The Online Photographer

We've Moved

2009-03-29T02:27:00.004-05:00

Greetings—you've reached The Online Photographer's old site, which was active from November 2005 to June 2007.

To visit the new site, active from June 2007 until now (and adding new content daily), please click here.

Of course, you're also welcome to browse around in the old site if you wish! There's still lots of content here. But do visit us at the new site when you get a chance.

All best,

Mike J.
Editor, M.C., Head Functionary and Chief Bottlewasher

New Address

2007-06-05T06:47:00.000-05:00

We have a new home!

Please bookmark:
www.theonlinephotographer.com (front page)
http://theonlinephotographer.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html (Blog)

(Note: If this does not work for you, please try:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)

Mike J. and the TOP writers and photographers

Laid Low by the Spam-Fighting Robots

2007-06-04T14:25:00.001-05:00

Well, wasn't that fun.

If you haven't heard, last Friday I got locked out of The Online Photographer. When attempting to post I got a dire Warning! message that informed me that Blogger's Spam-Fighting Robots had identified TOP as a spam blog (whatever that is...and please don't tell me, I'm quite sure I don't want to know). So for three days—thank the stars and the Blogger Team it wasn't more—I haven't been able to post here or to even tell you what was going on!

I've been almost ill over this. I feel I've worked hard for my traffic—you, that would be, and thank you—by giving you something new every day. In nearly a year and a half I don't think I've ever gone three days without posting new content. That was the original idea behind TOP—to give photo enthusiasts a place where they could reliably find something fresh.

And I have to say I've been pretty happy with Blogger for this purpose...up till now.

But apparently I have just run headfirst (and, yes, ow) into one of the major failings of a free-service site: namely, no Customer Service. I did everything I could think of to find someone to help—even tried to call Google in California. No luck. Good as it normally is, Blogger is a take-what-we-give-you type of arrangement. Don't like it? Tough tiddlywinks. Once I'd made the request for reinstatement, all I could do was wait. My only option was to sit on my hands. You can imagine how I felt when I heard the news (from reading in the Blogger Help forums) that TOP might have been out of commission for as long as a week.

I did get the "thanks for your patience" reinstatement this afternoon, and here I am posting again. Fine. But in the meantime, I did something I probably should have done a long time ago—built a new version of the blog, and registered it under my own domain name.

It's looking pretty rough yet, but I think it will end up being an improvement. See what you think: the new URL is www.theonlinephotographer.com (same as before, just without the "blogspot" in the middle there).

For now, until the DNS servers catch up with us, you may have to access the new site HERE.

I'll be interested to hear comments. And my apologies for abandoning you over the weekend—it wasn't voluntary, believe me.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Tripod Resolution

2007-05-31T16:50:00.001-05:00

Every now and then when the moon is almost full I grab my camera. I think it's because I love the phrase "waxing gibbous moon." Waxing is the opposite of waning; it means it's getting bigger. And gibbous is the opposite, or the complement, of crescent; it means a partial moon larger than a half moon. I've always wanted to title a picture Waxing Gibbous Moon.

Two nights ago I took the camera out by the garage and took this. I tell myself in those situations that there's no time for a tripod. For this shot, I turned on "Anti-Shake" (actually, I never turn Anti-Shake off) and jammed the camera up against the garage door.

When I saw that the exposure wasn't totally sharp and the moon was still blown out (this would be a good application for two quick exposures blended with one of those actions that combines two exposures for extended dynamic range—I'm not just imagining that those exist, am I?), I had one of those "tiny epiphanies" of which my days are full—I realized I dislike tripods on principle. That is, I don't think of myself as a tripoddy kind of person, all finicky and particular. I'm an anti-tripodite.

Real Purple: This unsharp waxing gibbous moon Kind of Blue moon
—a detail from the shot above—is also one of the few times I've ever
actually seen bonafide purple fringing from my 7D and 28–75mm lens.

I have a friend named Christopher Bailey who was once a house painter. I remember keeping him company once four stories above Georgetown. I couldn't leave the window, but Chris was scampering around on boards laid on scaffolding with nothing under him but sidewalk, dizzyingly far below. Now, I'm scared of heights, dramatically so, so just watching him had my stomach in knots. At one point I said, "Chris, aren't you afraid of falling?"

At that, he started jumping up and down on one of the boards, which flexed beneath him and then flung him upwards. He jumped on it like it was a trampoline. "Oh, I don't know," he said, "I just feel like if I fall, I'll get my hands on something."

Bingo. That's how I feel about steadying the camera. I'll use anything and everything to brace the camera on or against—mantelpieces, car windows, someone's back, whatever. I like to extemporize. More than that, I like to think of myself as someone who can extemporize. Even when I do use a tripod, I just jam the camera down on the top plate with my hands—I seldom actually attach the camera to the tripod head. What I realized the other night is that I avoid tripods just because of this self-conception I have—even when they're called for, and would be appropriate and useful. There was really no reason at all not to grab a tripod when I went inside to get the camera the other night.

So here's my resolution. The next time I shoot a waxing gibbous moon (granted, the shot above is another miss), I'm going to get the tripod out, and use it properly. In fact, I'm going to try to use my tripod more often in general. I don't care for "tripod snobs," but being an anti-tripod snob is no better.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Cliff: "Waxing Gibbous Moon—Nikon D70, Nikon 18-200 VR, 1/400 sec. F5.6:"

Featured Comment by Joe Decker: Image stabilization can save the day when tripods won't do the job. This was taken from a moving ship (Canon 300L/4 IS, f/4, 1/160, ISO 400):

Featured Comment by DMayer: "While I agree with your comments both pro and con about both tripods and VR/IS/whatever, I'd like to humbly point out that the argument would be moot (mooot?) for moon shots. To successfully photograph the moon you have to shoot at a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the moon and to make the earth's movement negligible. At usual f-stops, the proper exposure would be fast enough to freeze the moon with a 'normal' lens in a shutter speed range that would allow your IS to be effective. Shoot slower, and a tripod may yield a sharper picture of everything else, but your moon would either be blurred or grossly overexposed. Cliff's WGM looks good at screen resolution, and was presumably shot at 200mm at a high ISO (I would guess around 800?) At this shutter speed some people may not need the VR, let alone a tripod, especially if you use the stabilization method that you (Mike) used for your moon shot. And let's not talk about the need for remotes and mirror lockup while on your tripod. Sort of takes away the spontaneity a little, eh? Yes, I do have a tripod (carbon fibre of course, sniff-sniff), a remote cord, and a usable MLU function on my camera, and do from time to time use these functions, but I also have VR lenses, and in a pinch which do you think would yield a more successful moon shot? (The smarta-answer is the tripod, used a couple days before the full moon around sunset, when the difference between the sky exposure and the moon is within the dynamic range of your sensor and the moon is close to the horizon. Luck has nothing to do with making a good photo.)"

Once in a Blue Moon

2007-05-31T08:58:00.000-05:00

Today is the Blue Moon—the second full moon in a calendar month.

Blue moons happen about seven times every nineteen years.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Doug (seconded by many other NPR listeners): "Based on a story on NPR last evening, it seems that this was not a Blue Moon and that people have been using the wrong definition since 1946 when it was incorrectly reported in Sky and Telescope magazine.

Idle Response by Mike who actually knows nothing about it: Doug, perhaps that will end up being one of those "errors" that are sanctified by popular acceptance into becoming true. For instance, there is (or was) no such word as "troops"—"troop" (or troupe) is already plural; the singular is "trooper." But I doubt you could convince many Americans, or even many lexicographers, of the non-existence and/or incorrectness of "troops" as a legitimate English word.

(I'm hoping the same thing isn't going to become true of "loose" for "lose," which I think is one of the most persistent misspellings on the internet. Or maybe it just annoys me the most.)

As for Blue Moon, we would probably need the AHED Usage Panel's scientific advisory panel to render a verdict on this one.

Further Comment by dasmb: "I've a degree in rhetoric and agree with Mike—the only definition of a term that matters in terms of effective speech is the one that your audience expects. Dictionaries are a largely academic thing—it doesn't matter if your usage is right by the dictionary, if it contradicts popular belief then it's unsuccessful speech.

"As for me, I'm going to celebrate this lunar event falsely called a Blue Moon with a nice tall glass of Blue Moon, a beer falsely called a Hefeweizen."

Random Excellence

2007-05-31T07:02:00.001-05:00

Jan von Holleben's Dreams of Flying.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to David A. Johnson

They Needed to Talk

2007-05-31T07:01:00.000-05:00

And family friend William Eggleston, his camera at his side, felt compelled to shoot

By Emily Yellin, Smithsonian magazine

The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn't drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend's house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. "I always thought of Bill as just like us," Karen says today, "until years later, when I realized that he was famous...."

READ ON

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Robin Mellor

A Banner Year for Big Cameras?

2007-05-30T15:55:00.000-05:00

2007 is shaping up to be a banner year for top-end cameras. Not only is the new Canon EOS 1D Mark III now shipping, with its leading-edge high-ISO performance, but it looks like this year will finally see Sony filling out its fledgling line with two higher-end DSLRs—one paralleling the old Konica-Minolta 7D (right) and one situated above that, at flagship level (top)—which might or might not be full frame. Sony is releasing product pictures, but no specs yet.

Even more interesting rumors are swirling around Nikon. "According to the French magazine Réponses Photo (issue 183, June 2007)," went a recent post by one Charles Brugg on the DPReview Forums, "Nikon will soon bring out a new 'pro' camera. It will be available around the same time as the Rugby World Cup later this year." The poster goes on to report that "this new camera will use a 18.7MP sensor made by Sony, slightly smaller than full frame (1.1X) thus allowing further use of the classic F-mount."

This is all just scuttlebutt, so please don't ask me for more information. I just pass along what I hear. My contact at Nikon, for instance, is an illiterate guy named Gitchi who sweeps up under the counters where they solder the circuit boards. I'm sure he knows something, but then, I don't speak Japanese.

It looks like both Sonys and the Nikon might have image stabilization as well, although we will have to wait and see.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "Big cameras?

"Indeed, with regular special sheet film offerings from Ilford and Kodak and the East European manufacturers, large format camera builders like Keith Canham, Richard Ritter, Chamonix, and Lotus seem to be selling all the larger-than-8x10" cameras they can make and there is a brisk trade in ULF and banquet cameras on the used market."

Mike Replies: Okay, here we go. 2006. All DSLRs: about 6 million units sold. All film rangefinders from Leica and Cosina (Voigtlaender and Zeiss) combined: about 20,000 units. All ULF cameras (larger than 8x10") sold by the above four companies: I'm going to guess not more than 400 units between the four of them, and I'll even let you throw in Wisner, Phillips, and Gandolfi and anybody else you can think of.

Just a wild guess. What do you think?

Oren Adds: "I guess I'm one of the two people in the universe who found the headline strange.

"When I tell family or friends that I'm heading out with a big camera, it means a big wooden camera that makes pictures on big pieces of sheet film. It would never have occurred to me to call one of those Sonys a 'big camera,' no matter how bloated it is relative to those little sensors."

David Answers: "I'm just poking fun at the 'big cameras' headline, Mike.

"Wisner's been reorganizing their operation, so I don't think he's sold many new cameras in the past year. In addition to those we've both mentioned, Ebony and Shen-Hao should be in there as well.

"400 ULF cameras? Maybe, but among ULF cameras that would be a banner year. I wonder how many are being sold in China, which seems to be the growing market."

Mike Adds: I wonder how many people in our audience have never seen a wooden ultra-large-format camera in person? (I'll never forget the sight of Fred Newman with his 20x24" Wisner...nor of David Alan Jay 'hiding' under its dark cloth when he wanted a break from the Photo East show crowds...).

Glyph Supersale

2007-05-30T15:14:00.000-05:00

Encore Data Products, one of this site's sponsors, is having a monster sale on two audio-production-quality Glyph hard drives—you can save 49% and 45% below retail on a 500GB or 750GB Glyph Quad drive, respectively. The sale only lasts until 3:00 tomorrow Mountain time, so move quickly if you want to take advantage!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Question from Richard Sintchak: "What is it about 'audio-production' quality that makes it worthwhile at so much more?"

Here's the best answer from Glyph's website:

"Glyph was born with a customer service focus, addressing the needs of its coveted clients. The A/V production world is full of content creators and editors providing audio and film entertainment, training materials and broadcast programming as their core businesses. Down time means lost revenues, especially in this market. Oddly enough, most of the companies that claimed they were servicing these niche markets were in fact just large hardware vendors with antiquated service policies based on the commoditized and gigantic general computer market.

"Glyph has instituted some very powerful service policies that are 'standard' with the purchase of Glyph products.

"Since hard disk drives have been replacing analog tape in many studios, quality storage products and minimal downtime are critical to the user's success. In 1997, Glyph launched the Advance Replace program. Still in effect today, if a SCSI or GT Series FireWire hard disk drive fails within the first year of its warranty, it is eligible for advance replacement by 10:30 AM the next business day.

"Glyph offers 5-year warranties on SCSI hard disk drives, and 3-year warranties on FireWire hard drives and enclosures. Any in-warranty product will have a maximum turn around time of 48 hours in the Glyph facility. Simply put, if a product needs replacing, Glyph will install a new or serviced part in the device and ship it back within 48 hours. This requires a serious commitment to on-hand service inventory and the necessary human resources."

—Mike

Featured Comment by Encore Data Products: "Just a follow-up...

"The Glyph drives definitely cost more than an off-the-shelf usb drive you get at Best Buy, etc. For basic backups a cheaper one will work fine; we always suggest brand named product so at least you know where it came from. The benefits of Glyph are reliability, speed, little noise, and quality. Glyph products are used a lot in music, TV & film production where you can't take a chance of the drive not booting up, being loud (especially when recording music), or having slow transfer rates. With Glyph you know the drive will do what it is supposed to. Backed with the best support on the planet, Glyph does well in situations where you don't want to take any chances. If someone is just archiving photos and they don't access them all the time the Glyph quad series is probably more than they need but for ongoing usage it works well. The Quad series also offers 4 port formats: FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA. This helps if you move the drive around and require different connections. The portable storage case is a plus too."

Random Excellence

2007-05-29T17:04:00.000-05:00

Purple Day

Damaged

A comment from Nitsa the other day reminded me to revisit her site, nonphotography.com. There is also a book. Nitsa's non-photography non-rule rules:

no special gear (too heavy).
no instruction books (too boring).
no calculations (too calculated).

Nitsa, Self-portrait

Her work has been on CD covers and in movies, featured on the web, in newspapers, on T.V., and in many magazines and now—giving her the recongition she deserves, at last, whew—here on T.O.P.'s Random Excellence. (I kid.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Needle Exchange

2007-05-29T06:58:00.000-05:00

Stephen Crowley's latest project.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by dyathink: "My brother died of AIDS from sharing a needle with a friend who also died of AIDS. My brother was not an addict. He was just a young guy looking for a thrill. Seven years later he paid with his life and left a 25-year-old wife and three kids under age five. Thanks, Mr. Crowley, for the compassion and sensitivity."

First Camera Makes $775,000

2007-05-28T17:18:00.000-05:00

Mike O'Donoghue writes to tell us that "the Susse Frères black softwood box (1839) went for 480,000€ Saturday at the Westlicht auction here in Vienna. That makes 576,000€ [about $775,000 or £390,400] with fees."

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to Mike O'D.

'A Perfectly Beautiful Place'

2007-05-28T15:27:00.000-05:00

This nation's most hallowed burial ground for its war dead is Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery at Arlington Heights, a beautiful area high above the Potomac River across from Washington D.C. and not far from the Lincoln Memorial. Its centerpiece, Arlington House, was the beloved home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his family. It was built in the early 1800s by Martha Washington's natural grandson and the stepson of George Washington, George Washington Parke Custis, who originally dedicated the home to the honor of Washington's memory. He kept many mementoes there from Mount Vernon, his own boyhood home. Custis was Robert E. Lee's father-in-law. During the Civil War it was fortified for the protection of the capital and then used as a refugee camp for freed slaves. In 1864, with Washington D.C. overwhelmed by wounded and war dead, it became the site for a new national cemetery, partly as a spiteful move by a bureaucrat named Meigs to prevent Lee from ever occupying it again as a home.

Two Arlington postcards from the early 1900s
from the collection of Michael Robert Patterson

That gravesites should be used to keep Arlington from being used as a residence again is somewhat ironic in that, during the war, Abraham Lincoln spent his summers north of the city in a cottage at the Soldier's Home—which was then an active hospital and sanitorium with a graveyard continually in use for the interment of war dead. It is another gently spectacular spot in the countryside, with beautiful views. Lincoln would commute to the White House between June and November on horseback. Soldier's Home, which Lincoln is known to have loved, is now one of the few places apart from the White House that still exists largely as Lincoln knew it in his lifetime. In 2008 it will open as a restored national museum.

Jack Boucher, Lincoln's Cottage at Soldier's Home

Robert Lee never did return to Arlington. Down the hillside from Arlington House is the Tomb of the Unknowns (also known as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), where tourists gather to watch the changing of the honor guard, and at the foot of the greensward that we would call the front yard of the house is where the eternal flame burns for John F. Kennedy, himself a war veteran.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Nature Photographer Mauled by Grizzly

2007-05-27T14:24:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, photographer Jim Cole, 57, of Bozeman, Montana, suffered an attack by a grizzly bear while trying out a new digital SLR in the Hayden Valley area of Yellowstone National Park. Jim was swiped twice across the head and face. Jim then had to hike two to three miles back to the road to find rescue. After being flown to a hospital in Idaho Falls, he underwent seven hours of emergency reconstructive surgery, and is now on a ventilator and being fed through a tube, unable to speak. As of Sunday he was listed in fair condition.

Jim's two books on grizzlies, Lives of Grizzlies: Montana and Wyoming and Lives of Grizzlies: Alaska, are the result of a lifetime observing and photographing the animals. (The links are to the Amazon.com pages.) Jim is an outspoken advocate for the protection of bears and their habitat.

"Grizzly" is not a separate species of bear as was once believed. It's a name given to large individuals of the species Ursus arctos, or brown bear, in the northern reaches of its range. The fur of mature brown bears can turn silvery at the tips, giving the animal a shimmering or "grizzled" appearance. The biggest grizzlies are, along with big polar bears, the largest land predators on Earth. They can grow to 1,500 pounds and are phenomenally strong. Their "cuddly," roly-poly appearance is an illusion, created by thick fur and a layer of fat; skinned, their musculature resembles that of supersized, superhuman weighlifters. There are some wonderfully vivid grizzly bear stories in John McPhee's superb book on Alaska, Coming into the Country.

A grizzly, showing the gray or grizzled tips of its fur.
(Photo: John Eastcott and Yva Momatiuk, National Geographic)

Bears involved in attacks on people are sometimes destroyed, but Yellowstone Park Rangers do not plan to take any action against the bear. Last Wednesday's attack is believed not to have been predatory, since there were no bite marks on Cole's head or chest. Apparently Cole himself told the Rangers who found him that he believed it was a defensive action by a sow with a cub.

It was the second bear attack on Cole. The first, not as serious, occurred in 1993. In 2004, Cole was ticketed for willfully approaching within 100 yards of bears, but was acquitted of that charge by a judge in 2005. Until Wednesday there had been only eight minor incidents with bears in Yellowstone since 2000, and the last time a person was killed by a bear there was in 1986. Cole's friend Rich Berman told reporter Scott McMillion of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that Jim Cole would not want the bear to be hurt as a result of the incident. "If anything good comes from this, it would be that people learn from his mistake," Berman said. "Jim would want people to still go to the park, enjoy the park, respect the wildlife and be careful.

"And please don’t try to get too close to get the perfect picture."

Our best wishes to Jim for a speedy recovery.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, from reports in the Bozeman [MT] Daily Chronicle

Mark Brautigam

2007-05-27T12:10:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen Mark Brautigam's great "On Wisconsin" series online, have a look. Oren—who admits to having an attitude problem—points out that "self-conscious irony, in color, is all the rage these days," but these pictures resonate with me. In fact, I'd give a knuckle or two to be able to shoot like this guy.

And, not at all incidentally, I found this series through Joerg Colberg's well-loved and much-admired Conscientious blog. Conscientious is the favorite online destination of a great many committed photographers. If you haven't discovered it yourself yet, you're in for a regularly-repeating treat.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Photographers at Work

2007-05-27T11:51:00.000-05:00

This is very funny. (Warning: the second picture down is not workplace/
school friendly.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Sandy R.

Featured Comment by Aleksander a.k.a. Alkos:

Featured Comment by helge.nareid: "Back in the early '80s I spent a year or so doing quality control in a photofinishing plant. One of my tasks was to spool through rolls of prints as they came off the processing machine. During that time I saw a fair cross-section of 'real people' photographs. I've also seen a fair number of the common mistakes, such as the result of taking a photo of a TV screen with flash.

"One roll of 110 film stays with me though. It shows a series of shots of an uninteresting landscape with an out-of-focus ear on one side. Clearly, the photographer shot an entire roll of film holding the camera back to front, which was easy to do with some of those cameras. The entire roll must have been shot at the same time, the landscape did not change significantly through the roll. I'm still wondering what was so important to the photographer that he wanted to expend an entire roll of film.

"These days at least, you don't have to wait for the film to come back from the lab."

On Lens Reviews

2007-05-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

I appreciate Erwin Puts' comments in his recent article "On Lens Reviews," and I think he's on to something. His clarification of the various approaches to lens reviewing is right on, and better articulated by him here than I've seen from other writers elsewhere.

He's got me pegged, for one thing, when he says that my approach "takes the whole imaging and viewing chain as an integral process and reviews a lens for its impact on the presentation of the scene as fixed on a print and viewed by an observer." I couldn't have said it better myself, and it's very true—the proof for me is the print, and what you can't see in the print doesn't count for very much as far as I'm concerned.

In other words, I'm an "eyeballer," as Phil Davis used to call me (not very approvingly)—although I'll register my usual protest, which is to say that I think I'm a good eyeballer.

But the empirical, practical approach is in some ways not very descriptive. In fact, I don't even like to call my lens reviews "tests"—I prefer the word "trial," because all I'm doing is trying the lens and then describing my results to the reader. A "test" implies a scientific approach that is experimentally sound, measurable, and repeatable. Erwin Puts names that approach in honor of Geoffrey Crawley (Editor of the British Journal of Photography for a 21-year tenure), but it could just as accurately be called the Erwin Puts Approach.

"The Crawley-Puts Approach" evaluates the technical properties of the lens in isolation, without even muddying the waters with the contributions of the imaging substrate (film or sensor), much less all the other elements of the imaging chain. The Johnston Approach, as Erwin names it (I'm flattered, even if I'm not sure he means it as flattery!), has the advantage of being more practical, and the disadvantage of being more limited. For instance, I usually include in my lens reviews disclaimers as to what they will not shed any light on—starting with color transmission, since that's largely invisible to the black-and-white films I normally use.

The much more rigorous Crawley-Puts method of describing a lens is ultimately more accurate, as well as more readily applied to differing applications, but has the drawback that it might not be descriptive of what users will actually experience using the lens for their own work. Indeed, this is often reflected in Erwin's writings when he notes that high levels of technical skill are necessary to extract the very best out of any particular lens (and sometimes to detect the differences and distinctions he describes). This is a repeated refrain in his writings, and it's obviously something that concerns him.

Armed and dangerous
The key to writing a good subjective review—the kind I write—is to arm the reader with as much information about the terms and conditions of the review as possible. My recent controversial pair of posts about the Leica M8, for instance, were widely criticized. Some criticisms were simply errors or were based on errors (one commentator concluded that the vehicle in the first picture in the reviews, of a parked BMW SUV, must be my own car. He then used this premise to speculate about my feelings toward German technology. (I drive a Ford.) Another commenter said that I work for Apple, and another stated that I write for Outdoor Photographer magazine. Neither of those things are true either). But many people made criticisms that were very valid. Even certain friends complained that I hadn't done enough shooting with the M8, for instance. I ran into repeated references on other forums saying I had shot only "90 pictures" or some number close to that. Actually what I said was that I filled up most of a single 1GB SD card, which might be 200 or 300 shots when you consider the ones I deleted as I went along—careful reading without assumptions is still required. Regardless, the underlying criticism that I hadn't shot enough with the camera still holds.

But how did they know that? They knew because I told them, that's how. I'm always amused, after I write a subjective review, how many people raise objections using the very information that I deliberately provided for them in the text of the review.

That's how a subjective review works best, in my opinion. Readers should be well informed of the writer's prejudices, the extent of his trials, the conditions under which he worked, even his tastes. They can then take all that information into account when evaluating and applying—or, yes, dismissing—his conclusions.

Called for and needed
The Crawley-Puts Approach admits of no such "slop." There is little room for impressionism. When a technical measurement is made, it must be made exactly: it's not good enough to say "Well, I wasn't being very careful, so maybe the optical resolution of the aerial image two-thirds out from the center is 10 or 20 lp/mm better or worse than my figures show." No. That won't do. Exactitude and rigor are called for, expected, and needed.

In the end, with this approach, what the reader is left with is a description only of the lens and its potential performance, and there is no guarantee that he will see this potential realized in his own work. But the description he does get is complete, thorough, and exact—more so than a subjective trial could be.

There is room for both approaches in reviewing, of course.

I've said nothing about what Erwin calls "A Third Way," but I recommend that you read his comments carefully. What he describes there is, among other things, one of the fatal downfalls of most high-end hi-fi reviews.

A final point could be raised, which is that it is very rare for any single review to be 100% of one type or the other. I, and other subjective reviewers, sometimes employ technical measurements to discover or support a point of argument. And, even in a technical review, tastes and personal judgments will sometimes be found. It is perhaps understandable when a subjective reviewer is not as careful as he should be with technical measurements, but that's no excuse. And it might also be understandable when a technical reviewer is influenced by personal tastes or previous experiences yet casts these things as facts, but he should be vigilant against that error. We all try, I'm sure.

The timing of this article is fortuitous for me, too. I'm about to embark on a new review project, and these discussions make a good foundation for that review.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

OTA*: Colorful Cube

2007-05-26T10:38:00.001-05:00

At the risk of further enraging those readers who hate off-topic posts, here's a photo (does it count as on-topic for architectural photography?) of the fantastic new Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision building in Hilversum, by architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk. The brightly colored facade, which the Times says "draw[s] on everything from primitive temples to comic-book illustration and the decorative ephemera of Andy Warhol," are made of cast glass. The building is conceived as a cube that is half underground and half above.

Watch the building go up in photographs.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-Topic Alert

James Clerk Maxwell's Big Mistake

2007-05-25T12:54:00.000-05:00

by Ctein

Contrary to popular opinion, this was not the first true color photograph
ever made. It was experimental error.

There's a certain type of error in judgment that we humans are all subject to. When presented with information that contradicts our beliefs, we tend to be nitpicky and skeptical and aggressively compulsive about every detail. When handed information that confirms our beliefs, we're inclined to accept it without critical evaluation.

What does this have to do with photography? Well, James Clerk Maxwell is credited with having made the first true color photograph back in 1861. Most of us accept his results at face value, because they agree with how we now do color photography. There's one small problem with this. Maxwell's experiment was a failure; it had a major methodological blunder that rendered it meaningless. It didn't prove anything. Few of us caught that, and certainly Maxwell did not.

Here's the key problem, which should have bothered all of us the first time we read about this great experiment. In 1861, there were no panchromatic emulsions. The type of emulsion Maxwell used was sensitive only to blue light, with just the faintest hints of blue-green sensitivity. Nothing beyond that. No yellow, no red. While it's possible the Maxwell used some experimental emulsion that had red sensitivity, there's nothing about this in the detailed account of the experiments written by his assistant, Sutton (who did the actual labor). So, how in the world could they have successfully photographed a scene through red, yellow, green, and blue filters?

(And why yellow? Well, I think the likely answer to that is that Maxwell was also testing out the three-color versus four-color theories of human vision. Newton had proposed that there were four visual primaries: red, yellow, green, and blue. Later, others argued that there were three primaries: red, green, and blue. This was not a settled matter, so it is very probable that Maxwell saw this as an opportunity to test both hypotheses.*)

The unfortunate answer is that he didn't. The blue exposure was just fine—a matter of seconds. In order to make the green exposure, Sutton had to substantially dilute the copper chloride solution they used as a filter. Even then, the exposure ran to 12 minutes. A strong, deep-red filter of ferric thiocyanate resulted in an exposure of only eight minutes, though.

Maxwell should have caught this. Although he could not have known that his emulsions were 100% insensitive to red light (knowing that would take theory that wouldn't be devised for half a century) he would have known that the sensitivity to red light had to be very, very low.

So, why did the experiment work at all? Because ferric thiocyanate passes a considerable amount of ultraviolet light, and many red fabric dyes reflect in the near ultraviolet as well as in the red. By pure accident, they got a plausible-looking photograph. It was the right answer, but for the wrong reason; had they a chosen a different subject (say, a flower garden or a rainbow) it would have come out all wrong.

The greatest expert on light and electromagnetic radiation the world has ever known got tripped up by a simple experimental error because the results confirmed his expectations. Imagine how easy it is for us mere mortals to be caught in the same intellectual trap.

Posted by: CTEIN

*The answer, not established until the 1970s, is that both are correct! The human eye has three kinds of cells that respond to frequency bands primarily in the red, green, and blue. But the brain interprets the information from those cells as four distinct primary colors.

Feature Creep

2007-05-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

-
The Financial Page
by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,” costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them.

READ ON

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "This really hits a nerve with me. I'm not a technophobe. I know how to set a VCR. I worked as a software developer for 25 years, sometimes in low-level systems design.

"I have owned two cell phones and still have the second one (though I only use it on vacation) and I cannot for the life of me figure out why people buy new cell phones a couple of times per year. I have yet to meet anyone who knew what their phone's features were or what they were for.

I'm over 50 now and am sick and tired of reaching for my glasses when I am using a camera. I need them to read the menus, read the LCD's, stick the USB cable in, and have to wear them around my neck all the time. I hate this. With my Pentax MX, I needed only to turn two dials, the shutter speed and the aperture ring. Other than ISO, those are still the only two parameters that need adjustment when taking pics so why are modern cameras so finicky to use?

"No one, but no one else I know in my circle of friends and family has the first clue about what the buttons do on all their camcorders and digicams. I have never met anyone, other than other geeky photographers, that has ever read a camera manual. Not one.

"'Feature creep' is the opiate of the masses. It fools us into thinking that we are making choices. Since we don't use the features, having the choice is an illusion. It is a con game that takes places at the point of purchase. It's a come-on.

"We can't buy a large sensor small footprint digicam with a 24–70 mm (equiv) lens. Now that's a choice I'd like to be able to make.

"(I feel better now, thanks.)"

Featured (partial) Comment by MHMG: "...I find myself growing very 'new interface' weary. On a recent trip I stopped at a gas station/convenience store that had just installed an LCD touch screen panel at the food counter. Not realizing this apparent inventory control interface existed for my 'benefit,' I tried to order a hot dog from an employee at the grill behind the counter. The employee said, 'you have to enter your choice on the touch screen over there and then pay for it at that counter over there.' I looked at the computer screen and then said, 'Well, I guess I didn't need the hot dog that bad.' The employee curtly remarked, 'What's so hard about ordering on the screen?' I replied, "What's so hard about giving me the hot dog I asked for so that I can now go over there and pay for it?'

"I suspect that machine interface overload is going to get a lot worse before it gets better!"

(You can read MHMG's complete comment in the comments section.)

Eye Heart Camera

2007-05-24T22:39:00.000-05:00

What the Duck's new "I Love Photography" merchandise. The design: Simple. Clean. Quirky. Communicative. Kewl! We like.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Taxes: Codae

2007-05-24T22:05:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of codas to my "Taxes" post below (in which I tried to affect a sort of rueful tongue-in-cheek humor and evidently, for most readers, failed. Oh, well, I tried). Anyway, consider:

• Photography isn't that expensive. No matter how much you spend on it, there are any number of other hobbies / passions / obsessions / pasttimes which constitute much more efficient ways to pee away specie. You could own a boat, for instance, or collect cars like Jay Leno, or have a passion for racehorses, or be into really high-end audio. Photography can be expensive, sure, but there are lots worse things. Even if you collect photography, and do things like pay $2.1 million for the odd Cindy Sherman, you could always be buying paintings instead and tossing away ten times that. Comparatively, photography always comes out looking pretty good.

• Photography is reasonably wholesome, all things considered. I always qualify this by noting that there are indeed a few ways one can break the law with photography, and there must be a few ways that one could turn it toward immoral ends. But for the most part, it doesn't hurt anybody. Including you. Whenever one of my friends mentions that a spouse or S.O. is complaining about his or her counterpart's immersion into the hobby, I point out that it's better than crank 'n' liquor, poker 'n' prostitutes, yatta yatta, things of that nature—real vices. You could be pouring your wealth one quarter at a time down the throat of a one-armed bandit. That's a far sight worse than overspending on ink, methinks. Wouldn't you say that, on balance, photography keeps more of us good folks out of trouble more often than it gets us into trouble? That would be my guess.

I've always paid the various taxes and been happy. I spend a certain amount of my money on photography, sure. Have for years. But it's my thing. And that's a good thing.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Darkov's Answer

2007-05-24T16:08:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I got a comment from a reader called darkov who asked:

There was a music/cd review blog that you had referred to in some previous posts. Any chance of putting a link to it on your "Online Photographer" blog?

Right. Thanks for asking. It's called C60CD, a name with a long and storied history, and it's written mainly by my friends Bob and Kim, who continue to put up some really nice stuff there. They can both be pretty challenging, but I've learned immensely from both of them and my musical life is always made better when I read the site.

I've put up a leetle tiny permanent link so you can always find it—there in blue, over to the left, under the Amazon link. See it?

I need to go write a couple of new reviews myself. It's been a while.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Taxes

2007-05-24T12:30:00.000-05:00

Michael Reichman once used the phrase "the Photoshop tax" in a conversation with me about imaging software. That is, every so often Adobe upgrades PS, and you're suddenly behind, so you have to pay a hundred and a half to upgrade and get yourself back to zero. It's a regular if intermittent expense. You know it's going to come around again, like rainy season. The "Photoshop tax."

It got me to thinking. What else is a "tax"?

The "film tax" might be one. You can protest all you want about how great film is and how great your prints look, but like it or not, when you use film, every time you release the shutter you incur costs. Every time you click, it's like throwing a nickel in a can. Or a fist-wad of dollar bills, if you're shooting 4x5 color neg. The "film tax."

There's the "upgrade tax." I know of a few photographers who have been using the same view cameras since Cher had two names, and I talked to one blissed-out guy online once who'd been using one single screw-mount Leica since 1948. He'd never bought himself a second camera. He was still happy with it—this was in the '90s, as I recall—and felt no need to think about a replacement. For the rest of us, well, it's more than a little ironic that we spend so much time arguing about how long our cameras will last. Who wears out their cameras? Before digicams came along, not very darn many of us. No; we get wandering-eye and buy something new, just because, well, we want something new, darn it. My little bro' has a budget line for things he calls "non-recurring recurrables." You know. Like "the upgrade tax."

There's gotta be a "camera-bag tax." Who has just one camera bag, and who lets the fact that he already has ten stop him from buying one more? It's like we can't help ourselves. Like every untried camera bag we run across is the green grass on the far side of the fence. If I just had that camera bag....

So what else is a "tax"? What else do you just keep spending money on in this silly hobby, with no end in sight? Anybody got another one?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Chris: "There's the LBA tax, at least for me.

"Over on the Pentax forum at DPReview, LBA is the acronym for 'Lens Buying Addiction.' I seem to have acquired a fairly bad case of it.

"No matter how many lenses I have (in multiple formats) there's still another one on the horizon that I just gotta get. Places like eBay and KEH are not healthy for me...."

A Perfect Fit

2007-05-24T12:07:00.000-05:00

Lest anyone think the most important equipment debate is between a shirt-pocket compact cam and a sling-over-the-shoulder entry level DSLR, here's Carl Weese's new Honda Fit packed up for a two-day photography jaunt through Massachusetts and New York State. Carl tells me that the small brown bag on the far right, besides a laptop and two hard drives, contained a change of clothes and some toiletries. All the rest is photo equipment. Also, there's another case under the tripod that you can't see; it held extra 8x10 film holders and two big lenses for the 7x17" view camera.

Incidentally, Carl noted with some amazement that over the course of one 366-mile leg of the 874-mile trip, the Fit's mileage was 10% better than the EPA Highway MPG estimate, even though he ran the A/C part of the way! It outperformed its EPA estimate for the trip as a whole, too. Not too shabby for hauling all this gear.

It has to hold Carl, too. Although he's not wide, lucky sod, he's quite a bit taller than the average Joe.

Carl Weese, Ballfield, Keeseville, New York

And here's an example, if you can call it that, of why Carl goes out. The web image was scanned from a 7x17" contact platinum/palladium print made on Masa paper, a Japanese tissue with a rough surface that Carl says works surprisingly well for contact prints. The original is of course exquisitely detailed, and vivid and luminous despite its gentle contrast. The web image is only the merest approximation of the print.

Here's the 7x17 set up at the Transit Drive-in Theater, Lockport, New York, 5/22/07.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Photographers at Work

2007-05-24T00:29:00.000-05:00

Unidentified Photographer, Lewis Hine photographing children in a slum, ca. 1910

George Eastman House Collection: Gift of the Photo League,
New York: ex-collection Lewis Wickes Hine

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Tony Collins: Twenty years ago when I set up a theodolite on a tripod in town kids used to say 'Take my picture mister.'

Another more harrassed-looking photographer at work:

Major Low-light Digital Photography Breakthrough Inbound from Korea

2007-05-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

The new sensor will enable clearly luminated images from atmospheres as dark
as a movie theater. (Korea Electronic Technology Institute)

by Nirav Sanghani, DailyTECH

Researchers don't want you to worry about bright flashes in dimly-lit scenes anymore

Our eyes will possibly get some relief from the blinding flash of cameras in low-light scenarios. South Korea's Electronic Technology Institute announced the development of a new image sensor chip that allows digital cameras to capture vibrant images without a flash in dark spaces.

The digital camera equipped with the chip will be able to take high-resolution photos or video-recordings at 1 lux. The camera will be able to snap pictures in places such as theaters, underground traffic tunnels, or dark-lit bars and clubs. The chip promises clear pictures with light as bright as the lighting from a candle 1 meter away in a dark room and is said to be 2,000 times [that's 11 stops] more light sensitive than other sensor types....

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

A Splash of Photo History Comes to Light

2007-05-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

This century-old Edward Steichen autochrome, probably of Charlotte Spaulding,
has been discovered after decades in storage.

By Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

At first glance the two pictures seem to be gorgeous anachronisms, full-color blasts from the black-and-white world of 1908, the year Ford introduced the Model T and Theodore Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term.

But they are genuine products of their time, rare ones, among the few surviving masterpieces from the earliest days of color photography, made using a process developed by the Lumière brothers in France and imported to the United States by the photographer Edward Steichen a century ago this year. They were taken by Steichen, probably in Buffalo, and are thought to be portraits of Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student who became his luminous subject for the portraits, which resemble pointillist miniatures on glass.

Almost as intriguing as the pictures themselves, however, is the story of how they recently made their way from a house in Buffalo, where they apparently sat unseen for decades, to the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the world’s leading photography museums, where they will be exhibited for the first time this fall....

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

NOTE: There is also a good article about this at the Independent, called "Timeless exposure: 100-year-old colour photos discovered in attic." (I've misplaced the name of the reader who brought this one to my attention, but thanks to him. —MJ)

Illustrations: George Eastman House Collection

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "They look wonderful and appear to be in terrific condition. I am glad that they're not (yet) in a private collection.

"So, a point of perspective. If Henry Wilhelm is accurate, our Epson Ultrachrome K3 prints will look just-printed fresh when they're the same age as these photographs."

The Image of Woman and Woman-as-Image

2007-05-23T08:58:00.000-05:00

My Marilyn, from Color Vision and Art

An oldie but goodie, from 2006.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

OTA*: A Brilliant 96 Pages

2007-05-22T08:47:00.000-05:00

About 55% of this site's readers come from countries other than the U.S., and some of you ask me from time to time about U.S. politics, especially concerning Iraq. I do read a lot about the subject—far more, I'm sure, than the average citizen, although far less than the average policy expert. I find it a difficult topic. Mostly, one ends up reading polemics, or immersions into the minutiae of policy, or defenses and condemnations of the red-herring rationales put forward to bamboozle the hoi polloi. If you really want to know what's up with Iraq, in easy-to-digest, compact form, I recommend Part I of Kevin Phillips' book American Theocracy, "Oil and American Supremacy."

Phillips is an outstandingly talented and highly prolific author who writes long books and lots of 'em. But for words aplenty, this sprawling work goes well over the top—one could argue it's some 300 pages too long. His overall thesis is that a sort of "perfect storm" is brewing for America. The three conditions feeding this storm are oil economics, the rise of radical religion, and debt. American Theocracy is thus divided into three parts. Each part could really almost be a separate book, even though Part I—the shortest of the three—is only 96 pages long. Plus, only Part II ("Too Many Preachers") is really served by the book's overall title (most of the criticisms of the book have come from religious quarters). Part I and Part III ("Borrowed Prosperity") don't have much to do with theocracy, although I don't imagine the author minds the implication that we're overly worshipful of oil and money.

I found Parts II and III interesting, if a bit turgid, but not so compelling as Part I. "Oil and American Supremacy" is the first thing I've ever read that has actually made me feel sympathy for Bush and Cheney's misguided goals—and I'd rather kiss a lizard on the lips. I've written a letter to Mr. Phillips and his publisher suggesting that they put "Oil and American Supremacy" out as a separate little book. True, it's only 96 pages, but it's the most trenchant, direct, and clear-eyed explanation I know of that truly explains U.S. involvement in Iraq, in its global, historical, geopolitical, and economic dimensions. If it were shorter and titled more appropriately, more people would read it. That would be a good thing.

As it is, I really believe you can read Part I of this book as a stand-alone essay, ignoring the rest of the book if you're so inclined, and get an awful lot out of it. It might seem bad value to buy a nearly 400-page book just to read a quarter of it, but not in this case. It may be only 96 pages, but it's a brilliant 96 pages.

The book's cheap, too. Here's a link in case you want to buy this book from Amazon.

Back at the ranch, I've also recently found two new technical photography titles that I think are head and shoulders above the crowd—the first ones I've found that deserve to stand next to Bruce Fraser's Camera Raw. I'll be writing about both when I finish reading them.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-Topic Alert

Featured Comment by Matthew: "You've got a good photography blog, please don't ruin it with political comments. This guy is a far to the left nut—which is just as scary as far to the right nut.

"If your aim is to have a photography blog with only people that think like you politically then forget what I've said above and good luck. One more post like that and I'll simply end my RSS feed and stick with more mainstream photography blogs.

There's enough extremism in the world—no need to add more...

Mike Replies: Extremism? I recommend a book by an historian and that's extremism? Funny, and here I thought extremism was strapping nails and plastic explosive to your torso and detonating yourself in a crowded market, or exploding a truck bomb in front of a Federal building, obliterating a bunch of toddlers in the daycare center there. Silly me.

Kevin Phillips is not a "far to the left nut." He's a white guy who lives in Connecticut—politically more like an Eisenhower Republican than anything else. He has no Communist or Socialist sympathies that I can detect (that is, after all, what "far to the left" means). He's a distinguished historian and one of the nation's leading writers on current affairs. The section of the book I recommended is about geopolitics—oil politics—and it provides useful background about the history of energy (wind in Holland in the 1600s, coal in England in the 1700s, etc.), energy sources, energy policy, and the relationship between U.S. policy and oil and how it's evolving. It's a good read.

I've gotten a number of comments on this posting that are examples of what I call "The Get Out of My Living Room Gambit." As far as I know this originated with, or at least was popularized by, the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, a yellow journalist and agitator whose brief—whose mission—is to foment anger, resentment, and social strife...but who is certainly clever. The GOOMLR Gambit goes like this: whenever anyone says anything that is not what you want to hear, you can always complain about being within earshot.

Thus, if a writer in a magazine makes a political aside, you write a letter to the editor complaining that you did not "invite the writer into your living room" to have his political opinions thrust upon you. The standard threat is that you will no longer subscribe to the magazine, watch the television station, read that newspaper, or whatever, unless they repress any and all political comments of the sort you happen to dislike.

This would be a laughable ploy, except that it's also kind of, er, sinister. It amounts to saying that you have a right to your ignorance, and you will not take the responsibility upon yourself to simply ignore the writers or articles or shows or posts that you dislike, even if you're afraid to read them. Rather, you insist that everything even mildly unpleasant to you be suppressed, so that nobody can read them.

First of all, you really shouldn't be so afraid to listen to opinions different from your own. Believe it or not, it doesn't hurt to learn things. It doesn't sully your brain to know where other people are coming from. It can actually be broadening and informative to expose yourself to a wide range of viewpoints.

And, in any event, it was only a recommendation—as far as I know, there's no way I can actually compel you to go buy or read the actual book.

Unless, that is, you are some sort of Zombie. Do you have any decaying flesh on you anywhere? Have you been walking around stiffly with your arms held straight out in front of you, intoning, in a broken monotone, "MUST...READ...KEVIN...PHILLIPS..."? Do you find yourself doing whatever I say, with no free will or your own? Did you toss your digital point-and-shoot in the trash can the other day and go buy yourself an old mechanical 35mm camera on eBay?

No? If you answered "no" to all these questions (well, or all but the last), then you can rest easy: you are probably not a zombie. You can leave all those nasty book-thingies alone, and never learn a blessed thing about geopolitics or anything else if you don't want to. Ah, freedom.

On the blogosphere, the whole premise of The GOOMLR Gambit falls apart. There are hundreds of millions of web pages and sites. Millions of blogs. Hundreds and hundreds of photography blogs. Wherever you go, you choose to go. You pay nothing. In this post, I didn't ambush you. I announced in the first sentence that it was about politics, just out of politeness to people such as yourself, so you could skip it if you wished. It was not even the only post for the day, much less the only one you might be able to find to read. And yet, still, your threat is "one more post like that" and you're going to take me off your RSS feed?!?

I'm shakin' like a leaf. Not that! Anything but that! I feel my legs getting stiff, my eyes widening, my arms going straight out in front of me...MUST...STAY...ON...MATTHEW'S...FEED....

Or not. Matthew? 'Bye.

—Mike

Getty Claiming Copyright to National Archives Images and Selling Them

2007-05-22T07:48:00.000-05:00

By Bob Shell

It seems that Getty Images learned a few years ago that they could buy 4x5 negatives of images from the US National Archives for $5 each. They bought thousands. Now they are selling these same images through their stock agency and claiming copyright on them. The vast majority of the images in the National Archives were taken by government employees and are public domain.

As public domain images, these images belong to us, the U.S. public. Getty, or anyone else, has absolutely no right to claim copyright to these images and sell them.

We need to spread the word on this, and any of Getty's customers who have paid to license such images should demand an immediate and full refund.

Posted by: BOB SHELL

Featured Comment by Morven: "It's unfortunately very common for people to claim control over works that are actually in the public domain.

"Many of them base their 'claim' on the legal theory that lost in the well-known case of Bridgeman vs. Corel, in which it was reaffirmed that U.S. copyright law requires at least a minimal level of creativity.

"They assume that the act of scanning or photographing the public-domain original creates a derivative work which can itself be copyrighted, even though the original cannot. This is what Bridgeman vs. Corel explicitly denied, based on the Feist vs. Rural case (in which it was established that a telephone directory could not be copyrighted, for similar reasons). Because Bridgeman vs. Corel was never challenged in appeals court, they argue that its opinion is not binding and that the law might turn out different—however, it's been eight years and nobody in the industry has been foolish enough to risk finding out for sure that their claims are groundless.

"In many places outside the U.S., no creativity at all is required to establish new copyright; thus a simple scan or photocopy of a public domain work creates new copyright and this kind of scam is completely legal.

"In this case, even if Getty et al. were correct about U.S. copyright law, it would only apply to images copied from their copy of the work. This is, however, the way that many museums, art galleries etc. make their money—by restricting access to public domain works and establishing themselves as the gatekeeper to 'legal' copies.

"Because Bridgeman vs. Corel appears to be a good reading of U.S. law, museums probably can't enforce copyright claims on photos and scans of public domain works, though they can still sue the original licensee under contract law if they allow any copies of the public domain artwork to get 'free.'

"Outside the U.S., though, they can lock up public domain works forever."

Featured Comment by Carolyn E. Wright, Esq.: "Has Getty taken the image down? Nothing came up on the link or a search on the photo #.

"Generally, copyright protection is not available for 'any work of the United States Government.' (17 U.S.C. Section 105.) Any work that is 'prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as a part of that person's official duties' constitutes a 'work of the United States Government.' (17 U.S.C. Section 101.) Those works fall into the public domain.

"Sometimes, however, copyrighted works are created by non-government personnnel for the government, such as when the government commissions a piece of art. The artist later transfers the copyright to the government. The 'government works exception' then allows the federal government to hold the copyrights for those works transferred to it by assignment. Some have argued that the government is using this exception unfairly as a way to circumvent the copyright law. The government works exception has been used to prevent the copying or creation of derivative works from such varied items as a film series on early Supreme Court cases and the Sacagawea coin. Recently, The Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, Inc. made claims to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a bronze sculpture created by Glenna Goodacre of Sante Fe.

"The Government Works Exception would not apply to this case. However, since Getty bought the negatives, it can sell the reprints based on the hi-res scan and it does not have to give the negatives to others for them to make copies. Having the negatives does not impart a transfer of the copyright. But Getty cannot prevent others from copying the photo if they can make reproductions from other sources."

High P&S ISOs: B&W vs. Color

2007-05-21T07:34:00.000-05:00

Ted Matsumura, Fuji F30 shot at ISO 3200 (click on image for larger version)

Ted Matsumura posted an interesting thought in the comments, which is that he uses his Fuji F30 up to ISO 800 in color but finds that 1600 and 3200 are practical in B&W mode. His blog is here. I think Mitch Alland actually prefers higher ISOs with B&W P&S shooting because it gives a rougher, grainy aesthetic similar to that of 35mm high-speed films.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Random Excellence

2007-05-20T12:55:00.000-05:00

Josef Sudek's great portrait of Jaromir Funke, Prague, 1928

(scan from Exibart.com)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

On P/S High-ISO Noise

2007-05-20T09:47:00.001-05:00

In a stroke of serendipity given our recent conversations here, Simon Joinson at dpreview has posted a primer article on digital point-and-shoot noise at higher ISOs. (He calls 'em "compact cameras," probably a better term.) Conclusion? Basically that only the Fuji F10-F20-F30-F31fd series offer usable high ISOs in a compact camera, with good performance to ISO 800 and a usable (if barely) ISO 1600—and pretty much everything else is marketing hype and wishful thinking.

Although it's discontinued, the best buy in this series, the F20, is still available from many retailers. At only $142, it's almost $100 cheaper than the newest F31fd ("fd" stands for "face detection," which might be useful if you're unable to recognize faces for yourself. Forgive sarcasm). That seems very cheap for a walk-around pocket camera that will give you a real ISO 800.

Do read the whole article if you're thinking of getting a point-and-shoot / compact camera—it's sure to be the definitive word on the subject for the foreseeable future.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to David Bennett

Rate Your P/S!

2007-05-19T15:11:00.000-05:00

Yashica T4 Zoom, a long-gone film point-and-shoot
that many photographers found useful

Got 20 minutes to squander for zero real reason? Rate your point-and-shoot! Use the rating system in the "Building the Perfect Point-and-Shoot" post below and tell us how your p/s does.

For Feature #4, award 3 points for each property. For Feature #5, a prime lens deserves a full 10 points if you ask me.

How's yours do? Tell us.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Peter

READER RATINGS
(with the "handle" of the reader in brackets):

• Canon G3: 66 [Ernest Thiesen]
• Canon G7: 51 [amin]
• Canon S2 IS: 36 [Tommy]
• Canon A80: 40 [Alex]
• Canon A610: 45 [ctyankee]
• Canon A640: 60–70 [paul]
• Canon SD500: 52 [PleasureSean]
• Canon SD 700 IS / IXUS 800: 68 [mike]
-------------------------------------54 [Eddy]
• Canon SD 1000 / IXUS 70: 63 [david vatovec]
• Canon A710IS: 63 [Tim]
• Canon S70: 61 [Tim]
• Canon G5: 67 [Dan K.]
• Casio EX-Z850: 49 [bob, under protest]
• Fuji S5000: 36 [Albano Garcia]
• Fujifilm Finepix F30: 49 [erusan]
• Fuji Finepix E550: 64 [Robin P]
------------------------54 [Joshua]
• Minolta Dimage A1: 64 [Seungmin]
• Nikon CP8400: 65 [Dwig]
• Nikon P5000: 55 [Ming Thein]
• Nikon 35 Ti (film): 72 [Steve Thurow]
• Olympus c-5050: 78 [Dr Hiding Pup]
• Olympus 770SW: 47 [Matthew Robertson]
• Olympus 720SW: 62 [Brian Auer]
• Olympus c-5060: 47 [Rusty]
• Panasonic FX01: 48 [Bruce McL]
----------------------49 [Paul]
• Panasonic Lumix LX2 / Leica D-Lux 3: 48 [tom]
------------------------------------------------58 [Andrew Fildes]
• Panasonic TZ3: 67 [Ming Thein]
• Panasonic LC1 / Leica Digilux2: 51 [huzur & urmuz]
• Panasonic Lumix FX8: 66 [digiTED]
• Panasonic DMC-LX1: 65 [Yvonne]
----------------------------52 [ayh]
----------------------------48 [Dan]
• Pentax Optio S5i: 56 [John]
• Pentax 750z: 62 [kshapero]
• Pentax A10: 47 [Patrick Mallette]
• Pentax Optio 43WR: 45 [John Banister]
• Ricoh GX100: 54 ("Strictly graded") [jobo]
-------------------56 [Andrew Fildes]
• Ricoh GR-D: 61 [Ming Thein]
-----------------61 [Andrew Fildes]
• Sanyo W31SAII mobile phone with a 1.1 megapixel camera: 29 [JanneM]
• Sony DSC-W30: 53 [Seungmin]
• Sony DSC-P43: 44 [Dorin]
• Sony DSC-V1: 36 [cjobowlsby]
• Yashica T4 Super (film): 70 [Mark]

Unfair in the End

2007-05-19T14:08:00.001-05:00

Paul Butzi, over on Musings on Photography, recently had a couple of interesting postings about Droit de Suite (a French terms that translates as "Right of Continuation" or continuing rights). The first posting is from May 3rd, and the followup appeared on May 7th. As Paul explains,

The basic idea of Droit de Suite is that an artist should get a share of any increase in value that occurs after the sale of an artwork.

Sometimes, someone buys an artwork, and then later sells it for a higher price than they bought it. Without Droit de Suite, the profit of the sale goes to the person who bought the work and subsequently sold it. If an artist sells an artwork for, say, $500, and then the buyer eventually sells it for, say, $50,000, the buyer nets a profit of $49,500, and the artist’s share of this profit is...zero.

Proponents of Droit de Suite say that’s not fair. The artist did all the work, the buyer did nothing but hold the work for a while, and yet the artist gets nothing but the original $500 and the buyer gets $49,500. Not fair, not fair!

So what Droit de Suite does is this: whenever an artwork is sold, the original artist gets a cut of the sale price (for example, in France, between 1% and 3% of the sale price goes to the artist).

Paul's very scornful of this, taking a "narrow" or strict free-market capitalist perspective on it, as if an artwork were identical to any other sort of commodity. That doesn't work for me, entirely, for a variety of reasons; for instance, the artist may have been under duress or in distress when she originally sold the art, or the initial buyer may have been duplicitous or dishonest. But that's quibbling, really. The main problem with Paul's capitalistic critique is that the artwork increases in value not entirely because of what it is, but because of who the artist is, what her significance is, the publicity she engaged in, the awards she won, and everything else she accomplished and achieved in the meantime. In other words, Cindy Sherman herself has added to the value of her 1981 photograph since 1981, even though she hasn't had possession of it. Art isn't strictly a commodity, with just material commodity value and no other kind of existence. (Artists themselves "comment" on this fact all the time, for instance when Andy Warhol signed blank sheets of paper and sold them for $5,000 each.)

I would argue, however, that photographers can sidestep the entire issue altogether by investing in their own work. That is, Cindy Sherman may have sold "Untitled No. 92" for two thousand dollars in 1981 (I don't know the actual original price, so don't quote that), and now it's worth $2.1 million, but nothing stopped her from making an extra two or three copies and keeping them for herself. Had she done so, she could now presumably sell one of her own copies of the work and realize her own profits.

So every time you make a print, make a couple extra, and stow them away. If you end up famous, it'll be your retirement account.

Of course, nothing can really compensate artists for the value they add to their work by, um, dying. But hey, as the free marketeers are so fond of pointing out, life is never fair in the end.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Mike

Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "My thoughts in response to this in this new post on my blog."

Featured Comment by Tim Atherton: "...People are talking as if Droit de Suite is theoretical. It's now in place across the whole EU as far as I recall."

Featured Comment by Robert: Anyone interested in reading more about 'Droit de Suite' in practice should go and have a browse through the DESIGN AND ARTISTS COPYRIGHT SOCIETY website which can be found here—www.dacs.org.uk. If you look in their royalties report or the annual review on the 'about' page, you will find some interesting facts about how this works in practice, and how it has worked. For example, the minimum threshold was lowered from EURO 3000 to EURO 1000, and this has led to a 60% increase in claims, which would indicate that it is not just the massively succesful who might benefit form this.

"'Artist's Resale Right,' as it is known in UK, became law in Feb. 2006, following an EC directive. Sherman's entitlement for "Untitled No. 92" would have been capped at EURO 12,500, about $17,000 at today's rates. That is 0.008% of the auction price. It also only applies to 'Art Market Professionals' thus excluding Museums and private collectors—though it does apply to galleries or dealers or auction houses.

"You will also see that they do a lot of simple copyright work for artists too—over 60% of which benefited photographers in the last report."

Featured Comment by Tim Atherton: Good take on Droite de Suite here.

Building the Perfect Point-and-Shoot

2007-05-18T13:21:00.000-05:00

We've done several posts here recently on point-and-shoots, a subject which is, despite all the attention, not near and dear to my heart. We have learned, among other things, that some people like the little stinkers; that the best ones are made by a company (Ricoh) that doesn't sell its products in North America; and that, in any case, no one can agree on the definition of just what a point-and-shoot is.

Here, for the record, and in hard-to-read rainbow colors (sue me, I'm bored), is a description of Ten Features an ideal point-and-shoot would have, in no particular order.

Feature 1: True shirt-pocket size
Reason: Many serious photogs who use p/s cameras do so because they're portable and painless to pack.

Feature 2: No more than 8 megapixels—6 would be better
Reason: Where too-tiny sensors are concerned, more pixels mean lower image quality, past a certain point.

Feature 3: RAW capability
Reason: Using a RAW converter is the best way to extract more image quality out of any given sensor, and eliminates the worry and fuss of setting white balance while shooting.

Feature 4: Waterproof, shockproof, and freeze-proof
Reason: A take-anywhere camera should be able to be taken anywhere.

Feature 5: A zoom lens of no more than 3X, 28–85mm equivalent, ƒ/2.8 or faster on the short end.
Reason: Greater magnification zooms compromise on image quality, and are slower. Most photographers can do anything that needs doing with these focal lengths.

Feature 6: Reasonably noise-free to ISO 400.
Reason: I know, it's asking a lot of a small sensor. Still, Fuji manages.

Feature 7: An articulated LCD
Reason: Many tinycam users use the LCD as a viewfinder.

Feature 8: An optical viewfinder
Reason: Many tinycam users prefer not to use the LCD as a viewfinder.

Feature 9: Anti-Shake/Image Stabilization/Whatever Yawanna Callit
Reason: It's a very useful feature, especially in low light and with tiny cameras that are hard to hold. (I'm still impressed with this technology.)

Feature 10: Must be fast, responsive, and very quiet, with excellent shutter lag and shutter release feel.
Reason: Because this is a criterion that should be met by any camera that is meant to take pictures with.

I might point out, modestly, that I've also just devised the perfect point-and-shoot rating system. Any camera can be evaluated by simply awarding ten points for any of the above features it has. Zero is worst, 100 is best. I am a genius. Modest, too.

The 100-point camera described above will most likely never be made, because cameras of this type aren't made for photographers and never have been. Still, a number of existing cameras actually come pretty close on various fronts—there might even be some cameras out there that score a 50 or a 60—so there's no point in complaining.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by OK-1K: "If you ask a random teenager who's browsing through Best Buy for XBox 360 games what they require from a point and shoot camera, you essentially receive the instructions that millions of dollars of marketing acumen and sampling tell the camera companies every year:

1. It has to be small, futuristic, and shiny so that it will look cool when I non-chalantly show it off to friends.
2. It has to be able to zoom in really close, just in case a girl is looking super hot and I'm too far away to see anything with my own eyes.
3. It has to be able to have enough shutter lag for me to blame my lack of photo talent on the camera.
4. It must have a flash so that people will know I've taken their picture, because otherwise they don't know to stop posing until I tell them. And I hate talking.
5. It must be able to take pictures in the dark, because I'm mostly nocturnal and spend most of my time in basements or clubs.
6. The LCD display needs to be big so that I never have to print anything and can just show people the back of my camera for 95% of what I take. The rest I'll just upload lo-res to Photobucket for my MySpace page.
7. If my parents have to spend more than the cost of an iPod on it, I'll never hear the end of it when I inevitably lose it or drop it in a pool.
8. I need it to do HD video, too. Again, just in case that hot girl is around.
9. The fewer buttons the better. I only have one belly button and that's the way I roll, so that's how I want my camera to roll.
10. And, finally, could I just subscribe to your company for an annual fee and receive the latest model every 6 months, because these things are disposable, right?

"Anyhow, hats off to you Mike for keeping this POS topic rolling. I hope the powers that be read your blog."

A Cindy Sherman Sells For $2.1 Million

2007-05-18T12:54:00.000-05:00

Cindy Sherman, Untitled No. 92, 1981
$2,112,000
Christie’s New York, May 16, 2007

Christie's $384.6 Million Contemporary Sale

The evening sale of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s New York on May 16, 2007, was certainly dramatic, if higher and higher bids coming one after the other almost without end is your idea of drama. The sale totaled $384,654,400, a new record for a contemporary auction, with 74 of the 78 lots finding buyers, or 95 percent. Gee, looks like the bulls still rule the art market...

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I spent part of my Thursday dinner discussing the soaring prices of photography with museum curators and collectors. The prices are keeping quite a few photographers and works out of public collections, and this is a real problem for museums. Photography departments even at major art museums don't have the deep pockets that other departments sometimes have. So they must often rely on bequests and cultvating directed donations to get such works.

"To break the monotonous tone of envy let me present a slightly different perspective on the situation. Productively diversifying large investable sums is, and always has been, a challenge that's hard for most people to understand unless they're faced with the predicament. Investments in conventional and traditional instruments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds) is fine and relatively safe. But these instruments, over time, produce relatively modest returns and present varying degrees of risk. Art and antiques have, for quite a long time, been considered 'alternative investments.' Private bankers track these asset classes for their clients in much the same way that they track other assets, and they quite often represent their clients at auctions and private sales.

"Spending $2+ million for a photograph might seem outlandish and arrogant to many people, regardless of the photographer. But in fact it's simply someone's investment transaction, and one that's almost guaranteed to reap a much more robust return than stocks or mutual funds. Photography actually represents a real ground-floor bargain today when compared to other flat works. In fact, today it's considered a nice beginner's investment in the art world.

"So before you automatically denigrate those who participate in such sales you should realize that these are simply investments, and generally damn good ones. You should also realize that the general caricature of the type of people who buy such works is often far off the mark. In fact, increasingly the buyers are coming from Europe and China."

Featured Comment by Ctein: "Wow; I gotta disagree with almost every comment posted so far (very unusual; I'm usually in accord with you guys).

"First off, as an artist who doesn't sell for anywhere near the prices he would like to (or needs to, to make a living at it) I am thrilled when I see photographs go for high prices. I don't care who gets the money. Art has no, I repeat NO, intrinsic economic value. It's only worth what people pay for it. People won't pay much for my work. If someone collector decided to sell some early photo of mine at an auction and manage to get a million dollars for it , I would be jumping for joy.

"It's not about me getting a cut of the sale. That's not the way the art world works. And if Ms. Sherman doesn't understand that, she hasn't been paying attention. Frankly, I can't believe she doesn't; I think, Mike, you must have misremembered or misread something somewhere. Because every artist knows collectors buy work not only for enjoyment but also for investment, with the hope that the price for the work will go up and they will make money on the purchase. The way we benefit from work that gets resold for high prices is that we can then raise our own prices. I am sure that Ms. Sherman's agent is going to be kicking up the prices for her photos substantially as a result of this sale, and she WILL benefit directly from that. The best thing in the world is for an artist to become collectible.

"As for social inequity, there are lots and lots of ways that I hate what the rich are doing with their money. I hate the way they use it to bribe politicians to create even more ways to evade taxes on their stock options and dividends and tax shelters. I hate the way they drive up prices for all the rest of us; I live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and if I could wave a magic wand, I would cut all the house and housing prices by a factor of four. (The fact that I lucky enough to be home owner doesn't change that.) There are schoolteachers here, for God's sakes, who can't live within an hour of the school districts they teach in, because they can't even afford an apartment. Those are ways the rich hurt us with their wealth!

"But spending their money on inflated art prices? How does this harm me? How does it make the cost of housing, or groceries, or health care higher? I'd much, much rather they inflated a harmless market like art speculation than use their wealth to make the world an even more unlivable place for me.

"OK, rant off."

In Praise of Prokudin-Gorskii

2007-05-17T14:00:00.000-05:00

by Ctein

In my always-humble opinion, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was the first master of modern color photography. There are many web sites devoted to his work; these two are good places to start:

http://www.gridenko.com/pg/
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

He is an offshoot from the main track, largely as a result of having worked in Czarist Russia and then getting pretty well lost in the post-WWI reshuffling of Eurasia. But I consider him a major figure in photography; I'm a very big fan of his work.

I'm not talking about his technical achievements, although they were monumental. What makes him stand out is that he was a genuine artist, not just a craftsperson. Color in photography wasn't taken seriously for a very long time. It's not just all the early experimenters; you can see the "Oh, wow, it's got color" aesthetic (or unaesthetic) operating well into the middle of the 20th century in way, way too much of the body of photography. Even in the classic National Geographic dictum of many years ago: "stick someone in a bright red shirt in an otherwise-dull landscape to catch the reader's eye." That's not color as art, that's color simply for the sake of an exclamation point. Color was usually tacked onto a B&W aesthetic rather than being treated as an integral part of the aesthetic. Prokudin-Gorskii took the medium of color photography and ran way ahead of this time. He got beyond the gee-whiz factor of "Looky, mom, I'm recording color!" Instead, he did some seriously good art.

His work has surprisingly modern sensibilities. Prokudin-Gorskii understood the subtle interplay of luminosity and chroma that make up the totality of visual experience. He didn't see color and tone as disconnected elements but as part of an integrated whole. It reminds me a lot of the B&W WPA work of the late 1930s or even the post-WWII work of the '50s but with a more pastoral feel about it. Kind of Hudson River School meets Walker Evans.

Looking at his restored work, you'd never imagine he was working with such a difficult means of making photographs. You see the art; you don't notice the technique—one hallmark of really good work.

Posted by: CTEIN

The Publisher as Casino

2007-05-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

To answer some of the questions that have come in about the book project:

"Which do you want to do?"

I want to write a book that will sell. I already have unpublished, unpublishable manuscripts in my desk drawer (or hard drive). In this case—on this occasion—I'd like to write a book that people actually want to buy.

"When will it be done?"

Well, it won't be, as things stand this second, because it's not going to be a book. It's going to be a book proposal. Then if an agent can persuade a publisher to part with an advance, it will acquire a timetable. At that point, it will have an estimated time of completion. Until then it's not even a project, really.

The work of writing books is way too front-loaded for a guy in my situation. Which would be fine if there were a reasonable guarantee of a payoff eventually; law school is expensive too, with a lot of front-loaded effort, but the law school student who is putting in all that money and effort up front has a pretty reasonable prospect of a payoff down the road. You don't have that with a book, which is why it's more reasonable for a large corporation to undertake the risk.

So why demand that a corporation take on a risk that that I won't take on myself? It's like this. When a publishing company takes on the risk of a book project by funding it with an advance, it's functioning sort of like a casino. It places a great many bets, some of which pay off and some of which don't (about 70% of published books lose money), but it can usually manage its odds so that it comes out ahead overall. A casino doesn't really care if it loses or wins any one particular bet. A person making one single wager is not in that position, so the risk in the case of a single wager is a lot greater if the person placing the bet can't handle the downside (i.e., losing).

Bottom line is, either a publisher will have to be persuaded to help amortize the risk or the project won't go forward.

But at least now I have an answer for the publisher who asked, "Why not do a book on how to choose a digital camera? That sounds like it might sell." I have a little more ammunition now for saying, well, maybe, but probably not to people like my blog readers.

"Before you write another book, where's my copy of The Empirical Photographer?"

If you paid for but have never received a copy of The Empirical Photographer, please contact me by leaving a comment that starts "NOT FOR POSTING." But you must leave your email address in the comment or I won't have any way to get in touch with you. Please don't forget to include your email address.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

The Results

2007-05-16T06:59:00.000-05:00

Total number of responses as of about 10:30 this morning: 233

16 respondents named two titles, with no clear preference indicated.
2 people said they wouldn't buy any of them.
3 respondents named an alternative project but gave no choice from among those presented.

All other respondents' first choice only counted:

How to Choose a Digital Camera: 5 votes
Classic 35mm Photography: 21 votes
Camera Lenses: 42 votes
Game Theory for Photographers: 144 votes

Thus, the "Game Theory" idea got more than twice as many votes as the other three titles combined. You have spoken—and my mission is clear. Many thanks.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Help Me Decide What Book to Write

2007-05-14T16:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, another little mind game—and for me, market research. (I just read a fascinating article about publishing that points out several times, albeit obliquely, how little the publishing industry really knows about its customers.)

Let's say you like photography (a safe assumption, since you're here) and you rather like the writings of this fellow Mike Johnston (at least a reasonable possibility, for the same reason). So now let's say you're in your favorite bookstore, in the Photography section, looking for something appealing to read. There, you would encounter only one of the following books:

Proposal No. 1: Camera Lenses. A discursive, chatty, historical / scientific / anecdotal / enthusiast appreciation of the camera lens as an object of lore, fetishism, and usefulness. Includes everything from optical aberrations described in layman's terms to how to test camera lenses by looking at pictures to reviews or appreciations of individual lenses.

Proposal No. 2: Game Theory for Photographers. A book exclusively devoted to how average-to-good photographers can get better and "improve their game." A how-to book with nothing technical in it, but lots of commonsense discussions and many exercises that are concrete and practical rather than theoretical.

Proposal No. 3: Classic 35mm Photography. A book designed to do for 35mm, black-and-white film photography what Ansel Adams's New Photography Series did for large-format black-and-white photography in the early '80s, formalizing everything about the art from cameras, to shooting technique, to darkroom practice.

Proposal No. 4: How to Choose a Digital Camera. My idiosyncratic take on what matters about cameras and how to narrow down your options to what works best for you. To get a sense of what such a book would be like, how it might read, look no further than the point-and-shoot discussions of the past several days.

So my question is, if it were entirely up to you—that is, not based on your guess as to what would sell best to others, but purely based on a selfish appraisal of what you yourself would most want to buy—which of those four books written by me would you most like to find at your bookstore?

Thanks in advance for any answers....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Note: I will eventually post all the replies but I want to hold off for a while until I get a few responses so that peoples' responses are not colored by the consensus (if there is one) in the comments. So don't worry if your comment doesn't show up right away.

Le Grand Jackpot

2007-05-14T10:40:00.000-05:00

Amazon.com has purchased dpreview.com, according to BusinessWire this morning (our link is to TMCnet, since the BusinessWire page is a popup). According to the terms, the dpreview site (the name is short for "Digital Photography Review") will continue to operate as a stand-alone, and editorial content will be unchanged, although I would presume you could look for, er, more Amazon-specific vendor links. In other news, Phil Askey and Simon Joinson will soon be driving even nicer cars.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, who is currently in talks to sell The Online Photographer to Google. Unfortunately, Google is not at the present juncture talking back....

Doomed

2007-05-14T08:51:00.000-05:00

"Burden's most trenchantly significant work was 'Doomed,' performed in April, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight, and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went. Burden didn't move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. ('It was awful,' he recalled.) Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis O'Shea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden's reach. The artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a public action that imperilled himself. It wouldn't have made sense. 'Doomed' unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O'Shea's case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there until he died? 'Probably not,' he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenberg's famous intention 'to act in the gap between' art and life. There isn't any gap. Art is notional. There is always only life and death."

—Peter Schjeldahl, "Performance: Chris Burden
and the Limits of Art," from The New Yorker

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Recommended Point-and-Shoots

2007-05-13T16:03:00.000-05:00

Here are a few recommendable point-and-shoots and the reason for recommending them:

• Fuji F20. Tiny size, good image quality, and good low-light performance.
• Nikon S10. Unusual and handy form-factor.
• Canon A640. AA batteries, articulated LCD screen.
• Casio EX-S600. Simple controls, decent shutter lag, not too expensive.
• Olympus 770SW. "Shockproof, freezeproof, waterproof."
• Ricoh RDC-7. Very slim, doubles as voice recorder.
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2 (a.k.a. Leica D-Lux 3). Image stabilized, 16:9 ratio, good lens with true wide angle, fast at the wide end, shoots RAW.

Any others anybody wants to recommend?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Withering Fast

2007-05-12T20:02:00.000-05:00

A digital point-and-shoot picture by David A. Goldfarb

In response to the previous post, "Lazy Aussie" wrote:

"You are right—mostly, the only people able to get good photos out of [point-and-shoots] are the people least likely to want one. Yes, there are superb images out of pinholes, Holgas, point-and-shoots, etc., but these are usually from those who learnt their skills from other cameras. But maybe your complaint is that more people don't care that their images could be better?"

My complaint is that more people don't care that their cameras could be better.

I'm perfectly sympathetic to people who use digital point-and-shoots. I know nice work can be done with them. They do have advantages, of course (low cost, handy size), and there's nothing wrong with striving to work within the limitations of the breed.

Overall I'm increasingly disappointed about the direction that digital camera design appears to be taking. Paul Leidl mentioned something that's been a sore point with me for the last half year or so (actually I don't remember when I started getting cranky about this, but it's been a while now): has anybody noticed the demise of the entire "prosumer" or "bridge" class of cameras? As long as the cheapest DSLR was $3,000 and up, there was plenty of room between lowest-common-denominator point-and-shoots and DSLRs, and the manufacturers for a while had some very creative offerings in the middle there. For a while it looked like there was a sort of renaissance in camera design occurring. There was some real creativity going on. Not all the attempts were equally successful, but companies were "thinking differently" and taking fresh approaches and trying new things. I was very encouraged by it.

I also assumed it was going to continue. But the most creative, fresh-thinking company—Olympus—has gotten spanked time and time again for daring to be different. And of course as soon as the APS-C-sensor DSLRs fell to $2,000 and then to $1,500 and then to $1,000 and now to $500 or even less, the intense price pressure simply vaporized whole classes of cameras. Oh, I know there are still quite a few interesting and different cameras out there. And the consumer mania for those absurd 12X zoom lenses is keeping one class of "different" cameras from dying, at least so far. But what it's looking like more and more, to me at least, is that the market is heading straight toward exactly where it was just before digital came along: namely, divided between black-blob Wunderplastik SLRs on the one hand and crappy little cookie-cutter point-and-shoots on the other. (And the BBWP category is divided strictly in terms of better = bigger and smaller = cheaper, just like film BBWP used to be. Arrrgh.) Nothing but a straight copy of where film cameras were in, say, 1995. Digital's not there yet, but it's sure heading there fast.

Even Leica, which is in the near-unique position of being able to charge luxury prices for its products, just copied its own most popular film camera. No newthink at all.

Hell in a handbasket. It would be a real shame if, after just a ten- or twelve-year renaissance of creativity, variety, and fresh thinking, we were to be consigned once again to a dull wasteland of sameness, conservatism, and unoriginality.

People react with great umbrage when I decry excessive choice, because in their view choice = freedom, but the truth is that, at the low end of the market, product proliferation isn't motivated primarily by the desire to give consumers more choices. It's done for that reason, yes, but also for other reasons, which I won't go into here. And the truth is, product proliferation amongst digital point-and-shoots is largely false choice. There may be 150 digital point-and-shoots on the market—I don't know what the real number is—but from the consumer's perspective you could probably boil that down to eight or ten cameras without effectively compromising consumer choice.

And yet look at all the choices we don't have. The Nikon 950-style bodies, largely gone (partially resurrected recently in the S10, I admit). The Sony F-7XX line made it all the way to the large-sensor R-1, but is now gone. The Olympus c-XXXX series, long-running, but basically gone. The Olympus E-10/E-20 series hangs on in the form of the inexplicably orphaned E-1, one of the most successful overall camera designs I know of, film or digital—but it's not going anywhere from here. There won't be an Epson R-D2. The Canon G7 is a definite step down from the more capable G6. (Why? Because you're supposed to buy a Digital Rebel if you want the features the G6 had that the G7 doesn't.) Articulated LCDs are getting scarcer. Of the brands tracked by dpreview, Agfa, Contax, HP, JVC, Konica-Minolta, Kyocera, Sanyo and Toshiba have entirely or effectively fled the field, and Ricoh doesn't sell its cameras, including the well-regarded GR Digital, in North America. It's been sixteen months since I published "'DMD': The Digital Camera I'd Like to Own" on The Luminous Landscape, and the first reasonable approximation of a camera like the one I described, the Sigma DP-1, is slowly making its way to release only now.

We'll see how that does. Frankly, I think the "window of opportunity" for a DMD has come and gone. There's probably no longer a place for a fast, responsive, large-sensor miniature camera in the price hierarchy. (There was probably never a place for a fixed-prime-lens camera, but let's leave that topic alone for now.)

The cameras today are better now in some ways, naturally, because of engineering progress that's been made in the meantime, and the DSLRs are certainly cheaper, but in terms of inventive designs we have less choice now than we had four years ago. Moreover, the welcome spectacle of camera designers rethinking whole categories and types of cameras and styles of shooting, and the great promise it held for the future, seems to be withering fast. I hate to say it. I hate to see it.

I don't deny that there's a place for a digital point-and-shoot even in a seasoned photographer's bag of tricks. They're useful little buggers. (I've got a Fuji F30, although I can't seem to remember how to use it in between the times I try.) But they're not the only kind of non-DSLR that's useful. What I'm afraid of is that point-and-shoots are soon going to be the sole option south of entry-level DSLRs, because Joe Sixpack and Jill Boxed White Wine won't want, need, or care about anything else.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Ken Cobb: "I think the innovation is now coming from the smaller DSLR models, like the D40 and the E-400, where they're trying to pack DSLR features in ever smaller bodies. Which is fine by me, since while I loved my C7070 and made many very nice photos with it, it was frankly very sluggish (RAW mode was unusably slow), hard to use, and noisy above ISO 200.

"Where I would like to see more innovation is in smaller lenses for these smaller DSLRs. In other words, get back to the bridge camera size, but come at it from the DSLR end rather than the P&S end."

How To Choose a Digital Point-and-Shoot

2007-05-12T09:57:00.000-05:00

Mulling over the topics of the past several days, I thought I would revisit for the digital era my thoughtful, carefully considered advice about buying a point-and-shoot. A "point-and-shoot," a.k.a. "Ph.D. [push here, dummy] camera," is a miniaturized camera with a flash and a zoom lens built in, small enough to fit in a purse or pocket. Choices of digital ones have proliferated in recent years to the point that buying one has become a task that looks almost insurmountable at the outset. But you're in luck! You can take advantage of my thorough familiarity with the market, my years of experience as a photographer, and my subtle understanding of photographic technique and camera technology.

I won't keep you in suspense. Here's the upshot: they're all shit. And I don't mean "shit" as a pseudo-hip way of registering a connoisseur's disapproval of the demotic or an enthusiast's disdain for the democratic. I mean that despite their cunning little shiny bodies and technologically marvelous innards, as cameras they're little stinking turdlets of fresh, steaming excrement. Yageddit? Poo. Stool. Just north of camera phones. And when I say they're all shit, I don't mean most of them are shit. Eighty percent of them are horrible, outrageous, awful, a swindle on the public and a fraud perpetrated on their purchasers. And the other twenty percent are really bad. Bah-dum-pah.

These disreputable little excuses for cameras can kill the ardor of any budding enthusiast or extinguish the desire to learn in any noob or neophyte. They exist to prevent accomplishment, stymie satisfaction, and permanently obfuscate the acquisition of relevant knowledge. You can hardly be a photographer with a point-and-shoot (the occasional exception proves the rule), and you cannot learn photography with a point-and-shoot, and if a point-and-shoot is your only experience of photographing, you will most probably neither want to learn more about photography nor be a photographer anyway.

Point-and-shoots came about as a category in the 1980s because consumers wanted to buy cameras like any other small appliance, such as, say, hair dryers or electric toothbrushes. They were meant to be so small that they could be carried effortlessly, and so simple that even people missing a section of prefrontal cortex the size of a scoop of ice cream could use them. Moreover, they were meant to function entirely behind a veil of ignorable-ness, meaning that they would not communicate to the user what they were doing or how they were doing it, and could not be induced to do anything differently in any case. Nowadays, they have completely lost that virtue of simplicity, while at the same time retaining all of their formidable and varied drawbacks and acquiring nothing in the way of compensating virtues. But they are even smaller, so that if you'd like to carry a camera that's frustrating to use and often doesn't take good pictures, at least you don't notice the weight.

Accordingly, the best advice I can offer with regard to choosing a digital point-and-shoot is: don't waste your time. I am not speaking colloquially—I don't mean you should forego the activity altogether. No. I'm saying if you spend long hours reading reviews, comparing features, gathering opinions, and agonizing over slight advantages and disadvantages, weighing pros and cons, you will be losing precious minutes and hours of your time on Earth that you will never get back. It doesn't matter if you have three choices, or thirty, or three hundred: if every option is crap, then the option you choose is going to be crap, and that's that. Therefore, the best course of action is to not worry about it. No matter which point-and-shoot you choose, it's still going to be a point-and-shoot. So go to any big-box store where they have rows and rows of point-and-shoots on display, spend five minutes (ten or fifteen if you're a gentleman or lady of leisure), and pick one because you like its look, color, size, or feel. Take the advice of the teenager with the colored logo-embroidered shirt on if that reassures you, go by name recognition, or pick one blindfolded. Regardless, at fifteen minutes you're comfortably into the region of diminishing returns. Effort beyond that is wasted. Pick one. Go home.

Once you get your new camera home, then spend some time. Spend an hour or two carefully and thoroughly reading the instruction manual, all the way through. Try everything. Concentrate on really learning how the camera operates. Work out how to hold your new camera horizontally and vertically, which settings you prefer, which settings are in effect on turn-on, and how you personally are going to use the camera. Go over it enough times so that you feel you've got it mastered. This effort is far, far more predictive of eventual satisfaction with your purchase than is the make and model of the particular camera you have purchased. Good photographers can actually learn to use point-and-shoots reasonably effectively, and you can, too. But only if you try.

Finally, you're going to be frustrated. Why? Because digital point-and-shoots are lousy cameras. The lesson here is simple, too: deal with it. Don't worry about the fact that your camera is often fiddley to use, only semi-capable in some circumstances and near-incompetent in others, and that it completely defeats your intentions from time to time. If you allow this to trouble you, again, you will be wasting worry on the inevitable. Better to chalk it up to death, taxes, and digicams. Don't think for two seconds that because your camera is lousy, it means you should have bought a different lousy camera—because any other point-and-shoot would frustrate you too. Don't think that if you had just gotten a Brand Y instead of a Brand Z your pictures would look better. They probably wouldn't. And even if they would look just a little better in some ways and in some situations, they'd look just a little worse in others.

Mind you, I'm not trying to talk you out of buying a digital point-and-shoot. I'm just advising you how to get the most satisfaction and the least frustration out of that purchase. To summarize:

• Don't agonize over the choice. Pick one and stop worrying.
• Take the time you would have spent obsessively shopping and spend it mastering the camera you did buy.
• When (not if) you get frustrated while photographing with one of the little beasties, don't let it get you down. They're all imperfect. Just shrug and say "oh well" and move on.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by JanneM: "I had a couple of P&S digital cameras for a couple of years, realized their limitations, and picked up a Canon 350D. After a year and a half, I realized that camera (and the system), while fine, wasn't really perfect for me and so I sold it to a friend to buy a Pentax K10D. The sale went pretty quickly, though, and the K10D got delayed, so I found myself without a camera for about a month and a half.

"Well, except for the 1.1 megapixel camera in my phone. Which I proceeded to use. Now, that kind of camera makes even Mike's lousy P&S look like large-format view cameras by comparison; I had no idea it was possible to actually have so low-contrast, smeary image quality on a camera. As a comparison, my first P&S had the same resolution, but because it was a dedicated camera (and because the price was hefty at the time) the actual image quality was far better.

"But surprisingly, I had a great time with my phonecam. It was amazingly frustrating at first, but once I started to learn its limitations and think within them, I found I could get some half-decent images out of it. Not many, true, and even my best attempts still took heroic amounts of postprocessing to get anywhere, but still, it wasn't always hopeless.

"And it reminded me that for a hobby, the amount of fun is not necessarily connected to the quality of your tools (look at Lomo users, where the relationship is if anything inverse). My 'keeper' average may be in the single percentages, but I had at least as much fun trying to think my way around the severe limitations of the phone cam as I have using my DSLR with far less effort."

Featured Comment by Stephen: "Mike, I understand your points on philosophical grounds, but disagree on empricial grounds. My late-lamented little Canon Powershot S45 took wonderful images when used with skill and when shot in RAW mode. Maybe because I spent 23 years learning the craft of photoggraphy shooting Olympus OM-1's and manual focus OM lenses before I bought my first digital camera (as late as 2002), but I got wonderful images from the little S45...images that I have printed large format on my Epson 2200 that were beautiful prints.

"Unfortunately, my little Canon died this year, probably because it was in my CamelBak when I took one too many headers over the bars mountain biking at Mammoth. Alas, it now rests in peace. But, the key point is that it was with me all those glorious rides at Mammoth, which an SLR or larger camera would not have been. It's pretty tough to get images ripping down singletrack with a DSLR, but you can with a P&S. I ride motorcycles too, and a P&S is just the ticket to always have a camera in the tankbag ready for a photography

"Here's a snapshot I took last year while out on a bicycle ride with friends...I whipped out the S45 and snagged this while waiting for my friends to catch up.

"My biggest gripe lately is that the camera mfrs have taken RAW out of almost all of the P&S cameras, unless you want to drop $600 for a Leica D-LUX3. That has really irritated me.

"Like you, I really wish a camera mfr. would get real and make a compact camera with a proper optical viewfinder and a large CMOS sensor mated to a really good lens, like the one on my Contax T3."

'Sustainable Jewelry'

2007-05-12T09:36:00.000-05:00

Amanda Vandermeer and Paul O'Grady have collaborated on a photographic project called "Sustainable Jewelry"—"marrying nature photography with fashion," says Brendan Seaton—and Brendan has posted some of the pictures on his blog.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

We Have a Discrepancy

2007-05-11T14:33:00.000-05:00

My first digicam, purchased for $700+ and now worth nothing, was an Olympus C-3040z. Its shutter lag from a standing start—autofocusing machinations included—was about four seconds. Okay, I exaggerate. It wasn't four seconds. I might have told you this story before: once I was downtown sitting in a pub by the Milwaukee River, and I took a full-press shot of a boat going by. It wasn't some speedboat, either. It was one of those low-wake river-tour boats. I pressed the shutter when the boat was in the middle of the viewfinder. This is what the shutter lag felt like:

[Shutter press]

Camera: Whoa, what? You want me to take a picture? Sure, sure, just let me do a coupla things first...gotta focus...measure the ol' exposure...'kay...almost got it...hang on...workin' on it...ready! Here we go!

[*click*]

I got a shot that was half boat ass and half empty river.

But that wasn't the way I used the camera. The shutter lag when I prefocused with a half-press of the shutter button was pretty good—I have a poor memory for numbers, but I want to say a tenth of a second, maybe? 100 ms? Does that sound right? I can't remember how long I actually used that camera—eighteen months, maybe—but I always prefocused. It was just the way I used the camera. After a month or two it got to be habit. So shutter lag didn't bother me.

A reader named Yishon pointed out that Cameras.co.uk's shutter lag figures are nowhere close to Imaging-Resource's figures, in some cases at least. So who's right? I have no clue, although my prejudice would favor I-R. But maybe it's not critical. As with many things that appear to be a straight case of compare-the-numbers, sometimes it's best to try before you buy and go with your gut. There are two ways to get a camera to do what you want it to: follow it or fool it. Maybe a camera that scored a good number doesn't feel responsive to you, or maybe you can take a camera with a bad number and make it do what you want it to. Anyone who's never used workarounds in this business probably hasn't done much work.

Even the EOS RT, which had the shortest shutter lag I've ever heard of, 8 milliseconds, had a special mode you could switch it to that would change the shutter lag to 60 ms. Why? Because Canon's top pro camera at the time had a 60 ms shutter lag. The best pros had learned to anticipate the action by 60 ms, and Canon didn't want the faster RT to throw their top guys' timing off.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Hall of Shutter Lag Shame

2007-05-11T09:38:00.000-05:00

Eolake has found a page on Cameras.co.uk, a digicam review site, that helpfully lists shutter lag times for a variety of digicams. As I hope I don't have to remind most readers here, shutter lag, a camera feature that is "hidden" from most nonphotographer consumers, is the measure of time between the button push and the actuation of the exposure. It's a basic aspect of camera responsiveness.

The Cameras.com.uk page mainly points up how really awful most digital p/s shutter lag times really are. I'd consider any shutter lag time north of a quarter of a second to be unacceptable for any type of general-use camera, no matter how basic or inexpensive. To put you in context, a "standard" pro film SLR has a shutter lag of about .06 sec., an amateur film SLR about .125 or .150, a mechanical Leica .018, and a Canon EOS RT with the metering plate pre-fired, about .008! Autofocusing times have complicated this measurement somewhat, but Imaging-Resource pegs a pre-focused Canon XTi DSLR at .105 sec., and a pre-focused Nikon D200 at .057.

The Nikon Coolpix L3 has the dubious distinction of having the worst shutter lag of any camera listed by Cameras.co.uk. Between pressing the shutter release and the time the camera actually fires, the poor clueless buyers of this wretched excuse for a camera have plenty of time for a sip of coffee and a little idle conversation.

More than a half-second of shutter lag is really atrocious and makes photographing even slow-moving action a hit-and-miss affair, but the hall of shame awards go to the following woeful cameras: the Fuji Finepix A500, 1.6 sec.; Nikon Coolpix L3, worst of all at 1.8 sec.; Nikon Coolpix P3 and P4, 1.62 and 1.65 secs. respectively; Olympus FE-170, 1.62, and FE-270, 1.73; Pentax Optio S7, 1.61, and the Sony S500 at 1.08 sec. Educated consumers would drive these pathetic products right out of the market, so do your bit and continue to advise your friends and relatives about this too-often-overlooked aspect of camera performance.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to Eolake Stobblehouse

Featured Comment by Hoainam: Coincidentally, the New York Times recently had an article about shutter lag. Hopefully raising awareness about the issue will make consumers demand less shutter lag and manufacturers will respond accordingly. (Sheesh, why does it sound like I'm trying to save baby seals or something?)

Pentax Retrenches

2007-05-11T06:56:00.000-05:00

The news is filtering through from Japan that Pentax is scrambling to resist the takeover bid by Hoya. Imaging-Resource is reporting that Pentax will sell its valuable headquarters and research facility properties to raise cash and concentrate its business on the most profitable areas, including DSLRs. For one thing, this will probably spell the end of the company's film medium format camera lines. Still uncertain is the fate of the previously announced medium format digital camera.

On the other hand, the company is profitable and apparently no layoffs are planned, which bodes well for employee morale.

An official announcement from Pentax is expected today.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Last Word on the Ikomat

2007-05-09T06:43:00.000-05:00

(From Stephen Crowley of the New York Times)

Mike,

Last word on the Ikomat. I own two; one made around 1930 that has limitations (no flash sync, separate viewer for composing and focusing), and the 1952 model I mentioned earlier. Great cameras that you can fit into your back pocket. I've been shooting video for a New York Times project, American Album, since last August. I've used the Ikomat for the print edition and later began incorporating some of the snaps into the video. One of the videos was shot entirely with the Ikomat. So, it's the best of all worlds. (I'm opposed to "frame grabbing.") We're lucky to have a boss, Michele McNally, who supports any method if it makes for more effective story telling. Angel Franco is using film for his weekly feature with Dan Barry. Fred Conrad, who I think is doing his best work these days, uses everything from early Speed Graphics to tintypes. I'm glad you pointed the way to his "Harley's Heros" story. David Burnett's Katrina essay in National Geographic, shot on 4x5, was simply amazing.

Magazine editors seem to be rediscovering some of the forgotten schools of photography.

Wonderful site you have Mike.

Cheers, Stephen

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, many thanks to Stephen. Photo: Ritz Camera

Quote o' the Day

2007-05-09T06:33:00.000-05:00

"In college, I remember telling one of my teachers, 'I have an idea for a great film. I just need to get access.' The teacher said, 'That's all you ever need. It's always just about access.' I took that to heart."

—Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield
in an interview in Focus magazine issue 11, February 2007

Excremental Value

2007-05-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

By John Miller, Tate Etc.

"If you stuck a piece of shit on the wall, it would be all the same to them as long as someone told them the shit was worth money. That's the nouveau-riche approach."

—Andrea Fraser, performance script for May I Help You? (1991)

Fraser's statement issues from the mouth of a supposed patrician, a woman who might serve on a museum's board of directors. Hers is a provocation meant to distinguish between old money and new, between those with a vast store of cultural capital and those in the business of acquiring as much as they can in the shortest time possible. For the patrician, the acquisitive efficiency of the nouveau riche is odious because the very prospect of ready exchangeability jeopardises long-standing traditions of cultural inheritance. This efficiency, as such, produces a relative indifference to deeply ingrained aesthetic experience. Curiously, her rhetorical substitution of shit for art recapitulates the logic of Piero Manzoni's legendary work Merda d'artista (1961), a provocation of an entirely different order.

Piero Manzoni, Italian, 1933–1963: Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit), 1961

Merda d'artista is an edition of 90 signed and numbered works that Manzoni said he made from his own excrement. Each is a 30-gram can of shit, measuring 4.8x6.5cm, "freshly preserved, produced and tinned," as stated on the label. This information appears in Italian, French, German and English, against a background pattern produced by repeating the artist's name in block letters. Because Manzoni sold each can by weight at gold's daily market price, the shit literally became worth its weight in gold. In retrospect, this has proved to be a bargain. At $35.20 (£18.07) per ounce—the price at which the London Gold Pool (an international consortium of central banks) wanted to fix the precious metal—a tin originally would have cost about $37. That was 1961. Thirty years later, Sotheby's auctioned one for $67,000. Then, the price of gold had climbed to $374 per ounce. If Manzoni's initial pricing scheme still held, it should have cost only $395.77. In other words, in 1991 Merda d'artista had outperformed gold in price by more than 70 times....

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Featured Comment by David Bennett: Wonderful—that's the kind of thing that makes this site worth coming back to—this educational shit is great.

Jimmy's Assignment

2007-05-07T07:52:00.000-05:00

Feeling like a hotshot this morning? See how good you really are.

(This is silly, but fun. Hey, it's Monday. If you're looking for more substantial fare, check the new links under "Film Ain't Dead, Part LXXXVII," below.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to David Emerick

Film Ain't Dead, Part LXXXVII

2007-05-06T16:27:00.000-05:00

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times: Kunal Sah’s parents had been seeking political asylum in the United States, but last year they were sent back to India.

Here's some work by one editorial photographer who's still using film. That's not a Hasselblad; I wonder what it is? Anybody know Stephen Crowley?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Richard Sintchak

Featured Comment: by Stephen Crowley: Yes, journalists shooting film are in the minority but I keep at it best I can. I'm using a 1952 Ikomat. Wonderful camera. Conrad continues to do amazing work on film.

Cheers, Stephen Crowley

Mike's Comment: Very cool. By the way, by "Conrad," I assume Stephen means Fred R. Conrad.

Street Sense

2007-05-06T00:43:00.000-05:00

Street Sense, Calvin Borel up, comes from 19th place to overtake leader Hard Spun in the stretch at the Kentucky Derby. Photo by Jeff Haynes/Agence France-Presse

The best two minutes in American sports takes place once a year on the first Saturday in May. This year's race was a dandy. Street Sense is aptly named if it refers to moving through traffic; he should have been called Moses, if that overhead shot of the sea of horses parting to allow him to pass is any indication. And then to have those afterburners to turn on to actually take advantage of the gaps. It was like magic how he moved through the field—and what speed at the end! Hard to imagine, but the race Street Sense ran was in some ways just as impressive as Barbaro's lovely win last year. Made a fan of me. Wow. What a race. I can't wait for the Preakness.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Sci Fi Tech Gets It Right

2007-05-05T11:23:00.000-05:00

As Marv Albert used to say, YESSSSS!! I was delighted to see this article by S. E. Kramer at Sci Fi Tech. It addresses a longtime pet peeve of mine—no, worse than a pet peeve, a veritable sore spot—and it's one of the few articles I've read that addresses the issue directly. Briefly, the idea is that manufacturers of small personal electronic devices have adopted the strategy of flooding their categories with multiple models, which is a supermarket strategy, meant to crowd competitors off of limited shelf space, when what they should be doing is focusing brand awareness by limiting choice.

I've written about this before, though not specifically where cameras are concerned. But S. E. Kramer's article comes along at an appropriate point for me. Only a few weekends ago, I helped my non-photographer cousin Linda buy a digital camera. We went to a local store that had banks of long rows of nearly identical digicams, which naturally seems totally off-putting to any rational consumer—the job of making a choice prior to purchase is almost as bad as the job of learning all the proliferating and confusing features after purchase. My function was to narrow Linda's choices down to three, at which point she lasered in on her favorite immediately. My further function was to reassure her that she had chosen a good one. Sale. Elapsed time: no more than 15 minutes. Happy retailer, happy customer.

Read at least the last two headers in the Sci-Fi Tech article—from "Phones Are Just the Beginning" on. This is a really important idea that some big name in the camera industry is someday going to find the cojones to try. Choice is good; too much choice is bad.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Eolake

ADDENDUM: For more on this, see Barry Schwarz, "The Tyranny of Choice," Scientific American Mind, December 2004. (Thanks to Seungmin).

ADDENDUM: Not that it really matters, but Linda bought this.

The M8: Coda

2007-05-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

A final wrap-up regarding my comments on the Leica M8.

It, um, drew a lot of responses, from all over the internet. Overall, responses seemed to be about evenly divided between people who thought my reports were reasonable and fair, and people who had complaints. (The former included some M8 owners, and the latter included some people who obviously didn't even read the articles, but never mind about that.) The complaints, in turn, were divided between those who thought I was overly critical and/or needlessly provocative, and those who felt I was not critical enough.

For the most part, the complaints can be explained by the fact that it was only a brief user report based on brief experience, not a full review. Many years ago it was my personal policy that I would use a camera exclusively for a minimum of three months—for "real" work, not just tests and trials—before I'd write a review of it. That was a good policy, but it's not always practical.

Complaints part A: Cons were too con
1. Shutter lag. Writing a brief review based on a week's experience is problematic, though, that I can't deny. One of the stickiest problems arose because of one friend who felt that something I'd said wasn't factually accurate. He thinks that the shutter lag of the M8 is actually very good, when I reported it as being not very good. He's right that this is a measurable property (shutter lag is defined as the time between the press of the shutter release and the beginning of the exposure) and shouldn't be misrepresented. Others who've tried the camera—even including some M8 owners—didn't disagree with my conclusion that shutter lag was only so-so, however. But it's quite possible that I was fooled by the poorish shutter feel and/or by the various noises happening after the shutter press; perhaps image capture happens earlier in that sequence of noises that it seems to.

If I'd been able to look into this, I would have. My problem is that by the time I heard this from him, the camera was long gone. It's not a happy state of affairs to realize a conclusion you've put into "print" might be wrong, but maybe this one was. On the other hand, I reported my impression accurately, as far as it went, and I think I have to leave it at that for now.

2. Comparisons to the XTi. Another common objection to my reports was that people felt it was needlessly provocative to compare the M8 to the Canon XTi. While I can see their point, I don't agree at all. If you look at it the other way around, you can imagine that Canon might be offended if anyone said that a tiny little company building only its second digital product (rebadgings aside) could better the expertise of the world's leader in the category.

If it were possible to look at the two cameras totally objectively as tools, putting aside their relative positions in their makers' lines and their relative status, the contrast/compare on the XTi vs. M8 could be fascinating. On the one hand you have the biggest, richest camera company in the world, that makes its own sensors, and enjoys the best economies of scale of any DSLR manufacturer, creating its most affordable (and hence most important!) DSLR, the #1 selling DSLR in the world. The engineering, materials science, and manufacturing expertise that goes into such a camera is staggering. On the other hand you have an impecunious, struggling old-World manufacturer of hand-built mechanical cameras, one that has essentially no firsthand expertise in digital sensors and actually fairly little in electronics, making a low-volume, partly hand-built, one-off, large-sensor rangefinder for the carriage trade and its loyal existing customer base. The prices don't begin to tell the story, because if Leica had to develop the XTi, it would have to sell for $10k (or more), and if Canon made the M8 it would sell for $2k (if not less). In various ways, one camera runs rings around the other, and in other ways, vice versa. I don't think it's necessarily an insult to either company to compare the two. It's legitimately interesting. Of course I was aware that it would make some of the snobs see red, but then again, if I ran my life based on what they think, I would have had to kill myself long ago.

3. Off-axis LCD viewing. Some readers felt I made way too much of this. Who needs to look at the LCD off axis? One M8 owner wrote to say that he never looks at his LCD off axis. Well, duh—but what comes first, the chicken or the horse? (Sorry—old yolk.) If you can't see the image off axis, naturally you'd better learn to look at it on axis. Maybe I made too much of the whole issue. Maybe a $4,800 camera should just have a better LCD. You decide.

4. The importance of lenses to digital. The single thing I said in either review that drew the most violently negative reactions was the statement "my experience so far is that digital de-emphasizes the importance of optics to the final result." It's ironic that Leica aficionados would object to this so strenuously, since it's one of the few things that Erwin Puts and I apparently agree on. But in any event, this requires a more extensive article to explain, so I'll write about this topic in the future.

Complaints part B: Cons weren't con enough
1. IR/color issues. A number of people felt I let Leica off too easily, and that there are serious issues with the camera that I hardly touched on. It appears that a number of people feel that the color and IR sensitivity issues are inexcusable, and that an expensive camera that requires IR filters as a band-aid, after-the-fact fix to a problem that never should have existed in the first place is outrageous. Well, I don't know. I guess it seems to me that if the company says you need to use IR filters, then you just use IR filters. I didn't, and it's doubtless what caused the uncorrectable pinkish cast of some of my interior shots. So I didn't make a big deal about that. Again, a full review that didn't treat this issue thoroughly would be remiss, but I wasn't writing a full review.

2. The distorting of the purpose and applications of the legacy focal lengths. Several people took me to task for not addressing this issue, and perhaps I should have. One of the main purposes of the M8, these complainants felt, was to be able to use the lenses you already had; but your old 35mm lens is no longer a 35mm, and your old 50mm standard lens is suddenly a decidedly non-standard, and much less useful, 65mm. The most-used lens on 35mm Leicas is the 35mm Summicron. To get the same thing on the M8, you need to spend $3,200 for a lens that's bigger and heavier (the 28mm Summicron) and feels different. (Leica introduced a slower 28mm with the M8 to ease these folks' pain.) Moreover, you may already have a 35mm Summicron and not a 28mm Summicron, which means you either have to change the way you see or buy a new lens. Well, okay; I see the complaint. Maybe it is indeed more of an issue with a camera that accepts mainly primes, and is less of an issue with DSLRs, which take zooms. But I guess my feeling is that we're all used to dealing with "magnification factors" with digital sensors by now, so you just figure this stuff out as part of your purchase decision, and then deal with it.

3. High failure rate and "recalls." I gather that a fairly significant fraction of M8 buyers have had to return their M8s to Leica, or have had their cameras stop working, necessitating a trip back to Leica. Again, while a legitimate issue for a full review, this just isn't something that I think ought to be reported in a user report. Simply stated, I was giving my impressions of my own personal experience during the short time I had the camera, and that just wasn't part of my experience. If the camera I was using had stopped working while I had it (alarming thought!), you can bet I would have written about it. But it didn't—it worked fine.

Conclusion
The worst thing about writing about Leicas is that once you say anything negative, some people completely ignore anything and everything positive that you also said. So it was with my M8 posts. The M8 is a cool camera. People are doing good work with them. Some people really like them, and I understand why. If you're accustomed to rangefinder viewing or just really like rangefinder viewing, it's close to the only game in town.

It's also a deeply flawed product that probably hadn't reached a true v.1.0 at the time of its release, and that provides such spectacularly bad value that you'd best be rich enough to be able to shrug off the cost if you intend to buy one. And it's going to be outdated in no time, hopefully when Leica itself brings out a v.2 that fixes all the problems it learned about from its own early adopters a.k.a. beta testers. I'm glad the M8 exists, and I hope it's successful so Leica can build the M9 and M10 and M11, and so other makers are encouraged to bring competitors to market—I'd love to see a Zeiss Ikon digital and an Epson R-D2, for example, just as I'd love to see digicam-sized cameras with large sensors and real optical viewfinders that are large and usable. We'll see.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Random Excellence

2007-05-04T14:04:00.000-05:00

Roark Johnson, Sailor from Great Lakes Naval Base visiting his family from Ohio in Chicago

Roark Johnson's "Stranger A Day 2007."

Great stuff—well worth a look. I hope it's going to continue.

(Just as an aside, this may be one project that might easier to do with a view camera than a digital one. It might be easier to persuade strangers to pose for a big, non-moving, serious-looking camera on a tripod than it would be to enlist their cooperation with a dinky digicam.)

Roark Johnson is a commercial and editorial photographer from Chicago. You can see more of his work at his website, including lots o' shiny happy commercial portraits and a nice series of school kids.

And finally, if you don't already know (I'm apparently one of the last people on Earth to find out about this project), here's a link to the original Stranger A Day.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Charlie D. and to Kathryn

The Existential Sandbox

2007-05-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

The existential sandbox—perfect thoughts for a Friday morning. (You need to start with the post "Now This Here Is a Sandbox.")

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Buying Digital: Too Much Shopping!

2007-05-03T12:58:00.000-05:00

by Ctein

I have a bunch of film cameras gathering dust. My standard carry-around camera is a Fujica GA645, a fully automatic medium-format point-and-shoot with manual overrides. I've a Canonet G-III 17 and an Olympus XA with flash that I haven't used in 10 years, and an Olympus Stylus Epic that I haven't used in four. They're not more convenient to use than the GA645 and the negatives are just too small to really make me happy. Why make photos if I don't get pleasure out of them?

So, they're off to eBay, along with some Wallace ExpoDiscs, etc. I'm gonna finally buy a low-end digital camera for its convenience, and researching this is giving me a serious headache. There are too many damn compromises unless one spends lots of money. I'm not going to spend over $400.

Is this the stuff that dreams are made of...or nightmares? The camera may prove to be the former, but buying is definitely the latter.

I'm a color negative, available light photographer. Low image noise in dim light and low contrast in any situation are important to me. I know a cheap digital camera isn't going to have the capture range of even slide film, let alone negative film. So I want either really low image contrast or RAW format. And I'd like some decent degree of sharpness, so that when I make 8x10 prints I don't feel the same way I did with my dinky 35mm negs.

I looked at the Fuji Finepix F30/F31. Fabulous low light performance and sharpness more like a 10 MP camera. But dpreview says daylight photos are very contrasty with clipped highlights and shadows, and no RAW to circumvent that. Forget it!

Next came the Olympus SP-550 UZ. RAW, image stabilization, and a big zoom (size matters). But the lens is lousy; an awfully fuzzy image for 7 MP. Low light quality is poor and there are weird performance issues. Feh.

Third time's the charm...maybe? The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8 looks plausible. Good lens and good sharpness, very good image stabilization and RAW quality, even usable RAW quality at high ISO's. But...

I can't seem to find any review sites that provide "characteristic curves" ("dynamic range," if you prefer) for different cameras. Pretty basic and important info, that. Give me a graph that plots exposure on the x axis and output value on the y axis. Is that too much to ask?

Headaches, really!

Posted by: CTEIN

The Legendary 1839 Susse Frères

2007-05-02T15:12:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, May 26th, the Vienna auction house WestLicht will auction what will very likely become the world's most valuable camera. For most of photography's history, the oldest commercially produced cameras were thought to be those manufactured by Daguerre's brother-in-law Alphonse Giroux, of which some ten survive. But behind the Giroux was a mystery: it was known that a sliding-box Daguerreotype camera had been advertised by a Paris firm called Susse Frères a mere ten days before the first announcement of the Giroux. No examples were known, and for many years it was doubted that any had ever existed.

Until, that is, one turned up recently in Germany. The camera to be auctioned by WestLicht is essentially an "attic find." "It was originally owned by Prof. Max Seddig (1877–1963)," reads the auction description, "who was the director of the Institute of Applied Physics in Frankfurt am Main and, among other things, godfather to the founding of the Josef Schneider Optical Works in Kreuznach. Seddig gave the camera to his assistant, Günter Haase, as a present. The latter was later Professor at the Department of Scientific Photography at the University of Frankfurt and, from 1970 on, occupied the Chair for Scientific Photography at the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Günter Haase died on February 20th 2006 at the age of 88 and left the camera to his son, Prof. Wolfgang Haase.

"Numerous experts attest that it is very likely the oldest commercially-produced camera in the world."

Previously, the world's most valuable camera was believed to be the surviving Ur-Leica of Oskar Barnack, owned by Leica AG, of Solms, Germany, although it has never been sold. Opening bid for the legendary Susse Frères will be 100,000 Euros, and the selling price is believed likely to exceed 1 million Euros.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Frames, the CameraArts newsletter

Switcheroos

2007-05-02T05:52:00.000-05:00

Lloyd Chambers, Eagle on Iceberg from kayak, Alaska’s inside passage, 2002

In a rather shocking turnaround, Lloyd L. Chambers of diglloyd recently announced that the upcoming EOS 1D Mk. III has him convinced. Check out his article "Goodbye Nikon?" As usual, it's an interesting, wide-ranging analysis. Especially interesting is his discussion, in the article, of what he feels is Canon's superior commitment to developing new prime lenses.

This is the most unexpected switcheroo since 2006, when landscape photographer and master dye transfer printer Charlie Cramer switched from his 4x5 Linhof to a $25,000, 39-megapixel PhaseOne medium-format digital back—and zoom lens—that he had tested and found was very close to the quality of the 4x5. Charlie reports that the biggest change in his shooting was that he went from about 500 film exposures per year (at $4 a pop) to 5400!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Great Minds...

2007-05-01T15:58:00.000-05:00

This is kinda cool—compare Anthony Collins' Mona Lisa with the current cover of The New Yorker, which shows a couple chimping a picture of a painting on a tiny digicam while standing in front of the painting.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Hannah:

(Cartoon by Michael Leunig)

Review: Think Tank Rotation 360 Backpack

2007-05-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

by Joe Reifer

The most innovative design feature of this backpack is the bottom section is actually a beltpack that can rotate around to allow easy access to your gear without taking off the bag—perfect for quick lens changes. I’ve been testing the Rotation 360 since January, and rotation feature works quite well. Once you’ve tried this bag, you’ll notice how many times you set your regular backpack down in the course of a shoot to access your gear.

Speaking of setting your bag down, the Rotation 360 stands up straight because the bottom of the backpack frame is completely flat. My other backpacks have a propensity to topple over into the dirt, so I really appreciate this feature. The ergonomic carrying handle on the top of the bag is also nicely designed.

Features and ergonomics
The materials and zippers on the Rotation 360 are high quality, and the straps are comfortable and easy to adjust. The placement of the padding that rests against your back is designed for ventilation. The belt strap attaches to the right of center, which keeps the clips from rubbing. I’ve been on multiple 4–5 hour adventures using the Think Tank 360, and it's quite comfortable.

The bag includes a basic camera strap with metal loops that attach to a clip on the backpack's shoulder straps. The clips are easy to connect, height adjustable, and store away neatly when not in use. This innovative strap system really takes the weight off your neck, and also helps comfortably distribute the load by moving some weight to the front.

A standard sized tripod can be carried by putting two legs into a pocket on the outside of the lower backpack compartment and securing it with a strap at the top. For a more balanced load when carrying large tripods there is a hidden fold-down pouch on the bottom of the bag.

How much stuff fits?
The Rotation 360 holds 1–2 camera bodies, 2–3 lenses, flash, and accessories. You can attach additional Think Tank modulus components to the waistbelt for quick access, or to the upper part of the bag. If you normally shoot with a standard zoom but occasionally need quick access to a telephoto, you can mount a lens changer on the belt. Or keep your lenses in the bag and use the space for a Lightning Fast flash pouch, or R U Thirsty water bottle holder. Having a medium sized backpack that’s expandable is a good way to have a lot of flexibility when packing your gear.

Pricing and conclusion
In case you couldn’t tell already, I am a big fan of the Rotation 360—it’s a versatile, thoughtfully designed bag. Innovative design and quality materials do not come cheap. The Rotation 360 retails for $279. There are certainly other camera backpack options in this size range for half the price. The quick access, comfort, and long list of useful design features make the Rotation 360 well worth the price. I’ll be getting rid of a couple of my current bags, and using the Rotation 360 instead. Having one bag you really like means less time spent packing gear, and more time shooting—and that's a worthwhile investment.

To see the Rotation 360 in action, check out the product information including photos and videos.

You can read a longer, more complete version of this review at my website.

Posted by: JOE REIFER

4 Million

2007-04-30T15:14:00.000-05:00

It's now 3:14 p.m. in the Midwest, and sometime within the past two or three minutes, The Online Photographer logged its 4,000,000th visitor.

Whoever it was has just won a NEW CAR! That's right, a brand new blue Infiniti G35 Coupe.

Oh, no, wait, that's for the 40 millionth visitor. Never mind.

(Seriously, many thanks to everyone who sees this. You're always welcome and please keep coming back. )

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Go, Kent, Go

2007-04-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

Well, naturally I've gotten raked over the coals in many of the Leica forums this morning, for insufficient worship (here and here) of the M8. I'm getting called names, insulted, denigrated, accused of name dropping and bias and of having no qualifications, and of course everything I wrote was outrageously wrong in nine kinds of ways—one guy called my report "piffle" and another jumped in and listed the several specific kinds of piffle it was. (To another it was "tripe." Well, which is it, piffle or tripe? I'm afraid that's something they're going to have to work out amongst themselves.)

This is par for the course, and it's why Sean Reid (who has a large amount of editorial material about the M8 at his site) is wrong when he suggests that the "religion" analogy is a red herring. With some Leicaphiles, as with religion, if you're not a true believer then you're automatically an apostate. There's no such thing as the moderate middle ground. You really can't insert enough qualifiers or make the criticisms gentle enough—either you believe, or you suck.

I'm sorry if I upset anyone. It's really not such a big deal, though. The M8 is nice. I was disappointed, is all. I expected to like it better.

Of course, the over-the-top nature of some of the responses make me wonder if some of the acolytes don't themselves have doubts. If you're really secure about a decision you've made, why get so threatened just because some guy on the internet doesn't agree?

A much more secure and confident response came from my M8-toting friend Kent, whose response was to send me a bunch of pictures.

The attached note said, "I love this thing, warts and all."

Kent Phelan, Busch Stadium, Saturday, April 28th (Leica M8)

Cool by me. Go, Kent, go.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

'...You Just Had to Run'

2007-04-29T22:13:00.000-05:00

"Sometimes it pays to get to the set before your crew, which I try to do on almost every picture. I like to get there first. I walk around, and figure out what I'm going to do that day. I got to the set while it was still dark and then I saw, as it got lighter, where the sun was going to rise. It was going to rise on the very flat area, and I suddenly had this idea. Luckily, thank God, the camera truck had arrived and there was one assistant and he was taking boxes out of the truck. I had the driver and the assistant take an 800mm lens out and stick it up on an Arri, and we ran with five sandbags. I ran into the makeup hut and grabbed these four Japanese who spoke no English. I gave them swords and put hats over their heads, and dragged them out to the field, and basically said, 'Do what we did yesterday. Do. Rehearse.' I took a sake cup: 'And do this and bow.' I ran back to the camera, which was about an eighth of a mile away. It was awful—this was before we had little motorcycles and golf carts—you just had to run. They were having trouble getting the magazine loaded because the guy who took the camera off the truck was not a loader, so we were both together loading the camera. I had never loaded an Arri before and you have to load it properly. By this time, the sun is five feet off the ground, and we're not going to make it in time. Finally, we closed the gate. I do an eye focus, turn on the camera, and scream as loud as I can, 'DO IT LIKE YESTERDAY.' It was like kismet, like magic, just where the sun needed to be. We filled the entire frame with the 800mm long lens. We were able to get that moment."

—Steven Spielberg
describing the shooting of a scene from Empire of the Sun

DGA Monthly, Jan. 2003

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

A Photographic Project Idea: Dropout Teachers

2007-04-29T17:18:00.000-05:00

The issue: Teacher retention. More and more school districts, especially but not exclusively in high-poverty areas, are experiencing what's called "high churn rate"—excessive teacher turnover due to burnout, low morale, and poor teaching conditions.

What could be pictured: Still active but "disillusioned teachers; teachers who've already dropped out, showing who they are and what they're doing now; illustrations of the top 10 reasons (named in the article) that teachers cite for leaving.

Might be a good project for: A teacher, a college student, anyone whose work takes them to schools, a photographer who can't travel much but can get to one or more area schools.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Adam McAnaney: "I know this post (and this blog) are about photography, but this hit a nerve. No need to post this comment if you would rather avoid the controversy, but here are my thoughts. I briefly taught fourth and fifth graders in a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. I’m no longer a teacher.

"For starters, there are lots of reasons for the problems with our schools, but bad teachers have to be very low on the list. They obviously exist, but they are few in number and a product of the system. If you solved the other problems with our public schools, you would have far fewer bad teachers and the impact of those that remained would approach nil. Of course, there are so many problems with our public schools, that it is laughable to say something like 'If you solved the other problems with our public schools, then….' Indeed, I think the magnitude of the school problem has prevented serious efforts at solving it. I could go on and on, but there are plenty of books on this subject, written by people who have far more experience and better credentials than I do. I will point to two issues, however:

"1. While I suspect that David Jenkins and I would disagree on a great many issues, I sympathize with his feelings about the lack of discipline and the fact that kids know they are untouchable. Think about any and every form of discipline you every experienced as a child. All of those are probably considered corporal punishment and disallowed. No detention. No writing phrases 50x (though, to be honest, this always struck me as a silly punishment anyway). No sitting in the back of the class. Writing or calling home is pointless (partly due to a lack of discipline at home, partly due to parents overwhelmed by other problems and partly due to a reflexive tendency on the part of today’s parents to defend their children and blame other children or the teacher). So what’s left? Well, you can keep kids in during lunch and prevent them from playing on the playground. Except that only works every third day, because the school is overcrowed and supposedly 'temporary' trailers have been erected in the schoolyard, leaving only a fraction of the space available for lunchtime play. So the classes rotate days on which they are allowed to go out during lunchtime. On the other days, the students have to sit in the cafeteria the whole time. Disgraceful.

"2. Which brings us to the bigger problem with our schools. While money doesn’t solve everything (and I agree that teachers’ salaries aren’t the biggest problem), it helps. All of the issues raised by the article point to a lack of resources, and resources cost money. More administrative staff to reduce paperwork, more teachers, more classrooms, more teaching assistants, more money to make schools look like schools, rather than run-down penitentiaries. Of course, some schools have all of these things. Why? Because the vast majority of school funding in the United States is derived from local property taxes. Big surprise that kids in poorer areas with low property values underperform. And since parents tend to move from areas with below-average schools to areas with better schools once they have a high-enough income, this becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. The well-off move to high-income areas with better schools, contributing their tax dollars to a system that is already doing well, and depriving their old neighborhood of a chance at turning the tide. This is such a perverse funding system, that nobody outside the U.S. could ever imagine why we established it. (Yes, I know there are historical reasons. But at some point we need to update our structures to confront modern realities.)

"Ultimately, however, people expect too much from schools. Students probably spend around six hours a day in class, receiving instruction. During the other 18 hours of each day, during weekends, during vacation and holidays, they are out of schools’ reach. We can’t expect schools to solve the greater problems in our society, although neglecting schools will certainly contribute to those problems.

"Okay, I’m done. Just thinking about this makes me angry and sad. I couldn’t say all I have to say if I had 100+ pages to say it in. I don’t have the time or the energy to try, and I know that even if I did, it wouldn’t make a difference. I could have made a difference if I had stayed, but I didn’t. Which makes me angrier (at myself) and sadder and a part of the problem."

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "Most of the time, we get what we pay for.

"Public education used to be considered important because we believed that it was advantageous to a society that large numbers of people in it be able to read, think, and reason.

"The fact that we are seemingly not willing to pay for this any longer (I say we even though I live in Canada) seems to suggest that we don't see the link between an educated populace and a decent society in which to live. (Or at least, that it's okay if a lot of us don't have access to it.) It is a spectacular failure of imagination.

"We moronically complain about the cost of public education and related high taxes, but we never calculate the cost of not funding public education, even though those costs are staring us in the face every time we walk out the door.

"The occasional bad teacher during one's schooling is not in itself a bad thing. If nothing else it teaches you to recognize nitwits and that sometimes nitwits get into positions of authority. This can be a valuable lesson in life.

"I wish I knew how to turn this state of affairs into a photographic essay. It must be one of the most high profile failures of our culture. We used to have good public education and we are letting it slip away. How do you photograph stupidity?"

Leica M8 Pro and Con: Con

2007-04-28T21:11:00.001-05:00

Gman Music and Cosmic Records, Waukesha, Wisconsin

This half of my 2-part brief User Report of the Leica M8—the first part is here—is going to be an exercise in mind games. The perplex of device, psychology, history, function, status, loyalty, and tradition that is Leica is like a religion, in that it doesn't easily admit of soberly objective analysis. Some say you've either got to believe, or you don't get it; others think faith blinds the gullible and the fat old has-been Emperor is parading around in a Speedo. Some people think it's just another camera, and some people think it's magic juju, and a lot more people fall in between somewhere. Everybody vectors in on it from different directions, has different axes to grind and oxen to gore and sacred cows to bow down before. That's the reality; it is what it is. So to get a better handle on the M8—or to better communicate my take on it, perhaps I should say—allow me to set up and play with a few simple thought experiments (in a thought experiment, you simply take a situation that is not real, and imagine that it is real, and then examine the conclusions that derive therefrom).

Let us play.

What if the M8 were a Leica rangefinder, but not digital?
For a quarter-century and more, Leica's gotten hammered when it tries to think new, from the M5 flop to the tepid semi-acceptance of the R8. (Oddly, considering its signature camera has such a strong identity, it's like the company keeps struggling to find an identity.) It has learned its lesson: with the digital M, the designers clearly tried to preserve as much M as possible in the design—all the way to the removeable bottom plate, which is as much of a "technological male nipple" as any feature I've ever seen on a camera. The principle was very clearly "make it feel and behave as much like an M7 as possible."

How'd they do? Well, pretty well, as I elaborated yesterday. Then again, the gestalt of the Barnack camera was to sacrifice quality for stealth—for portability, small size, quiet operation, and unobtrusiveness. And in that regard, the world has shifted around the Leica while the Leica has stayed the same. Most any bread-and-butter digicam fits the original Leica gestalt better than the Leica does, these days—they're smaller, quieter, less obtrusive, more portable (see Mitch Alland's comment in the "Leica M8 Pro and Con: Pro" thread).

A "Barnack camera" (i.e., thread-mount Leica). Prior to roughly 1950, many serious amateurs and most professionals looked down their noses at 35mm cameras because of their low enlargement quality, often deriding them as "toys" and refusing to take them seriously.

Mind you, I'm not knocking Leica's choices. It made the M8 as much like an M as possible because that's what its faithful wanted, and giving your customers what they want can hardly be construed as a bad thing. The M8 is trying to be an M that just happens to be digital; but in terms of my thought experiment, if it were a film camera, it would feel not so much like a Leica but like a clunky, cheaper copy of a Leica. The feeling of build quality is almost there but not quite; the shutter delay doesn't have the razor-sharp responsiveness of the film M's (the Canon XTi to which I compared the M8 has a markedly better, quicker, and more responsive shutter feel); the controls, although nicely conceived, are somewhat slow and unsure; and the always-ready, always-on, tough-as-nails feel of the film cameras just doesn't translate to what is, after all, mainly a piece of electronics. Nice try—A for effort—but a miss. If it weren't a digital camera, the M8 wouldn't quite make it as a Leica.

But, of course, it is a digital camera. So if that's what you want, then there you are.

What about the opposite?
That is, what if the M8 were digital, but not a Leica?

With some of my shooting I got great files from the M8. It's clearly a DSLR-quality sensor capable of high-quality results. With more experience, no doubt I could do even better.

There's some question about the color accuracy, if the forums are any indication—one issue after another comes up and gets hashed to death. This may be a manifestation of the remorselessness of Leica-obsession, but I doubt that that's the entire cause. I can't draw any solid conclusions about colors because I didn't perform any real tests and I didn't use the M8 for very long. I had no problems with shadows. But the camera had pinkeye. I might be spoiled, as my regular camera has unusually good color accuracy. However, unbidden, my friend Nick H. reported, "Having shot about a dozen images on my little SD card with Mike L.'s loaner M8 and my 40 Rokkor, I ran them through the preliminary 'processing' routine last night. This involves laying out the images in Adobe Bridge and inspecting them in Camera Raw to see how much adjustment they need before being dumped into Photoshop for final tweaking and printing. The first thing that struck me was the color rendering. Your face was imaged in a lurid shade of deep pink not usually seen outside of Toys 'R' Us, and it was only with some heroic manipulations of the Color Temperature, Tint, and Saturation sliders that I could get you to appear mostly human although still not at all well."

(A note to skeptics: in real life I do indeed look like a well human.)

Second, the camera is slow. It writes files to the card slowly, and a "burst" is not very burst-like at all. Scrolling through images on the LCD screen, you can flick through three or four quickly before the camera has to pause to catch up. When magnifying the LCD image to look at details, if you zoom all the way in quickly, the image is at first coarsely pixelated until the buffer catches up and the "detailed detail" appears. This is like going back in time, to earlier generations of DSLRs, and it destroys the sense of undefeatable positive responsiveness that the film cameras always had. Speed performance, at any rate, is pretty marginal by current standards.

The shutter has a "rubbery" feel, more than the usual delay, and it's loud. It makes a muffled "thunk" sound followed by a grinding whirr. Not that it's bad in any objective sense; it's a soft-sounding noise, and it's lower than the shutter sound of many a DSLR (although the Canon XTi, in a direct comparison, is quieter). But it's louder than a film M, and, again, the world has changed—many digicams are silent. Silent, as in no noise at all. It's in these contexts that the M8 has to be judged as being on the loud side.

And finally (saving the worst for last), the LCD screen is downright poor. You have to change its brightness settings manually, and even so, in bright sunlight you can't see the image well enough to evaluate your cropping. Indoors, where the LCD image is visible, it's a bit grainy, with an oversharpened look (maybe that can be fixed in the settings)—and highly directional. The directionality is its real Achilles' heel. If you're as little as 10 or 20 degrees off-axis, the image is degraded such that you can't evaluate color or exposure even approximately. Worse, by the time you're off-axis by about 30 degrees or more looking down from above, the image disappears altogether.

On axis, above, the LCD is fine. As little as 30 degrees off axis from above, as in the picture below, and the image is all but invisible.

This isn't poor performance for a $4,800 camera—it's on the poor side for the average pocket digicam, and I don't know of any current DSLR that's anywhere close to as bad. In fact, just to be sure of myself here, it was at this point that I hopped in the car and zoomed down to the local Circuit City to compare it directly to the Canon XTi, and what I found was what I expected—the XTi's LCD screen (like that of the D80, D40, 30D, D200, E-500, A100, etc., etc.) was much better.

The best way to use the M8, then, is to ignore the LCD screen completely—just shoot, then look at your files for the first time after downloading them. I'm sure this suits many veteran Leicaphiles, but that's no excuse. It has a curious side-effect that's also very un-Leica-like...as far as the LCD screen is concerned, I felt somewhat "blinded" at times. This is directly contrary to the Leica's traditional virtue, which is that the bright, water-clear viewfinder always made it seem like you could always see everything, even when the light was bad.

Putting aside for a moment the ghosts in the air and the weight of tradition, the Canon XTi that I pressed into service as a point of comparison emerged looking surprisingly good. It's better not just generically, but even at some of the things that are considered the Leica's traditional stocks-in-trade: the XTi is just as small, light, and portable; it's just as quiet, if not more so; it's considerably more responsive, positive, and fast; and—most damning to the German camera, bordering on a sacrilege—the Canon's shutter feel and shutter lag are both decidedly better than the Leica's. It doesn't have rangefinder viewing, of course, but, offsetting that, its LCD is easily superior. It can't take Leica primes, but it can use teles and zooms, which the M8 can't. Plus, its metering is more accurate, and users report fewer problems with color (hardly surprising, since Canon has vastly more experience with digital sensors). The M8 is far, far more nicely built, in accordance at least to some degree with the disparity in cost, and the Canon hasn't got a fraction of the Leica's panache. But point-for-point, even at some of the most Leica-esque of virtues, the XTi is arguably a better camera. And not just for the money. (Pity about that crappy viewfinder, and I sure hope users can defeat that zany mind-of-its-own pop-up flash in the settings menus.)

So, vis-à-vis thought experiment #2, if the M8 weren't a Leica rangefinder, it wouldn't rank very highly as a digital camera. It's okay; it's just that the entry-level Canon I compared it to is better, never mind the more expensive models.

Of course, it is a Leica rangefinder. So if that's what you want, there you go—again.

Cost is relative
there's one final issue that I haven't covered yet (which will eventually lead me to one last thought experiment). Namely, cost.

If you persist in demanding or expecting that your expenditure be efficient, the M8 doesn't make a whole lot of dollars-and-cents sense.

However, luxury goods are defined as goods which are more desirable, and sell better, when they cost more rather than less. The M8 is a luxury product, and consequently there's quite a premium to pay for it. Presumably, buyers like that about it.

Not me, though. I'm never going to pay $4,800 for a digital camera, personally. I'm just plain not rich enough, for one thing. But even if I were rich, I'd still be a cheapskate. And even if I weren't a cheapskate, I still wouldn't be very status-conscious, because I just don't care very much about that sort of thing (my watch is a big dopey-looking Timex, for instance. I like it because the face lights up in the dark). So nothing—well, no camera—can sell me on $4k worth of prestige. Or even $2k worth. It just isn't possible. I'm not susceptible.

Not only that, but as a camera reviewer and magazine writer, I would never recommend that anyone else pay $4,800 for a digital camera, either. The march of progress and the pace of obsolescence is just too swift. The premium the M8 demands over even a Canon 5D is $2k, which is, in terms of cost-efficiency, crazy.

Mind you, when I say I would never recommend a $4,800 camera to other people, that's not the same thing as saying other people shouldn't buy one. They should if they want to. And maybe they just can. If there's one thing I've learned in dealing with photography enthusiasts over the years, it's that price is relative.

A little story comes to mind. I had a girlfriend once who asked me to help her buy a nice stereo. I planned a whole afternoon of store-hopping, fully expecting to expose her to a lot of different equipment and educate her enough about the options so that she could make an intelligent choice. Almost as an afterthought, as we walked into the first store (it was a Myer-Emco in Washington, D.C.), I thought I'd have her "calibrate her ears" by first listening to the store's reference system. She listened to half of a song, and said, "Okay. I'll take it."

"No, no," I said, shocked. "I didn't mean you should actually buy this one. I just wanted you to hear it before we go upstairs to listen to some other speakers—"

"What do you mean? Are there better ones upstairs?"

"No, but—"

"Isn't this a good one?"

"Yes, it's a very good one, but—"

"So what's the problem? I like it," she chirped. "I'll take it."

The salesman had this bright, happy, dazed look.

So anyway, after loading $12k worth of stereo gear into her big black BMW (that was a lot of dough for a stereo back in the mid-'80s), we were on our way back to her place to set it up when we happened to pass an certain antiques store. "Ooh, I saw the most gorgeous little Renaissance madonna in there a few weeks ago," she exclaimed. "I'm going to stop and get it." Then, half to herself, she added, "No, on second thought, it's $6,000, and I've got to try to be good. I've already spent enough money for one day!"

Ahem. Anyway, like I say, this stuff is relative. A price that's out of sight for some is trivial to others. Same as it ever was. And it's not for a reviewer to judge what's worth what to whom.

The bottom line
But on to my last thought experiment. In this review, I can't fall back on the standard reviewer's parting "would I buy it" shot. I know I'm not going to buy it for what it costs. To get down to my own bottom-line verdict, I had to imagine that the M8 doesn't cost what it does. What if there were no premium to pay? What if the M8 cost, say, $1,500, roughly double the price of a Canon XTi?

To sum up from above, the M8 doesn't quite make it for me as an M camera. It's physically similar to the film versions but misses the gestalt, perhaps unavoidably. To me it ends up feeling more like a weird replica of an M than a real one. And it's a decent but not great digital camera, bettered by average DSLRs in both operability and, to a lesser extent, image quality. But if for some reason your digital camera must be a Leica or your Leica must be digital, then it's the only game in town. And I can see that. As ennumerated yesterday, there are some good reasons to want one.

I didn't hate the M8. I actually kinda liked it, for exactly the reason I'm supposed to, namely, that it reminded me of the film versions. I can see how others might like it, too. If it were my camera, I could get used to it. So would I buy one if it cost $1,500? Surprisingly, I actually didn't have to think very long or hard about this. The honest answer, I'm afraid, is no. I know some people are crazy about the lenses, but my experience so far is that digital de-emphasizes the importance of optics to the final result. And I can't get excited enough about the lens quality to be willing to put up with such a compromised body, and a shooting experience that, while pleasant, is not spot-on.

This is just one guy's opinion, a single data input, nothing more. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

ERRATUM*: The quote that originally appeared at the top of this page was not an actual quote. My apologies for screwing up.

UPDATE: Read Colin Jago's response to this review.

Featured [partial] Comment by Carsten Bockermann: "...To continue the Leica tradition of small, fast cameras with truly excellent lenses, I think we need a new system designed from scratch." (See the full comment in the Comments section.)

Feature [partial] Comment by William: "...This camera suffers from distorted color performance due to its IR sensitivity. IR light is minimally at removed before the sensor by a very thin, relatively inefficient optical filter in order to achieve the highest possible optical performance (all filtering—analog or digital—degrades information content to some degree). So, Leica traded color fidelity for optical fidelity. This means that color photography must be done with an IR filter in front of the lens.

"I have looked at hundreds of on-line M8 photos since December because I love the rangefinder/M esthetic and the idea of a digital M mount rangefinder really appeals to me. Pixel-peeping clearly reveals the M8's excellent image quality. This camera takes full advantage of Leica lenses as well as glass from Voightlander, Zeiss, Rokkor and others. Leica's strategy to eliminate the pre-sensor anti-aliasing filter and use a thin IR filter is a success. But viewing even low-resolution, on-line M8 color images shows IR contamination is problematic on most images recorded without on-lens IR filters. No amount of post-processing manipulation can eliminate the color distortion (post-processing can produce some amount of improvement). While IR contamination is most evident in the blacks and greens, all colors are affected to some degree. The color on the majority of M8 images I've seen just isn't right." (See the full comment in the Comments section.)

*That's Latin for "egg on face."

Random Excellence

2007-04-28T16:50:00.000-05:00

Bud Green, Statue on Construction Site, Las Vegas, Nevada

And if you want to see some examples of what Leicas are good for, check out Bud Green's flickr photostream.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Rubén Osuna

CameraLabs.com on the Limiteds

2007-04-28T10:45:00.000-05:00

Gordon at CameraLabs.com has posted a nice video overview of the Pentax 40mm and 70mm Limiteds, which, among other things, gives you the best idea short of seeing them in person just how small these lenses actually are. It's part of a more complete suite of Pentax reviews.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Eolake

Featured Comment by Jeff Kott: "I recently acquired the K10D and the six Pentax limited lenses. After about a month of use I will probably be selling the DA 40 and DA 70 because I find I am using the 43mm ƒ/1.8 and 77mm ƒ/1.8 instead.

The 43/1.8 is not that much bigger than the DA 40, but you gain over a full stop and the 43mm is sharper than the 40mm at ƒ/2.8. I have started using the lens hood from the DA 40mm on the 43mm. The DA 40mm lens hood makes the 43mm very compact and it works great with the APS-C sensor. My never leave home without it camera is the K10D plus 43mm with the DA 40mm lens hood attached in a Lowepro Sliplock 50 pouch. BTW, the DA 40mm lens hood is available separaely from B&H.

"Similarly, the 77/1.8 Limited isn't that much bigger than the DA 70mm, but you get an extra stop.

"The 40mm and 70mm focus a little quicker than the 43mm and 77mm and have the quick shift focus option. But, for a minimal increase in size, I'll find myself going for the wider aperture of the 43mm and 77mm."

Leica M8 Pro and Con: Pro

2007-04-27T23:59:00.000-05:00

Leicas are good.

The first Leica I ever saw was an M4-P at Industrial Photo in Silver Spring, Maryland, when I was a first-year photography student. I handled it for about 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It felt awkward, unfamiliar, and strange, and I made a distinct mental note: nope, this is not the one for me. I went back to looking at Yashica-era Contaxes, my favorites at the time.

Leicas strike at lot of people that way, at first. Accordingly—mainly in the many volumes of what is by far the largest body of literature devoted to a camera marque—a sort of protective lore has grown up around them, to prevent such snap misimpressions from festering. Nine years later, I bought my own first M Leica, an M6. An enthusiastic follower of the lore myself by then, I set about discerning, learning, and mastering all the camera-handling skills, arcane film-loading protocols, secret handshakes, and so forth.

Eventually that M6 went the way of all cameras, and I started using Olympus OM-4Ts (still probably my lifetime favorite cameras). About five years after I sold my M6, I ran into Nick Zavalishin at Photo East. Nick's a studio pro, but since he was on his own time he happened to be wearing a sparkling mint M6 around his neck. We were outside the Leica booth, where Ralph Gibson was signing books. Nick hadn't heard about pre-focusing, so I was telling him about it. By chance, Nick had a 4th-gen. 35mm Summicron on his M6, which had been my main lens. I took Nick's camera and, without lifting it to my eye, looked at Ralph, focused the camera, and handed it back to Nick. "See how I did," I said. "It should be focused on Ralph." Nick checked, and sure enough, it was.

It's like riding a bike. Once you learn, you never forget.

And if you really get used to a Leica, nothing else will serve, either. It kinda gets under your skin. You get used to having nothing available but prime lenses—no zooms—in set increments within a fairly narrow range of focal lengths. (.72X Leicas can use lenses from 21mm to 135mm, but for practical purposes their best range is from 28mm to 90mm.) Your eye gets used to seeing like your lens does. You practice pre-focusing—that is, guestimating distance by eye and setting focus by feel—and get used to having a rather cavalier attitude toward the viewfinder, which you only use sometimes. You stop getting distracted by depth of field considerations, since you never look through the lens (think about it—with an SLR, you're always seeing the least d.o.f. the lens is capable of). You get used to the ultraresponsive shutter and addicted to the quiet little "snick," the one that splits into two parts at slow shutters speeds and that hardly anyone ever notices.

Something happened
But then something happened. It went about like this:

• 1994—We don't need no stinkin' digital.

• 1998—Please don't take away my film. Will they still make film? Somebody please tell me they're going to keep making film.

• 2002—Hey, this digital stuff ain't so bad.

• 2006—We don't need no stinkin' film.

2002 was the year that Leica conceded that maybe even consumers would be buying digital cameras in another two decades or more. (Leica lives behind the curve.)

We all know the history. The 3-megapixel, $3,000 Canon D30 changed the landscape, and the original Digital Rebel did it again. Before you knew it, film scanners had fallen off the map, never mind film cameras. And Leicaphiles started swapping rumors of a digital M.

It was a few years in coming, but that's nothing—the half-life of a Leica rumor must be a decade or so. By ordinary Leica standards, the M8 arrived lickety-split, a pleasant surprise. And lo and behold—Leica didn't reinvent the wheel, or play feature-wars with the Asians, or dare to be different—the company did exactly what the overwhelming majority of diehard Leica users wanted it to do: it made a digital M.

Cut to last week, a neat quarter-century since I saw that M4-P at Industrial Photo. I'm at Ancora Coffee in Madison, where some of Wayne Brabender's pictures are being exhibited, with a T.O.P. reader named Mike Lougee, from Minneapolis. I fully expected to take a look-see at Mike's M8 and nothing more, because I had checked with my insurance agent and found that somebody else's $5+k camera would not be covered while it was in my possession. I can't afford a $5k camera at all, but I certainly can't afford $5k to pay for someone else's camera that I break or lose—and that I don't get to keep!

But Mike had also checked with his insurance agent, and he was covered. Mike must be a generous guy, and trusting. The upshot was, I got to use a borrowed M8 for the better part of a week. Not long enough to really get to know it intimately, but long enough to get familiar with it. And remember—it's like riding that bike.

Riding shotgun
It was really nice to reacquaint with a Leica M c. 2007. It felt very familiar. Coming from my oversized, overweight Wunderplastik DSLR with its large and clumsy zoom lens, it was a positive pleasure to wear the M8 like a necklace without having it get in the way. Rangefinder focusing is always a bit awkward at first, but it wasn't long before it became second nature again.

Metering and default white balance outdoors seem fine. Voightlander 21mm lens.

There's not too much different about the M8. It's slightly larger than a real M camera—thicker—and there's no cocking lever to hook your right thumb on. I've never used an M7, so the "A" setting on the shutter speed dial was new to me, too. The oddest and most "precious" feature about the M8 is the fully detachable bottom plate, which never did have much of a rationale on the film cameras, and now has none at all, save the fact that it replicates what the film cameras had. Leica did a nice job with the digital controls, with one exception, which is that once you're in delete mode, you can switch files—pictures—in delete mode and delete the new one with a single click. This led to the first time I've ever deleted by mistake a picture I actually wanted to keep. Most DSLRs make you hit two buttons consecutively, which is safer. Other than that, the digital controls are simple, straightforward, nicely laid out, easy to understand and use.

The main felicity of an M camera is the way it rides shotgun, always there, always on the alert, always ready to go. The M8 is not really different, so long as you have charge in the battery and space on the card. Whereas most cameras want to make it possible to do more and more until you can do an infinite number of things, an M camera doesn't let you do a lot. It pares away what isn't really needed and just leaves what is. The M8's designers respected this principle.

I wasn't able to do a whole lot of shooting with the M8—five sessions, none very long or intense, resulting in not quite a whole 1-GB card. Outdoors the metering is pretty accurate and the default white balance good. The files are large and detailed, as you can see in the example below.

The whole frame. Voigtlander 35mm ƒ/1.7 Ultron.

A central detail (sharpened)

A note-taker, ever-ready
It strikes me that there are four really good reasons to want an M8. The first is if you want DSLR quality but you're accustomed to the feel and handling of rangefinders, especially if your other cameras happen to be M Leicas. Or you just got used to the interface over the years. It might be a relief not to have to switch over to a much more electronically-oriented DSLR to shoot digitally. Second reason is if you already have a lot of Leica M lenses and perhaps other accessories that you know and like and want to continue to use. Third, you might desire the exclusivity: few people can afford to pay the premium, so your M8 will always be the camera of choice for only a select few. Fourth, it comes passably close to the "DMD"—the "Decisive Moment Digital"—that I described some time ago: a handy, portable camera that has a large image sensor and accepts small, compact, but top-quality prime lenses. A note-taker, ever-ready. It's not exactly what I had in mind, but it serves the stated purpose.

I enjoyed my brief sortie with the M8. It's straightforward to use, and like most Leicas (indeed, most rangefinders) encourages you to pay attention to what you're looking at rather than what you're looking through. Using the M8 felt like old home week, 21st-century style. A pleasure.

My thanks to Mike Lougee for the kind loan.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "That's a nice backgrounder and summary, Mike.

"I've had an M8 since early February, have used it in all kinds of conditions and agree with your key points. The initial batch of M8s, shipped last November, had some serious problems which Leica has largely remedied through firmware and trips back to Solms. The M8 does, however, still have some quirks. The white balance can be quite adventurous; the power switch on many (mine included) is a bit funky; and cyan vignetting still occurs occasionally with wide-angle lenses. Aside from the power switch issue (which can apparently be fixed only by German elves) the other oddities seem indefinitely intractable and are just part of the camera's character. (The drop-plate bottom is a real hoot.)

"I originally bought an M7 to visit a different and simpler style of 35mm photography. Having a few M lenses from that excursion I was naturally eager for the 'digital M' to appear. In my experience, aside from some new product bumps, the M8 has offered a nearly perfect transition to digital for the M.

"I don't see the M8 as a 'status' symbol at all. The vast majority of the public think it looks like grandpa's old camera and have no idea what an 'M8' is. ('Look mommy, that man has to take his camera apart to change his SD card. That must be a really old camera!') Several years ago a friend's home was burglarized. He had several cameras, among them a Leica M6 and a couple of lenses. The burglars left that several-thousand-dollar kit behind, preferring to snatch a point-and-shoot. True story.

"The M8 is a wonderful little camera. The quality of M lenses, in combination with the unique optical relationship that those lenses have with the sensor, make the M8 quite capable of recording some breathtaking images. But, as yoou noted, rangefinder photography has its practical limits. (This is contrary to some new and born-again enthusiasts' opinions, rather like boys with a hammer seeing a nail-filled world.) I am delighted to have mine. But it's also made me appreciate just how really good and versatile today's digital SLR cameras really are. It's easy to see why the rangefinder camera was nearly wiped away by the SLR.

"By the way, if you're interested in seeing how an M8 is put together take a look at this M8 dissection by Mark Norton on the Leica User Forum. (Warning: Not for the faint.)"

Hawking Floats

2007-04-27T22:20:00.000-05:00

Coolest picture of the week: Astrophysicist and bestselling science author Stephen Hawking, who is normally wheelchair-bound, floats on board a zero-gravity jet on Thursday, April 26th. Photo: AP/Zero Gravity Corp.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

There Goes Another Three Minutes

2007-04-27T08:48:00.000-05:00

Hey, take a look at the featured photo on Flak Photo for April 27th. Cool, huh? There goes another three minutes of my allotted 15 minutes of fame....

Now, back to slogging away on my Leica M8 review.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Ed Taylor: "First, let me say that I love the photo. I fully understand why it was selected. I think the title helped as well.

"But, one can't help but be struck with the randomness of what is considered great photography. There are many factors involved in determining what is a great photograph, including the reputation (deserved or otherwise) of the photographer. As I show my own portfolio to people, I notice that there is no consistency with regard to what photos are selected as the best or the most original. One person will rave about a photo and tell me it should be in a museum and another will see the same photo, make a strange face and say 'ah, good luck with that.' We all know of highly praised photographers whose work looks like the photos we routinely discard, and other photographers whose work is amazing, but no one seems to care. Photos of beautiful women often get praise for no reason, and, amazingly to me, I often see photos of another artist's sculpture or wall art generating praise for the photographer, not the artist. What is up with that?

"Many of us wonder why the photos in the museum are there and ours are not. Marketing has a lot to do with it, otherwise, who knows? The logic of it really is suspect. Of course, there are many photographs that just about everyone agrees are great photographs, but does appealing to the masses make a photo great? Maybe.

"Having been around a long time, I can tell you that there are some photographers whose photographs sell for big bucks today who were considered 'cheesecake' photographers in their day (and that was not a compliment at the time). It is hard to appreciate street photography and photojournalism as well as landscape and glamour, but I do.

"I guess I can explain it this way. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If the beholder is in a position to publish, or display or promote, then the photographs that the beholder likes are 'art,' and the reputation of the photographer who made the 'art' will flourish. All subsequent works by that photographer will automatically be considered 'art.' It is the photographer's job to get his works to be viewed by the 'right' beholder."

Mike Replies: Your comment reminds me of a well-known photographer who was approached by a patron at an opening. The patron asked why the photographer's pictures were on the wall of the gallery and his (the patron's) weren't. The photographer looked at him with a deadpan expression and in a very dry tone of voice said, "because mine are great and yours are shit."

Rimshot, please....

Jokes aside, thanks for your compliment, but I'm hardly a "great" photographer. My pictures seldom get singled out for praise or attention. I'm quite certain that the reason this one got selected for Flak Photo was that the guy who runs Flak Photo liked it. That's all.

Your comment raises a lot of different issues, but it also contains an awful lot of assumptions that might or might not be supportable. As for the issue of "randomness"—it's usually not very random, in my experience. In my case it's that I've established a photography website that gets 15,000 or so hits a day (a number I'm proud of, but I'm still a very little fish in the ocean of the web), so when I put up one of my pictures, a number of people see it. It took me a lot of work to get to this point. That's hardly random. The same is true of many people whose pictures you may think get attention "randomly." It's probably not random at all; it's probably because they worked very hard to get where they are. Maybe you think your pictures are better than theirs, but the difference may be that they've worked to get theirs seen and maybe you haven't.

Second, if the pictures you're discarding look just like the ones you keep seeing on gallery walls, STOP DISCARDING THEM!

I'm serious, too. I really do think that most photographers don't know their own best work. Many photographers probably really do discard their very best shots.

Next, where is it written that everybody has to agree what's great? Do we all have to agree which women are prettiest, which sport is most fun, which music is good and bad, what kind of food tastes best? Sorry, but I don't understand this. Some people like certain of your pictures and others don't like the very same ones? Well, the nerve of those people.

There's nothing monolithic about "art" or the photographs that get shown on gallery walls. It's not like it's one big club where everyone who gets attention is a big success and they've collectively decided to keep you out. It's a great big stew of advocacy and advantage, serendipity and bad breaks, unfair conditions, luck, hard work, persistence, the trading of favors, and money, and on and on and on. Do you have any idea how many "successful" art photographers in history were simply people who had money? They made their own fame, but the opportunity they got was boughten. And for what it's worth, maybe half of the "great" photographers I've met or befriended think they've been unfairly ignored and that they haven't gotten their share of the pie. So it's not just you.

Featured Comment by Chuck A: "Finding fame in the photographic art world is like trying to hit the bullseye on a dartboard from 50 feet away. It takes an enormous amount of trial and error and lots of luck. The vast majority of photographers will net even get close.

"Whether or not you become famous or get 'a piece of the pie' as Mike said is irrelevant. Why not take photos for yourself, hone your vision and skill and show your work as much as you can. If you get known well that is great. But I really think that it is like grasping at the wind."

Gone Again

2007-04-26T21:09:00.000-05:00

Apparently John Szarkowski's Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Museum of Modern Art is now once again out of print—Amazon was not able to fill a recent order for a friend. I've removed the link from the list of books here on the site. This is one of the great books of delectation and erudition—I hope you got yours while you had the chance.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Pretend You're My Editor...

2007-04-26T07:13:00.000-05:00

...What would you assign me to review?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Michael Seltzer: How about the Pentax Digital 645?

Oh, that's right...there is no Pentax 645D!

I'm thinking of starting a new magazine called The Vaporware Review. It would include product announcements, interviews with designers and manufacturers, and in-depth product reviews. I imagine this would well serve the photographic trade (maybe the entire technology industry).

As a first go, I'd like to see if I could get my hands on the obviously mal-formed under-glass model of the 645D. If I can’t, I can always build one. Doesn’t look like it would be too difficult. Maybe out of cardboard, or a lump of clay I pushed on here or there and painted black. Or better yet, Bakelite. Wonderful stuff, Bakelite, especially in that 1950’s yellow—a color not seen in nature and, like the secret pigments of some of the (long dead) great artists, one no one has been able to correctly reproduce since. Anyway, once I get a mock-up, I’d take it out for a field test, see what it can do. I’d try to cram a CF card into it, press down on the fake shutter release until something goes click, then write up the results (“On the plus side, this baby’s practically noise-free, unless you drop it. Trip the shutter and there’s no mirror noise, no vibration, no mirror slap at all, because there’s no mirror, no shutter to trip, and even if there were, there’s no way to trip it! And you can set this beauty up on a tripod, press as hard as you want on the shutter release and leave it for hours, and there will be no luminance or chroma noise—absolutely none! On the other hand, the resolution’s not so good”).

I mean, why wait for product to do a review? Why wait for data? In a world with such announcements, where people become celebrities not because of anything they’ve said or can do, but simply because…well, God knows; where even the government doesn’t allow pesky little things like data, information, or understanding, and certainly not the cries of the well-informed, to stop them from doing what they “know” to be right, why wait at all? Let’s go marching boldly forward, advancing the tide of ignorance (and trying to make a buck in the process). Hey, that could be the magazine’s tag line. What do you think?

Uhh—that you're having a bad day at the office? —MJ

Bzzz!

2007-04-25T12:40:00.000-05:00

Reader ambroseliao nominates the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG6 as the ugliest digital camera, because he left his in the bathroom and came back to find his father trying to shave with it.*

So is this the best/worst we can do?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Not really.

The Man Who Made Mapplethorpe

2007-04-25T08:11:00.000-05:00

By Philip Gefter, The New York Times

Tall, handsome and rich would be one way to describe Sam Wagstaff, a legendary figure in the international art world of the 1970s and ’80s. Urbane is another. Iconoclastic, certainly. And glamorous, without a doubt. But the word that keeps cropping up in “Black White + Gray,” a new documentary about Mr. Wagstaff by a first-time director, James Crump, that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival next week, is “visionary.”

Mr. Wagstaff was one of the first private art collectors to start buying photographs as early as 1973, long before there was a serious market for them. His photography collection came to be regarded not only for its scholarship. It was also original and unorthodox, and turned out to be extremely valuable. Mr. Wagstaff sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 for $5 million, a fortune at the time, establishing that institution’s collection of photographs, now among the finest in the world....

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Bakelite Gone Mad

2007-04-25T07:47:00.000-05:00

Remember our discussions last year about The World's Ugliest Camera? One reader has found another good candidate. It's the Coronet Popular Twelve, made in England some 55 years ago.

Hmm, I wonder what would get the nod as the ugliest digital camera in current production?

And don't forget our eventual prizewinner. Still the champion!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Craig

The Duck on Captions

2007-04-24T22:10:00.000-05:00

"What the Duck" by Aaron Johnson, used with permission. Click on the strip to see it larger.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, hat tip to Adrian

B9180 Watch: Full Review

2007-04-24T08:32:00.000-05:00

My review of the Hewlett-Packard B9180 pigment-ink printer has been published in the English Black & White Photography magazine.

Black & White Photography issue #71, April 2007

The review appears in two parts: Part I, which appears in issue #71 (April, 2007) covers general use and operation and color photographic printing, and Part II, devoted entirely to the B9180 as a black-and-white photographic printer, is in issue #72 (May 2007).

Black & White Photography issue #72, May 2007

The magazine is widely available in the U.K., where the April issue has just gone off newsstands. In the U.S. and Canada, where the April issue will still be current for another week or two, it is most easily found at Barnes & Noble bookstore newsstands and other large bookstore chain newsstands.

The review is not available online.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by John: And Mike, one should add that (even without your contributions) it's a super magazine and well worth a subscription.

Thanks John...I think. —MJ

Gisele Freund on Captions

2007-04-24T06:38:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, seen here articulating the word of God as he understands it, has announced that his flock will picket the funerals of the Virginia Tech victims with signs saying things like "You're Going to Hell" and "God Hates You." A Church spokesperson told CBS News, "The evidence is they were not Christian. God does not do that to his servants."

Another important aspect of ethical reportage is accurate captioning. Real pictures with fake captions is a common enough comic trope—whole humor books are made out of the idea—but of course misleading, mistaken, or mismatched captions can communicate inaccuracies as easily as manipulation of the photograph itself.

Gisele Freund discusses this (and many other aspects of the misuse of photographs) in her 1974 book Photographie et Société:

"Few photojournalists...are able to impose their own points of view. It takes very little on the part of an editor to give photographs a meaning diametrically opposed to the photographer's intention. I experienced this problem from the outset of my career. Before the Second World War, share trading at the Paris stock exchange still took place outdoors, under the arcades. One day I took a series of photographs there, using a certain stockbroker as my principal target. Sometimes smiling, sometimes distressed, he was always mopping the sweat from his round face and urging the crowd with sweeping gestures. I sent these photographs to several European magazines with the harmeless title, 'Snapshots of the Paris Stock Exchange.' Sometime later, I received clippings from a Belgian newspaper which, to my surprise, had printed my photographs with a headline reading: 'Rise in the Paris Stock Exchange: stocks reach fabulous prices.' Thanks to some clever captions, my innocent little story took on the air of a financial event. My astonishment bordered on shock when I discovered the same photographs sometime later in a German newspaper with yet another caption: 'Panic at the Paris Stock Exchange: fortunes collapse, thousands are ruined.' My photographs illustrated perfectly the stockbroker's despair and the speculator's panic as stock value dropped. The two publications had used my photographs in opposite ways, each according to its own purpose. The objectivity of a photograph is only an illusion. The captions that provide the commentary can change the meaning entirely."*

The caption under the top picture is a real news item, from last week (the Church has since called off its pickets of the VT victims' funerals after being offered radio time, according to godhatesamerica.com.) But of course it doesn't actually go with that picture. The real "Reverend" Phelps is at left—sorry for slandering the gorilla. Here's the real caption, from the AP:

Kimani, a 2-year old western lowland gorilla, presses her face against the glass of the enclosure at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, Sunday, April 22, 2007. The zoo held special activities and workshops in conjunction with Earth Day on Sunday. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, Boston: David R. Godine, 1980, p. 162 ff. The book is unfortunately long out of print. I once tried to revive it, and got as far as discussing it with a VP from Godine. Unfortunately, we concluded that the rights and permissions would be very difficult, if not impossible, to secure. That's too bad; it's a wonderful little book, one that more photographers should be familiar with.

Featured Comment by Chris Gibbs: And this article speaks for itself!

Featured Comment by Yoram Nevo: Can't remember who said: "a picture is worth a thousand words, but a picture without a few words beneath it is worth nothing."

Canon Scoop

2007-04-23T07:20:00.000-05:00

"Trying to write something meaningful on every aspect of the EOS-1D Mark III is impossible, because there's just too much that's new."

—Rob Galbraith

Rob Galbraith has scooped the other digital tech sites* by publishing an extensive first look at the new Canon pro flagship, the 1D Mark III. This is an iteration not of the full-frame, highest-megapixel 1Ds, but the high frame rate, reduced sensor size camera meant for professional news, editorial, and sports shooters. The 1D Mark III features a 10-MP, 1.3X CMOS sensor and an extremely long list of features.

Oh, and Rob's pictures that accompany the article ought to be titled "How to cover a volleyball game." Camera and photographer combine to create some outstanding sports work.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Whoops! Except Imaging-Resource.com. My bad.

Don't Make News

2007-04-23T00:24:00.000-05:00

by Ctein

There is a clear and powerful rationale behind the NPPA rules against digital manipulation. News photos are important. Not just because they convey daily information to thee and me, but because they are the primary historical record in the modern world. News archives have become the most important cultural database and are vital to historians. Watch a show like the History Detectives and see how often they wind up in some newspaper's morgue to pin down otherwise unverifiable facts. That's not a convenient TV fiction, that's real.

Even the trivial can be significant. I don't think anyone is competent to judge the import of content. I sure know I'm not. An artist thinks nothing about deleting power lines from photos. For the historian and the energy researcher, presence or absence of power lines in photos is very important to charting and analyzing the process of electrification and urban modernization in America. Epidemiologists use photo records to plot historical patterns of EMF.

At casual glance, Adnan Hajj's faked "smoke" picture is only an aesthetic change. But, the original shows one fire burning. The fake implies three or four. When so-called "precision targeting" is a hot political issue, this is not a trivial difference! The fake also shows buildings, both damaged and intact, that don't exist.

(Fun fact: after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, city officials altered photos of the downtown to show buildings intact but burning. In fact, they had collapsed in the quake. The East Coast insurance companies would pay off on fire claims, but they didn't cover earthquake damage. The fraud worked, by the way.)

Even white balance changes can matter. Give me a photo of a slightly hazy day in downtown LA (is there any other kind?) and I can change it from healthy air to a second stage smog alert just by messing with the overall color balance.

Who knew power lines or RAW could be of such import?

Without hard guidelines people will alter important new content, either by intention or innocent ignorance. Alteration is simply too easy and too useful, either for reasons of aesthetics or agenda.

And then there's credibility. With most news sources legitimately challenged over objectivity (an uncapturable beast), engaging in active deception, benign as the intent might be, is suicidal.

It's so tempting to make the picture nicer. So the penalties for violation must be stiff and inflexible, because it must be unacceptable. Journalism is not about writing the prettiest words or making the prettiest photo, it's about doing the best you can within the rules that try to keep the profession credible and useful. If you can't live with those rules, don't be a journalist.

Posted by: CTEIN

Light Meters c. 2007

2007-04-22T10:36:00.000-05:00

"My DSLR is the best light meter I've ever used."

My radar screen has lots and lots of low-level blips on it, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out which ones are planes and which seagulls. One such faint blip that I've been "sort of" aware of and "sort of" tracking is the rejuvenation of the old Minolta light meter line by Kenko, imported by THK in the U.S.

I'm a little worried about my screen-reading skills on this one. Try as I might, I can't really interpret who's going to buy these things, or who's going to care, or who should.

I might be wrong, but it seems to me that if any species of photographic kit has been rendered 100% redundant—and hence, obsolete—by digital, it's light meters.

I mean, light meters were never any fun to use. They added nothing to the experience of photography. They just existed to help you see in the dark. You didn't know how the exposure was going to look until you had the film developed, so you set the camera based on the light meter. I suppose there were studio pros who used light meters to calculate lighting ratios, but the studio pros I knew—and their ranks included some serious high-dollar shooters—didn't. One pro I worked for briefly, who had two separate stages at his studio and more than $100,000 invested in C-stands and other Matthews gear, to give you an idea of the level he was at—never touched a light meter. "Polaroids are my light meter," he proclaimed. He did everything from the Polaroids. The light meter stayed in the cart drawer.

Digital, of course, is the apotheosis of the Polaroid. Its feedback is instant. Mine shows me a "proof" of the scene with the overexposed highlights or underexposed shadows (or both!) blinking. I can get a color histogram at the touch of a button. It works equally well for ambient and flash. Frankly, if these features had been available in a handheld light meter back in, say, the '80s, the manufacturer could have charged $1k for them and they would have sold like cold beers on Bay Bridge.

My DSLR is the best light meter I've ever used. The picture above was taken with an off-camera monoblock on a stand, through a white umbrella. Setting the exposure was laughably simple—with the shutter set to the sync speed and exposure on manual, I just fired off a few test shots, adjusting the aperture until the exposure was perfect. It might have taken a whole minute if I wasn't hurrying.

I know that many photographers are still shooting film in medium- and large-format cameras. Maybe some of them prefer light meters (and don't already own one). In any event, if I've missed something here, and you're eager to buy a handheld light meter, Kenko's got the goods.

Me? I'd buy a DLSR and just use that. (It has other uses, too.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

M'ate!

2007-04-21T20:58:00.000-05:00

I spent part of the day today photographing hither and yon with a Leica M8, loaned to me by Mike L., a T.O.P.-reader friend from Minneapolis. He and I met in Madison the other day to look at work and talk photography, and he's apparently one of those admirable fellows who actually keeps his camera insurance payments current. So off I waltzed with his M8 and a couple of lenses, for a brief trial.

I can't imagine that more "tests" of this already-famous camera are needed or even wanted, so I imagine I'll restrict my eventual comments entirely to "user impressions." Mike needs his camera back on Friday of this coming week, so look for my comments to be posted on or near next weekend.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Bad Cloning Everywhere

2007-04-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

Apropos the Detrich controversy at the Toldeo Blade, PDN is reporting that the New York Times ran an Editor's Note on Wednesday admitting that it had run a page-wide color photo in its Metro section that had been digitally retouched.

The excuse in this case was that the picture was taken by a NYT staffer who was not a staff photographer and was therefore presumably ignorant of the paper's rules. The Times stated, "Had editors been aware of the manipulation and seen the original picture, they would have either published the picture with the blemish or not used it."

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

So You Thought You Had Good Buffer Depth

2007-04-21T11:16:00.000-05:00

"...We can comfortably say that in 10 years photojournalists will only be carrying video cameras."

—Dirck Halstead

Many readers have recommended Dirck Halstead's editorial essay "The Coming Earthquake in Photography" from the April 2007 issue of The Digital Journalist. Predicting the future has never been a high-percentage business, and it's possible that some of Dirck's predictions are "mileu-specific"—that is, he's looking at photography through the prism of photojournalism—quite naturally, since that's his bailiwick. You might not read the same predictions in the pages of PDN, for instance—I can't see studio advertising photographers succumbing to a pressing need to shoot video—and of course the camera market as a whole, despite the preturnatural popularity of the deathless marketing word "pro," is almost entirely driven by amateurs, enthusiasts, and consumers. It's a fascinating essay nonetheless.

And check out the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One, which to me looks for all the world like the over-the-top plastic alien-zapping space guns I used to buy for Zander at the Toys'R'Us when he was a little guy. It'll shoot 60 12-megapixel frames per second. And you thought your Canikon had good buffer depth.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to erlik

Featured Comment by Juan Buhler: Regardless of whether still photography dies completely, this is extremely interesting. Imagine what would happen to street, 'decisive moment' photography when there is a device that fits in the palm of your hand and can capture 60 12MP images per second. Will pictures that we would consider great today lose some of their value?

I think this goes right in the heart of what is art and what isn't. Is the difficulty involved in making an image an intrinsic part of the image's value? It is a fascinating issue.

Featured Comment by Matthew Miller: This is just the first step. In the somewhat farther future, but very possibly within our lifetimes, lenses will be obsolete.

Instead, a sensor will capture the unfocused image and transform it digitally into the focused one—you'll pick focus point, focal length, and aperture in post-processing. Combine with the idea of constant recording, and you can choose the instant you want and select "exposure" too. The shutter button just becomes a handy way of tagging interesting points.

Sounds crazy? Consider this: a lens is just an analog computer which does a mathematical transform on the input data (light rays striking the front element). Anything an analog computer can do can be approximated with a digital one with the right algorithms and processing power. We don't have that yet, but it's a very safe prediction to say that we will. At that point, instead of primarily analog cameras with a digital recording element, we'll have real digital cameras.

Quote o' the Day

2007-04-21T11:07:00.000-05:00

"I have no idea what a 'megapixel' is. No idea. But I'll pay $300 for an extra one."

—Craig Ferguson, on the Late Late Show

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

The Status of Still Pictures

2007-04-20T07:52:00.000-05:00

I guess I hadn't realized how far still photos have fallen in status and prestige in the popular imagination.

For news reportage, video has many clear advantages over still pictures. But one of its big disadvatanges is that it's difficult to get video footage of unexpected news events as they occur. That fact, coupled with the national media habit of saturation coverage and its subsequent voracious appetite for footage, means that sometimes some pretty inadequate video is heavily overused.

This situation is especially bad with regard to the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. The two most-repeated video clips seem to be a jiggly view of a parking lot with pops of gunfire heard on the audio portion, and a clip of an obese law enforcement officer in a brown uniform running up an incline. I've seen the latter at least thirty times, and it hasn't added anything useful to my understanding of the event past viewing #1.

Into this void came the killer's own videos, which have naturally been overexposed as well, to widespread objections.

Still, it startled me when a TV news commentator said something like, "Surprisingly, some of the most powerful images of the tragedy have been still pictures."

Who is surprised by that, exactly? Not me. But then, maybe the tendency to overvalue still photographs and undervalue videography is another of my personal idiosyncrasies. I don't know.

Whether by chance or design, the shooting spree occurred at the very beginning of the publication cycle of the weekly news magazines here in the United States. I anticipate that as the new issues of the newsweeklies hit the newsstands over the next few days, we're going to be reminded again how powerful still images can be.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Chris Jordan

2007-04-18T07:40:00.000-05:00

Wow—talk about photo-illustration!

Any idea what this is?

Over the past few days we've had a few posts about the differences between photojournalism and manipulated photographs, with manipulated photographs claimed to qualify as photo-illustration. That might actually shortchange photo-illustration pretty severely. Real photo-illustration can be far more than an ordinary photograph with a few power lines removed—it can be conceptual, imaginitive, abstract, decorative—and powerful. All those descriptives apply to Chris Jordan's American Self-Portrait project.

One more description applies—"statistical." Jordan's project makes statistics visible. "Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing," he writes, "making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs."

Here's a detail, at close to actual size if you click on it to enlarge it, of the picture at the top. It—the top picture—represents 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the U.S. every five seconds.

Note that Jordan also says, "My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended." Which must surely be true—"Plastic Bags, 2007" in the original is 60x72 inches. Still, I think they already have a pretty powerful impact at monitor size. Cool stuff.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Stephen Bartlett

Hypothetical Questions

2007-04-18T07:01:00.000-05:00

OTA*

The study of ethics often deals with hypothetical questions, and it's always exasperating when people refuse to grasp that the conditions of a hypothetical question are provisional. For instance:

Questioner: If the world were going to end tomorrow, would you take the day off from work?

Respondant: The world's not going to end tomorrow.

Sigh.

(The answer is non-responsive, of course. The whole point of making a question hypothetical is so you don't have to get sidetracked arguing about the premises and conditions. Don't they teach this in schools?)

Amateur beekeeper pouring bees into a hive. Photo by smthng (used with permission)

Anyway, you've probably heard of an emerging potential crisis that's just beginning to catch the world's attention—colony collapse disorder (CCD). To make a long story short, bees are disappearing—abruptly, mysteriously, and in large numbers.

This issue about the bees is going to be interesting, and most of the questions I have are (as usual) hypothetical. If (provisional condition), as the most recent research suggests, it turns out that cell phones are responsible for CCD, and if (additional provisional condition) it could be demonstrated that this syndrome were going to be total, causing the collapse of human agriculture and resulting in widespread starvation, would the world's governments have the will to ban cell phones and destroy the cell phone industry? Or would we politicize the premises and gab our way straight to perdition? Hypothetical question.

One premise here that's not conditional is the importance of bees. Not to nature—to us. Here's something Albert Einstein supposedly said: "No bees, no food for mankind. The bee is the basis of life on this earth." Another quote ascribed to Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

The content of these statements is true enough—bees are essential to agriculture—but the arguments over the premises are going to be fierce. What's killing the bees? (Genetically modified crops and pesticides have also come under scrutiny for blame.) How important are bees? Unlike, say, puppies, or panda bears, most people don't have any attachment to bees. There's no helpful sentimental construct or anthropomorphic link to fit them to. (Another small trouble is that it's doubtful Einstein ever made the abovementioned statements, at least according to his most recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, former editor of TIME magazine. Einstein is one of the most frequent misattributions for quotations; whenever someone has some point to make that needs the indisputable imprimatur of science, one quick and easy way to secure such an endorsement is to ascribe it to Einstein. What they're trying to do is subvert the idiotic arguments about premises we should all know well enough to take for granted.)

When the premise seems absurd—and you only wish it were
The other side of this coin is illustrated heartrendingly by some of the responses to the calamity Monday at Virginia Tech. An item from the New York Times: "'As a parent, I am totally outraged,' said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. 'I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.'"

Before the fact, the hypothetical would have had to have been constructed like this: "If you knew in advance that a shadowy anonymous murderer were going to go on a killing rampage unprecendented in modern society hours after either he or someone else murdered two people in a dorm room, would you try to close down a thriving institution of some 34,000 people (24,000 students, 10,000 university employees) after the first two murders had occurred?"

I suppose you might, although we could argue as to whether such a move would be either feasible or effective. The problem with the question is that, lacking foreknowledge, any sane person would simply have to dispute the stated condition. As a premise, it appears to be nearly as absurd as saying "If the world were going to end tomorrow...." There's utterly no way anyone could have foreseen that 30 more murders would follow the first two. Not only is it atypical, it had literally never happened before. Murders happen every day; like it or not, they do. But the police aren't in the habit of shutting down a whole city or town after a single murder, and you can't shut down a whole huge campus after two, either. It wouldn't be rational. In advance of the event, it barely makes sense even to consider it...except as a hypothetical.

If only that's all it had been. Fran Bernhards' outrage is completely understandable, but its nature is psychological—it's the result of fear and a desperate desire to believe that the horrific event of Monday was a) foreseeable and b) preventable, if only someone who should have known better or done something differently had acted in a different way. It's a desperately fond hope, something most of us would dearly love to be able to believe. Regrettably, the more probable reality is that random violence of such magnitude is unforeseeable and unpreventable, rather than the result of a essentially benevolent authority simply making a mistake.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-topic alert

ADDENDUM: I've disallowed a number of the comments about bees. Not because I don't appreciate learning about them, but because I'm feeling a bit...wounded. Rightly or wrongly, I fancy that I'm at least a fair-to-middling writer, with an above-average ability to express myself clearly. But here in this post I went way out of my way to explain exactly how, and why, my hypothetical question was not about bees. It was about responses to threats.

You know, like how the first question is not about whether the world will end tomorrow?

I guess that was not clear. I suppose I am not as articulate as I think I am. (Actually, for many years, one of the words I could never quite remember, and thus typically stumbed over in conversation, was "articulate." Maybe the gods were trying to tell me something?)

Anyway, thank you, but let's talk about the bees some other time. VT was what was really on my mind.

Incidentally...

2007-04-17T14:14:00.000-05:00

Incidentally #1: Re books, I've finished the second edition of The Empirical Photographer, and it includes the "chronicle of childhood" article that Michael so kindly mentions in the comments to the post below. Unfortunately, I've been stuck with a "font not embedded" error from Lulu, despite the fact that all fonts are supposedly properly embedded (and checked and rechecked), so I'm kind of stuck. I'd work on it, if I knew what to do....

Incidentally #2: So many people said nice things about the "Wallpaper" shot from a few days ago that it is now officially included in my Four States project. It's now "Indiana #1." And thanks for the encouragement!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Anthologies Old and New

2007-04-17T10:53:00.000-05:00

Somewhere on the internet, somebody seems to be discussing my old book, Lenses and the Light-Tight Box. I only know because I've gotten a half dozen queries about it out of the blue recently. It is indeed still available from Lulu.

And I've just reduced the price from $27.00 to $19.99.

The book is a collection of some of my old magazine articles about cameras and lenses. Included are a history of Canon that Canon USA reprinted and distributed for free for a number of years; an article about choosing an arsenal of lenses; an explanation of how to read technical lens tests; a comparison of Canon's and Nikon's corporate philosophies; and "Leicaphilia," an encomium to the lore of the Leica. There are 21 chapters in all. The book is 8.5 x 11", about 60,000 words, 153 pages, and it's illustrated, although the reproduction quality isn't anything to write home about. Also, it's not scheduled for a second edition. (I only wish I could justify the time.)

It doesn't include any of the 36 editorials I wrote when I was Editor of Photo Techniques, the 100+ columns I wrote for "The Sunday Morning Photographer," the going-on-60 columns I've now written for the English Black & White Photography magazine, or anything I've written on this blog. Hmm, might be time for a new anthology....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

How Photojournalism Is

2007-04-16T16:32:00.000-05:00

"A news photograph is a statement, like a spoken or written one, subject to interpretation and evaluation, but as capable of being honest as any verbal statement...."

I had to scrounge long and hard to find an clear example of image manipulation in my files, but here it is—this is a paperback book cover I once did, and below it the original file.

As you can see, I've taken some liberties with reporting the telephone pole that was sprouting from the golfer's neck. (You can click on either image to examine them more closely.) Of course in my usage of this picture here, it falls solidly into the category of photo-illustration, not reportage. But it makes a nice, if modest, point: that even a very minor change is enough to cross the yawning chasm that's supposed to exist between photo-illustration and reportage.

In my experience, some people never learn how to really look at photojournalism, because they're too preoccupied with pictorial prettiness; they get distracted by the ugly details and bad juxtapositions and the sometimes poor technique of photojournalistic pictures. You need to learn to see past that stuff to see into the essence of what's being reported. (And by the way, I certainly can't agree with the commenters who've asserted that every photograph is a fiction, any more than I believe that reality is a dream. A news photograph is a statement, like a spoken or written one, subject to interpretation and evaluation, but as capable of being honest as any verbal statement.) Photojournalism is rougher, rawer, often less organized and composed. That's natural. It's just a different form of photography.

One thing that I count among our losses these days is something that I seldom see mentioned. It's become a truism that photographs have always been doctored, were often faked, and always had the potential to be false, and that's true—but it's also true that deceit in an analog photograph was much harder to accomplish and much easier to detect. Consequently, one of the chief aims and rare prizes of photography was finding real situations that were visually remarkable—it was that assumption that the things photographed existed in the world just the way they looked that lent them much of their charm and strangeness. Now, of course, with so many more "images" become naught but photo-illustrations, so much less transparently, this manner of enjoying pictures has been diminished.

As an (again, modest) example of what I'm talking about, consider the picture to the left. I think it's funny only because it's true. In the days of analog, the joke would have been difficult to fake in "post," at least without a fairly onerous amount of work. It would be trivial to create the joke in post-processing with digital. (What joke? Click on the picture and look at the license plate.) In this case it's pictured just as I saw it—no manipulation. How do you know? Because I said so, and ultimately you either take my word where my "statements" are concerned, or you decide not to. That's how it is with photojournalism.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Blork: The statement that "all photographs are lies" is useful for people who like to sit up all night in (formerly) smoky cafés pondering metaphysics, but it isn't useful for determining guidelines in the "real world" for the separation of photography and photo illustration.

Mike, you said "some people never learn how to really look at photojournalism." I would amend that to "many people never learn how to look at photographs."

Not to be overly cynical, but photography is the "easy art"—particularly these days, with the ubiquity of digital. So we're working in a medium that is saturated with millions of essentially meaningless images. We're inundated with photographic images in newspapers, magazines, online, on billboards, sidewalk advertising, etc. Everybody and his dog has a digital camera and is uploading to Flickr and similar sites. Thousands of "photo a day" photo blogs are out there, where people post a photo every day, whether they have something worth posting or not.

What gets lost in there is the idea of contemplating the image. As you say, people get hung up on "prettiness," so endless overprocessed HDR images get more eyeballs and are more highly ranked than images that are actually about something but require more than three seconds of eyeball time to "get."

Oh dear. I think I'm falling into a rant, so I'll stop right there. Suffice to say that your removal of the offending pole in the book cover image is a non-issue. The photo is "about" setting the stage for a golf book; it's not about that specific person on that specific hole at that specific time.

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

2007-04-16T15:28:00.000-05:00

Adnan Hajj's infamous "cloned smoke" photograph that got him fired from Reuters News Service in 2006. Kind of makes you wonder if he would have gotten away with it if he'd simply done a better job....*

by Randy Dotinga, WIRED

A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned.

Adobe plans to start rolling out the technology in a number of photo-authentication plug-ins for its Photoshop product beginning as early as 2008. The company is working with a leading digital forgery specialist at Dartmouth College, who met with the Associated Press last month.

(Click here for a gallery of famous fake photos.)

The push follows a media scandal over a doctored war photograph published by Reuters last year. The news agency has since announced that it's working with both Adobe and Canon to come up with ways to prevent a recurrence of the incident....

READ ON

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Mark

*Caption by T.O.P. is not from the WIRED article.

Detrich Update

2007-04-15T17:55:00.000-05:00

This is an update to our post "Detrich Resigns" from April 10th.

Following an investigation by the Toledo Blade, explained by Blade Vice President and Executive Editor Ron Royhab on toledoblade.com, it now appears that Allan Detrich might have been more in the habit of altering photographs than he was willing to admit. An excerpt from Royhab's article:

"An intensive investigation of Mr. Detrich's work, conducted by Nate Parsons, The Blade's director of photography, found that since January of this year, Mr. Detrich submitted 947 photographs for publication, of which 79 had been digitally altered.

"Twenty-seven of the altered photographs were published both in the newspaper and on toledoblade.com, and an additional 31 were published only on toledoblade.com. Another 21 altered photographs submitted by Mr. Detrich were not published.

"The changes Mr. Detrich made included erasing people, tree limbs, utility poles, electrical wires, electrical outlets, and other background elements from photographs. In other cases, he added elements such as tree branches and shrubbery.

"Mr. Detrich also submitted two sports photographs in which items were inserted. In one he added a hockey puck and in the other he added a basketball, each hanging in mid-air. Neither was published.

"The Blade is removing all of Mr. Detrich's photographs from toledoblade.com and blocked access to any of his photographs in the newspaper's archive. Like many other newspapers, The Blade shares its work with the Associated Press, an international news cooperative. On April 6, the AP removed all 50 of Mr. Detrich's photographs from its archives.

"Honesty is the fundamental value in journalism."

This also would seem to render Detrich's defense of his actions (in his blog) to be itself deceitful.

Mr. Royhab goes on to cite the NPPA's Digital Manipulation Code of Ethics, which he says Detrich signed. It states:

"As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy; therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public.

"As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images...in light of this, we the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession. We believe photojournalistic guidelines for fair and accurate reporting should be the criteria for judging what may be done electronically to a photograph. Altering the editorial content...is a breach of the ethical standards recognized by the NPPA."

Update posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to bomath

Jim Johnson's Son

2007-04-15T12:54:00.000-05:00

Weighing heavily on our thoughts today is the freakish accidental death of Jeff Milano-Johnson, 14-year-old son of "Politics, Theory & Photography" blogger Jim Johnson. As the father of a 14-year-old boy myself, I can't (or perhaps won't allow myself to) imagine it. My thoughts are with Jim and his family.

(My heart also goes out to the young player whose action led to the result, who might have his own demons to wrestle with.)

As an organ donor, Jeffrey Milano-Johnson saved or prolonged other lives, and gave hope and joy to the families of transplant patients facing death or debility. Although this is but a consolation to Jim and his family, no doubt, it is still a noble one.

We hope Jim will return to his blog's mission when he's ready to.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Stan Banos