The Online Photographer

The other day I promised Chas Williams that we'd declare a moratorium on mentions of Paris Hilton, but I'm going to have to break that promise (hey, the hounds of news and all. Sorry, Chas). David Schonauer of American Photo has uncovered a rather stunning coincidence: the picture that's been making the rounds of P.H. being hauled back to jail was taken by none other than Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut. Nick Ut, as you remember from Photo History 101, was the photographer who took one of the iconic pictures of the Viet Nam war, the picture of Kim Phuc running naked down a country lane after suffering serious napalm burns. Ut's photograph was arguably the apex of the notion of "The Concerned Photographer," Cornell Capa's phrase for the idea that photographs of injustices and atrocities could help correct the situations that led to them.

And get this: the two pictures were taken exactly 35 years apart, to the day. Quite a coincidence.

June 8, 1972, photo by Nick Ut

June 8, 2007, photo by Nick Ut

Can you imagine two more fundamentally different pictures of young women crying? A world apart in more ways than one. (Although maybe not as far as it seems: Kim Phuc Phan Thi, below, is now a Canadian citizen with her own philanthropic foundation. Click on the picture to link to the Kim Foundation page.)

The temptation here is to pontificate about the changing concerns of the American public, or at least its news media. Just last night, Jay Leno showed an equally stunning clip from MSNBC—I believe, though I'm not sure, that it was legitimate—showing a major breaking international news story about the Iraq war being shoenhorned into the Paris coverage as if it were far less important. Take a look.

But maybe that's reading too much into it. Coincidences happen. Maybe it's just that Nick is older now, and Hollywood's a cushier beat than the middle of a war.

Neal Ulevich, Nick Ut, May 1974

Donald R. Winslow, Nick Ut, September 2006

Kind of makes you think, though, doesn't it?

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Mike (thanks to Andy Frazer)

P.S. The full frame is interesting, too:

Whoops! Now we think this is the full frame (thanks to Siquing Zhang):

Featured Comment by Larry Armstrong: First, I should disclose that Nick Ut is my friend, and Nick is very well liked and respected by those who work with him. He is a quiet and unassuming person who takes his work as an AP photographer seriously. I couldn't imagine him telling his editors, who assigned him to the courthouse that day, that as the author of "the napalm girl" he shouldn't have to shoot Paris being wisked off to jail. You go where you are assigned to cover the "news of the day."

I do take exception to Marc's implication that it is an overestimation that an image could contribute to ending a war. Three images which have been widely accepted as having turned public opinion against the Vietnam war were Nick Ut's 1972 image of a naked girl fleeing her napalmed village, Ronald L. Haeberle's color pictures documenting the 1968 My Lai massacre, and Eddie Adams's 1969 pulitzer prize shot of South Vietnamese Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head in the middle of the street.

When Saigon fell and and the first refugees streamed into a tent camp at Camp Pendleton, Nick Ut was briefly one of the anonymous refugees waiting and hoping for a sponsor. Some photographers who recognized him put pressure on the AP to take responsibility as his sponsor. They did, and he became a staff photographer assigned to the Tokyo bureau, then in 1977 he was transfered to Los Angeles, where he has covered everything from fires, breaking news, trials, major sports events and yes, even Hollywood.

Those interested in the whole story of "The Napalm Girl" might find this article from the Digital Journalist interesting.

By Scott Parsons

I've been in the photo business for a while now. Mostly on the retail side. Here are a few things I thought were neat, but never really got anywhere. Why? Sometimes it was the customers and sometimes it was the manufacturers. Sometimes just bad timing and bad luck. Or young Harvard business school graduates, hired by the photo companies, with no practical photo knowledge, making decisions for retailers.

1. APS   (Advanced Photo System).  A lot of old-timers will scoff at this one. APS really was a love-it or hate-it kind of product. It had a lot of potential but got steamrolled by digital. I sold it as the perfect "Grandma Camera": Simple to load and operate for the mechanically challenged. Good images and small-bodied cameras. Canon's Elph was the clear design and sales winner. There were even a few SLR APS cameras.

P.S. Quick, name me a current camera that can be sold as a "Grandma Camera." Are there any? Easy to operate for the mechanically challenged? Not everyone on the planet is digital ready. Something easy to understand that takes nice, decent quality images. Anyone?

2. ASF (Applied Science Fiction) This is the company that invented The "Digital Ice" algorithm in most of the scanners today. In the mid '90s they showed a prototype of a new film processor that would develop your film and print it all in about 20 minutes. The chemistry was adhered to the film to draw out a latent image, ruining the negatives in the process. The customer saw the positive image on the screen, made print and enlargement choices and received prints and a "digital negative disk" CD. They showed this concept for about three years. Each year it got smaller and more refined. Eventually Kodak bought them out and scrapped the whole thing. But they're still making nice money off the Digital Ice licensing!

3. Kodak's Create a Print Center.   This was a standalone enlargement center. You stood in front of it, inserted a film negative strip into the front and made nice-looking enlargements up to 11x14 in just minutes. The processing part in the lower half was rock solid. Standard RA-4 chemistry and a dryer. The top half was another story. Once the negative was inserted it was drawn into a Rube Goldberg apparatus with piano wires and electrical circuits. The whole thing would spin with lenses zooming in and out and, and, and.... It was truly a sight and very problematic. Soon after, Kodak started introducing the digital versions of this idea.

4. Kodak's Picture CD.   Way before its time!  They had all the right concepts and even had a line of CD players to hook up to your TV for viewing. Many larger processors made good money outsourcing for mini labs. The problem was that not many photographers felt a need to invest in this technology then. Five years later maybe. Ended up selling the players at a huge discount as music CD players.

5. Sony's digital cameras that wrote to the floppy disk. Customers loved this! Regretfully the image sizes had to be small to fit on the floppy. Customers really could relate to the floppy concept. But as soon as Sony changed from floppies to bigger capacity (proprietary) media, this design started fading quickly.

6. "Panoramic" switches on 35mm cameras. A short-lived thing. Flip a switch on the back of the camera and the image was cropped top and bottom. The photo lab would print a 4x10. Neat idea and good for the photo labs. Some customers would forget it was on and shoot a whole roll that way and be very upset upon getting the pictures back. There was no way to reverse this for the customer. (But you could with APS! Thy name is irony!) The idea quickly faded after a year or so.

7. Ektar print film. Another neat marketing concept from Kodak. Nicely designed boxes with a range of ISOs from 25 to 1000. Easy to explain to customers and a nice up-sell from the standard Gold lineup. Again, Kodak's SASS ( Short Attention Span Syndrome) killed the line too soon.

8. Minolta's 8x42 XL binoculars (mid '90s). Camera manufacturers have made binoculars for decades. A really nice sale for most photo retailers. Good margins and names recognizable to customers. But generally, binoculars were binoculars. Black, with a case. But every now and then all the pieces would come together and the exact right combination of design, glass and metal would come together for a really nice unit. These were one on those "divine designs." Low weight, amazing clarity and excellent price. As good as Leica or Swarovski? Heck no, but really super good for the price. Birders loved them. I sold all I could get. But then some design guru at Minolta changed the design, and everything went back to ordinary. Black, with a case.

9. Stacks of filters. This is more of a nostalgia thing, but I really liked small, dense stacks of various filters. Rotating it around to find the exact right one. Adding and subtracting from the pile. Sometimes trying one on just because you want to see what it did.  Digital has changed this one. Probably for the better.

10. Choice. I know what you're thinking. "We have tons of products to choose from! A huge assortment of cameras and accessories!" I'm not talking about that. I want to know where you now purchase your stuff. Your choices of retailers are very diminished now. Many fine specialty retailers are now gone because of the choices the manufacturers started making back in the mid '90s. The manufacturers control who sells their stuff and for what price. MAP pricing and competing with the big boxes have changed your choices regarding who you buy from.

Please find a quality independent photo retailer and support them as much as you can.

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Scott Parsons is the proprietor of 13 Photography Gallery and Shop, in Grand Junction, Colorado, providing fine art photography and services to Colorado's Western slope.

The worst lens ever.

____________

Oren (Thanks to Peter Zack)

Our friend Howard French (a.k.a. A Glimpse of the World) is being featured in The New York Times' Travel section this morning, as the lead article in the Travel section's "Photography Issue." There's a slide show. Worthy article, worthier pictures—worth a visit! Actually the whole page has a wealth of interesting stuff, perfect for a Saturday morning browse. And congrats to Howard.

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Mike

You might not think the picture above is terribly impressive, but...it was taken by a cat.

Seems a German guy living in South Carolina named Jürgen Perthold has modified an inexpensive digital camera so it could be worn by his cat, Mr. Lee (right, with CatCam at ready). Mr. Lee has since become an accomplished and inveterate photographer, dutifully documenting his trips to the woods (he found a snake), his water dish, well-framed views of his house from a distance, and so forth. Presumably, the picture above, taken from underneath a car, is a portrait of one of Mr. Lee's associates. The modification of the camera wasn't trivial, either—the CatCam website takes you through it step-by-step, just in case you should be the owner of a cat and in dire need of a project. (The website has gotten so many hits that its former hosting service banned it. The link is to Mr. Lee's new online representation.)

Meanwhile, over on the Rangefinder Forum, Dr. Leo B.—presumably dissatisfied by the M8, or else acting under the "Mt. Everest Principle"—perpetrated the following on an otherwise innocent Leica M3. Voilá—digital rangefinder. Although its creator admits it's ugly, it actually works, making Dr. B. at least three times as clever as me.

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Mike

Featured Comment by David Goldfarb: The idea of putting a small camera with an intervalometer on an animal is not entirely new or ridiculous.

Here are a couple of photographs of Julius Neubronner's pigeon camera, patented in 1903.

Pigeon cameras were used for aerial reconnaissance during WWI. You can find a hi-res image of a WWI pigeon camera on this page.

Since the flight path of a pigeon is somewhat more predictable than that of a cat, the timer could be set to improve the probability of obtaining useful images.

Mike adds: And I feel a potential conflict brewing. God forbid a cat with a CatCam should eat a pigeon with a spy camera...the visuals don't bear contemplating.

Seriously—thanks for this, David.

Just a quick note to say thanks to everybody for a) visiting, b) reading, c) being patient will my teething pains on the new site, and d) for all the suggestions. We're on pace to log 75,000 hits for the week by this evening, and I've gotten a lot of very nice emails and comments and a lot of great advice.

I think I'm going to stick with TypePad for now, but I'll be starting a beta site in WordPress when I have time, to find out more about it.

I'll keep posts on the blog about new material elsewhere on the site to a minimum. I'll group several uploads in one posting, and provide links.

For those of you who would prefer just reading the blog, that should work fine. It will go on just as before. The added features are mainly archives of my other writings—and it just wouldn't be feasible to upload even a small percentage of that material as blog posts. I've written more than 250 columns for various publications over the years, for instance. Just a "greatest hits" selection would, um, clog the blog.

For some reason the individual page URLs such as permalinks are not always propagating in the address bars of peoples' browsers. I don't know why this is, but I've posted the whole URL for the direct link to the Weblog page on the Welcome Page. You can use that for your bookmarks if you'd like to open the site directly to the blog.

I'm always open to your comments and suggestions. I learn more from you than you learn from me. Thanks again for helping to make this launch a successful one.

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Mike

In Columns & Essays: "The Colors of Black & White." About the perception of paper-base and emulsion color in B&W media.

In Cameras Page > Camera Reviews: "Totally, Completely Okay: The Pentax K100D" by Mike Johnston.

In Columns & Essays: "Johnston's Not Much of a System System." A four-part illustrated article about the exposure and development of black-and-white rollfilm. The first part, "Why Gray Card Readings can be Wrong," might also be of use to transparency shooters. About 4,000 words. Originally published in four separate issues of Black & White Photography magazine in 2004.

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Mike

"I love art. It is uplifting. If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time."

—artist Damien Hirst, whose personal fortune is estimated at $250 million

A sample of surface cracking on a dye-base inkjet print. Photo: Image Permanence Institute, R.I.T.

by Ian Austen, The New York Times

The preservation center at Canada’s national archive here might have the last word when it comes to keeping the color in color photography. A four-story concrete building, which is enclosed within a second protective building, holds two warehouse-size vaults where negatives, prints and film are kept in the dark at 0 degrees and 25 percent relative humidity. Before anything in the collection can be examined, technicians must put it into an acclimatization chamber that resembles an oversize stainless-steel refrigerator, where it is warmed up over a 24- to 48-hour period. Henry Wilhelm, an American researcher on photographic preservation, says the complex and costly system is worth the trouble.

“Those images should last thousands of years,” he said from his office in Grinnell, Iowa. “Imagine seeing photos of the building of the pyramids.”

But even officials at the archive are uncertain how to manage the medium that now dominates photography: inkjet prints....

READ ON

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Oren Grad

So you say you want to score big? All at once, the brass ring, el enchilada entero?

Well, get this—the Paparazzi expert on the TV program "Access Hollywood" estimates that the first photograph of Paris Hilton in her jail cell "would be worth half a million dollars." It won't be easy, though—even guards are being searched for cameras.

So get to work on that jailhouse food worker disguise and that fake prison work pass. Could be worth it!

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Mike

And we lose a reader: [To multiple recipients] "Having been offline for ten days, and pretty much off the grid, I'd like to stay in this very positive state of mind. So I'm driving less (didn't drive at all on vacation) and doing some filtering. Actually, if you're getting this note, you're being filtered because you're running a 'Paris Hilton' lead story. As I log onto my favorite sites to catch up with the news, I'm finding it best to delete my bookmarks for all sites that perpetuate the Paris Hilton meme. Hopefully, this will also filter out Anna-Nicole-Smith-related material. Thanks for all your good work in the past and best of luck with your chosen endeavors." [Name withheld]

(I thought this was hilarious, even though—or maybe because—I sympatize! —MJ)

[1992]—Last summer, without much fanfare, John Szarkowski officially retired from his position as the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern art, after almost exactly twenty-nine years on the job. His career was thus almost exactly contemporaneous with Johnny Carson’s, and within the small world of art photography he has been almost as much of a one-man show. He leaves behind a legacy and a corpus of writings that have made him, over those three decades, one of the half dozen or so most influential single individuals not only in recent contemporary photography, but in the medium’s entire history....

READ ON in "Columns and Essays"

Mark Levison over at "Notes from a Tool User" has posted a useful guide to some head-to-head comparisons of Adobe Lightroom vs. Apple Aperture. He links mainly to two other blogs, but I'll let you follow along from his page. This post has obviously been helpful for people mulling over a sortie into one or the other of these new hybrid programs, because this post has been one of the most popular and heavily linked on "Notes" during the past few months.

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Mike

Yup, I'm a little preoccupied with administrative concerns these days, what with our recent forced-march relocation and all. Be patient with me.

Thank you for all the nice comments. To answer Jernej, the point of having an introduction page is that new people coming to the site for the first time don't know that the top post of the blog isn't indicative of the contents of the site as a whole. It's fine for the regular crowd if the top posting is about kudzu-eating goats or the Chicago Bears, but it misleads chance visitors.

I'm reminded of a time we had a problem with the cover of Photo Techniques. I'd chosen a photographer who was basically out of our league, and talked him into letting us use one of his existing pictures. But he wanted a spurious detail retouched out of the picture I chose. Well, those were the early days of both digital pre-production and Photoshop, so we had to send it to New York for retouching. The films came back to our Graphics Department very late—and about 3/4ths of an inch too small in both dimensions.

Rather than abort, I decided on a workaround–we just ran a half-inch red border all the way around the cover. Kind of arbitrary, but it looked okay.

Well, we probably got a dozen letters about our "new look"! Some people liked the red border, some people thought it looked too much like TIME magazine, some cautioned us that maybe it worked for that cover but it wasn't going to work for every cover. But pretty much everybody assumed that it was a) deliberate and b) permanent. One guy even called it "the start of something big"! Er—no.

People have a tendency to assign too much weight to recency. In some ways this makes sense—nobody remembers that both Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan were originally Democrats, and they're probably right not to—it's probably not pertinent. But I think when people happen across a blog for the first time—especially a free-ranging one like mine—they tend to read a post or two and assume they know what it's all about. The introduction page simply combats that kind of misimpression.

Joe Lovano and Matt Mullenweg

Besides, there's really no such thing as a "home page" on a site like this, since both sidebars with all the navigation tabs are visible on every page. So if you want to go right to the blog, the solution is simply to bookmark the blog page and ignore the welcome page. Right?

And in answer to the numerous people who are hurting my brain with the suggestion that I go with WordPress instead of TypePad (you have no idea how hard it's been for me to get this far with TypePad—I'm as thick as a brick)—well, I still have 11 days left on my TypePad free trial, so now's the time. I'm going to buckle down and mock up the entire website in WordPress. Not saying I'll switch, but now that we have our very own domain, it's trivial to point the domain name to a different site without discombobulating anybody.

And you know why I have to? Matt Mullenweg of WordPress is both a photographer and a jazz fan. (The thing that impresses me most about his blog? He met Joe Lovano on a plane.) Ya just gotta give a guy like that a chance.

_________________

Mike

"Bill Emory is one of my favorite photographers."

I've said that I don't know how many times or for how many years. A dozen, and six, maybe? I don't know. I said it again tonight, in an email to a friend. Emails containing pilfered pictures always follow whenever I go for a meander through Bill Emory's website. 

I don't know Bill Emory. I don't know what he looks like, or anything about him. I know he wrote a nice essay about a dog. No, actually it's an essay about loving a dog.

I know I keep meaning to do up a proper post about Bill Emory. That's a task I keep putting off, and I finally realized why—it's because I don't have a damn thing to add.

Sometimes it's just good to go to Bill Emory's site and look at some of Bill Emory's pictures.

Bill Emory, they are all called Harley

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

TOP on Blogger's back up, as you may have noticed. This means I can get back to some posts about photography, and quit messing with all this ruckus. I'll have something new up by tonight. Meanwhile, please bookmark...

http://theonlinephotographer.com

Thanks!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Note: that's voyageurs, not voyeurs. I hope your French is better than mine.

If you're reading this, it means you've successfully found us.

Can you help get the word out about where we are now? The new link is:

http://theonlinephotographer.com

Although for a day or two you may have to use this:

http://

Over at the other site we'd been averaging about 15,000 hits every weekday (about 10,000 on the weekend days). People stopped by from all over the world. Well, for the rest of this week, anybody who drops by the old site is going to see the clock stopped. Crickets chirping, and I don't mean Buddy Holly's backup band. I'm eager to try to get the word out to as many people as possible that we're here for now. If you could post the news on Forums, other sites you visit, your own sites or blogs, well, I'd be grateful. I don't want people to think I stopped caring.

Eventually, this move is going to be good for us, I think. Check back during the week to see what's new.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

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 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