of GIFs which fade between two values, just have the before-and-after picture? Also makes it easier because we can visually compare side by side as fast as we want, without waiting for the GIF cycle."

Patrick Murphy: "Or put it at a website, or even (gasp) Facebook—someplace where people can see the thread—sorry—of your argument all at once, instead of chopped up pieces."

Patrick Murphy: "I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything gets pounded. And when all you have is Twitter, thoughts get chopped up into 19 tiny bits that start-stop, start-stop, start-stop, start-stop like trying to drive down a street where you hit Every Damn Light One By One By One."

Mike replies: I see what you did there.

Moose: "He's right, of course. But what a convoluted way to go about it. Photoshop provides simple desaturation, but also provides a very powerful Color-to-B&W conversion tool, capable of everything from wild effects to great subtlety. Repeating myself from 4/15: 'In Image > Adjustments > Black & White (Alt-Shift-Ctrl-B), Photoshop provides enormous control over the conversion. Once you get a conversion you like, you can save it.'"

'Finding a Visual Identity in the Digital Age'

I wrote the following yesterday: "Cameras have all gotten so 'good' that what's starting to emerge is a certain tyranny of sharp, clear, detailed, correct-color, adequate-DR digital images. It's not all the same equipment, but more and more it's the same, or a similar, aesthetic look."

Richard Palmer emailed this morning to point out that Ralph Gibson addressed that very subject in a TEDx talk called "Finding a Visual Identity in the Digital Age." Indeed, at 2:53, Ralph says more or less the same thing I did: "...software is a key word here because it enables us all to take pictures very easily, and at the same time it makes everybody's pictures look the same."

I'm not sure Ralph entirely answers the question about how to find your identity—not everyone's work is keyed to graphic issues such as shapes—but his talk is good to listen to all the same: it's certainly great to hear about his epiphany in the Navy, what he learned from (and about) Dorothea Lange, his catharsis about his mother in front of the New York City beauty parlor, and other big moments in his life.

I've met Ralph several times, and in his studio darkroom in Manhattan I got to see a curious photographic artifact: his old Leitz enlarger (the Leitz family began and owned Leica for many years). Not only was it the enlarger that printed all the pictures from Ralph's seminal 1970s books (Ralph said he liked negatives that "fought back"), but he got it from another photographer he assisted, Robert Frank, who used the same enlarger to print all the pictures in The Americans. I wrote to Ralph long ago suggesting that that enlarger belongs in the Smithsonian or the George Eastman Museum when he's done with it. Nobody values old darkroom equipment but that's one of the most significant darkroom artifacts in American photography if you ask me. Hope I planted that seed. (I've been aware of several cases where famous photographers sold off significant darkroom artifacts simply as used equipment, with no thought to its provenance.)

If you don't know Ralph Gibson, head to your local library and see if you can find copies of his Lustrum Press books The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-vu (1973), and Days At Sea (1974) (you couldn't get away with that scandalous NSFW cover today!) to look through. Here's a short backgrounder on Lustrum Press, which he founded and ran. Many of his later books are just as good but weren't nearly so famous or influential. My own favorite book of his, for reasons I don't fully understand, was his first book in color, L'Histoire de France.

Mike
(Thanks to Rich Palmer)

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

San Warzoné: "It was obvious early on that Ralph Gibson's images were different...nowhere near the 'same' and certainly not 'MCU back of head with outdoorsy hat.' It was his choice of subjects that made them look so unique and attention grabbing. Being poor and living out of a suitcase didn't stop me from buying his 'Trilogy' in the bookstores along Polk Street back in the '70s, while living in San Francisco. Looking through those books was like going to school...eye opening, provocative, stimulating and direction changing...eyes open and head up."

s.wolters: "There is a lot in here Mike. Here are some loose thoughts:

"Alec Soth is one of my favorites. In Ping Pong Conversations he comments on his postcard picture 'Falls 26' in his Niagara project:
‘Everybody shoots in the same direction as I did here. The cover of any touristic book is essentially this view. What I think is hysterical is that this was my best selling picture. I printed it large and people said “Wow, you just could fall in, it’s so beautiful…” but there are a hundred million people that have taken the same picture.’

Alec Soth, Falls 26

"Looking at many of his pictures you get the feeling that you could easily have made them yourselves. So what is so good about them? Soth is of course very much involved with his his subject. A more personal style (like Gibson or Adams) would have interfered with his story.

"Technically perfect images can be extremely boring and ineffective when it comes to visual communication. In my career as graphic designer I have dealt with these problems so many times. There is always a need to make a difference. You always need something special for grabbing the attention. So if everybody shoots full color with the latest high-end DSLR you might steal the show with let’s say a twenty-five-year-old compact camera and pushed Tri-X. Good illustrations of this can be found at fashion magazines. Real professionals don't always go for the latest high tech. (Graphic designers have of course many more and heavier weapons to pimp boring images, a universe that expands far beyond Lightroom and Photoshop).

"The most important rule in the world of imaging is that there are no rules. Except for: ‘Always be honest.’

Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, Cappuccio Girls, Milano 2011,
from Exactitudes

"The 'MCU back of head with outdoorsy hat' series seems larger than the sum of parts. The cheerleader effect. Also reminded me of this great project [Exactitudes] of photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek."

Mike replies: Thanks for that. I'd been thinking of that project but I couldn't remember any of the names. It's really not good for my work to have most of my books in boxes. I need my working library!

It's also fascinating to hear Alec Soth's thoughts about that picture, because it's what I always thought about it. It always seemed out of place to me in the book. Which I also have. Somewhere.

Two Old Snapshots

I'm intending to take Saturday off, unless it's already too late for that. But I wanted to leave you with something to chew on for the weekend.

I ran across an old snapshot the other day that jumped out at me. To my eye, it has the authenticity and casual grace of the very best of the genre. It's a simple picture that shows an apparently happy, healthy young woman playing on a snowy street with two children. You can see it at this link. (I tried to reach Kate Daloz for permission to post it here, but was unsuccessful, alas.)

I know from experience that you can sift through thousands of old snapshots and only find one or two that have this sort of magic. It's a beautiful photograph.

It's made more poignant by the fate of the young woman in the picture. Her name is Win Mayer, and the cause of her death was "Attempt at criminal abortion, self-inflicted." It illustrates an article by her granddaughter that tells everything the younger woman has been able to find out about her laughing grandmother's grim fate.

So many old photographs are essentially tragic, if we take the time to really think about them. A memorably beautiful, achingly sad picture, to me.

Exercises in absurdism
It was fortuitous that I came across that snapshot just after reading about another. Janet Malcolm, who wrote the seminal book of anti-photographic criticism Diana & Nikon (difficult to buy now; check eBay or your library) during the Photo Boom, reveals the backstory of one of the illustrations in that book:

"For many years my late husband, Gardner Botsford," she writes in the New York Review of Books, "kept a small black-and-white snapshot on his desk of a man and woman wearing shorts, walking one behind the other on a tennis court. I didn’t know who the couple were but assumed they were friends from Gardner’s life before our marriage, people he had been close to and fond of. One day I asked him who they were and he laughed and said he had no idea. He had plucked the picture from a pile of rejects on their way to the wastebasket. It had leaped out at him as an example of an outstandingly terrible snapshot, one that had everything the matter with it. The couple had their backs to the camera; the tennis court showed a few white lines; there were undifferentiated shrubs and trees edging one side of the asphalt. That was all. I saw what my husband saw and laughed with him. There was no reason for the existence of this picture. Keeping it was a wonderful exercise in absurdism."

When she was writing in Diana & Nikon about a type of art photography that took the snapshot as inspiration, she couldn't resist the sly "in joke" of including Botsford's "outstandingly terrible" one as an illustration. The career of that photograph thus seems similar to David Letterman's early innovation of making stars out of stagehands and random ordinary people such as a local deli owner, and, especially, of his recurrent use of Calvert DeForest, a.k.a. "Larry 'Bud' Melman," whose significance on the program seemed to have a permeable membrane separating satirization (as the worst possible actor the producers could find, the main part of the joke), and real acting accomplishment and real celebrity for Larry Bud. DeForest, who did walk-ons for years and ended up having a good career being implicitly lampooned by Letterman, said that his introduction of the first episode of "Late Night"—a parody of the prologue to the Boris Karloff film Frankenstein—was "the greatest thing that had happened in my life." Poor guy.

Poor guy—? Or lucky guy? I still don't know. I don't think we're meant to.

Getting back to the ringer snapshot, there's a funny little coda, too, which you'll read about. I couldn't help but feel twinges of sympathy for Graham King (I have his book, in a box in the barn), who'd been had. Although King was right—all he claimed about it was that it had "been published." As it was.

A short but neat little essay. Recommended, if you have the time this weekend. It seemed like synchronicity that I encountered these two old snapshots—one so deeply sincere, one so deeply ironic—in close succession.

Mike
(Thanks to the reader who recommended the Malcolm link to me—I can't find it now.)

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XKCD 1952

If you have camera-bag-itis, you'll need to see this. Especially the bar graph at the end.  :-)

This is one photographic compulsion I seem to have completely escaped. I owned one wholly inadequate (but very expensive) camera bag for about 25 years; replacing it, I tried a few, quickly settled on the Tenba Large Messenger bag (now discontinued), and have remained perfectly happy with that.

I just figure that bags are like tripods—they can't be optimized because they're fundamentally frustrating, in that they have at least two design parameters that are diametrically opposed. In the case of tripods, you want them to be conveniently tall and rock-solid when set up, but small, portable and lightweight when being transported. With bags, you want them to hold everything securely, yet also be small, featherweight, and wieldy (that's the opposite of unwieldy), and keep everything easily accessible. Ergo, I accept that I'm never going to be satisfied with any tripod or camera bag. Quixotically, this allows me to be perfectly sanguine about owning less than optimal examples of both breeds of products (although my tripod, a carbon fiber Gitzo, is wildly better than my ancient all-metal one. And, come to think, my Tenba is much better than my yeoman Billingham bought during the Reagan Administration, too).

Mike
(Thanks to Ian Goodrick)

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Avo Koplimae: "Back in the mists of time, I recall a camera store clerk helping me with the purchase of a tripod. He explained that there were three desirable qualities to look for. A tripod should be sturdy, lightweight, and inexpensive and that I could have any two of those choices. I certainly haven't been able to disprove that statement in all these years."

Doug Thacker: "Avo, that could have been me you talked to. That's exactly what I used to tell all my tripod-shopping customers when I worked in a camera store. And it's still true today, as Mike points out with his own tripod. The nice thing about tripods, though, is that if you buy right, you might only have to buy once. There aren't too many things you can say that about.

"I used to have a closet full of camera bags. Backpacks, waistpacks, messenger bags, shoulder bags, you name it. I even tried my hand at my own design, with the intention of having it made. About four years ago, I discovered the Lowepro Passport Sling, and that's the only bag I've needed ever since. The Lowepro Sling combines the best features of a backpack, a messenger bag, and a shoulder bag, and there's not much you could do to improve on it. It has two padded compartments—I usually put a camera in each—as well as a large, unpadded space. I often have an additional lens or two inside this space, each of them in its own padded Lowepro lens case. The bag can also be expanded by unzipping it in front, but I almost never have to do do that. Without expanding it, the Sling holds two XT bodies, each with a lens attached, two additional lenses, each in its own case, a Ricoh GR, and enough extra batteries and cards to get through a full day of shooting. It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing to perfect I've yet found in a bag."

Marc Lawrence: "Some years ago, early in my photography obsession, I bought a Lowepro backback, and I can't argue that it is a very good, well-built photography backpack, probably. But I never, or rarely, used it. I do now—it perfectly holds a Nespresso coffee machine, frother and coffee supplies when we go roadtripping, because I need my first-thing-in-the-morning latte (it’s okay, I hate myself a little bit too). I just bought my partner a drone camera backpack from Lowepro—I wonder if it might hold an icecream maker and waffle grill...?"

MikeR: "This made me laugh! Just last night I surveyed my own collection of compromises, and re-activated a Lowepro Slingshot 100 that has been empty for at least six years. And of tripods, I have a few, including a carbon fiber Manfrotto, which I love, but rarely use cause it's such a beast to carry around. My latest object of covetousness is a Benro 'footed' monopod with a video head. Thank you for putting into words the conundrum of tripods and bags."

Eolake: "I also have a carbon fibre Manfrotto. I agree, it’s amazing. The weight difference from my old metal Manfrotto is startling."

Mike replies: I think this is the one I have. I have to admit it almost destroys my "opposing parameters" theory because it's both very light, and tall and sturdy as well. Good thing, because I tend to keep my tripods for 30 years. It doesn't break Avo K.'s adage, though.

Curt Gerston: "Thank you Mike. Very wise words...but where was this post 17 bags ago?"

Gordon Lewis: "On the other hand, there is no law that says you can only have one tripod or camera bag. I have a large, super-sturdy tripod I use for home studio work and a very portable tabletop tripod I use for travel. Same with bags: Big padded bag to protect equipment during rough transport vs. small, lightly padded shoulder bag for street shooting."

Greg Heins: "This is often overlooked, but the camera bag to tripod (includes monopods) ratio is crucial. It is best kept at or near 1:1. By means of some judicious pruning, I’m right there with about a half-dozen of each. When the ratio goes awry, your photographs suffer. As I say, often overlooked...."

Mike replies: Dual-purpose rationalization. Efficient. I like it.

Mark Kinsman: "I have the perfect messenger bag...it only needs to be a few inches taller and wider to be even more perfect. Oh, and a little lighter too. Actually that’s true of all 11 bags and backpacks I own."

Benjamin Marks: "I first bought the largest bag I could afford. Then I bought the largest bag I could carry. Then I bought the smallest bag I could stand. Then for hikes I bought a small back pack. Then I realized that I could pack differently depending my mode of transportation:

• Bicycle: one camera, one lens
• Airplane: one camera bag plus a smaller satchel for walking about.
• Train: Two camera bags Car: Three camera bags
• Walking in NYC with an 8x10: a Dolt backpack strapped to a folding handtruck.

"Oh, and bungees. Lots of bungees. Don't get me started on tripods. My rule: the largest possible, given the circumstances. For travel, a mini Manfrotto. For home: a maxi Reis. And everything in between. I have swooned for carbon, but settled for aluminum."

Ian [who sent me the link —MJ]: "What made this even funnier was I had just agonised over a non-camera backpack, to replace one I bought at the turn of the millennium."

Wayne Levin on Lenscratch

"When I descend into this wonderland I want to make images not to explain
or clarify that world, but to deepen the mystery" —Wayne Levin

There's a fine new interview by Tara Cronin with B&W underwater photographer Wayne Levin on Lenscratch today. A very well-done presentation throughout. Nice, and worth your while.

A brief sample, from Wayne, related to the quotation above: "I don’t feel that I am able to live my life in realization of the mystery. In my day to day life, I’m a bundle of uncertainties, hopes, anxieties, anger, joy, tension, and relaxation, just like most humans. I do however often have a strong philosophical bent, and a drive that borders on obsession with my photography. I do feel that often I learn and get new ideas or concepts from my photographs. They teach me and open up new possibilities."

At the very least, head on over and look at the photographs. Not like anyone else's.

Mike

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Jack: "Whoa, thanks, Mike, that was a treat. Sometimes I see photos and think, I can do that too. In this case I say I'm glad Wayne can do that, because I can't, but really like his work.

The Ultimate Nightmare Clients

This is a pretty involved story, but if you've ever been a professional photographer you will be sucked into it with a mixture of horror and fascination. And probably some level of familiarity.

The vindictive wedding clients deliberately ruined the reputation of wedding photographer Andrea Polito of Dallas, Texas, with an Internet and social media campaign that advanced an easy but false narrative. Andrea's prospering business withered and she was forced to close her studio.

But Andrea got the last word when a jury awarded her more than a million dollars in judgement, finding that the couple, Andrew and Neely Moldovan, were guilty of malicious defamation.

As with many such judgements, Andrea might never collect, but at least the truth is out now, and known to the world. 

The article is called "They trashed their wedding photographer over a $125 fee, so a jury told them to pay her $1 million." Reading it is like watching a train wreck. (You'll find more articles if you Google "Andrea Polito.")

Let's all be careful out there.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick)

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Always in your corner.
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toto: "Some bloggers will try and ruin other people just to attract readers. (TOP not included, of course) Here's another case."

Mike replies: Great link, but it seems like that's a case of a blogger/photowriter (Gary Fong) coming to the aid of a persecuted photographer (Nelson Tang). The villain in that case was a lawyer/client.

Random Excellence: Lori Swadley's '52 Addicts'

The June 5 & 12 issue of The New Yorker features a long "Reporter at Large" article by Margaret Talbot called "The Addicts Next Door: West Virginians fighting to save opioid abusers—and their town—from destruction." It's a long, engrossing article, if one that's difficult to read.

The article includes a series of mini-profiles of a number of people, and one of the first ones featured is Lori Swadley, a successful wedding, portrait and boudoir photographer from the Martinsburg, West Virginia area. Despite obviously having lots else to do, Lori started an Instagram series called "52 Addicts."

Courtesy Lori Swadley, used with permission

Lori says in The New Yorker story that she herself was inspired by a reporter named Jenni Vincent, whose byline was on many of the stories about overdose deaths in The Martinsburg Journal online. "You could tell she wanted the problem to be known," Lori told Margaret Talbot. "Because at that time it seemed like everybody else wanted to hide it. And, to me, that seemed like the worst thing you could do."

That took me back to my son's first girlfriend, a bright, personable 14-year-old named Katelyn who I know I'll never be able to forget. Despite a loving mother (we didn't know her dad), Katelyn died of an overdose at 20—and there was no mention anywhere of how she died.

I spoke to Lori on Saturday, and she said she wondered when she was talking to the reporter whether there would be any negative blowback for her business, but she's found that all the responses to the work and the publicity have been positive.

Great admiration to Lori for taking on her "sideline" project for the sake of transparency and honesty and to honor those among her neighbors and her community who are struggling against the epidemic.

Mike
(Thanks to Lori)

Random Excellence = excellence randomly encountered.

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Doug Mills: 'Sending You a Nice Picture Now'

Presidential administrations often become known by a few iconic photographs—Dirck Halstead's picture of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky at a Democratic fundraiser; George W. Bush affecting a military uniform (always a blunder, as it ignores an essential principle of American democracy) underneath the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Doug Mills may have taken the first such picture of the Trump administration—former FBI Director James Comey testifying in an unusually crowded "216 Hart" (Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building).

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times. (NYT caption.)

How did he do it? Here's an interview with Doug that includes a description of how he set up and even a picture of himself taking the now-famous picture, captured by one of his own remote cameras.

(Just as a personal aside, I've been a photographer in the press pack at Senate hearings, and, although it's true I never did it enough so that it became routine, I can "testify" that there's a lot of pressure inherent in the situation. The women and men like Doug Mills who not only "get the shot" consistently but manage to make an outstanding picture in circumstances that are constricted in so many ways have really accomplished something. I don't know about you, but my hat's off to Doug.)

Mike
(Thanks to Phil)

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Stephen Voss: "A great shot, and the best application of a technique Doug has employed a few times previously. Here's one. But I think the larger takeaway here is less about method and more about his thinking in why this would be the right moment for this kind of shot—that's what makes Doug such a great photographer. Tangentially, I also was photographing that day and it was one of the most crowded hearings I'd ever been to."

Mike replies: Wow, your lead is a great shot too.

Mike Shwarts: "Interesting, but he might want to switch to an Olympus Micro 4/3 and Android phone with the Olympus Share app. You put the phone in a bicycle mount that you attach to the monopod. Then you have a live view and the phone can trip the shutter. I've been doing this lately for a different point of view for static displays at air shows. Takes the guess work out getting the composition correct.

"I think phone remotes with live view that can be used on DSLRs are being developed through Kickstarter."

Weekend Reading: G. Steidl

Well, darn, after all that, I didn't even get around to the post I meant to write today. It was about something weird I've noticed about landscape photography. Hope I'll remember come Monday.

If you have any free time over the weekend and are looking for something fun to read, The New Yorker has published a profile of the protean Gerhard Steidl. I won't comment about the article because I haven't even finished reading it yet, but the beginning was tasty, and it has this to recommend it: about sixteen TOP readers have sent me a tip about it so far, starting with David Lobato. And if that many TOP readers recommend it, it has to be good.

Here's the link. [Note: I had trouble getting to it in Firefox and had to use Safari. If you have trouble, try a different browser.] Thanks to everyone who suggested it. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Here's another random sky pic taken on the way home from dinner tonight. I just had to stop the car. I really love the skies around here. It's a show!

Have a great weekend. If you're in the northern hemisphere, don't you just love the long days? It really makes me happy to see light in the sky after nine o'clock.

Mike
(Thanks to David et alia)

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The sky's the limit
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psu: "As a telescope nerd, I never liked the short/late nights. Maybe when I retire I'll move somewhere without them. 😃 "

Jim Kofron: "Love the long days? I'm not sure. I get up at 5:00 a.m. and the sun is getting up and birds are singing—and I feel lazy. I leave work at 6:00 p.m., and the sun is still high in the sky and I feel like I should be doing more; get home, grill dinner, and then fall asleep on the couch after too much work during the week....  :-) 

"Yes. I love long days. But I love the spring light with its promise after winter, the smells of the earth warming up, the otherworldly greens as plants and trees leaf out. The summer with its long days, its impossibly beautiful skies dotted with storm clouds, and 'life everywhere.' Fall with the intense blue-beyond-blue, the incredibly textual heavy cool skies (we had one of those yesterday), autumn colors beyond compare, sharp shadows from the sun going low. And winter with skies that contain colors that you never see any other time, the solitude of white landscapes, and the opportunity to focus on shapes and textures. It is good to be alive. And in winter, I don't feel guilty for sleeping in until 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning...."

There's More than One Way to Hunt Wildlife Photos

We've covered the story of wildlife models and photography game farms before, but Quartz's authors and photographers do a thorough job of presenting the issue in a new article called "Love wildlife photos? There’s a good chance they weren’t shot in the wild." The "window-shade" illustrations are a nice touch too. Well done.

In principle I have nothing against the practice, especially considering that people do the same thing with killing animals; we've all heard the stories of big cats being chained up on "widlife preserves" so they can be safely shot as "trophies" by "big game hunters." (Scare quotes well deserved.)

Good for you, Great White Hunter

And yes, whenever humans are responsible for animals, there will be a range in the animals' treatment from ethical and humane to cruel and atrocious. I'm sure not every photo-game-farm wolf, fox, buffalo or cougar is well cared for. But it's not inherently a crime for animals to work for their keep, and all in all I'd rather have them posing to be shot with long-lensed Canons than with high-powered rifles.

As for the photographic results, well, we're learning to be skeptical, aren't we? Listen to what the human photographer says about any picture, and decide whether you want to trust what that person says about what you're looking at. Photographs don't lie; only photographers do. And then only sometimes.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, here at TOP rural HQ we're trying to be courteous to the mother robins who have built their nests under the eaves of the pavilion out back. At first, the dogs coming out the back door would scare them out of the nests and into diversionary tactics; but now they've learned that the canines down on the ground won't hurt them, and they sit there impassively, eyeing all three of us. I try to move slowly and stay out from under the pavilion roof.

My first Spring in this house I tried to dissuade the robins from building their nests on the patio, but robins are bloody-minded in their determination to build their nests where they want to build them: nothing will make them change their minds. So I figure we'll just do our best not to bother them until the hatchlings strike out on their own. It's not so bad. I feel a part of the project, in a small way.

The robins' nests with the mothers gone. It doesn't make for much of a picture, but I don't like to disturb them when they're at home egg-sitting.

Back to the photo game farms: I suppose they're harmless, all things considered. I know the subject is controversial, and any judgement I might make about about it open to challenge and criticism. But it doesn't matter what I think anyway. Different people have different feelings about animals and that's just the way it's always going to be. Check out the article and see what you think.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes)

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This photo was not staged
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Ken: "To me, as both a nature lover and an amateur photographer, the biggest thrill of photographing wildlife is the experience of encountering and seeing the animals in their natural environments. Any pictures I get are bonus."

Dennis: "I have no conceptual problem with well run game farms or with photographers using them. I'm sure many specific game farms are problematic. But to me, it isn't wildlife photography; it's closer to zoo photography—maybe somewhere along a sliding scale—and as a result, ends up being something I'm just not that interested in.

"A picture of an animal is a picture of an animal; in and of itself, rarely exceptional as a two-dimensional image. Context is everything. It's not a particular arrangement of form and color that makes us react to a mountain lion cub one way or a snarling grizzly another. Wildlife photos rarely stand on their own as art; they're usually accompanied by some text that provides context. Captions at least or maybe a whole story. Without that, they're postcard pics.

"Ctein once argued on this blog that nobody cares how hard you worked to get the picture and there's obviously truth to that, but I think that with wildlife photography, viewers appreciate knowing that they're looking at something that was difficult to get. I know that reading about how Greg DuToit obtained his 'lion at watering hole' images made me appreciate them more. I looked into a wolf preserve while vacationing in Colorado last year, but my daughter wasn't quite old enough to join us in a 'work encounter' package. Maybe on a return trip. But I had little interest in actually photographing the animals. I'll take a mediocre photograph of an animal that I legitimately encountered in the wild over an excellent photograph of a captive animal any time. (Just like I prefer shooting candids over posed portraits). They're different 'animals' and to each his own."

Miserere: "I strongly object to these wildlife farms, in the same way I object to photographers using model agencies. If you want to photograph a human, book a safari to the nearest concrete jungle and take your chances. That human beings sell themselves and allow to be photographed in exchange for money is disturbing and inhumane (I mean, have you seen the lankiness of those human models? Clearly they're not being fed enough!)."

Mike replies: What an interesting opinion. And one I've never heard before, which doesn't happen often with photographic subjects.

Dave Elden: "Re robins: I have a nest in a similar location that I can watch from my desk. I am very happy to see the birds there because of the way they chase the squirrels off—a squirrel being chased by a robin hasn't got time to chew anything it I don't want it to! Plus the entertainment value of the chases is considerable. Robins, a sign of spring here in Ottawa—although it's snowing right now on top of extensive flooding."

Daniel: "Don't really have a problem with those using handlers and game farm animals. What I do have a problem with is these photographers failing to label the images as captive/tame animals. Many of these photographers try to pass off the set up with tame animals as 'Wildlife' rather than quasi-zoo shots. At least places like Yellowstone, Ding Darling refuge and so many where photographers photograph the same semi-tame animals over and over are 'in the wild' without a handler. Animals so used to people that you can photograph with a normal lens at times—but still 'in the wild' as they are not being driven to a location and a handler helping manage the animal for the image.

"If you photograph it, label it correctly."

Stephen Voss on Trump's First 100 Days

Photo by Stephen Voss

Longtime TOP reader Stephen Voss, a photographer who lives and works in Washington DC, has been "documenting the upheaval and psychological tumult of the Trump Administration here in DC on both a local and federal level," as he says, and now has a major portfolio published at Politico.

Politico's introduction: "For anyone who lives in Washington, it was clear Donald Trump campaigned against the city in two ways. He ran against 'Washington,' the metaphorical seat of unchecked government power, and also against the actual city of Washington, a multicultural, Democratic stronghold that embraces immigration, marijuana and seemingly every other progressive policy Trump voters rejected. Since the inauguration, photographer Stephen Voss has been documenting the city’s uneasy relationship with its highest-profile new resident."

Outstanding documentary photojournalism, well worth taking a look from a photographic perspective regardless of your politics. Big congratulations to Stephen.

Mike

P.S. Here's Stephen's website.

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The Astonishing Catherine Leroy

At the World's Greatest Photography Magazine,* the astonishing story of the French war photographer Catherine Leroy. Raised in a convent in Paris and determined to be a combat photographer, she booked a one-way ticket to Laos in 1966 when she was only 21, arriving with no affiliations, no credentials, a Leica M2, and only $100 to her name. She became one of the most daring, and among the most accomplished, photographers of the Vietnam conflict.

Catherine Leroy with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in a combat
jump, photographing the jump as she made it [NYT caption]

She was the first journalist in the Southeast Asian conflict to participate in a combat parachute drop (above).

This is a photographer we should rightly know more about. Catherine Leroy retired from combat photography after working in Lebanon in the mid-1980s, and died of lung cancer in California in 2006.

Mike

*I know the New York Times is behind a paywall for some readers. As I've said before, I think it's worthwhile to subscribe just for the excellent photographic content, which is plentiful. I mention stories from the newspaper from time to time; hope you won't mind.

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Thomas Paul McCann: "The last time you recommended the NYT subscription I subscribed. As a European I find their editorial suits me and happily read it daily, but I'm jiggered if I have yet to come across anything specifically photographic. Where do you find it?"

Mike replies: Underneath the main title on the home page you'll see a horizontal list of subtopics starting with "World." All the way to the right is a tab marked "All." Click that and a vertical list at the left appears. Click "Photography."

Other relevant content you will find in various sections—Arts, Obituaries (such as Don Hunstein's), sometimes in editorial features such as today's interactive "Road to Nowhere," which identifies individuals in a group photo. Unfortunately there's no central clearinghouse of all the relevant content, and you might find it anywhere. For example, the Catherine Leroy feature is in "Opinion" because it's written by a guest author.

Adding to the problem is that the newspaper's "Search" function is poor. For instance, when I enter "Catherine Leroy," the current feature on her that I linked to here doesn't even come up at all.

Dave Kee: "This April marks the 50th anniversary of the battle of Khe Sanh which Catherine photographed so heroically, and for me personally of heading off to basic training at Ft. Dix, N.J. Thankfully, I was never shipped overseas, but god bless all of those who were, and thank god for her courage in documenting it for all of us."

The Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the AIC

Reviewed by Kenneth Tanaka

As anyone who has studied any art or photography history probably knows, Alfred Stieglitz was perhaps the most prominent early figure in getting photography admitted into the world of art. As a somewhat elitist, self-anointed connoisseur and relentless promoter of photography (and other modernist works) Stieglitz became point-man for the medium in the influential American East coast art world.

What you may not know about Stieglitz is that he also became a major art collector. By his death in 1946 he and his wife, the renowned American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, had amassed a collection of photographs, paintings, and sculptures so large that no single public institution could absorb its totality. It was left to O’Keefe to organize and allocate segments of the collection to various public and academic museums throughout America. In 1949, as one of 13 institutions to receive collection allocations, the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) acquired over 400 works from the collection, 244 of which were photographs (159 by Stieglitz). It was a transformative event for the museum’s then-budding photography collection. Many of these pieces have since been among the museum’s most viewed and exhibited photographs.

Fast forward to 2016. Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, the AIC’s Department of Photography was able to undertake a very ambitious project to fully digitize the 244 photographic works in the museum’s Stieglitz Collection. This was a far more extensive effort than simply putting images onto a website. In addition to full conservation analysis reports, each object’s research would be updated and centralized along with condition reports. The end result of this work was to be not only extensive object documentation on this collection but also an organized, easily-approachable presentation of this information freely available to the general public anywhere in the world.

And that’s exactly what the project team delivered. Recto and verso views of each object, mounted and unmounted, are just the start. Full conservation analysis reports, object research, exhibition histories and cross-references with other collections are presented for each object. It was a stunningly successful deep digitization project, among the best that any art museum has ever produced. A tremendous resource that serves scholars as well as high school paper-writers and hobbyists.

I think most TOP readers will find the AIC’s new Stieglitz Collection module an interesting place for any of three reasons. First, it documents some of the most significant works of photography’s early modern history. Second, it’s interesting to see what Stieglitz collected beyond his own stuff. Third, and most importantly, the module gives the public a glimpse at what museums really do. The world’s great museums are actually bastions of scholarly research, only necessarily dressed as showrooms. Deep in their bowels, behind and below the galleries, are armies of rarely-seen curators, conservators, educators, etc. devoted to preserving and plumbing the mysteries of their collections. So the depth and breadth of object information shown in this module is not really extraordinary for a museum to have. What is extraordinary is to see it so neatly gathered and exposed to the general public. Even as museums gradually open some of their collections for free viewing on the Internet, such depth of presentation is, and may remain, relatively rare.

So make a pot of coffee on a cold, wet afternoon and explore the Alfred Steiglitz Collection of Photographs at the Art Institute of Chicago!

Ken

©2017 by Kenneth Tanaka, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Mike adds: This might shed a little light on how that collection got to be so large. Here's Georgia O'Keefe talking about Alfred Stieglitz, transcribed from the 1977 PBS documentary "Georgia O'Keefe." Remember, as you read this—Stieglitz was an art dealer! Makes me laugh.

Miss O'Keefe: I was interested in what he did and he was interested in what I did. Very interested. So much that his favorite word was ‘no’ as I told you before.

Interviewer: To whom?

To anyone who wanted anything.

Oh really?

Oh, certainly. He didn’t want people to have anything. He wanted to keep it all. He liked it and he didn’t want to sell it.

But didn’t he try to sell the…the paintings…

He never tried to sell a painting. He tried to keep people from buying. And if I had had any particular feeling about money we would have been fighting all the time, but I didn’t care. He’d come home and tell me how somebody came in and wanted a particular painting and he didn’t let them have it. And this would go on, maybe, till, along in April, and I’d say, ‘well, Alfred, you know it’d be nice if I made my living this year’ [laughs].

Well he liked what I did like I liked what he did. That’s how we got along at all.

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Featured Comments from:

Peter Wright: "It's certainly a wonderful collection, and the AIC is to be commended for making it available in this way. One thing in particular that struck me in looking through these pictures was how very different my response was to each of them. The city pictures like 'Terminal' and 'Steerage' have a major resonance for me, likewise most of the portraits, but the tree pictures and the clouds leave me pretty cold. It is interesting (for me) to reflect on why that is and what it means for any work I might do. As always, art tells us much about ourselves if we let it."

Jack: "OMG. This is a treasure trove. Now I'll get nothing done for the next six months. Thanks a lot! No, I really mean it—thanks. A lot."

Roger Watch

The modern-day maestro of lens connoisseurship has weighed in again with another installment in his great ongoing opus of magisterial lens demystification. Roger Cicala of LensRentals has just published "Painting Zoom Lenses with a Broad Brush—Roger’s Law of Wide Zoom Relativity."

Not to be missed, it goes without saying.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey Schimberg)

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Two Genius Street Photographers

Photo by Richard Sandler

I make plugs here about the wide-ranging and far-flung photographic content at The New York Times, but TIME Lightbox also does a nice job. I got in the habit of ignoring them because early on I couldn't access them: some glitch in the Tubes of the Interwebs somewhere made it so the front page would open and then get stuck. So if I saw a link to TIME Lightbox I would ignore it.

Photo by Harry Kydonakis

No need now. Whatever was broke is fixed. And it's a good source for excellent, thought-provoking, eye-gratifying, mojo-revivifying slideshows. Consider these two: Richard Sandler, written about by Alexandra Genova, and Charalampos "Harry" Kydonakis, written about by Gus Powell. Harry Kydonakis is from the Greek island of Crete (home of the Minotaur and birthplace of Zeus) at the southern edge of the Aegean Sea. He's known as "Dirty Harrry" [sic] online, and a search will yield many breadcrumb-trails to follow if you're so inclined. Richard Sandler, who is currently a videographer, has been getting increasing amounts of attention stemming from a book of his classic street photography done in the 1980s and early '90s, mostly in New York City. There is more of his work at his website.

Stout stuff, both. Drink it in.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Kenneth Tanaka: "Very compelling work samples by both Kydonakis and Sandler. Most interesting to me is the contrast in their styles of choices and presentation. Sandler's work reminds me a bit of Bruce Davidson's style, perhaps because of those trashed subway scenes. Kydonakis's work is much looser, not as generally figuratively impactful as Sandler's but much more conceptual. At least that's my take. Thanks Mike."

The LensVid Summary for 2016 Is Out

Four the fourth year in a row, LensVid has published its excellent summary of the camera market, upon which we have all come to rely.

Iddo Genuth of LensVid

For today, just a link to the video. All the information is in the video, and it's not too long. News this year, although no surprise, is as bad as any of us feared. Note, however, the kernal of admittedly selfish hope: more of the action in the camera industry is going to be in higher-end and professional products...in other words, just the sorts of things that most interest a lot of us.

Here's LensVid's outstanding chart for this year, if you don't have time for the video.

I'll have more thoughts about this in the days to come, no doubt, but all in good time. Oh, and @LensVid...thanks for this.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Burke)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Dire thought
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The World's Best Photography Magazine

Who were these people? A snapshot from an old album
left out for the trash collector

Last week almost all the posts here were about equipment—"gear"—and a fair number of people complained. Two readers stomped off in a huff over it, one telling me that I was just a "click baiter" and the other opining that the heyday of blogs is over.

Heh. Like I ever cared about blogs. I like photography; blogging is just how I happen to be talking about it now. First it was being a student, then it was being a teacher, then it was writing magazine articles, then it was writing multiple columns for a variety of outlets; for a short time it was the PDML and the LUG and other forums; now it's TOP. Some of those outlets worked better than others, but it's all the same. You need a window to the World. Photography's mine.

If you want more about photography...
I keep saying this, and I say it jokingly, but I'm serious: the New York Times is "the World's Best Photography Magazine." It's very much worth subscribing to it just for the photographic content, and I mean it. Its photography content across many different categories and sections is (small-"c") catholic and encompassing, cultural and historical, richly visual. It covers news and obituaries, profiles photographers, reviews museum shows and galleries and books, presents a wide range of portfolios, and regularly takes a deep look at a very wide range of cultural stories related to photography or inspired by it.

You do have to poke around to find it all, though. The Lens Blog is the main place for portfolios, but photography content is here and there in the newspaper and website and magazine. Pops up in all kinds of ways in all kinds of places.

The Internet is awash in gear sites, where we happily natter on about shot noise and the forensics of the lens image and whether the X-trans sensor is or is not free of moiré. As a counterbalance—because its content is not similarly mirrored far and wide—the Times is as valuable as any random ten of these.

Case in point: the recent article "Love and Black Lives, in Pictures Found on a Brooklyn Street." (Copy that and Google it.) A reporter in Brooklyn finds an old photo album set out for the trash collectors. She takes it home, and gets curious about the people in it and their lives. The editors give her the go-ahead and let her have a researcher and a photographer. And gradually, she uncovers the story—along the way, honoring the lives of the deceased people in the photo album and, by extension, others, not pictured, like them. It's a lovely article that I thoroughly enjoyed, and you really shouldn't miss it. Illumines brilliantly (and compassionately, and nostalgically, and in proper historical context) one of the most important of photography's many prismatic facets. You can't get that from some overlong YouTube video of an Asian teenager wandering city streets taking random snapshots with a very expensive camera. You can't get it from me, either.

'Little England': Romford Market, in Havering, in operation since A.D. 1247.
Photo by Andrew Tesla for the New York Times.

And of course there is original photojournalism, too, which is getting as rare as endangered tigers. For example—and this really is just a random example, it happens be to be what I was reading just now, over my coffee—Andrew Testa's pictures for the article "In a Pro-'Brexit' Corner of Britain, Impatience to Be Done With It." Nothing particularly distinguished about these in particular, but they are characteristic, which is to say excellent, and it's good to leaven a diet heavy in found pictures and demotic amateurishness with some conscious photojournalism once in a while—one seasoned photographer doing his best to illustrate a particular story with deliberately honest photographs.

People complain when I link to content at the Times, because they don't subscribe and they sometimes can't get to the link. So then subscribe. It's worth it. It's something you should do. You should do it.

It's the World's Best Photography Magazine. I don't know a better way to say it.

And there's very little about gear.

Back to TOP
Back here at home again, a word about click "baiting": actually, what helps in blogging is not necessarily links, but traffic. Talking about gear improves traffic. Last week, with the gear posts, traffic was up an average of 2,000 page views a day over the week before, and one post drew 248 comments (if you include the "Featured" ones). If I talk about photographs all this week, traffic will go down. That's the way it is. The more traffic, the more your 'umble blogger will earn. It's not the links per se. It's the numbers.

And I've never been a hound for traffic, either. If I were only interested in traffic—or click-throughs, or SEO, or viral attention, or whatever (right now, YouTube is the hot way of making money anyway)—I could do a much better job optimizing it.

But for me those aren't the most important things. I like photography. It's fantastic that I can make a living talking about it, but I made a living as a magazine editor too, and a teacher before that, and I'm sure there are more efficient ways to get wealthy than doing this. It's thinking about and talking about photography that I enjoy. You have to engage with something in your life—something to really get into and think about. Something to get to grips with. Photography is one of the things I picked.

In any event, I don't mind gear posts. I like cameras.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Ken Tanaka)

Original contents copyright 2017 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:

Dalen Muster: "Word."

Pak Ming Wan: "Hear, hear. I was one of the few who probably turned off last week from your site when you went into gear mode...I especially enjoy the photo side of this site."

Chas: "I would like to see (slightly) more gear-oriented posts. Not the tech detail stuff...more the user opinion...what is it like to own and use; does it feel good in the hand, how is the viewfinder in daylight, is focus, colour rendition, contrast, noise suppression etc...'good enough' for it's purpose, how do the files print...again, not the tech details but real world opinion from a person with experience!"

David Babsky: "Thank you. I subscribed."

Nick Cutler (partial comment): "Agree wholeheartedly about the NYT. In England our equivalent is The Guardian newspaper, with excellent, long, in-depth articles and photography. The print edition carries a full-sized center spread photograph every day; some of them are simply stunning."

John Gillooly: "I came across that NYT story over the weekend and shared it with a few folks I knew would be interested. Really is a great all-around story based on the photography. It is also a reminder of how important it is to provide information on your prints. With no information and context, the people become ghosts. Knowing something about who these people were, what they did and why, gives the photos life." 

Robin Harrison: "Well...that was most peculiar, unnerving even. I've been reading TOP since day one, but I never expected to see a photo of Romford Market. That Uppercut is where my father used to take me to have my hair cut. My mother still lives half a mile away from where this was shot. What interest could The New York Times possibly have in this place? Just goes to show how easy it is to ignore the significance and photographic potential of what is under one's nose."

Robin Dreyer: "Mike, I've been reading TOP since the beginning and for a while I thought your characterization of the Times was meant in a joking way. Then I really started paying attention to the photographic content and I realized that you were not joking and, furthermore, that you are probably right in this assessment. I have always eked out what I can from the Times without paying for it, but recent events have caused me to remember how incredibly important journalism is to our society, and I decided I needed to do a little more to support it. The Times hires a lot of good journalists so I finally subscribed. And now, along with everything else, I love having unfettered access to all of their photographic content."

Brian Taylor: "Its a remarkable tribute to TOP's format that those 248 comments were fun to read! I can't remember ever reading that many comments elsewhere! On other sources, NYT may be good but I've had to cut down on subs, and am in the U.K, so would like to put in another word for the Guardian, whose previous editor Allen Rusbridger was a photography enthusiast. They still have very good coverage. Today's feature, for example, is Richard Page on 'Going to the Dogs, the Face of Modern Spain.'"

Looking Glass

I went down a little rabbit hole on the Internet this morning, as has been known to happen on occasion. (A-hem. Cough! Cough!)

Wikipedia featured this image on its home page today:

View from the Artist's Window by Martinus Rørbye (Source)

I had to look into it because paintings like this have a tendency to annoy me—painted in 1825, it's clearly a fastidious copy of the image in a camera obscura. It even reproduces, somewhat, the tonal qualities and slightly faded colors of a lens image on a groundglass. Although that must have been a sensational and cutting edge technique at the time, presaging the shock of reality that representational photography was soon to make on the consciousness of the world, it's just another example of photorealism now. Albeit a pleasant and historically significant one, particularly if you are Danish. Isn't it beautiful?

But it's not how people see; it's how a lens sees.

Compare it to this work by Eugene Delacroix painted in the same year, 1825, "A Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst":

That's not lens vision, although we can possibly imagine a model striking that pose in the studio as the painter paints by eye.

Schjeldal and Rørbye
However, from there, one thing led to another, and soon enough I came across "Lonely Men of the Nineteenth Century" by the critic Peter Schjeldahl, from the May 2, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. He mentions Rørbye, but basically the article is about Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest painter of the movement to which Rørbye belonged. First, Schjeldahl calls Romanticism "the first distinctly modern movement and, it seems to me, the default setting of Western sensibilities ever since," which is a great line. Then, in passing, we are treated to this:

Friedrich proves that an experience of the capital-“S” Sublime—the idea of malign beauty, then in vogue—doesn’t require a storm in the Alps. It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing. Variants of the effect abound in the arts of the past two centuries. It is cranked up to a steady state of panic in Kafka. It is becalmed but ubiquitous in Edward Hopper. Most of all, it has engaged innumerable photographers and filmmakers. Take Robert Frank’s classic, devastating shot of gauzy curtains blowing in a window that overlooks a grimy mining town: the good news of beauty laced with the bad news of being stuck in Butte, Montana. Come to think of it, any camera might function as an inanimate avatar of Friedrich—analogous to a brain being invaded wholly, exclusive of thought, by the uncanniness of the not-oneself.

Isn't that great? Cranked up to a steady state of panic in Kafka, becalmed but ubiquitous in Edward Hopper. Nailed that. Makes me want to go immerse myself in Caspar David Friedrich's work, for one thing. Might be appropriate as I soldier on with Melville!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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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Chris Y: "All that, and gotta love the lucidity of Peter Schjeldahl—this from a review of Richard Prince’s Instagrams in 2014—'Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sincere abhorrence. My own was something like a wish to be dead—which, say what you want about it, is the surest defense against assaults of postmodernist attitude.' You can’t really forget a line like that…."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I kind of love the idea of a color photo from 1825! We don't get to see the objective photographic view of what happened that long ago very often. Of course, we don't know that the painter didn't in fact alter things. It was pre-Photoshop, but not pre-Artist, and artists are always suspect  :-)  ."

Heinz:

"Just a few weeks back I stumbled into a Caspar David Friedrich moment on an outing and couldn't resist this selfie called 'Was nun, Caspar?' [What now, Caspar?]"

Andrew Molitor: "When I see a reference to Frank's picture of Butte, I always check to see if the writer has really looked at the picture. Nobody ever seems to mention that the mine headframe in the distance appears to be engulfed in flame.

"Well, it's probably steam, but it's still dramatic as hell. That photo has always struck me as a guy seeing something dramatic out his window, and shooting it with the far-to-wide lens he has mounted. The white-engulfed headframe in the distance is the beating heart of the picture, even so small. It's graphically important, as well as, to my eye, the obvious 'subject.' But people always drone on about the dreary town and the curtains."