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March 2024

Sunday, 31 March 2024

Open Mike: I Go To Wander and Hope (OT)

My car-2

When I was recovering from my heart procedure, which was supposed to take six weeks, I had to put my shirts and coats on backwards, because I wasn't allowed to raise my left arm during that time. I had not thought about how I put on a shirt or coat since I was, I don't know, five or six? When do kids learn to put on their coats? If I was five, that means John F. Kennedy was President the last time I consciously thought about how to don a coat. It wasn't a real problem, just an annoyance. But I had a ludicrous amount of trouble with it. I swear it took me the whole six weeks to re-learn how to do it. I didn't get the knack of doing the motion backwards till the last day. Honestly, it was that hard.

That's part of the reason I got all agitated when I learned my old keyboard had been discontinued. The replacement (which I called the No Natural because it had the same name minus the word "Natural") was different enough that I couldn't type on it at first. I was convinced it would take me forever to get used to it. Because, you know, the putting-on-the-coat thing, not to mention lots of other things like that.

But when I finally actually tried to learn the new one, I adapted to it in...about eight minutes. I exaggerate. But it's fine.

Do I still need to learn to touch-type? Not really. I took a typing test using the No Natural at Monkeytype, typing my old way with three fingers and one thumb, and within three tries my score was 50 WPM with 98% accuracy. Which (again) is fine.

So all this keyboard business was just me being Chicken Little. I was honestly panicked when I found out my keyboard had been discontinued. I mean, I had been been using it for 30 years (a new one every three or four years). Meanwhile, readers were all like, dude, just learn to type. As I was freaking the F out.

Lost souls
Speaking of odd nicknames for weird things, like No Natural, I went to Wal-Mart yesterday. I decided that store should be called "Wander and Hope," because that is what you have to do there. I get an attack of existential pessimism whenever I go into a Wander and Hope. It makes me question the culture of now, the meaning of life, and whether I belong on this planet. I never feel lonelier or more defeated. Manfully, however, I found three blue-vested employees in a little klatch talking with each other animatedly about their men, their kids, and their lives. I interrupted them and asked them for what I needed, and one of them turned away from the others and sucked it up and put on her concerned/motherly/helpful employee-face. She waved and pointed and said, "It's down there, way down there, just look for a section called 'More Meaningless Crap.' You'll see it. You'll find it. You'll be all right," and I repeated, "More Meaningless Crap?" to help me remember it, and she said 'More Meaningless Crap." Then she went back to her discussion with her friends. Within 40 steps I had forgotten what section she told me to look for (it wasn't actually the More Meaningless Crap section), but I was too far into it to go back and ask again. I thought perhaps I would find another employee in the interior of the store to ask, but encountering a Wander and Hope employee in the interior is as common as someone offering you a Prosciutto e Melone sample on a tray in the middle of the Australian outback. I had about a football field to walk. In my meandering I encountered several more old men wandering aimlessly, doddering into view for a little while and then disappearing. At any given time in any Wander and Hope there must be at least eight old men shuffling around lost, having forgotten or given up on their mission of finding whatever it was they came for. They wander around for part of the afternoon and then eventually manage to trickle out the front doors. They probably lose their cars in the parking lot, like I did, but here's a hint: if you just keep walking around purposefully out there like you know where you're going, nobody can tell you're lost. If you ask any of those old men later that evening what they did that day, they will look at you with a bewildered expression, which is not all that different from their usual expression, and say, "I went to Walmart."

I eventually found a round plastic can of wipes for car interiors, and I was pretty amazed that I found it. It occupied about 12 inches of linear shelf-frontage in a vast wall of other stuff, on an aisle adjacent to twelve other very similar aisles, and the employee had pointed to it from a football field away, and I found it anyway. I was a little proud of myself. Next, you wander until you detect daylight, and head toward that. Sometimes you merely sense it. Eventually you will get to a long stretch of cash registers, all of which say "CLOSED" except two, which both have long lines. At that point you are within an automated self-checkout payment of freedom, so keep going.

Ignore that orange warning light
My car came home yesterday, by the way. It was at the dealership because no one could figure out a persistent problem with the TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system).

This popped up about two years ago. At that time I took it to the Honda dealer in Canandaigua and asked if they could have a go at it, to save me the drive all the way to Rochester to the Acura dealer. (My car is an Acura, but Acura is a division of Honda, and my car is based on the Honda Civic.) I waited patiently, and presently the Service manager came out to talk to me. He kind of hemmed and hawed, saying that he didn't know if Acura used the same machine as his, and that Acura might have different codes than their machine used, and that I would probably be better off just taking it to Acura. I thanked him and left. In the interim I had several other places try to fix it, a couple of tire stores and a couple of independent mechanics. The light kept coming back on. It didn't really bother me much. It was merely an annoyance, no big deal. I learned to check the tires the old-fashioned way, and ignore the big orange warning panel that says "CHECK TPMS."

My car had to go to the Acura dealer for a different issue, so I asked them to take a look at the TPMS problem while they were at it. I, er, expressed my skepticism that it could be fixed. The Service manager said, "Oh, we'll fix it." When I picked the car up a week ago he told me the TPMS was fixed. I said, I dunno, that's been a pretty persistent issue. The light came back on before I even got home, same as usual.

But Acura is super-serious about standing behind their work. When I called and told them the light had come back on, that's when they sent a driver in a loaner car to pick up my car, so I wouldn't have to make the drive to Rochester again. They delivered an expensive, gleaming, brand new SUV, an RDX, for me to drive. They kept my car a whole week. No extra charge for any of this.

That's service.

Having not seen my own car for a week, it came to me in a flash of obviousness that it was dirty, hence the stop at the Wander and Hope. I had softened a good deal toward that Acura RDX that I ended up driving for one solid week. When they picked it up yesterday I still didn't know how to turn the radio on and off, but I had learned what a lot of the other features did and had started to relax into its weird mid-2020s vibe. I learned many things about it. If you can believe this, that damn car will drive itself on a more or less straight road, for miles, no hands on the wheel. It weaves gently from the fogline to the centerline and back again...until it reaches a curve, when it will go right across the centerline and into oncoming traffic. That seems a.) amazing, yet also b.) not a desirable functionality in any way, shape, form or fashion. We didn't hit anything.

So the reason they kept my car for so long was because the dealership was hosting a visiting Acura engineer for a day, for a completely separate matter, and they wanted him to take a look at my car while he was there. Well, guess what? The engineer discovered that the piece of testing equipment the dealership was using had gone bad.

He tested this hypothesis by driving my car to a nearby Honda dealership and getting them to fix the problem!

So everyone's happy. The Acura dealership discovered their equipment was faulty—they've ordered a new one, of whatever it is—the Acura engineer solved my issue, and my issue got solved, which is what I wanted.

I just think it's a little ironic, is all. If the first Honda dealer had just taken a shot at fixing the problem, it probably wouldn't have been a problem for the last two years. You know what they say: Oh well.

I can't complain. That's life. Life on life's terms.

Typing testThis post typed the old-fashioned way

Meanwhile, I'm using the chip-away method on my dirty car. Whenever I have a big task to do, I tackle it by doing just a little at a time. To "detail" the interior of my beloved 2014 Acura ILX 2.4 with manual transmission (that's it in the top illustration, taken in the dark with the iPhone), I get a container of those car interior wipes, keep it in the car, and just clean a little bit every day. The inside of a door one day, the body sill the next; the center console the next day; the top of the dash the day after that; and so on. Before you know it the whole inside of my car will gleam like new. 

Now I'm off to chip away a little bit more on my taxes.

Happy Easter to those of you celebrating!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David L.: "I work in a big box retail store. One of the most common searches is 'I’m looking for my wife/husband.'"

Steve Rosenblum: "As you know, Mike, here in Michigan we have these gigantic Meijer superstores (formerly called 'Meijer Thrifty Acres' before they decided to jettison the reference to their West Michigan Dutch Reformed roots). I believe they were pioneers of the 'superstore' concept because they had the combination grocery store/huge discount store thing going before I started college in 1970, long before Walmart and Target got on that bandwagon. I was amused by your post because even in my college days, long before I became an old man, I found myself in a kind of mild dissociative state after wandering around in there for quite a while trying to find the item I came there to buy without a helpful employee in sight. There didn't seem to be any logic to where things were located, or at least I was unable to perceive it. These days they are somewhat better organized; plus, many of the big box store apps will actually indicate on which section and shelf the item can be found."

Ken James: "Mike, that was the funniest thing I have read in like forever. It was made even more special for me because just on this past Thursday I went to Walmart for the first time ever! I was one of those old men shuffling about aimlessly in total amazement. I went there because they apparently carry a dog food I am feeding my rapidly declining old dog, and yep! I finally found the dog food department and, like you, after wandering that quarter-mile-long aisle for 10 minutes I spotted it on the vast wall in front of me on the very highest shelf, one case left occupying the same 12 inches of shelf space. The whole experience was truly surreal. I could also identify with wandering until I spotted daylight. What an experience. My wife had a similar experience with the tire pressure thing on her car too."

Speed: "Both Home Depot and Lowe's will tell your phone exactly where a product is if you tell them which of their stores you're standing in and exactly what product you are looking for. Their computer knows where their stuff is, why shouldn't you? Some Walmart stores do as well—maybe all but I've not yet shopped in all of their stores. And all three of the above will 'pick' all the products on your list, package them up, charge your credit card and have them waiting for you near the door. Target too."

Posted on Sunday, 31 March 2024 at 01:56 PM in Followups, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (35)

Friday, 29 March 2024

Back to Basics by Ctein

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his entire legal name) was a longtime regular columnist on TOP. This is a somewhat shortened version of a recent recent column from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Ctein is the author, with John Sandford, of the sci-fi thriller Saturn Run. Recently he has collaborated with David Gerrold on a new sci-fi book called Ripple Effect which you can start reading for free. All the information you need is here.

Guest post by Ctein

One of the things you discover pretty quickly if you're a regular writer of articles and columns for magazines is that you have to repeat yourself. There are two reasons for that: the first is that they are always new readers coming in who haven't read what's been written before. The second is that—remarkably—people don't remember every single word you've ever written.

What inspired me to do this was, in part, the business of posting my old TOP columns (over 300!), wherein I was reminded of this bit of wisdom. Along with the fact that I didn't remember everything I'd written...so how can I expect you to do so?!

Should you find yourself having questions about any of these assertions, please read the linked articles before girding for battle. You might find that I've already addressed your concerns.

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1. Photography Isn't Math...or Physics...

This first one's a bit meta: most of the fallacies (and stupid assertions) that I read online are due to people who think that photography and optics are simple things, amenable to easy calculation. They are not. It's not just that the devil is in the details; the devil frequently dominates! A good rule of thumb is that any time you see someone making an assertion that they back with the phrase "it's simply a matter of physics (or mathematics)"...they will not know what they're talking about. They are appealing to an authority that is nonexistent.

Related to that: Even when something is a matter of physics, it doesn't mean that physical law is limiting the technology. I can state as a matter of physics that rocket engineers can't build spacecraft that will travel faster than the speed of light. At our current levels of engineering, this is not particularly restricting their endeavors!

You may enjoy reading the following for expansion on these points.

—> Further Reading: "Reality Is Not Arithmetic" and "NOT Off-topic: Mathematics vs. Science"

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2. It Doesn't Take 10,000 Hours to Master a Craft

Also kinda meta...

Malcolm Gladwell inserted this dubious notion into the public consciousness with such success that people took it on face value. It was a most definite case of jumping way beyond the available data to a facile conclusion, but its very facilety (yeah, I know—not a word) made it so appealing.

Too bad that it's wrong, and that it has inhibited so many people from pursuing their passions, people who internalize that and say to themselves, "OMG, if I spent an hour a day on this every single day of my life, it would still take me three decades to get really good!"

I will present the counter-example that I happen to be most familiar with…me. (In case you're wondering this is by no means the only counter-example I know of, but it's the one I can document with authority.)

I am universally considered by my peers to have been one of the grand masters of dye transfer printing, although whether anybody truly masters this arcane art is another matter. I keep pretty good records of my time in the darkroom (see the citation below). By the time I hit 1,500 hours of practicing that craft, I was already recognized as one of the best printers in the business. Most certainly before I hit 3,000 hours I had learnt everything about dye transfer printing that I was ever going to.

It's also true that some people will spend their entire lifetime and never master their craft. Not everyone gets to be really good.

I don't think this is a matter of "innate talent" to anywhere near the extent that most people do. I feel people give way more weight to it than they should. I assert this without much evidence, I admit, but I think an awful lot of what people attribute to talent is entirely teachable: It's got a lot more with how you approach the task than what you bring to it.

—>Further Reading: "How Many Hours?"

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3. Focal Lengths Have Equivalents, Apertures Don't

To be sure, there are major advantages to being able to democratize the dialogue, but there were certain advantages to having professional gatekeepers. This particular bit of weirdness never showed up until online conversations took over the discourse.

Focal lengths have equivalents for different formats. For example, my Micro 4/3 format is almost exactly half the size of 35mm AKA "full-frame" format. There are modest differences in the proportions, but not enough to matter. Focal length determines the angle of coverage in a photograph, so it's correct to say that my Olympus M.Zuiko 75mm ƒ/1.8 lens is the equivalent of a full-frame 150mm lens. Both would convey about the same field of view in the photograph.

What is not correct is to claim that this ƒ/1.7 lens is the equivalent of a full-frame 150mm ƒ/3.5 lens! There is a technical term for that—"utter nonsense."

The f-number, along with the shutter speed, controls exposure. If your light meter is telling you that the exposure should be, oh, say, 1/100th of a second at ƒ/4, it's going to be 1/100th of a second at ƒ/4 no matter what format or focal length lens you are using. Assuming all the cameras have the same sensitivity/ISO setting, of course.

The know-it-(not-at)-all's will argue, "Yes, but the full-frame ƒ/1.8 lens collects four times as many photons." Sure, but then it's distributing those little buggers over four times the area, so the flux per square millimeter on the film/sensor remains the same. That's why the exposure doesn't change!

Having failed on that challenge, they will bring up the shallower depth of field in larger formats. The problem with that argument is that the relationship is highly dependent upon the distance to the subject, the focal length of the lens, the f-aperture, and the resolution of the camera. There is no simple equivalency.

Let's put a stake through the heart of this one if we can.

(Caveat for the uber-geeks: absolute aperture—diameter—rather than f-ratio matters when you're photographing point sources, like stars. This is why telescope/lenses intended for astrophotography include both the f-ratio and the aperture of the scope in their specs. The former will matter for photographing extended objects—e.g., the moon, planets, and nebulae—but the latter will matter for photographing isolated stars.)

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4. Zoom Lenses are Not Optically Worse than Prime Lenses

OK, this is one that I believed up until about a dozen years ago—that zoom lenses wouldn't perform as well, optically, as prime lenses. There were just too many design compromises that had to be made to get good performance over a range of focal lengths.

(If size, weight, and maximum aperture are concerns, then primes still hold the advantage. No question of that. I'm only talking about image quality.)

That was old wisdom, and by old I mean it was something I learned very early on. It probably remained true through the 20th century.

As I got more invested in the Olympus system, I found myself with a couple of zooms in my lens kit, along with some primo prime lenses. The zooms filled in the holes in my focal length choices, but I wondered how much I was compromising my picture quality by using them. Time to run tests!

You can read the detailed results in the citations below, but my overall conclusion was that the zoom lenses performed, on average, as well as the primes—in some cases better than the equivalent primes, in others not so much.

In conversations with other photographers, who also know their technical chops, I've heard the same thing. Lens design techniques and materials have advanced immensely in the past 50 years, and zooms have especially benefited from that.

I hope it's understood that I'm talking about averages here. Will any particular zoom beat out any particular prime lens? Who knows...until you run the tests. Some lenses are so spectacularly good that nothing can compare. Others? Meh.

—>Further Reading: "Zooms vs. Primes, Part I and Part II"

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Well, I think that's enough for this time. That's plenty to chew on, especially if you dive into the citations. In future columns you can expect me to attack many more prevalent myths…and more controversial ones; if you want to make sure you don't miss any of these, subscribe to my newsletter.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2024 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I (Mike) earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Posted on Friday, 29 March 2024 at 04:19 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech | | Comments (30)

Wednesday, 27 March 2024

Examples of 'Punctum'

I would be remiss if I were not to mention that "punctum," apart from being a coined word with a conscientious and earnest definition, is also a signifier. As such, it's actually one of the biggest clichés in photography writing. It's trotted out ad nauseam by generalist writers when they turn their attention to photography, as code for "I'm a serious intellectual and we're not just kidding around here, I'm smart and educated and I know my way around ideas and you should pay attention to what I say" or implications to that effect. Despite that "other life" of the word, I still stand by what I said the other day: "To my mind, punctum is the most important thing about photography overall and the most important thing of all things to understand."

A photojournalist friend, talking about how discouraging it is to wade around online looking at random photographs, called most modern photography "camera-pointing." He knows that's dismissive and denigrating, even though he's not that kind of guy. The term implies that the photographers have demanded virtually nothing from their subjects or themselves. Ansel Adams said, "there’s nothing worse than a clear, sharp image of a fuzzy concept," an idea he might have gotten from Jean-Luc Godard (Adams laughed when he said it, indicating it might have picked it up because it amused him). That very thing is epidemic in our current culture. Punctum is what separates random camera-pointing (which, confusingly, is pointless!) from photographs that work: that register, that draw us in, that land, that have staying power. Any photograph can have punctum, not just intentional art and expressive photographs. Actually, come to think, those often don't have it, though not for lack of trying.

I'm going somewhere with this, so hang in there.

I often rove about through the endless thickets of the internet simply looking at whatever pictures I stumble across. For instance, the other day I wrote the initial post about COVID-19 and mentioned the number of deaths from the Civil War. After looking into the matter I could have written an entire post on the various estimates, who came up with them, and when, and how; but it also led me down various rabbit holes relating to the Civil War. One was that I happened to recall a Civil War book I read in sixth or seventh grade called Across Five Aprils. The Civil War began in April 1861 when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, inflaming passions in the North. It ended in April of 1865 when the aristocratic General Lee surrendered to U.S. Grant at a small place called Appomattox Court House—that was the name of the village—in the home of Wilmer McLean. Hence the five Aprils. Ironically, the first battle of the Civil War, called First Bull Run, took place largely on Wilmer McLean's farm in Manassas, Virginia, and he fled to Appomattox to get away from the war and keep his family safe; and then the war formally ended in his parlor. Here's a photograph of the McLean house where the surrender took place, with the members of the McLean household on the steps.

Does that picture have a punctum? I don't think so. Not as a photograph per se. It's fascination comes from its significance, the association of the subject with the momentous event that took place there. Remove the significance, and it might be a nondescript carte de visite you'd flip past in the old photos bin at an antiques-slash-junk shop, pausing only momentarily.

Anyway, Across Five Aprils was the first book written by an author named Irene Hunt. It's still in print, and might still be read in grade schools for all I know. She was exactly of my grandparents' generation, and wrote only eight books, starting when she was 61 years old, which might explain why pictures of her are scarce. Then I remembered that I also read her second book, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl who wanted to be a writer. I was disappointed that her second book wasn't also about the Civil War. It came back to me that that book featured a character called "Uncle Haskell," a charming but dissolute alcoholic uncle who was supposedly writing a "magnum opus" that nobody ever saw. (An instance of that pesky myth of the Great American Novel again.) It was the first time I ever looked up magnum opus. The discovery the main character makes as she grows up is that Uncle Haskell turns out to actually know and care quite a bit about writing, and he becomes a mentor to the book's young protagonist. I admit that even as a young teenager I had an uncomfortable sensation of foreshadowing when it came to Uncle Haskell, a feeling like "that'll be me one day." Up a Road Slowly was too obviously a book for girls for my young self, so I didn't follow Ms. Hunt any further into her career. Perhaps I was also avoiding further contact with my shadow future, in the person of the ne'er-do-well Uncle Haskell.

Anyway, image searches on "Irene Hunt" and similar terms are how I ran across both these photographs:

Irene hunt

This is not the Irene Hunt, but rather, just an Irene Hunt. She shows up on the search page, but not on a linked site; I couldn't find out anything more about the picture.

Irene hunt 3
It's a hand-colored B&W photograph that looks like it dates from the 1930s or '40s. It shows a confident young woman with unruly hair. She seems beautiful to me, and looks to be at or near the peak of her sexuality; she has a hint of a sly or louche look in her expression, and her blouse or dress, modest enough, hints of dishabille. She might be younger than she appears—in those days people dressed and acted like adults starting very young, whereas people do the opposite today. The plain background suggests it might have been a backdrop for a production-line portrait such as a school picture. Is it a senior portrait? Possibly, but to me it looks more intentional than that, more skilled on both sides of the camera. Who is she looking at? Not the lens. Impossible to know, but it might have been a boyfriend, or a new interest. Or a new husband. The punctum I would say is her not-quite-right hair. Was she having a bad hair day, or trying to be fashionable and not quite pulling it off? Or it could simply have been a bad angle. I went back and forth on it. It's hard to see, but there appears to be a bow in her hair directly above her left eye, so I settled on "trying to be fashionable." She's wearing lipstick; I can imagine she might have gotten a bit dolled up to have her picture taken, and perhaps was getting some unaccustomed attention because of it, and that accounts for her expression.

Of course punctum is personal, and you might or might not like this photograph. I have affection for it, especially considering how close it is to being lost. (I would imagine the number of photographs lost every day run into the millions.)

If I'm right about the date, she's probably gone now, even if she lived a long life. (Irene Hunt the author, by the way, lived to be 98, and made it into the 2000s.) I'm always flummoxed by the presence of sexual attraction in people, or in characters in novels, who are not present in the world. Willa Cather's My Antonia was enigmatic for me in that sense. I think we like characters who are becoming rather than who were and are now known to be done and gone. Although Marilyn Monroe and James Dean would seem to belie that. Even the Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot of Le Morte D'Arthur spend most of their long epic in the promise of their unfolding futures.

In any event, we're seeing but one moment in that young woman's day, one slice out of a busy young life full of the things healthy young lives are full of. She herself was probably much more mindful of the flow of the rest of her life than merely of the instant of the exposure. But the latter is all we're left with. No matter who she was, she's a mystery now.

Irene hunt 2

This one might be a harder sell. It was an illustration in a critical article about Across Five Aprils, but not otherwise identified or discussed. It's clearly old, but how old is not obvious. It appears yellowed, is torn along the bottom edge, and shows foxing in the light sky area. It has a tear along the bottom border area. It shows three individuals, all probably Black and all probably male. They appear to be cutting wheat, although I'm no expert. I first read it as three boys, although that might not be true; the person with the scythe might be a grown man, and the individual bending over could be a man or a boy. It appears to be a snapshot, not carefully made. Whoever made it took no care to get the horizon straight. Like many historical photographs, it probably documents a passing moment in several lives that have run their entire courses now. It has a certain bucolic or pastoral charm, a certain nostalgia, although that's only good from a distance—it might well have been a hot day and the people were probably working hard at a job that was very familiar to them and that had little variety and less appeal.

It set me off on a sort of reverie about how utterly anonymous most of our lives really are. It's no wonder that we like to imagine God as a being that sees every sparrow fall—it's reassuring in a way to believe that the actions and activities of our lives are not lost the minute they happen, or the moment they fall out of the conscious memories of those who witnessed them. Familiar jobs and unremarkable work take up a lot of our lives, and are perhaps the least likely thing even we ourselves remember. The thought that struck me about this is that these people don't give any sign that they knew their picture was being taken. A brief moment of their lives was commemorated for posterity, and they had no idea. Or so it seems. The punctum for me in this photograph is the unstudied poses their bodies take as they work, economical from repetition and familiarity. All three are "in drawing," as art historians might say, as graceful as if they were drawn by Jean Francois Millet, of the Barbazon school, who occupied himself on a different continent with scenes not dissimilar to this one.

These are just two of many. I felt we should discuss at least a few pictures when talking about a theoretical term. These just happened to pull me in this week. My life's been a slow-flowing river of images, passing like the minutes and the hours pass. As long as they give me something to think about, I don't mind.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

[A different] Mike: "Your observations about the photo of the field workers and generally about anonymous lives reminded me of a quotation attributed to Gandi: 'What you do will not matter, but it is very important that you do it.'"

Benjamin Marks: "Consider in that photo of the mowers that they are on a hill. I say this because the tree and edge of the house in the background are almost parallel with the edge of the frame. The image is off by one or one-and-a-half degrees counter-clockwise. But if the picture were corrected for that, the horizon would be even more 'tilted' than it is. Hence, I conclude that it the workers are on a road that is traveling uphill to the right of the frame. This is a quibble though.... Great post! P.S. I am personally punctum-less, in the sense that my brain won't hold onto the concept. Every time I read the term, it is like encountering it for the first time. Even as I write this, I can feel the concept slipping out of focus and receding from my working vocabulary. Whups! There it goes...."

David Aiken (partial comment): "Re 'I think we like characters who are becoming rather than who were and are now known to be done and gone.' In my retirement I’ve discovered a respect for novels that I’ll call 'coming of age' stories. That description is usually applied to tales about people making the transition to adulthood, the process of leaving school and starting work and/of finding a partner but I’ve come to realise that the reason I respond to these stories is that they’re archetypal tales of the issues we all face at various times of our lives. There’s a sense in which every major transition in our life is a coming of age experience and novels about people facing major shifts or changes in their life, whatever their age, are just as much a 'coming of age' story as novels about the transition to adulthood."

Mike replies: The lit-crit term is Bildungsroman (pluralize by adding an "e") because it sounds more impressive in German,  :-)  and the Wikipedia article includes a useful list of titles, from Jane Eyre and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Outsiders to The Kite Runner and Washington Black.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "As a commercial photographer who is very interested in the world of photography as art, I do find the cliché use of the word in question to be true and guilty as charged. I am critical of, and fascinated by, the use of this overly intellectualized description of art, including photography.

"But the word punctum, and what it tries to describe in photography, is obviously valid. I tend to get to that 'thing' as I ask myself questions about a given image—either my own while editing (mostly) or others while viewing. Is there anything special about this image? Is there something unique about it that gives it an edge? That 'unique edge' is that quality that separates a great photograph from a set of 'good' images. Could be any of its elements—composition, color, gesture, light, etc. But a great photograph must have something that sets it apart."

Posted on Wednesday, 27 March 2024 at 04:46 PM in Books, Photographic aesthetics, Random Snaps | | Comments (23)

Tuesday, 26 March 2024

A Great Article About Barthes and 'Camera Lucida'

By far the coolest thing about blogging, at least in my personal experience, is that you learn something as the result of almost every post. For example, when I wrote about appliances this week—appliances, of all things—we heard from Rob, the owner of "a large elderly apartment project" who has purchased hundreds of appliances, and Peter Jeffrey Croft, who is an electronics tech. Almost no matter what I write about, we hear from somebody who knows a lot more about it than I do, and we get to access that person's expert knowledge or practical experience. It almost never fails.

People do complain that we get on "jags" a lot, where one post on something leads to more. But that's kinda the way it goes when a discussion topic gets going, that's all. I don't sit down to write multiple posts about anything. It just works out that way.

Anyway, after I wrote "Punctum Def" the other day, an attempt to define Barthes' idea of the punctum, or telling detail, I heard from Ken Dixon, who sent me a link to his essay "Lucida and Me."

"Lucida and Me" might honestly be the best thing I've ever read about Camera Lucida. Ken both takes Barthes to task for his faults and flaws holding nothing back—he is scathing on the topic of punctum and the very word itself—but he is also lavish in his praise for the book's accomplishments, which he communicates with clear-eyed precision. "Punctum" he calls "a needlessly obscure way of saying that certain photographs have a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones—a commonplace that when draped in Latin becomes a shiny original thing, a breathtakingly sophisticated utterance." Made me laugh. At any rate, managing cutting criticism and fulsome praise in the same short essay is the mark of an experienced writer with a confident compass.

I've always suspected that a telltale of real admiration is when you wish you'd done something yourself—you see a photograph and think "man, I wish I'd taken that." It can happen in just about any field. A chef might wish he had developed a certain recipe after tasting a dish at a restaurant; a songwriter might hear a wonderful song and wish she had written it. It's a bit narcissistic—something is so good that you'd be willing to fold it into the precious self? How kind! Still, I occasionally read an essay or an article and I'll think, man, I wish I had written that. It's jealously to some extent, but also an expression of wholehearted admiration too.

'Too True'
Ken told me that the essay is included in his book Too True, but when I searched "Too True Kenneth Dixon" on Amazon I got crickets. You have to search for K.B., not Kenneth. I have not read Too True yet—I'm in the middle of Autobiography of a Supertramp at the moment—but it's in the queue. I hope I'll have the discipline to write a review of it here once I've read it.

"Lucida and Me" is a tasty intro, tho'. I'll ask you what you thought of it a week from now. Please remind me if I forget.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

calvin amari: "I note that this critique begins with a contrast: the author 'read the Sontag book [On Photography] many years ago with pleasure.'

"I find that odd, because I think Sontag’s overall view of photography is more skeptical than Barthes’. But might it be that, despite Sontag’s skepticism of photography, Ken Dixon was taken with a good number of the book’s trenchant observations about the medium? Perhaps, for example, Sontag's observation about photographs of politicians that: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.' If so, I agree, but that line—and at least a half dozen others that I have flagged in an old paperback copy that is not only heavily dog-eared and underlined but also bears some bruises from being helicoptered across the room at least once—is lifted without citation from something Barthes penned 20 years before: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'"

Mike replies: Goes to the intensity with which artists/writers/thinkers want to be their idols, perhaps? I believe I read once that Samuel Beckett so admired James Joyce that he not only wore the same type of shoes as Joyce, but in Joyce's size, even though they were too small for his own feet! And another author, I forget whom, who fair-copied their idol in longhand as a way of grabbing on to the elusive magic of the cadence and tone of the admired prose.

Michael Hill: "It's not often I come across someone reading The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp...W.H. Davies is my great uncle so I just had to comment.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Cool!

It deserves to be considered a cult book, since the band Supertramp took their name from it and a famous tragic hero took it as his name (Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, of the book [and movie] Into the Wild. The book is an engrossing read. I haven't seen the movie). Not to the level of The Catcher in the Rye perhaps, but in the same precincts. As you probably know, your great-uncle was skeptical of his own title, but his champion George Bernard Shaw convinced him to keep it!

David Comdico: "Barthes is a great and subtle writer and Camera Lucida is a wonderful exploration of his own phenomenological response to photographs, but it is a categorical error to apply his ideas to photography itself. He more or less admits this, as he does in the epilogue to Mythologies where he concedes a necessary degree of subjectivity which in Camera Lucida is taken to an extreme.

"In short, the punctum is not a photographic property. It is an artifact of (Barthes’) perception and experience. He cleverly does not include the photo which has the most meaning to him, that of his mother, because, he says, it would have little to no meaning to the average reader. There is a fair amount of subterfuge here, related to Barthes’ larger project of de-centering the author and replacing him or her with the critic.

"What’s interesting, and ironic, is how pervasive this worldview has become and how the deconstructionist take is assumed as a given, as 'a thing that goes without saying.' Many photographers now simply think of themselves as critics with a camera, which allows them to be both sophisticated and indolent."

Mike replies: Yes. As I used to say, photography is not about photography.

Posted on Tuesday, 26 March 2024 at 02:14 PM in Around the Web, Books | | Comments (11)

Monday, 25 March 2024

Blue-Sky Tech (OT)

[UPDATE No. 2, AKA UPDATE to the UPDATE: This is so cool. I figured it out!!! I managed to open the Sweep in Vial, and I figured out how to program the "tapdance" mods. Too long and not interesting to give all the details, but I think I'm going to be able to figure out how to do 90% or even 95% of what I originally wanted to do. I've actually programmed alpha keys on the top layer to double as Control, Option, and Command. Plus I'm getting used to the little keeb after some practice. I'm as fired up now as I was depressed when I wrote the first update. This ain't over yet babies!

Onward.]

[UPDATE after I learned a little more about what I'm talking about: In my 12-step program we have a principle that states, "continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it." Well, I was wrong. The keyboard described below, which I bought because it was the cheapest 34-key keyboard I could find, arrived yesterday. To my dismay, it is not flashed with the firmware it has to have to use the software I need. It uses VIA, and I need Vial, which has the "Tapdance" feature that would allow me to assign different actions to the same key, such as the shift functionality I described in this post.

Another quote: you remember in Goodfellas when Henry Hill narrates in voiceover, "It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball sh*t." Well, these minimal keyboards are real hotshot sh*t. It is among the mavens and the keyboard fanatics. For instance, many of them require you to do your own programming and many of them sell out after limited runs. Mine was 3D printed and handmade to order. That is, the whole category is mostly a hobby among keyboard wizards, some of whom code or program for a living and who use various programming languages and are comfortable working directly in code. Whereas I couldn't even define any of those terms with a gun to my head. Michael W. Plant asked which Ferris Sweep I bought and where I got it, but I can't recommend the one I bought...unless you're competent to flash your own firmware (which, the Vail website tells me, casually but hilariously, I might have to code myself. Right, that's going to happen).

The only products in this category I would recommend are by ZSA. ZSA is the hotshot sh*t made ready for prime time. The ZSA Voyager is a fully developed consumer product. A Voyager was what I really wanted, but I was too miserly to spring for one. I bought the Sweep trying to get something "almost as good" but cheaper. ZSA's products are expensive, but part of what you buy is the programming software which is powerful and easy to use. It's called Oryx, and you can try it out online before buying. VIA and Vial are free and can be used online, but VIA is very simple and doesn't allow for a lot of the functionality Oryx does. It's mainly just for layout remapping. I knew that, as is the case whenever you try to cheap out, it was a calculated risk and that I might just be throwing money away. And, well, sure enough. It was a gamble.

Here are reviews of the ZSA Voyager by my two favorite online keyboard reviewers, Ben Vallack and Ben Frain.

I considered just deleting this post but there have already been lots of comments [Featured Comments have been added] and oh well, TOP is surely warts 'n' all. As John Hall commented, "Mike, you're nuts. But we love it." Fortunately, I am at the stage of learning Colemak in which I'm just typing lowercase nonsense words on keybr.com and Colemak Club. So I can use the Ferris Sweep I bought just for the alpha characters (remapped to Colemak, which is easy to do) to experiment with the 34-key form-factor. Thus it still works for demystification, to an extent. So not a total loss. 

I'll leave this up, but proceed here with caution.... 

By the way, this will be the last keyboard post until February 2025. I started this "voyage" in February '24, while I was recovering from my pacemaker procedure and couldn't play pool. I'll report back at the year mark. Till then!]

Continue reading "Blue-Sky Tech (OT)" »

Posted on Monday, 25 March 2024 at 12:00 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (22)

Saturday, 23 March 2024

My 'Video' Camera

Just as a finishing touch to the stills-versus-video posts last week, I should mention again that my main "real work" camera today (I have three cameras in the rotation and mostly use two of them) is primarily a video camera. I've never used it to shoot video. The Sigma fp is available in two resolutions, 24 MP and 61 MP (the fp-L). Mine is the former. Most of its functionality and a lot of its features are aimed squarely at video. It was evidently intended to be the core of elaborate video rigs with other video equipment (microphones, hard drives, monitors etc.) hung on the cage. It doesn't even have a physical shutter, nor does it have a real built-in eyepiece viewfinder. It has only limited features and rudimentary capabilities for stills photography.

The thought has crossed my mind that maybe that might be part of the reason I like it. I want my camera to be basic and simple and my fp is rather basic and simple...when used for stills. Stills photography was probably an afterthought—surely secondary—during its design, included only because why not.

I suppose I could parse this suspicion with a deeper dive into its feature sets for video and stills, followed by a detailed comparison with competing cameras. But I don't have the interest. I'd rather spend my energy describing the features I use and how I have them set up, which I will do someday. Suffice to say that I have it set up, and use it, as a stills-only, B&W-only camera. In my mind, I think of it as a digital 4x5 loaded with HP5+. The results are similar, and, like 4x5, it rewards careful, thoughtful and deliberate work. It isn't very good for quick reactive shots, candids, or note-taking. For those I use the iPhone. For portraits I used the Fuji X-T1. (My son inherited my X-H1.)

I had the fp converted to B&W-only by having its CFA (color filter array) removed. I had already paid for this expensive modification when a generous reader volunteered to cover the cost. Shortly thereafter, because the Universe likes to taunt me like that (okay, I kid, but only sorta), Pentax came out with the K3 III Monochrome. What are the odds? If the timing had been different I would have bought the Pentax and lived happily ever after. But I'm actually okay with the fact that it didn't happen that way, because I love my modded Sigma. I even love that it's so odd and quirky. I love that it's probably possible to fit all the photographers in the world who use it like I use mine into one living room, probably with room left over. The viewfinder I have (and love) is a chimney magnifier turned sideways that enlarges the viewing screen on the back of the camera. It has to be carefully capped off when not in use because sunlight through the magnifier could damage the viewing screen. My camera (not the fp itself, but mine) is...a contraption. And I like that about it.

I'm still surprised that 80% of all real cameras aren't made for either stills or video but not both, with dual-purpose cameras that do both comprising maybe 20% of the market's offerings and sold at a premium. That's not the way things evolved. I'm surprised by a lot of other things in current culture too, not just the conventions around cameras.

If I were advising anyone else who wanted a B&W camera, though, I would simply say to go for the Pentax, or consider one of the B&W Leicas if you can afford them and they appeal to you. They are popular and well regarded.

Although I'm surprisingly happy with where I ended up, it's important to note that I'm still a refugee. I've "made do" with something not really designed or intended to be what it is I'm after. In an ideal world (I'm an idealist by personality type), things would be different. That doesn't mean I'm any less grateful. I'm extremely happy with my camera, which itself is strange given my history. I'm very fortunate to have found such a good workaround. I'm already worrying about when it gets old and breaks.

So, yes, I know you can buy a hybrid camera and just ignore the video functionality. It's what I do, in spades.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Kye Wood: "There are so many analogue/digital and simple/feature-packed correlations in the tools needed for other endeavours. Last night I bought the simplest guitar amplifier I could find. Not the cheapest. Of the smallest. And, as with the Sigma fp, there are compromises to be made in order to be blessed with such simplicity. But you get to enjoy the process—without the cognitive noise of other features trying to cut in, to steal the dance of enjoyment.

"P.S. Quality woodworking tools do one thing, properly. You put one down, to pick up another, to do a different task. Which imbues the end result with a glow of satisfaction that lives long past the end of the task."

Bear.: "Apart from fine art photography shot for only for printing, most professional photographers require hybrid cameras—photojournalists are compelled to produce video or vlogs to go with print/photo pieces; video journalists vice versa; my brother in law is a radio journalist but is required to produce corresponding print / video reports for every story; wedding photographers are required also to supply video footage; medical / science/ police photographers all ditto. So I don’t think it’s surprising at all that most serious still cameras in the market cater, to a greater or lesser extent, to video. And vice versa for serious video cameras. The market for wholly specialised equipment is just too small. Face it,Mike, we’re just dinosaurs soon to be extinct…."

Pak-Ming Wan: "This happily-ever-after feeling is real when you've found the right tool for what you want to do. I didn't think I would like B&W as much as I did, mostly influenced by reading this blog and Luminous Landscape in the 2000s, where I went through the whole time-compressed experience of learning how to shoot with B&W film then the transition to digital, and finally with B&W digital."

Posted on Saturday, 23 March 2024 at 09:47 PM | | Comments (9)

Update: Miracle

UPDATE: It's a miracle! Randy the repairman arrived today all cheerful, then got progressively more fatalistic as the washing machine came apart. Diagnosis: the circuit board was shot. Repair estimate: with labor, well over the price of a new machine. For a machine bought new in 2012, in a world where new washing machines are designed to last 10 to 12 years. Of course I refused the repair estimate. Which meant I had to pay for the service call. As I was filling in the form with my credit card number and thinking ahead to how I was going to go about getting a new one, he was putting my broke-down old one back together.

Then I heard a familiar little electronic blibbety-blip-blip! and Randy says, "well, would you look at that!"

Incredibly, the machine was working again. I said, "how did you do it?" He said, "I have no idea." He thought maybe it only needed a reboot. I came to a more logical conclusion: he's a magician. He charged me just for the service call, and I've done two loads of laundry since then. Not only the best possible, but also the least probable outcome.

We got a nice covering snow this morning, and tonight the air is bell-clear and the moon is nearly full and casting shadows. Clearly, leprechauns and sprites are out dancing in the snowy woods. The chipmunks are consorting with field mice, and fisher-cats are smoking cheroots. And I stand a chance of getting through tax season without having to buy a new washing machine. I'm ecstatic about it. Truly, a miracle.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Peter Jeffrey Croft: "As an electronics tech, it's no miracle that it came good. Connectors are the weak point of electronics PCBs, and simply removing then re-plugging will often make something come good. The other point is that electronic components are cheap. To be asked to replace a complete board for the sake of a 50¢ capacitor or a $2 semiconductor is a manufacturer ripoff. On the other hand, the chargeable hours needed to diagnose and fault-find at component level probably makes it cheaper to replace the whole board these days. It's a tough call. What you hope for is a tech who's familiar with the component(s) that fail and can replace/rebuild in quick time. But good techs like that are rare and unrewarded."

Dave: Re 'And I stand a chance of getting through tax season without having to buy a new washing machine.' Well, I hope so. But as easily as it started working again, it could stop. Plan to save some money each week to pay for the inevitable replacement machine. I don't know if any washing machine is available without electronic circuits for all functions, but it would be nice to have an all-mechanical method to time the wash cycle, rather than trusting electronics in a somewhat moist environment. Good luck!"

Daniel: "Start looking for a new Washing machine. Once you have circuit board problems you are asking for a flooded room or failure without notice. Might as well get ahead of it before disaster strikes."

Posted on Saturday, 23 March 2024 at 09:38 PM in Followups | | Comments (9)

Friday, 22 March 2024

Ctein on COVID (OT)

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his entire legal name) was a longtime regular columnist on TOP. After my update about COVID-19 the other day he offered to let me reproduce this recent column from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Ctein is the author, with John Sandford, of the sci-fi thriller Saturn Run. Recently he has collaborated with David Gerrold on a new sci-fi book called Ripple Effect which you can start reading for free. All the information you need is here.

Guest post by Ctein

Recently I've run across sufficiently valuable new information and products that I feel it's worth my time to write a column on a subject that we are all heartily sick of (I'm sorry, the bad jokes just won't stay suppressed). It's very likely that most of you know some of this information, but I'd be surprised if more than a handful of you know all of it.

Three questions:

"How can I reduce my chances of getting COVID?"

"How can I tell if I have COVID?"

"If I've gotten COVID, how can I tell when I'm no longer infectious?"

Before I get into it, I have two caveats:

The first is that some of the advice I'll be giving here does not correspond to what you are getting from your public/government health officials. That's not because any of us are wrong (okay, we might be, but not for this reason), but because our circumstances and goals are different. Public health is trying to minimize the overall societal risk by reducing the total number of cases without causing an unacceptable level of social disruption. That's not the same as minimizing personal risk. They also have to live in the world of the political, in contrast to the ideal, so they need to make recommendations that enough people will follow to produce the maximum feasible beneficial result.

In other words, they are trying for a kind of optimal "overall good enough," whereas I'll be talking about things aimed towards minimizing your individual risks.

The second caveat, sadly, relates to that aforementioned world of the political. Ever since our ex wannabe-dictator decided to wage war against rational, factual, scientific discourse, the world has been flooded with what is frankly antiscience and anti-sense bullshit. I do like being right—I've got two epidemiology/biomedical researchers on tap, and I read a whole bunch of primary medical journal articles (and rely on my expert friends to explain them to me when they're over my head). That means I really do want to know when I'm factually wrong! Please let me know if you find something in a primary source (a scientific journal article or an original research paper) that suggests that I am in error. I'd very much appreciate pointers to those, and I promise I will take it seriously. Please, though, no references to popular articles, newspapers, some other authority's pronouncements, etc. I want the source data, not someone's interpretation or opinion.

Now on to the purpose of this column:

"How can I reduce my chances of getting COVID?"

Taffix is an aerosol powder that you squirt up your nose, where it forms a gel coating inside the nostrils that traps viruses for up to five hours per dose. This isn't the first product to claim to do that, and my expert friends have been extremely skeptical of all of them, because none of them have provided studies that confirm that they actually work to reduce infection rates—it's all been supposition. This one has been tested, and although the studies were modest, the results were so striking that they made converts of my experts. They've been using Taffix, as have I. One of them even bought a multi-pack so they could distribute bottles to their friends.

Taffix is not a substitute for an N-95 mask; consider it a second barrier level that catches most of the viral particles that get through or around your mask. If I were to make a very crude guess, I would say it reduces the odds of getting infected by another factor of two or three. Obviously it's a whole lot less effective if you're talking or eating a lot, but seeing as there are no ill side effects and it's very cheap, it falls in the category of every little bit helps reduce your risk. Taffix has not been approved for distribution of the US, although it is in Europe and Israel (where it was developed). You can get it through eBay from distributors outside the US, who will happily ship here. Choose wisely—look for someone who has lots of positive feedback responses. You should be able to find Taffix for about $20 a bottle, including shipping. One bottle will last you two months, if you're using it every day for a full day (one dose is good for about five hours).

Taffix interferes with nasal-swab testing, so I'd strongly recommend that you do your testing (LAMP, PCR, or antigen) before you use Taffix on any particular day.

"How can I tell if I have COVID?"

Antigen tests are not reliable indicators of whether or not one has COVID; they are especially bad at detecting asymptomatic or very low grade infections, the kind you might not even notice. Even worse, in mild cases they're not likely to produce a positive result until you've been infectious for as much as two days. This is, as we technical folks would say, "sucky."

RNA amplification, your PCR laboratory test, can detect the disease quickly, early, and at very low levels of infection. PCR is strictly in-lab, but there is another amplification procedure, LAMP, that is nearly as good and is available in a do-it-yourself home test. Lucira (now part of Pfizer) has a home LAMP test that's very reliable but also very expensive. You'd know within 30 minutes whether or not you'd been infected, but you paid dearly.

That was worth it to me—I just got back from a week's trip to Minneapolis, and I immediately took a LAMP test, so that I could confirm that I hadn't gotten infected on the trip. If it had come up positive, Paula and I would've been able to quickly quarantine from each other so she faced minimal risk. Great...but $75 a pop is outside most people's budgets, including ours for routine use.

There's a new test on the market called Metrix from Aptitude Medical Systems and it's only $25! AMS has been making home blood glucose tests for some years, so they are not new to this business. Like the Lucira test, Metrix produces results within 30 minutes, but it's about six times more sensitive than Lucira. You can also use it with either a nasal or throat swab (Lucira doesn't work with a throat swab—yup, I tried). You can even just spit in the reaction chamber, if you can't tolerate swabs.

At $25 a test, Metrix runs a bit more than twice the price of a two-test antigen kit, but it is sufficiently sensitive that you can test two people at the same time and still have a high degree of confidence in the results. Paula and I have reason to do that frequently, at which point it's hardly any more expensive than antigen testing.

It's important to keep in mind is that a PCR/LAMP test will tell you if you've contracted COVID, but it is not useful for telling you when you've gotten over your infection. Viral RNA can circulate in the body for a considerable length of time after the infection has been vanquished. In the first year of the pandemic there were reports of mysterious cases where people continued to (PCR) test positive for weeks, sometimes months, after they otherwise were entirely disease-free. Now we know why! (That's the opposite of long COVID, where symptoms last for months even though tests say you're clear of infection.)

Which takes me to my last topic:

"If I've gotten COVID, how can I tell when I'm no longer infectious?"

Unfortunately, there is no really clean and convenient answer to this one, although the safety protocols have become considerably less onerous over the past couple of years. Other than just waiting it out for an ungodly length of time, the only test we have is the antigen test. Antigen tests produce a lot of false negatives, to they're not not very trustworthy, especially when you consider mild cases. Nonetheless, it does correlate with infectiousness, so it's not entirely useless.

Consequently, once you've contracted COVID, a single negative antigen test does not assure you that it's now safe to expose yourself to other people. Two tests a day apart, a commonly quoted protocol, is not a very good indicator—really it isn't, no matter what you read on the web! The closest we have to a gold standard (well, more like bronze or pot metal), is three tests separated by 48-hour intervals. Yes, five days is a long time, but it's better than how things used to be, that's all I can say. If you come up negative on all three, the odds are good that you're no longer infectious and you are not going to relapse. It's not even close to perfect, but "good" is as good as it gets for now.

Erring on the side of caution
Lest you think I'm simply being paranoid and overly fussy, here's a not-so-fun coincidence for you!

A couple of weeks back, while I was mapping out this column in my head, one of my sweeties came down with COVID. We were supposed to have a date last Friday. She finally tested negative early last week; in fact, she tested negative twice...but there wasn't enough time between the second test and Friday evening to run the third. Regretfully, I told her we had to cancel the date out of caution. The next day, Saturday, her third test came up positive—the so-called "rebound" infection.

I am well aware of that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but that doesn't mean it's entirely ignorable!

I do expect that COVID will eventually catch up with me, being endemic, but that does not mean I hold with the people who say, "It's inevitable that I'm going to get it sooner or later, so why try?"

Death is also inevitable (or so it is rumored—I am continuing to do research and I'll report back when I have definitive conclusions) but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to put it off just a bit longer.

Your mileage may differ. It probably does.

Still, to quote the police sergeant on an ancient TV show, "Let's be careful out there."

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2024 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate Mike earns from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Posted on Friday, 22 March 2024 at 09:29 PM in Ctein | | Comments (28)

Thursday, 21 March 2024

Cloud of Locusts

Sorry for the lack of new content these past two days. I have been, er, distracted. Things have been breaking again.

I finally got my water system fixed after a 2 1/2 week ordeal (no more bottled water, yeah!), but the car is AWOL again, and this morning I came downstairs, put the laundry in the washing machine, poured detergent in the cup, and...the machine is stone dead. Dang. I have spent more on that thing than a new one costs. Each repair only costs a few hundred dollars, but then there's another repair, and then another. I must have $1,100 invested in that $600 washing machine.

To their credit, this time the Acura dealership delivered the loaner to me, and their driver took my Acura back to Rochester to visit its relatives. So I didn't have to make the drive. That's service. The loaner is a brand new, loaded RDX "Premium Crossover." It's very nice, to somebody else's definition of nice. To me...well, it's wearing on my nerves. There's a series of buttons, bars and levers in place of the PRND control; I'm praying there will not be a quiz at any point. The driver's side mirror resets itself at a useless angle every time I turn the vehicle  off and on, and I'm at a loss. I think I've finally gotten the seat to stop doing the same. If there's a parking brake, I don't know where. Does "crossover" mean it's supposed to be on the small side? It's not. It's huge. It weighs two tons. I have not discovered how to turn the "infotainment" screen off, so it glows balefully at me while I drive at night, neither info'ing nor tainmenting.

I know I should just try to enjoy the experience. It's a luxury truck, with real wood trim, it probably costs $55k, and everything works. Smack in the middle of the current culture's current preferences. But I don't even like driving it. It's unbalanced, uncomfortable, slow- and sluggish-seeming because it's too high, and outward visibility to the sides and rear is awful. The steering—which more than anything determines the character of a car—is bad too, twitchy, with poor tracking, and the steering ratio feels awkward for normal 90° turns. The vehicle is so loaded with electronics, motors, chips and nanny-modes that it seems to have a mind of its own. I finally managed to turn the radio on today—Pyrrhic victory—but then couldn't turn it off, so I drove helplessly mile after mile with Faux News blaring at my ears. I finally had to pull over to the side of the road to futz around with the radio so as to stop endangering pedestrians, bicyclists, passing motorists, pets, and small woodland creatures. I cannot see how owners are supposed to feel pride of ownership in the RDX either, because—well, first, its name is three random letters—but also because it looks like every other SUV, which means, pretty much every other vehicle on the road. The seat hurts my butt and won't stay put and the pedals are in the wrong places, like they're designed for two-foot drivers. When I am in it I feel like it would rather have me out of it. Warning lights blink at you from every direction.

As much as I loved the Integra Type S I drove the other day, I don't like automatics, I don't like trucks, and I don't like vehicles that are loaded with electronics, so the RDX is not my cup of tea. If I won it in a contest I'd sell it. Still, it was very nice of Acura to deliver it in place of my car so I don't have to drive to Rochester again. wasn't it? May I please have my car back soon, though, please? I miss it.

At least it has a spacious "far back" (as we used to call the cargo areas of old-fashioned station wagons) so I can haul clothes to the laundromat. Looks like I'll be doing that for a while. Because my appliance repairman, like my former plumber, has vanished during the pandemic. The internet has been scrubbed of all trace of him.

Oh well, all these things are only things. But honestly, what's next for me, a cloud of locusts? Maybe so. I should stop complaining.

More soon. We're going to hear from Ctein soon, after lo these many years.

Mike

P.S. I am seriously star-crossed with laundry machines. I have a long history of mishaps, misfortunes, wasted money, mistakes, wrong moves, and disasters when it comes to laundry machines. Only one has ever gone the other way: an ancient 1970s Maytag I inherited with my Waukesha house in 2000. I used that for 14 more years without a problem. With every other washing machine I ever encountered or owned, there has been bad luck, the bleeding of money, and chaos.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ChrisC: "You’ll be happy to hear that various crash safety authorities, possibly lead by Europe, are proposing to mandate physical controls for certain key features like turn signals, wipers, etc., in order to achieve a five-star safety rating. I’m not really a fan of touchscreens in cars and have seen some very bad implementations of them over the years. At last someone has the sense to stop them taking over everything."

Trygve Strömberg: "You must be haunted. When we moved into our house we bought a new washing machine, a German Miele. It’s still working after 35(!) years. Keeping my fingers crossed."

Rob: "Having purchased hundreds of appliances while owner of a large elderly apartment project, appliances are a no-win proposition. We learned quickly to only by basic models with the fewest features and to never pay for repairs. We also never bought extended warranties. We found basis Speed Queens most reliable for washing machines."

Chris Kern: "Mike: 'I am seriously star-crossed with laundry machines. I have a long history of mishaps, misfortunes, wasted money, mistakes, wrong moves, and disasters when it comes to laundry machines.'

"My policy with respect to household appliances is that when they fail out-of-warranty, replace them. Modern appliances apparently have been designed to actively resist field repairs. Cars: Keep them for as long as they are able to convey you hither and thither. My wife and I both drive geriatric Subarus, 14 and 12 years old, respectively. They seem to thrive on my very infrequent efforts at preventive maintenance (with a local repair shop; they have only seen the inside of a dealer’s service department for a couple of warranty repairs—and those were years ago.) Computing devices (desktops, laptops, cellphones, tablets, and any associated peripheral devices): Keep them until their performance makes using current software intolerable. Also, be wary of operating system upgrades as long as the version you are running is still supported. Cameras: Use them, sell them, buy new ones. Keep the inventory small and enjoy the frequent churn."

Eric Brody: "There are two kinds of drivers, those who love the electronics and those who don't. I'm one of the former, my 2023 plug-in hybrid (brand is irrelevant) and just love all the things it can do from warning me about someone in my blind spot to keeping me in the lane, to stopping me before I run into something. I love the cruise control that speeds me up to the set speed when there's no one ahead to slowing me down to keep a set distance from the car ahead. I have found that these features decrease the stress and fatigue of driving. No, I don't and wouldn't let the car drive itself (no Tesla for me for political reasons), even if it could. My brother-in-law is just the opposite. His fancy car CAN do most of these things but he'd not do any of them... ever. Sorry the RDX displeases you. It might save your life though."

John Hufnagel: "I well understand your pain. Our 2019 Honda hybrid has an owner's manual that is over 650 pages long. It is only available as a pdf, but browsing that document on a phone is a PITA. The previous car's manual fit easily into the glove box or door pocket. To me, this is analogous to perusing the menus on my Canon R6 vs. using my old Canon F-1. More functionality but less accessibility. Technology is failing us. Or maybe we are failing technology."

MikeK: "So you're saying you don't like the car?"

Mike replies: Well, now that you put it that way....

John Montgomery: "It has always seemed odd that a vehicle would be named after a widely used explosive.  :-) "

Keith: "My last rental car scared the crap out of me a couple times because it did things I wasn't expecting. Like lane 'correction' when I'm trying to avoid a pothole. Like slowing down as I'm coming up behind someone on the highway and trying to finesse moving into the other lane to pass. Like turning the high beams on when I don't want them on. There are ways to turn all that stuff off, but you have to find them, and it's impossible to do while driving. I'm pretty sure the current car (2016 Honda Fit) is the last new car I'll buy because I really dislike the infotainment screen (what a horrible portmanteau word that is anyway, but it fits a horrible concept) but all new cars come with them now. Sigh."

Robert Roaldi: "The parking brake is probably an electronic push button thing. There will be an icon on the button, I'm sure. My car has one, it's a crock. I used to hear the line 'Kraft makes cheese for people who don't like cheese.' Nowadays, they make cars for people who don't like driving, but public transit is so inadequate they have no choice but to buy one. If you spend any time on automotive manufacturer websites these days, there's more on connectivity and phone management than there is about the driving features. There have been occasions when I was not able to find engine or transmission specs because they were so well-hidden in the menus. I was hoping that the new Chinese auto imports would insert themselves at the low end of the market so we'd have basic cars to choose from again, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Pedestrian and cyclist deaths keep rising despite all the 'safety' equipment too. We isolate drivers from the task at hand rather than train them properly. It's reminiscent of how obesity increased precisely when 'diet' foods came to prominence. It's all deadly silly."

Posted on Thursday, 21 March 2024 at 11:30 PM in Blog Notes | | Comments (38)

Tuesday, 19 March 2024

Punctum Def

Barthes

Barthes

Punctum—that which punctures. The point that skewers you. That "gets to you." The touch of the tip of the fencer's foil.

To my mind, punctum is the most important thing about photography overall and the most important thing of all things to understand, although you can be a photographer all your life and never encounter the term much less understand it.

Basically an anatomical term for a sharp point or tip, way down on the disambiguation page appears the line, "A concept in the 1980 French philosophy book Camera Lucida." Roland Barthes, the author of that book, his last, which you can read online or buy, coined it as a term related to photographs, yet he doesn't quite satisfactorily define it. At least not succinctly. His project in the book is to discover what he can know about photography by interrogating himself and his own reactions and feelings, which, like our innate sense of God, or goodness, is something that can only be discovered by looking inward.

He begins a discussion of punctum at the end of Part I of the book in Section 18 on page 42, and proceeds to discuss and describe it obliquely over a number of pages up to Section 23, where he slides somewhat petulantly into a sort of grumbling about eroticism and pornography. These sections won't take you very long to read. But on the other hand it's taken me 40 years to read them, and that's only so far. His examples are concrete and he doesn't appear to be trying to be obscure (we English speakers need to remember we're reading a translation), but, at the same time, his meaning winks in and out of, well, um, lucidity. His presentation is tortuous and remains at least somewhat inscrutable.

The punctum, usually a detail or discovered through a detail, is that which "pierces" or "wounds" a particular individual viewer; "it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there." [Italics his.] "The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: 'Technique,' 'Reality,' 'Reportage,' 'Art,' etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness."

It is a poignant detail that connects with an individual viewer's emotions or humanity—but only for that viewer. Barthes sets punctum off against studium. A "good" or "docile" photograph in his terms is one in which the objective is clear and the subject presented plainly, and the studium is the way in which such a photograph is culturally "coded," another term he introduced. We might say that the studium is the way you're intended to see the photograph and the punctum is the unruly and mysterious way that it might touch us uniquely despite itself, and despite, perhaps, the photographer's intentions. The punctum is outside of the cultural code in which the photograph was made and in which it was assumed it will be viewed and accepted.

Possibly the most remarkable thing he says about the punctum comes just before the quotation above, on page 53:

Ultimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.'

What these pages in Barthes, light in words but heavy going, bring up for me is not Kafka, however, but the beginning of what is for my lifetime the only significant translation of the Tao Te Ching, approximately pronounced "dow day chin" and meaning, roughly, "the way and its power":

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
This appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: With 150 Photographs by Jane English, translated/restated by Gia-Fu Feng and Toinette Lippe)

In a crazy way, these are both talking about the same thing. The studium is the named, the way to the myriad things of this earth, within the realm of desires; the punctum is the nameless, the mystery, the intimation of the eternal. With both Barthes and the first chapter of Old Boy (老子, Laozi, or Lao Tzu, the old man, the old master), my reaction on first reading was, what?

A distinct punctum, that mysterious or fugitive piercing or wounding that lets the mystery of life press a sharp point against your emotions, heart, or history, is the way a random snapshot can be as important to you as photographs that are among the greatest accepted artistic masterpieces of the medium. (Ever noticed how that can happen?)

Here's a link to the book. I recommend it, but at the same time, if my experience is any indication, you might find it frustrating and conceptually or intellectually dense; I think it's better to muse over it, contemplate it if you will—let it be a sort of departure point for your own meditations on the subjects it covers. After all, Barthes is examining himself and his own responses to photographs, which he thinks is the only way he can know them—and it should stand to reason therefore that you don't have to understand his responses and feelings, exactly. You have to understand yours. He can help, but only help.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Wow, what a way to start the day. Opened your website, read the COVID piece, then this popped up. You must have just loaded it. I’m on the morning train to work, pre-dawn light showing the underside undulations of the clouds outside, caffeine-less brain still struggling to piece through the fog of slumber. I might have to come back to this one—on the return train ride, if my brain isn’t too fried from work.  ;~) "

John Camp: "I once took bus from Chuncheon, Korea, to Seoul. I was in the Army, had with me my new Pentax Spotmatic, and was shooting all kinds of stuff, which I would print in the base darkroom. Anyway, the bus went past a tall building which I shot out the window as we passed. When I printed the shot, I found that a Caucasian man (probably a soldier) had been sitting in one of the windows, hunched over, staring out, almost exactly at my eye level. I had inadvertently caught his face in perfect focus; and there was something very strange about his expression, both harsh and remote. I have no idea of who he was, and have spent some time wondering what his expression could have meant. And I wonder if he saw me taking his photo, and if he did, if he wondered what the heck I was doing. When I read the Barthes book and his discussion of punctum, I immediately thought of that picture, which I can remember clearly some 55 years later. A simple, routine, thoughtless photo taken more to push the button on the camera than anything else, but which produced this very strange, odd, memorable instant, both striking and meaningless."

darlene: "One day, in my third-grade classroom, while the rest of the students were working, my teacher let me escape to the library after I finished with time to spare. I always looked forward to the library, and there it was one afternoon, staring back at me from an encyclopedia—my future! Doretha Lange’s Migrant Mother was my 'punctum' into photography. It took me years to understand why, and eventually, it surfaced from that deep abyss of my dark matter. It was the jet fuel for my motivation to live the life of a photographer. That experience, at the age of eight, opened my eyes to photography's profound potential. It revealed that it holds mysteries and answers. It illuminated the notion that there's a hidden essence, a 'secret sauce,' within great photography. Great article, Michael. Thank you!"

Yoshi Carroll: "'The Way that can be way’d is not the eternal Way'—my favorite translation of the first line. There are so many translations of the Tao Te Ching, and so much varied commentary, that I’ve come to think of the meaning as existing in the space between the translations. The translation that can be read is not the eternal translation. Which is much the way I feel about using words to describe photographs: rich and rewarding, generative, and eternally unsatisfying. I love the things you're pointing to in this post."

Mike replies: That's a great way to put it. I once heard it claimed that there are more "translations" of the Tao Te Ching written by people who do not speak Chinese than by people who do. Another claim is that it is the second most translated book into English after the Holy Bible. The one I linked, my favorite probably because I encountered it first, was translated by Gia-Fu Feng, who understood the Chinese deeply but did not write English well. His translation was then reworded by editor Toinette Lippe, who does not speak Chinese. She provides an account of the genesis of this version in an introduction to the current edition, which you can read in the Amazon sample. When I wrote about the book here many years ago, we got a response from Ms. Lippe herself. I felt about like I would if I had gotten a personal message from Helen Mirren or Joni Mitchell!

Dave Levingston: "I've tried to read Barthes, but...'you might find it frustrating and conceptually or intellectually dense.' Never was able to make much of it. I confess I had trouble with Sontag too. I guess I'm the dense one."

Bob Rosinsky: "With the exception of its incomprehensible first chapter, Camera Lucida is an excellent book. I used to assign it to my students when I taught college-level photography."

calvin amari: "Barthes’ theory of the opposition between ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ in a photo is actually about the lightest dose of French theory one can imagine. One can succumb to a lot worse, and I frankly think that it is generally worth some effort and attention for any photography lover. (I like the quip observing that a photo works in practice but questioning whether it works it theory.) If I recall correctly didn't Szarkowski in Looking at Photographs pretty much address punctum and just call it the photo's 'grace note?'"

Posted on Tuesday, 19 March 2024 at 03:30 PM in Books, Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (16)

COVID in the U.S. (OT)

Deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 fell to 479 in the week ending March 9th, the lowest level since before the first spike began in late March 2020.

That's compared to about 270 deaths a week or two ago from flu (down from this season's peak of 866 in the first week of January) and the weekly average of 700 deaths from fatal traffic accidents.

COVID-19 was the largest death event in American history so far. Its current 1,184,376 U.S. total surpasses the influenza epidemic of 1919, which caused approximately 620,000 deaths, and the American Civil War, in which approximately 650,000—850,000 Americans lost their lives. This last figure is according to the modern J. David Hacker estimate, usually expressed as the median of 750,000. The traditional William F. Fox estimate published in the year 1900 put the number at just under 620,000. Regardless of which estimate is used, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of America's other wars (and wars since 1945 undeclared by Congress) combined. The 1919 "Spanish Flu," despite its name, most likely originated in the United States, and got carried to Europe by soldiers leaving to fight in WWI. Unlike most such viruses it mainly attacked healthy young adults, especially young pregnant women. Most COVID-19 deaths were of people over the age of 50, with progressively older people dying in increasingly larger numbers. We need to pray that the next lethal virus doesn't disproportionately affect children.

COVID-19 mortality tends to come in waves, however, as is reflected in the graph of weekly deaths:

CDC

However, the last three peaks, as you can see, were all relatively mild, and the most recent one is the mildest yet. If they continue that way, it would appear that the pandemic is effectively over in the United States, in terms of overall numbers and in terms of its dangers, said with due respect and condolences to its recent, current, and future victims and their loved ones. The virus might simply be adapting. After all, the 1919 Spanish Flu is still around. You might have had it. It has simply mutated over the years into a less lethal form, for its own survival.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gary Merken: "Notwithstanding the raw numbers of deaths from the influenza epidemic, the Civil War, and COVID-19, it would be interesting to know the percentage of the U.S. population for each death event."

Dave Fultz: "As requested by Gary Merken, The U.S. population in 2019 was 333,000,000. The COVID-19 death toll was 1,184,376; therefore the percentage of the population lost was 0.355%. The U.S. population in 1917 was 103,000,000. The Spanish Flu death toll was 620,000; therefore the percentage of the population lost was 0.6%. The U.S. population in 1860 was 31,400,000. The Civil War death toll was ≈750,000; therefore the percentage of the population lost was 2.388%."

Mike adds: Evaluating these events as percentages of total population is another way of looking at it, of course, but I don't think it's inherently any more or less accurate. Looking at it that way, the worst war in North American history was King Philip's War in 1675–76. King Philip, whose real name was Metacom or Metacomet, was the son of Ousamequin of the Wampanoag tribe, known to history as Massasoit, a title meaning great sachem or chief. Metacomet's War, initiated by the natives, resulted in the virtual extermination of the Narragansett and Wampanoag. Grievous destruction was also visited on the colonies. Settlers were attacked and killed and the frontier pushed back; twelve towns, including Providence, Rhode Island, along with many smaller settlements, were burned. One out of ten able-bodied men (i.e., who could serve as soldiers) in the involved colonies were lost. This meets the literal definition of "decimated," which means to kill one out of every ten.

King Philip's War caused the death of the largest number of "Americans" (English colonists in America) as a percentage of total population. But the initial size of the colonial army was 1,000 white men and several hundred native allies. So although it was the worst war, it wasn't the worst war, if you see what I mean. 

Adrian: "Yes, but does long COVID also come in waves, or is it long enough on average that the active cases monotonically increase, so that at some point all of humankind will be crippled (extreme scenario, admittedly)? Moreover, will people who encountered the virus early in their lives do better than those who were older at the time the virus emerged (wet market? lab? we’ll never know) in 2019? If the young exposures do better, COVID may exacerbate the ills of societies where fewer and fewer active young people support a growing cohort of disabled old.

"COVID-19 is less than five years old, so despite the unprecedented (no hyperbole) speed and success with which vaccines and Paxlovid were developed, projecting that it is going to be progressively milder is wishful thinking. It might become another irritant, or it might remain a major cause of morbidity. The pathogen certainly is morally indifferent, so it will keep killing and crippling preferentially those who ignore precautions."

Posted on Tuesday, 19 March 2024 at 03:02 PM in News and Occasions | | Comments (13)

Sunday, 17 March 2024

Open Mike II: It Only Makes Sense

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP,
in which Yr. Hmbl Ed. betimes pouts, oft
proclaims, and ever opines.]

Richard Skoonberg commented, on the "Nikon-RED" post: "I have always had a passion for photography, however, I spent approximately 10 years working as a professional video producer. I made television commercials, promotional videos, and a TV pilot. Unlike photography, video production is more closely related to filmmaking and involves different skills. It is a form of visual storytelling that requires more than just a camera. To produce an engaging video, you must have a well-written script, talented actors, proper lighting and audio equipment, a crew, and access to editing software. You also need money. Using a DSLR as a substitute for a professional video camera is kind of silly. All the extras you need [are] already built into video cameras, so it never made sense to me."

Making sense? There are lots of things we would do if we were sensible. We'd put an age limit on being president (make it so that any candidate has to be in their 40s or 50s on election day; that would do the trick). There would be no McDonalds. There would never have been "infotainment" screens in motor vehicles—I don't know about you, but I've found that I drive better when I pay attention to the road and the actions of other drivers. We'd outlaw tackle football, at least for children. Protect birds. We'd get rid of QWERTY and the legacy horizontal stagger on keyboards. (Mike! Do not go there! Some subjects are just too touchy!)

And we wouldn't put video cameras in all still cameras. Maybe only half of them. Okay, okay, 70%. Doesn't still photography deserve 30% of the market for loyalty after 185 years of faithful service? Stop making all of our tools double as some other tool. 

(I should start an militant movement in favor of still cameras. Placard on stick: HYBRID CAMERAS ARE SPORKS)

Down with sporks

There are lots of things we would do if we were sensible.  :-)

Mike, admittedly out of step with the culture...

Ed. note: This post was re-edited late Sunday night. Too late Sunday night.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ken Sky: "Primes are usually better than zooms (for IQ). And certainly single use photography equipment tends to outperform multiple use equipment except for convenience. However, there seems to be a renaissance for vintage style cameras. Old-timers like me never use the video functions in modern cameras. But, we represent a small segment of the market. And no, I will not return to vinyl but you will take my CDs out of my cold dead hands."

Rick in CO: "The simplicity of a Leica M10. Backed up by an iPhone."

Mike replies: Now there's a really elegant little outfit! Retro in the best way, and yet no one could accuse you of not being up to the moment.

Kye Wood: "Knowing the things you removed from the original post, now...I honestly find it quite unsettling that you felt you needed to remove them. I figure this comment won't make the cut. Just wanted you to know that editing yourself is part of how we got to 'here' in the world."

Mike replies: Yes, it's a dilemma, one I have pondered many times. I'm aware that when I self-edit that I'm being "a good German." (Wikipedia says, "Good Germans is an ironic term...referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way.") I know I'm not contributing to any solutions. But it's a photography and general interest blog. I wrote a political blog before I started this one, and it achieved 20,000 page views in a year. This blog averaged 20,000 page views a day in its peak years of 2011–18.

I probably do my readership a disservice by proactively editing out progressive ideas just because someone might object. Even if they're far to the right of me, the great majority of TOP readers are plenty intelligent and secure enough to read divergent viewpoints without feeling threatened or responding negatively. I'm that way too—when Trump became the nominee ahead of the 2016 election, my response was to read a biography of him. But there's always that odd-man-out. One guy threatened to leave if I ever mentioned global warming or climate change again. (Guess he just left.) I also had a TOP reader threaten to withdraw his Patreon support and it turned out he wasn't even a Patreon supporter! That takes a bit of cheek.

But in the end, I don't want to make people uncomfortable, and discussions of hot-button topics often do that.

ASW: "I read the original post last night and didn't have any problems or disagreements with the points you have now edited into oblivion. But, I also recognize that you have to walk a tightrope to not make this or that group of folks upset. Knowing that you have a child and now a grandchild, I am glad that you think about these sorts of big-picture issues. Much better than the many folks who can't see past the end of their own nose when it comes to the future they're creating and supporting for their descendants."

Mr Andrew Johnston: "Sorry Mike, you're wrong on this one. The problem with many hybrid tools (spork is a prime example) is that they do neither or no thing well. That's not the case here. Cameras in this class do at least one of the two things well, in many cases both. Something like the Panasonic G9II or S5II is a professionally capable stills camera, on which you can either use the video or largely ignore it (as I do), or use the video and ignore the stills capability (as I have seen done). However when you need the other capability, it's there, just where you need it. And just to annoy everyone, I drive a convertible and use the air-conditioning!"

Mike replies: But as with some of my other enthusiasms, I'm not advocating that there be no hybrid stills-video cameras, just that some cameras not be. Same thing with B&W-only cameras—a small selection (which we now have) is enough; I don't insist that color be banished altogether. Same thing with simple, or rather just-complex-enough cameras (which we do not have, unless you count Leica). Same thing with a TLR-style digital (viewing screen on top with a fold-out hood) which we do not have. Same thing with cameras designed to make files exclusively for use on screens. We also do not have those, at least not in the way I envision them.

And I sometimes drove the Miata in borderline Winter weather with the top down and the heat on!

Jim Arthur: "Infotainment Screens: According to my 2023 CR car issue, the In-Car electronics are the least reliable part of a new car. On page 85 they summarize reliability across 17 categories (trouble spots) based on 300,000 survey responses, and the entertainment/navigation/communication systems have at least twice the problems of other categories. While those infotainment screens can be handy (tempting) for their mapping/communication abilities, they are also data harvesting gold mines for automakers. Mozilla recently published a report named Privacy Not Included that begins…'It's Official: Cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy.' Because your phone can be connected to the car, all sorts of information (texts, call logs, health app info, genetic info, etc.) can be collected for resale and you can’t manage (opt out) this data. Soon all cars will come equipped with video cameras that watch the driver at all times as part of the active driver assistance system. Lord knows how they will monetize this new video data. Apparently they already monitor the driver, passengers and nearby pedestrians in one way or another. The report mentions that the Nissan and Kia privacy policies state they can collect data on your sexual activity and sex life…whatever that means. Note that there was also a recent Washington State class action suit against the automakers for data collection."

Posted on Sunday, 17 March 2024 at 11:57 PM in Photo equipment, Photo-tech | | Comments (22)

Open Mike: The Princess Vanishes

Princess

Every now and then a particular photograph draws the public's attention. Right now it's a photo of a mother surrounded by her children, all grinning as madly as Americans.

A few past examples of such viral photos spring to mind. In 1994, there was a Los Angeles Police Department mugshot of O.J. Simpson used on the cover of both TIME and Newsweek, two weekly magazines that were major news sources then. Newsweek ran it apparently straight; the one on TIME's cover was given to photographer Matt Mahurin to "interpret," and was labeled, in a credit in small type on page 3, as a "photo illustration." The changes he made were highlighted, of course, by comparison with the Newsweek version, which was easy, because the magazines were usually displayed right next to each other on most newsstands. In TIME's version, O.J. was made to look more sinister and menacing, which of course had racial overtones. Black people were not the only ones who took exception. The managing editor of TIME didn't seem especially sensitive to the resulting storm of criticism, either, even after having had time to reflect on it.

Another was a picture taken in early 2009 of Captain "Sully" Sullenberger's US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the middle of the Hudson River, with people standing on the wing and huddled on the inflatable exit slide prior to rescue. It was taken by one Janice Krums, with a cellphone, the cameras in which were still crude at the time. It was one of the first photographs of the incident to be circulated, an early example of crowdsourced photojournalism before that idea became ordinary.

A third was the 2014 group selfie taken at the annual Oscar Ceremony when host Ellen DeGeneres decided to carry out a carefully planned "spontaneous" selfie shoot with Meryl Streep. But Bradley Cooper grabbed "her" phone, and a whole crowd of movie stars photo-bombed the planned dual-selfie of Ellen and Meryl. The phone wasn't really Ellen's—she owned an iPhone at the time, but Samsung had paid a lot of money to be a sponsor for the Oscars that year, so, after delicate negotiations, Ellen had been presented with a tray of Samsung delicacies from which to choose her phone-for-the-night. The resulting group shot was retweeted 750,000 times in 45 minutes and, according to Fred Graver, a member of Twitter's TV Team in 2014, "broke" Twitter for a short time. (Twitter is now known as "X, formerly known as Twitter.")

Princess-2

Kate's Uncle Gary called it "Sleevegate"

The photo of the Princess of Wales and her three children appears to have been clumsily doctored in small but possibly significant ways. As soon as the discrepancies were discovered, the news agencies all issued kill notices. In the ongoing absence of real information, the picture became the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation. The Princess herself appeared to take the blame, tweeting (X'ing), "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing." (Hereby nominated our Quote o' the Day.)

On the subject of scrutinizing photographs for the purpose of divining whatever truth might lie behind them, I hope you have seen The Commissar Vanishes by David King. (I'm sorry, that's his name.) Just from the cover of that book you can get the gist of the concept—as Stalin had rivals murdered, which seems a predilection of Russian leaders, he also had them expunged from photographs. The word was that during the Stalinist years, the CIA had a department whose job it was to scrutinize Soviet publicity photographs for clues as to what was going on in the Soviet hierarchy. That book kept coming to mind whenever my glance flitted across a headline about the photo of Catherine and her kids. You couldn't avoid those. Maybe your library has the book.

Princess Catherine has been out of sight for a number of weeks, purportedly recuperating from a planned medical procedure, which remains the simplest explanation for her absence from view. But a story that's emerging more lately makes it appear that she might be facing the sort of humiliation that in most peoples' lives would remain partly or mostly hidden, restricted to a local community or a circle of friends, but which in her case would be laid bare before the entire world. Humiliation magnifies according to the size of the audience, as you might know if you have ever been shamed in public through no fault of your own; I hope you haven't. I don't have the heart to limn the details. These people might be royals, but they're still people. That's how I choose to read them right now. No direct proof of anything seems to exist—it's overwhelmingly a matter of gossip and the sort of "facts" that often get agreed upon in the absence of facts. Hence all the attention being paid to a picture that is in itself nothing much to go on. Perhaps a young wife is in private pain in a life that is too public for that. And...so? If privacy is the real reason she's out of sight, let her have it. Most couples and all families go through periods of difficulty. Being privileged is no protection. They're still people. Life is not always a fairy tale even for a princess.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Malcolm Myers: "As a Brit and a Royalist I thank you for your sensitive post on this subject. It's been headline news over here for no reason I can really think of. It has given the conspiracy theorists in the press a field day. The truth will out eventually I'm sure but everyone is entitled to medical confidentiality, even those in the public eye."

MarkB: "My decades in the ad industry make me certain the unskilled retoucher in her public-facing media team was summarily dismissed, and the art directors given a stern talking-to about 'attention to detail, regardless of the messaging deadline.' (The '...experiment with editing' quote is almost equally ham-handed. Maybe her copywriters should also get the boot.)"

Posted on Sunday, 17 March 2024 at 11:44 AM in Around the Web, News and Occasions | | Comments (9)

Thursday, 14 March 2024

Nikon FX / APS-C

Thom accused me today of being "knee-jerk." Definition: "(of a response) automatic and unthinking." Sounds like ad hominem to me. I am many things (wayward, eccentric, crackpot maybe), but I promise, I am not knee-jerk. I think way too much about this stuff.  :-)

But to further illuminate where I'm coming from, the thing that got me excited in Thom's original "Nikon Acquires RED" article is this part:

So how does Nikon pull in new users from the young that want to go beyond what the product they grew up with does?

I’m pretty sure the answer lives in APS-C (or as Nikon calls it, DX). That’s because of cost and size, first and foremost. You don’t go from carrying a phone in your pocket to a 35 pound bag-a-gear on your back in one step ;~). You also don’t go from letting the phone make all the decisions and heavy lifting to dealing with 2+ billion customization possibilities in one step, either. Finally, you don’t go from the modest phone sensor costs to global shutter full frame sensor costs in one step.

Thus my comment: the answer lies in APS-C done right. We’ll see how fast Nikon figures that out.

APS-C done right. That's the precinct where I would be happiest contributing, if I could have any say in camera design and market planning. (Big IF. Thom likes to be prescriptive with Nikon—his relationship with the company is that of a gadfly, in the noblest Socratean sense—but I don't have much stomach for telling companies what to do. Because not only do they not listen, they don't even want to give the appearance of having heard, lest there be litigation over the credit for ideas in the future. I've actually had companies [not in the photographic sphere] implement specific ideas of mine, in detail, unmistakably, after long, multi-part discussions, and then disavow knowing me and deny having heard from me after the products came out. I had never mentioned payment and didn't require any, but they had to be sure. That's corporate behavior. Covermyassism. And it makes sense from the corporation's perspective, if you conceive of a corporation being a juggernaut that must constantly cruise forward and feed itself like a shark, preying on whatever it comes across.)

But I digress. DX would be the area where my ideas about what cameras should be would be most at home. IF Nikon could get comfortable thinking of DX as a transition step between smartphones and full-capability FF mirrorless Z cameras; and IF Nikon could get over that period in its history when it intended to stay dedicated to DX, stubbornly not moving to FF (later FX) until it realized it didn't get to say; and IF it could get over the cultural imperative to festoon and becrud products with all possible features purely as lazy marketing; and IF it could get over the failure of the Nikon 1 cameras while at the same time realizing that the Nikon 1 cameras were actually pretty good cameras in some important ways....

...Ah, forget it. Never happen. I don't think I should bother discussing my vision for what such Nikons might be like. I'd be a gadfly on the hide of a rhino. The rhino never knowing the fly was there. I accept that I'm at odds with current camera culture and that's an end on it.

But that's the area I like. It occurred to me yesterday that the Integra Type S I drove the other day is the best car I've ever driven as well as probably the best car I ever will drive. Part of that is that it's right at the very upper edge of the category I'm at home in: go any bigger, more powerful, fancier, more exclusive, more expensive than that, and I would progressively lose interest more and more. I wouldn't drive a Lambo if I had the chance. No interest. Back when I briefly sold audio, the other salesmen would gather after work in the high-end room for a soak in the Wilson Watt-Puppies and the $35,000 four-piece Krell Audio Standard, each channel on its own separate 40-amp circuit. I, meanwhile, alone, would head to the mid-fi room to listen carefully to mini-monitors, box two-ways and three-ways with no bass like the Spendor SP-1, along with 85-WPC one-box power amps and barebones preamps—simple, purist, purposeful, elegant, accessible, and nothing at all pretentious, snobby or show-offy in any corner of the room. No interest in the "statement" Krells and Wilsons; no interest in statements. Listening in the high-end room to the "reference" system and audiophile-approved recordings, I would fidget and squirm, and try to remain polite. I didn't enjoy it. It left me cold.

But a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of DX as a gateway step between phones and the Z series? As an excuse to make a pared-down light-weight single-purpose RWD roadster of a camera? I'd be all over that. Thom would have to move over!

Mike

P.S. If I bought a new car now it would probably be the Civic Si. Pending a test-drive, which might not be trivial to arrange: the local Honda dealer told me there's a year-long wait list! But I'm pretty sure my next car will be electric, or at least PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle).

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave Millier: "I recently purchased a Kia E-Niro EV. By no means a high-end EV, just a budget compact crossover with an all-electric drive train (there are ICE and Hybrid versions as well).

"What a car! Just makes petrol cars instantly obsolete. Accelerates like many a hot-hatch, but smooth as a Rolls. No stupid clutch to have to constantly pump as you stop-start along through the London rush hour at an average speed of 4 MPH. No choking tailpipe emissions. No gears to mess with. Most of the time you don't even have to brake, as it stops on its own when you lift on the throttle. Not quite a Tesla, but it does nearly 300 miles on a charge and (if you are crazy) the cruise control maintains your speed, slows automatically or speeds up again to maintain a set distance to the car in front, and it steers itself around bends! Terrifying, but it can do it.

"Best, Dave Millier, newly minted LRPS"

[The initialism means "Licentiate, Royal Photographic Society." More explanation here. Congratulations on that, Dave! —Ed.]

Nigel Voak: "I believe that DX was a stopgap sensor format that really does not make much sense in today's market. DX lenses are not much smaller or lighter than lenses made for 35mm sensors. Indeed the unexpectedly good 24–200mm travel zoom I use on my Z7 weighs about the same as its Olympus Micro 4/3 equivalent. The 17–55 ƒ/2.8 zoom I used on my D300 was a heavy beast of a lens probably not much lighter than a 24–70 ƒ/2.8 FF lens. Looking at the second hand market. There seems to be a big upsurge in the demand for 'vintage' glass. Especially at the wide end, these lenses make little sense on a DX- or smaller-sensor formats. Again specialist lenses like my shift lenses are best matched to 35mm sensors."

Mike replies: That 17–55mm you mention wasn't characteristic. It was an all-out professional lens made to match the pro-oriented DX cameras like the D500 while Nikon was still planning to stick with APS-C. Very big and heavy relative to its coverage. Also one of the best zooms I ever used, in the top 20, creme de la creme.

Dogman: "I won't hold my breath on Nikon ever taking the DX format very seriously. They never really did that with their DSLRs (after the introduction of the D3) except for a couple of lenses and one 'pro' model for use with their long telephotos. This after touting DX as the best choice for digital pro cameras (again, until they introduced the D3). Of course, my crystal ball is cloudy and who knows?"

John Camp: "Comment on Thom's post. I'm a longtime Nikon user, going back to the '70s, and Thom is one of the most useful resources on the net for people like me.

"But I disagree about the DX. They're not really smaller or handier and you don't have to have a 35-pound bag around your shoulder. I know that because my Nikon Z7 II has a 24–120mm ƒ/4 S mounted on the front and it fits nicely in what I believe is Think Tank's second smallest bag (the one they copied from Domke) along with Nikon's superb 85mm, a couple of batteries, a couple of cards and a charger.

"There really isn't much difference in the handling between a Z7 II and a DX, the lenses aren't much different, and if people are thinking of moving from a phone to a ICL camera, then there's also the prestige factor involved—why carry an identifiable 'amateur' camera where you could carry a full frame pro rig? There's a difference in cost, of course, but what about resale value if you decide to go back to your phone, or the new purchase cost if you decide to move up to FF?

"I'm aware of some of this because I have a X-T5 Fuji APS-C which is slightly smaller overall than my Z7 II, but then again, at the far end of things, the Z7 II is also slightly better. (The X-T5 is a fabulous camera. I could go the rest of my life needing nothing else. But the Nikon does have an edge.) IMHO."

Craig Yuill: "Nikon has been breaking my heart for a number of years. They created the Nikon 1 system, which I bought into shortly after it was introduced. Sadly, it was hampered by missing/crippled features, and lenses that were solid optically but could be unreliable mechanically and electronically. It was unceremoniously discontinued once the Z system was introduced.

"A few years ago I bought a D500, a superb DX-format DSLR, for bird photography. (It is a very fine general-purpose camera too.) I had considered buying one of their DX-format Z-mount cameras, but decided against it because of lacklustre AF and lack of IBIS. Unfortunately, it appears that Nikon is unlikely to introduce a DX camera with better AF, like some of the APS-C cameras that their competitors have on the market. One suggestion that annoys me to no end is to just buy a US$4,000 Z8 and crop down to DX. Yeah, right! I might have to look at another brand for a higher-performance crop-sensor mirrorless camera."

Mike replies: Yeah, actually this post of mine is extremely unrealistic. Nikon has demonstrated little commitment to DX and the smaller 1 System for many years now. It's not going to suddenly want to develop newthink small-sensor stepping-stone cameras to lure maturing smartphone photographers into the brand and eventually the Z system.

Posted on Thursday, 14 March 2024 at 12:42 PM in Photo industry, Photo-tech | | Comments (30)

Wednesday, 13 March 2024

Nikon-RED

Thom has weighed in on the Nikon-RED merger in more detail now. Worth the read. The comment that struck me was, "RED brings Nikon instant credibility in the serious video and cinema market, something that would have cost many many millions and years to try to do from the mirrorless hybrid platform." He makes a lot of other points, many of them cruising by at an altitude high above my pointy little head.

Personally I find my interest in this event to be minimal. I'm not a videographer and have no interest in becoming one. The invasion and takeover of still cameras by video, making our once single-purpose devices into hybrid camcorder + camera devices, is just one more of many negative trends in recent years to my way of thinking. That's a personal and self-centered response, but then, my interest isn't actually in the business of image technology.

Let me venture an analogy. Imagine that washing machine manufacturers suddenly got very interested in making the tops of clothes washing machines into, say, cooktop grillers for meats. For some reason maybe it was easy to do (perhaps the ventilation for the dryer becomes the ventilation for the cooking smoke—stay focused, Mike, don't get carried away!), and most people like meat, and grilling is very popular, and the fashion takes off and people get very interested in the grilling features of washing machines. An internet "community" pops up, and it's enticingly huge. So the manufacturers start taking clothes washing for granted and divert R&D resources into improving the meat-griller cooktop functions at the expense of clothes washing, which is considered mature and adequate. Eventually new products are mainly centered on grilling functions, and sales of plain old-fashioned non-cooktop washing machines start to wither. Meanwhile, there's me and a few people like me. I don't eat meat more often than maybe once a week and never cook it at home, but I can't buy a washing machine any more without a cat-danged cooktop. I won't go on.

I was okay by me when cameramakers started adding video capability to stills cameras as an extra bonus feature. They did it because it was easy to do and created added value for their products. Didn't bother me. But gradually, video improvements have started to overshadow stills improvements, a little, and the interest of the market in video devices has begun to influence product trends and directions and impose costs on many cameras that used to be solely intended to make photographs. This is just the way it is and there's no use crying about it. But on the other hand I don't have to like it.

The reason for all this (and your mileage definitely might vary) is probably because I start with the result I visualize and work backward from it. I've always been that way. It's what guides my interests. Sometimes, that leads me to embrace new technology; for example, I do 98% of my reading on my tablet. Other times it leads me to reject trends in technology; for example, I've been an audiophile since I was a young teenager, but I don't have any parallel interest in the quality of movie reproduction at home. I've never for five seconds wanted a home theater or coveted a huge flatscreen. That's because my interest is music. Specifically recorded music. Not in home entertainment technology of any kind for its own sake.

In the same way, I like photographs. And that's what guides my interest.

Consider Brunswick. Brunswick started out making pool tables. Then bought up its major competitors and became No. 1. Then flexed its might and power and branched out into other areas. As pool drifted down in popularity, tried to consolidate with bowling alleys and bowling equipment. Eventually diversified into, well, recreational boats. Kept its pool table business going as its legacy. Eventually stopped even building tables, started selling cheap Chinese crap (no offense) at grotesquely inflated markups instead. Bought more and more boat manufacturers. Finally said the hell with legacy businesses and the origin of the corporate name and jettisoned its greatly withered and vestigial (and cynical, and tiny) little backwater pool-table importing business. Now it's a big name in boats. It's very successful.

The problem there, for me, is that I'm not interested in Brunswick. I'm interested in pool tables.

Yes, I admire Nikon, and yes, I want Nikon to prosper, and yes, I feel a lot of respect for Nikon's user-base and fans. And of course I have zero criticism for anyone who's interested in video in any way. On the contrary, I'm happy for them that high-quality video tools are more accessible than ever before. That's great. I just don't much like the way video is impinging and imposing on tools once only used to make photographs, is all. And I don't have to like it. So my reaction to the news of this acquisition is just a little mistrustful. Maybe a tad skeptical. Maybe Nikon needs to be more video-centered, as a company, because it has to do what businesses do to survive, which is adapt. But I don't need it to be more video centered. And yes, that's just selfish, looked at narrowly through the peephole of my own idiosyncratic concerns. But my interest goes photographs > photographers > photographic tools > photographic tool companies > Nikon. My interest isn't in Nikon per se. No matter how big, fat and prosperous it might someday get to be in boats.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Richard Alan Fox: "What if Nikon started making pool tables?"

Mike replies: I would vigorously endorse its new direction and praise its astute leaders! Naturally.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I understand you're not much interested in video, and that's fine. However, your example is entirely unfair; a clothes dryer and a grill don't have much in common, not time, or place, or purpose (you found the one functional similarity in their needing to exhaust air they'd used). On the other hand, lots of uses of still cameras and uses of moving picture tech (old film tech, or newer video tech) are closely related, used by the same people or at least people on the same project. Photojournalism and news reels, using sequenced stills or movies to study movement (from horses to atom bombs), home movies and snapshots, wedding albums and wedding videos, film strips in class and also movies or TV, and so forth. These two things are very like each other! Even if they're not much connected in your own artistic thinking."

Jeff: "Fortunately there are still some companies like Leica (with the M) and Hasselblad (with the X2D) that produce photo-centric cameras sans video, each reflecting customer demand."

Terry Burnes: "I love my OM-D E-M5 III. But I don't need the video parts and menus and would love to have the screen just flip up and down, not sideways.

"But I'm also reminded a bit of snow sports. The arrival of snow boards caused a lot of consternation, and resistance, among skiers. But in the end snow boards had a great influence on the design of skis, resulting in a renaissance in ski design. Skis are much better today as a result. And the two technologies have found a way to coexist peacefully. Many younger enthusiasts use both.

"Still, I don't see why I can't pay, say, $100 extra to have an E-M5 that is devoid of video features."

nextSibling: "Couple of observations from mulling the arguments around this subject over the last few years...

—> Yes, of course, video technology has arguably enhanced still photography technology. No, all that technology doesn't have to be crammed into the same product. Even when it is, have you noticed how much additional accessorization these hybrid cameras attract when employed in serious video use? Why not design cameras with all that stuff already built in?

—> The cost saving argument is unsatisfying. It may be cheaper to manufacture hybridized all-in-one-package cameras for a wider market share, but cost isn't just about dollars for technology and features. There's an opportunity cost to the cognitive viscosity and redundant complexity of an over-engineered tool.

—> Video and still photography are fundamentally different media, requiring very different skills and techniques to do well, regardless of the technology.

—> Those skills and techniques should drive product design, not simply the availability of technology that appeals to online camera reviewers, marketers and forum critics more interested in gear than the outcomes of its use.

—> People who are highly capable and accomplished at both still and video are extremely rare. Perhaps they'd be less rare if appropriate technology was available to them."

Posted on Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 01:34 PM in Photo industry | | Comments (33)

Tuesday, 12 March 2024

Any Color You Like so Long as it's Bland

[Oooof! I goofed. I scrambled to get this done this morning, got it all done, then forgot to post it before I went out the door. Here it is, late.
—Mike the scrambled egghead Ed.]

Integra

I'm driving a loaner car today—a 1.5-liter 200-HP Acura Integra that shifts its own gears. My Acura is in Rochester getting ready to kick my wallet in the butt. I gotta sell some cameras and lenses.

This Integra is a lineal descendant of Phred, my mother's 1978 Honda Accord, her first foreign car. The Accord famously went on to become the best-selling Japanese car for 17 years in a row and, in 1989, the first Japanese car to become the No. 1 best-selling vehicle in the U.S. She had Accords for something like 15 years before switching to Saab. And I think I drove most of them more than she did. At least the earlier ones. The Integra is based on the current Civic, which is now larger than Phred was; the Integra is the successor to my 2014 Acura ILX 2.4. The loaner is red (I guess you can see that) and has an automatic transmission (I guess it's a CVT actually) which, for me, takes a little getting used to.

I also got to test drive an Integra Type S yesterday while loafing around the dealership awaiting the verdict on my car. One reason I bought my ILX was that the model with the larger, better engine only came with a manual transmission, and buying that model was the only way you could get a stick. In those days, most cars that offered a stick only paired them with the worst engine—very frustrating to my way of thinking—so the configuration of ILX models came as a relief. The Type S has a larger two-liter, 320-HP engine and, true to tradition, only comes with a stick. Which makes me want to buy one just to support whoever made that decision. Unfortunately it's also a $50,000-plus car, so no soup for me. I'm probably three to five years away from a new car, something like that. I've had seven cars in my lifetime. Is that a lot or a little? I wish it had been more.

Type SAcura Integra Type S camouflaged by reflections

But man, did I ever like it. The Type-S (it was black) has gobs of power and just the niftiest snick-snick short-throw shifter. Awesome/brilliant. The test drive with the Type S did exactly what it's designed to do: sold me. Which would have been great for the dealership had I been a potential customer. I love these cars. They hit the sweet spot for me. Of course, it's easy to love what you're used to.

But it's got me looking at reviews of the Civic Si, which has the 200-HP 1.5 engine, only comes with a manual, and has basically the same interior as the Integra. All in the family.

Black or gray or gray-black or silvery gray
As an aside, here's my theory as to why car colors are mostly so bland these days, my red loaner notwithstanding. When I was a teenager, most people in America owned their cars. So you saw more self-expression—clusters of whimsical bumper stickers, bright colors, decorations and customizations, etc. Now when you go to the car dealer, cars come in very predictable colors. Black, white, grays, and silvers are the default. Murky brownish/olive beiges of some indeterminate sort might be in the mix, with the occasional muted token red or blue thrown in so people don't lose the will to live. This is another of my many unpedigreed theories, but I think the reason is that most of us these days drive cars owned by banks. Banks like bland, so that their property can more easily be resold later. Rather than hard-to-remove bumper stickers, people now put fiddly little decorations on the windows, where they can be scraped off without a trace. The other day I saw a car with one decoration on it. On the rear passenger side window, about six inches high, was a white stencil of...a grenade. Wonder what that person's trying to say. Better yet, don't tell me. I probably don't want to know.

In case you're wondering why I willingly subjected myself to the dealer's service department—the one I'm convinced has an unofficial $600 minimum—it's because mechanics in my area don't have any openings. The local shop in town that I use told me the earliest they could look at my car would be next week. I can't limp along with no brake fluid for a week. The good mechanic up in the next town—the independent former racecar mechanic who specializes in Toyota and Honda (whose shop is begging to be photographed, by the way—it's got character out the wazoo, including pinup girls plastered all over the bathroom walls that must have been there since the '70s)—he has a six-week waiting list. Then again, that guy just inspected my car a month ago, and then this.

This culture is just sucking money out of people like me these days. As if to add insult to injury, the propane guy was just here, like I needed to spend more money this day in particular. My bills for propane refills used to start with a "1." Now they start with a "3." Got to get back to work on that book.

Call just came
Welp, the call just came in—my car's all done. Time to make the hike to Rochester again, gaze longingly at the Type S out front, give the red car back, and retrieve the old buggy. Later.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Speed: "The Splash Screen image of the new electric Porsche Taycan Turbo GT Weissach Package (from $230,000) is...purple. But what a purple. It's a Porsche thing."

[Note: Link added by Ed. —Ed.]

Sean: "If, like me, you know very little about cars, the asymmetric relationship with a car mechanic is built on hope, not trust."

Cecelia: "I choose a color for three reasons: I do not want to stand out in often contentious city driving; it doesn’t show the dirt; and it isn’t too hot in the sun. This always leads to silver or white for my urban California life."

Mike replies: I try to buy silver cars for similar reasons. My brother prefers black, saying black cars look the best when they're clean and the worst when they're dirty, but my observation was that his black cars were far more often dirty. As for not wanting to stand out, great point. I have a friend here in town who has a bright iridescent yellow-green Kia, and she says her friends are always telling her when and where they saw her car around town.

Robert Roaldi: "I like car colour names. My current Jetta is Pyrite Metallic Silver. I owned an Escort that was Cayman Green. My favourite was a friend's Legacy Turbo in Cranberry Mousse."

Posted on Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 09:07 PM in Followups | | Comments (27)

Monday, 11 March 2024

Backups

Looks like today's post will be late...my car suddenly went on the fritz yesterday and I have to deal with it. All the warning lights went off. Lights I didn't even know were on the dashboard lit up. The Service Manager at the dealer said, "we call it the Christmas tree of lights." Apparently in Acuras when one goes off they all go off.

This makes perfect sense, because I just had the car in for servicing and a general over-all inspection a month ago. Not even.

When you live in the country, it's not smart to have one vehicle. Borders on dangerous, actually. You don't need five, like one of my friends has. He bought his second full-sized pickup just because it was a great deal. New widow, didn't care about the money, just wanted it out of the driveway. Some of my friends buy beater used cars for $500 to use as a backup, and the damn things run on and on like perpetual motion machines, sipping oil and gas and emitting nary a murmur of complaint; but the universe would never let me get away with that. If I bought a $500 car it would need $1,500 worth of work within a week.

So I'm off to Rochester, three hours there and back, hoping whatever's wrong doesn't go more wrong on the way. On the good side, comment posting is all up to date. Maybe backups should be our topic of discussion today. Not computer backups necessarily. Usually when we talk about computer backups we hear from the minority subset of the readership that has that problem overmastered; all those who do not maintain deferential silence. But I used to distinguish pros from enthusiasts (advanced amateurs, hobbyists, art photographers, fans, devotees, camera addicts—c'mon, everyone knows what an enthusiast is, despite recent comments from people saying the term is undefined) by how many cameras they take to an important job. Hobbyists take their one good camera. Pros take two. They always have a backup. Do you have a backup? Is it kept in the closet or do you take it with you?

I don't have a backup. If my camera goes on the fritz somehow (usually it's operator error or poor planning, run-down battery, filled-up card), well, that's it for that day.

Odyssey

Wish me luck on my odyssey. My prediction in advance, not knowing what's actually wrong: the bill will be $600...and, if not, more.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and about comments: It's true that I need to keep comments current, but sometimes comments come in too late, too. Caleb Courteau's comment on "Honesty: Isn't it Refreshing?" would have been a Featured Comment, but it only came in this morning and the post is already three days old. Most people don't go back to look for new comments on older posts, so a lot of great comments get buried because of timing. And now I had really better get my ass in gear and get going. Turns out it takes a lot of time to not write a post!

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Vijay: "I’m an amateur enthusiast and I take a backup camera whenever I’m taking a trip of seven days or more that requires a significant outlay. If I don’t have a functioning camera, the airfare, lodging, etc. has significantly lower ROI. Phones are not a backup, yet."

Doug Anderson: "I have no backup car. I always carry my phone with the Uber app. And in 70+ years of using all-mechanical, i.e., no battery, film cameras I have never carried a backup camera body and I have never found myself in a situation where having one would have helped."

Craig Beyers: "When I shoot sports (and events), I have a Canon R6 as primary, a 7D Mk II as secondary (i.e., the prior primary), and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I typically use the 7D and an EF 24–70 ƒ/4 only during warm-ups and player intros and occasionally after an event for photos of families, then switch to the R6 with a EF 70–200 ƒ/2.8L with a 1.4x converter and the monopod for the action shots. The iPhone is my primary overview/ultra wide angle photo camera and it’s always in a holster on my waist. I bring the other cameras and a monopod in a ThinkTank roller bag with additional lenses and memory cards. For personal photo work I tend to restrict the kit to one camera and my iPhone, mostly to limit the carry weight. This works for me."

Stephanie Luke: "I'm so paranoid that besides having a couple of backups of an image file—on computer and external hard drives—I don't even consider it a finished picture unless I have printed it and it's sitting in my flat file. If I lose it there, then the house has burned down, and it's the least of my problems!"

robert e: "I have more 'backup' tripods, camera bags and camera straps than I know what to do with."

Ken Bennett: "When we got the 'Christmas tree' of lights, it was because a squirrel had spent a week chewing up the wiring inside our truck engine. In a Toyota, one fault means that lots of other things get turned off as well, like the cruise control, and so lots of warning light suddenly show up even though they aren't indicating actual issues, just that a feature was shut down due to the actual problem. The dealership service writer just wrote one word on the service form: 'rodent.'"

Mike replies: My problem was a bad brake part that ruptured and drained all the brake fluid. (I drove all the way to Rochester with almost no brake fluid.) The car will be visiting the dealership for three days, after which it will kick me in the wallet to the tune of $1,070. Told you it would be more than $600.

F Hall: "In 1980 when I was using a Leica M I had an Olympus OM something as a backup camera since I could not afford two Leicas. One day I went to use the Olympus and it was gone. I asked my wife of a few months if she had seen it. She said she gave it to her brother as I never used it. He lived in Canada and we were in Trinidad so I could not retrieve it. I explained the whole backup camera thing. The camera disappeared as the brother probably thought it was worthless since it was never used. Still married, did not want to change wives and have to go through that again!"

Posted on Monday, 11 March 2024 at 11:47 AM | | Comments (13)

Sunday, 10 March 2024

Acquisitions: Nikon Acquires RED and LensRentals Acquires BorrowLenses

Red komodoRED Komodo X

There have been two significant consolidations in the photo industry recently.

Nikon and RED
Just three days ago Nikon announced that it has acquired RED Digital Cinema, a leading maker of high-end digital video cameras for moviemaking. RED will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nikon. The leading independent online website centering on all things Nikon, ByThom.com, has an article about it in its News/Views section. Thom says he has "witnessed a resurrection of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement at NikonUSA" since the Z9 was announced, and that "that got another boost with last night’s announcement." He also notes that "the RED acquisition puts Nikon back in Hollywood." Nikon's press release is unspecific about potential advantages or future plans, and the majority of commentators don't seem to know quite what to make of the announcement. But all in good time, no doubt.

Will the acquisition "make it rain" for Nikon? The hope is that mergers and acquisitions by companies with cracks showing in their core business model result in increased synergy and dynamism for both companies involved. Less encouragingly, it's also a common behavior of companies that are flailing around trying to find a cure for what ails them; studies show that 50% of acquisitions don't succeed (Wikipedia, citing Investment Banking Explained pp. 223–224). In a weather report, you know what a 50% chance of rain means. Might rain, might not.

Nikon is currently third in market share among cameramakers, having ceded second place to Sony in 2019. Sony now has more than double Nikon's market share, with 26.1% against Nikon's 11.7% in December of 2023, according to Statista.

Although market share has been declining for years, however, the company is showing strength by other metrics. Nikon's Z cameras and lenses are highly thought of by committed amateurs, artists, and pros alike, and, like Leica in the film days, seem to be responsible for more good work than their market share by itself would predict. Here's hoping the RED acquisition works for Nikon as its executives intend.

Lensrentals and BorrowLenses
Lensrentals has acquired "select assets" of BorrowLenses, a would-be competitor. I think it's safe to say the former bought out the latter's inventory and customer lists. This acquisition was most probably done for old-fashioned reasons, namely, because the acquiring company is so good it's tough to compete with. Have you rented a lens or a camera from Lensrentals recently? Those people have the process down. It's impressive.

Lensrentals' press release states, "The acquisition will expand Lensrentals’ loyal customer base while augmenting its enormous inventory of more than 400,000 copies of over 6,000 different lenses, cameras, drones, lighting, audio and other high quality production equipment and accessories, in every format, from every major manufacturer available in the market. Additionally, the used gear program known as Keeper will also receive a significant boost in inventory." Keeper, if you don't know, means that you can buy equipment you've rented if you'd like to hang on to it after trying it out as a rental. This is great with lenses, because lenses still do have sample variation, as Lensrentals' owner/guru Roger Cicala makes obvious with real published data from time to time. If you love the way a certain rented lens renders, it's safest to buy that specific one rather than buy a new copy and spin the roulette wheel again.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Jon Porter: "Very disappointed to hear BorrowLenses is going away. I used them for years to try out cameras I was considering buying. Their West coast office was nearby so I could easily pick up and drop off gear, as well as chat with their staff about the camera. Now with the added hassle and expense of shipping it's not worth bothering to rent."

Jayanand Govindaraj: "Nikon's market share is declining, which only means they are, very sensibly, getting out of the point-and-shoot and other low-margin categories. Their margins are increasing as they focus more and more on high-value-added products, and their financials have become robust in the last few years.

"As an aside, in the last four years, Nikon equity has almost tripled on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. As a corporate finance professional through my working years, if you ask me, the camera brands that will be the first to disappear, if at all, would be Sony or Panasonic—the camera division within both these companies are insignificant in terms of size in relation to the behemoths that both the companies are, which means that they are inconsequential to the overall performance of the parent, and could be axed (or sold) the minute the need for cost cutting arises."

robert e: "RED+Nikon sounds very cool to me. Not that I have any expertise in this area, but on its face, I see two companies with core strengths that don't overlap but could complement each other very well. A maker of superb cinema bodies joining a maker of superb lenses; a well established presence in high-end digital cinema joining a legend in pro and consumer photography. Nikon has arguably caught up technically in hybrid video, but is having trouble competing with the head starts and reputations that Sony, Panasonic and Canon enjoy in that space and in the budget cine space. RED has no presence in either space but it would bring enormous prestige to compete with."

Mel: "Lensrentals definitely has the process down. And Roger's blog is full of technogeek information on bodies, lenses, testing, etc. I've rented from them several times and was never disappointed. Great way to try out a lens to see if it fits my needs."

Posted on Sunday, 10 March 2024 at 01:11 PM | | Comments (2)

Open Mike: Replying to Comments (Blog Notes)

So here's an interesting issue about running a blog and acting as discussion leader, and promoting selected comments to "Featured" status. When I respond to comments inline, it increases the sense of community and responsiveness, and fosters a sense of involvement. But on the other hand, as the writer of the post in the first place, I've had my say, and I should give you yours. So I don't want to "step on" somebody's comment for whatever reason—because I disagree, because he's wrong, because I'm wrong, because my feelings are hurt, because his comment might be misleading, because he's challenging my authority, because one of us is being picayune or playing devil's advocate, because he reminded me of my version of his story, or because he's a contrarian and it pleases him to disagree with whatever I said just because I said it. Most of the time it's simply best to give others their turn.

I try to hold myself to the same standard I request of you. I don't allow commenters to be insulting, and I don't allow people to respond to other commenters unless they're being friendly, or helpful, or both. I should hold myself to the same standard, right? No anger, no hitting back, no rudeness or put-downs. I try not to respond if it doesn't add anything positive or productive. Many times I will type a reply to someone's comment, read it over, and delete it, thinking, "you're just arguing," or "his opinion is as valid as yours...."

Old days
The idea of the Featured Comments comes from the old days when TOP was getting 20,000–30,000 pageviews a day and an average post could easily get 50 or 100 comments. I checked back to 10 years ago and alighted on a string of posts with 58, 38, 49, 82, 22, and 69 comments...that was the norm then. The "Featured Comments" is intended to be like a Letters to the Editor section—an edited representative sample of comments for people who don't have time to read all of them. Now, of course, you probably could just read all of them—the posts this past week, working backwards, got 15, 21, 5, 7, 7, 24, 17, and 19 comments. But I'm already in the habit, so yeah, here we go.

The key word is "representative"—it's not a selection of the best comments, necessarily. It's a sampling. I don't just pick comments that agree with my opinion. I try to air dissenting viewpoints, promote comments that oppose each other, and give weight to real-world experience. I worked with a guy many years ago who was very impressed with his own knowledge of photography, which exceeded that of most of the audience. But that made him belittle the audience and talk down to them. I learned a lesson from that; my conception ever since then has been that I might know more about my field than much of my audience does, but they know a lot more about their fields than I do. It keeps me from getting snotty. One of the coolest things about the blog to me is that so many readers have actual life experience or direct knowledge that relates to the topic under discussion. The example I like best is that we did a post about Irving Penn's oversized platinum prints once, and we got a comment from Penn's former darkroom assistant who actually made the prints. That's a standout case, but similar things happen all the time.

I'm not a perfect moderator. I try to be as fair as I can, and to value other peoples' input. I'm always trying to improve. For instance, I used to have a bias against people who write poorly. What cured me of that was when I realized that English isn't everybody's first language! And as the old saw goes, they write English a lot better than I can write their language. I can only speak English, despite years of French torture class in school.

The comments are a lot of work, but they're also the best part of the job for me. In the run-up to my pacemaker operation seven weeks ago, I heard from many people and learned a great deal. As he was explaining the process to me, the surgeon (a photography enthusiast too) was so surprised at how much I already knew that he asked if I have a medical background! Nope. Just a lot of readers who do.

Online discussion is inherently fraught, but, all in all, we do remarkably well. Keep those comments coming, and I'll try not to step on them. And, thanks.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Kye Wood: "Perhaps comments have decreased as more people began reading your blog using their phone? Typing this on mine just now is quite arduous. But reading the post was easy."

Mike replies: Oh yes, that's quite possible. I keep forgetting about that.

Paul: "I spend very little time online. This is the only blog I read with any regularity. I am partial to the photographic pieces. The well-moderated comments often enrich the article with an expansive and diverse set of opinions and views."

Dave B: "I always wonder when reading the featured comments…what nugget(s) am I missing from the ‘other’ comments?"

Bob Johnston [no relation —Ed.]: "You really do moderate extremely well. I only comment when I think that what I have to say will add something of value or sometimes because I disagree with what has been said. So I don't comment very often. I think that is what most of your commenters do."

Bear.: "This is the only public site I’ve ever posted on. That’s due to the quality of your moderation and of the posts. I do agree that posting from a phone is a pain. I’m pretty sure the same difficulty is also the behind rise of the like/dislike button and the emoji."

Aakin: "Your posts are over of the few things I comment on online, even though I read a ridiculous amount of blogs and sites. I think a large part of that is that I know you read every post, and actually look for things that are useful, and it makes me want to be a part of that."

Posted on Sunday, 10 March 2024 at 12:59 PM in Blog Notes | | Comments (10)

Friday, 08 March 2024

Honesty. Isn't It Refreshing?

Forum review of [X] camera:

Title: MY ENDGAME CAMERA!! By George*

Review begins: "This is it!! This is the camera I have always wanted and it will be the last camera I will ever buy!!"

Review might have continued, but doesn't: ...Because I just got it after weeks/months of focused and intense gear longing/pining/desire and I just unboxed it and it's brand new and I'm still enthusiastic about it. I've been working hard for days/ weeks now talking myself into it in order to justify the mostly unnecessary expense!! I.e., still on the pink cloud of NTS (new toy syndrome). I've got the latest shiniest bauble and few other people have it and everyone envies me. Besides, my wife is frustrated and borderline annoyed with me for slinging so much ready dosh into the crapper and I kinda need to broadcast my happiness so she'll think "at least he's happy" and back down.

Actual but unspoken conclusion: In three years I'll be tired of it and bored anew, and at that time there will be new shiny new toys enticing me across the far-flung domains of internet camerababble. Ardent influencers will be joyously proclaiming some new product's virtues just as they are my new toy's virtues today, slighting if not overlooking altogether its inevitable weaknesses because they got blessed by the manufacturer with a pre-release sample and they know which side of their bread the butter's on. So suddenly I'll start being hyperaware of the weaknesses of my by-then-old last-gen camera that I will claim only emerged after months or years of use when, actually, said weaknesses were listed right there in early non-ambassador reviews. And I shall duly begin talking myself into needing that as-yet unspecified newer camera at that time, as the cycle repeats.

Isn't honesty refreshing?

Mission
Spoilsport Ed.'s fingerwagging admonition: Work is what cures GAS. Nota bene. Print this page and clip this out and tape it to your monitor (Bruce Bordner cautions: but not on your monitor at work, or people will walk past very fast!):

 

Work cures GAS

 

I got this from the late Mark L. Power, one of my teachers and a wise man. It was late one night and we were working in the darkroom at the old Corcoran School of Art, since dismantled and dispersed; I might have been helping him set the colorpack for some of his pictures while he was printing in the school's color darkroom (he was red-green colorblind, and mostly worked in B&W but occasionally printed color). There had to be some reason he was working at school; his B&W darkroom was back at his Virginia farm. I mentioned that certain students seemed to be complaining a lot. He told me he had noticed over the years that when students get restless and bored and start to complain, it's because they're not working. They don't have a project. He said that as soon as they get a project and it takes off and they're energized by it and excited by pictures, the complaints come to a screeching halt. They only focus their attention on the shortcomings of their tools when they're not using them enough.

So if someone you know is ever feeling bored with his or her camera, you know what their real mission should be. The solution is work, not new gear.

Mike

*George, as you might remember, is a made-up person. I try never to ridicule real persons. The internet has a long memory, and nobody needs negative energy.

P.S. Johnston's Corollary: You should only take people seriously when they declare a camera to be their "endgame" camera and the last one they'll ever buy if two conditions pertain: 1.) it's already been superseded by a newer iteration, and 2.) they've already had it for long enough for all the NTS to wear off.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

J. Paul Thomas: "Many years ago I worked for a subsidiary of a major sewing machine company. This enabled me to purchase a new machine at a pretty good discount. My wife loved to sew, so this sounded like a good deal. An executive of the parent company advised me to always buy the top-of-the-line model of the previous generation. His reasoning was that all of the bugs had been worked out, and it would still probably do everything my wife needed. He was 100% correct. Over the years I have applied this advice many times to many purchases and have never come up wanting."

Posted on Friday, 08 March 2024 at 01:52 PM in Photo equipment | | Comments (18)

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