The Online Photographer: July 2025

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July 2025

Thursday, 31 July 2025

Just a Thought (EVs OT)

[UPDATE: I done did the deed! I bought a 2023 Nissan Ariya Engage e-4orce EV with 3,700 miles on it (not a typo) for $20,995 (also not a typo) on August 1st, 2025, ten years to the day after I closed on the sale of my house in Wisconsin to move here. Super smooth, fast, comfortable car with lots of luxury touches. "Like New" in used camera terms.

Nissan (manufacturer) Ariya (model) Engage (trim tier) e-4orce (AWD). It was the sixth of the original eight trim levels in 2023, third from the bottom, one of only two trims with the smaller battery. The original price was approx. $48,190 two+ years ago. That's about a 56–57% depreciation in two years, which is...a lot for a near-luxury-level SUV with only 3,700 miles on it.

Three main reasons it was so cheap AFAIK:

Nissan is limping globally in terms of business health
Smaller battery + dual motors and AWD with tons of e-horsepower and torque = low range
Slow charging, both at home (7.2 kW) and at DC Fast Chargers (130 kW)

All three of those are bad for sales, especially since charging speed and driving range are the chief concerns of new EV adopters. (That was Musk's big innovation with Tesla: give the cars great big heavy batteries to quiet consumers' range concerns.)

I bought it mainly because it was within reach for me, which almost nothing is, but there's a lot I like about it. Mainly, it has an opulent and very tasteful interior, but without the increasingly trifling overcomplications in the interiors of the highest models (I don't need a motor to open the secondary glove box, for instance). Main thing I'll touch on: it's possibly the most comfortable car I, now a sedentary overweight 6'1" 68-year-old*, have ever clambered into. The exceptionally good seats slide back automatically when you open the door to make egress and entry easier, the height and the lack of a stepover are very comfortable, and I love the elaborate "coffee table" which is what Nissan calls the center armrest. Importantly (I might even say crucially) for me, there's no center stack. The sharp side of a center stack digging into the side of my knee in a painful way is a surprisingly prevalent problem for me, disqualifying my second choice, the new Civic Hybrid.

Two pet-peevish things I love: you can cover up the cup holders, which are an eyesore in most vehicle cockpits IMO. And you lower the tailgate with your arm, which I remain convinced is something I am capable of doing all by myself like a big boy. No offense if your taste is for the opposite.

Anyway, brave new world. I'm as excited as a kid with a new toy. However, this news means you will stop hearing about EVs very shortly now, as I'll be "stopping shopping" soon. (And, as always [cheap pens?!? Really Mike?], thank you for your patience with me.) My late brother Scott's rule amongst the brothers was "new sheet metal requires pictures," but I haven't taken delivery yet. Pictures to come.

I beg your pardon for the off-topic post, but I'm just immersed in learning about EVs and everything associated with them (great fun, by the way) and I can't help but have the subject on the brain. (I have this problem: it's by far easiest to write about whatever I'm enthusiastic about at the moment. A few of you might possibly have noticed.)

Here's the thought: it's that one big problem with EVs resides, collectively, in our own heads. We need to re-train ourselves to think differently about fueling.

For years—forever—we have learned, practiced, and internalized the liquid-fueling protocol, namely, drive till empty and then fuel completely all at once, while on the move—that is, as a stop in the midst of driving around or driving toward a destination. So far, everybody except EV adopters still wants to mentally shoehorn electric cars into the liquid-fueling model—drive till almost empty then fuel all at once en route, while out driving. Well, not to sound like a second-grader, but that's not fair. At some point we'll have to change that thinking. Electric refueling goes like this: top off if needed when the vehicle is at rest, meaning mostly at home. It's a new way of thinking about fueling, with a new set of plusses and minuses. So by assuming or insisting that electric cars must replicate the paradigm of liquid refueling above all else, people are naturally allowing their thinking about EVs to be distorted. They have mental blinders on, so to speak. Mental blinders of their own making. Because, obviously, electric refueling is not going to be equally good at the one thing that liquid refueling is best at.

That's what creates "range anxiety"—because we're thinking about driving till empty. And we're assuming we'll need to charge on the road. And all of us (or maybe I should speak for myself) are familiar with that panicky feeling of suddenly realizing the gas gauge is low. Or of actually running out of gas and becoming stranded. But from most of the EV owners I've heard from, they don't drive till empty. That's not how the new model works. They let the charge go down as it will or as it must and then charge it back up more or less right away, the next time the car is at rest and not being used.

I first encountered this idea about fueling and peoples' thinking about it in an article written by Adrian Salinas at an Australian site called ArenaWire.

For most non-city-dwelling drivers (I didn't say all, and yes, I know the exceptions are out there), the car sits idle for most of most days, and even more of the nights. That's certainly true of what I would call "commuter" driving, meaning [home —> work or errands —> home]. Put it this way—imagine you had your own gas pump right next to your garage and the gas in it was nearly free. How many times would you come home at night running on fumes? If you said anything but "never," you're an edge case (maybe you work as a rural mailman. Maybe you have a 170-mile commute each way). If [home —> distant destination] driving is electric fueling's worst thing, then its best thing is that suddenly you do have a gas station in your own garage, with fuel that costs 1/3rd to 1/5th of what liquid fuel costs. Commuter driving is electric's best end-user attribute. Gas/petrol can't touch it.

To figure out if it's for you, all you have to figure out is, how much of your driving leaves the car resting at home, and what's your longest possible daily commuter trip? For me it's a drive to Rochester + maybe 35 extra miles at most doing other things along the way or afterward. That's 150 miles round trip give or take. That's my outlier. Well within the range of all but one or two of the worst EVs still on the market. And 98% if not 99% of my driving is commuter driving, starting and ending at home. For that last 2% or 1%, I could either deal with charging along the way, or rent a car.

The new 2026 Nissan Leaf, coming this Fall

A funny little aside: I have a friend here who bemoans range anxiety with great drama. At which point I remind him that he's got four cars. What, can't he just snag the keys to the ICE SUV on the way out the door for that road trip? Having a liquid-fuel vehicle as well as an EV is the crude way to quiet range anxiety. Any given person might not want this, and it makes no sense to prescribe it, but then, it's also true that a lot of people have it. Hedges & Company estimates that approximately 37% of US households own two cars, and an additional 22% own three or more cars (via AI overview). I've got a friend who has one "good" (expensive, shiny, new) and one "beater" (worn, working, older) pickup truck, as well as a motley of several lesser cars...and a 4-wheeler, and an enormous motor-scooter he bought for a departed girlfriend, and two real motorcycles, and so on. I don't know his opinion about electric cars, but I'll try to remember to tread gently and not blast him a new one if has the temerity to bring up range anxiety as the "deal killer" with Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

Finally, not meaning to be incendiary, but...Eisenhower built the entire Interstate highway system. Surely our flattened, infiltrated version of the once-mighty Federal government, meek, meagre and withered as it has become, could eventually shift itself to install EV chargers all along those highways. That would take care of a whole lot of those long-range trips. We even have convenient places already reserved to put them...they're called rest stops.

Mike

*I used to be 6'2", no kidding.

P.S. Here's a nice video about what it actually costs to run an EV.

Original contents copyright 2025 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.)

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Posted on Thursday, 31 July 2025 at 04:26 PM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (60)

Wednesday, 30 July 2025

Chris Killip (and a Blog Note)

I've been ill. Spent the whole night on Monday in the ER. Not serious, not chronic, and not important, but it was an ordeal. I'm recuperating.

Life happens....

Meanwhile, Oren and Carl (old friends, of each other and, later, of me—Oren can be seen here and Carl here) have discovered the Chris Killip Foundation website. There's a beautiful brief selection of photographs from each of several of his projects. Go to the site and then to "Images" and have a look. I think this work deserves extended viewing, even meditation if that's not too much to say. His great 1988 book In Flagrante is hard to obtain, and I've never actually seen a copy. It would be nice to have more of the work online if the presentation were as good as it is on the website. (Why can't whole books be presented online? I guess it's not done because then no one has to pay, and photographers need money too. But when the books aren't available and the photographer is no longer with us....)

I never quite had a handle on Chris Killip while he was alive, I'm sorry to say. So I've been reading bits and pieces of biography from here and there. The Wikipedia article on him is a good place to start.

Back soon.

Mike

P.S. I'll be working on catching up with comments today and tomorrow.

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Posted on Wednesday, 30 July 2025 at 07:20 AM in Blog Notes, Photographers, historical | Permalink | Comments (20)

Sunday, 27 July 2025

Open Mike: The Most Desirable Camera on the Planet?

["Open Mike" is the often meandering, summery, sylvan, and serene Editorial Page of TOP, because otherwise you might never hear what Yr. Hmbl. Ed. thinks about stuff. I'm kidding.]

This could be the one

Thursday, 24 July 2025

The Mysterious Case of the Missing DN

[UPDATE the following morning: That was interesting—the information in the post below, which I wrote yesterday using information from Sigma's and B&H's websites, is now obsolete and no longer correct. Literally overnight, not only have some of B&H Photo's listings for some of the I-Series Contemporary lenses changed, but Sigma's own web page for those lenses has changed as well. Sigma no longer includes the DG DN lenses on the Contemporary lenses page, but has added them to the "Discontinued" page. (It's also possible my search yesterday turned up an outdated page.) And several of the lenses I said were still available at the old prices at B&H Photo are no longer listed or are now listed as "Discontinued." It looks like the 65mm lens is the only one still available in L-mount at the old price. But I didn't check them all. Several of the older DG DN lenses look to still be available in Sony E mount at the old prices also.

A couple of things I missed: the 45mm ƒ/2.8 DG (new style) (now $619, vs. the old price of $449) does feature a change: it now takes the magnetic lenscap used across the rest of the line, according to DPReview. And the obvious one: these lenses are now available in silver versions, to match the silver BF. —Mike]

I shoot Sigma L-mount now, and the other day I noticed something that outwardly looked weird. Some of the Contemporary series of lenses seemed to have a subtly new designation—the older lenses were "DG DN" and the newer lenses are just "DG." Not just on the sale pages; the change is also printed on the lenses themselves.

(Note: These illustrations show just the lower
part of the lens, not the whole lens)

This is the older and newer Contemporary 35mm ƒ/2. Note the printed lens designations.

Then I noticed something else weird. On the Sigma page for the lenses, both versions are listed and illustrated, but they don't seem to be right next to each other. For example, this 35mm ƒ/2 DG DN is in the middle of one row and plain DG is at the beginning of the next row down. The 24mm ƒ/3.5 has three lenses in between the DG DN and the DG.

In Sigma-speak, DG is a lens for full-frame, and DN signifies (sigmafies?) a lens for mirrorless. So why did the "DN" disappear?

I know, the suspense it killing you, so I'll cut to the chase. The old and new lenses are exactly the same. No changes. The new lenses are every bit as much for mirrorless as the original DN-marked lenses are.

Then...oh, duh. A number of the "new" DG-only lenses are more expensive. So do you suppose they put the lenses on the company web page farther away from each other to make it less likely that you'd compare the prices? Or does that sound like a TOP conspiracy theory?

The ones that have gone up in price are the 17mm ƒ/4, 24mm ƒ/3.5, 24mm ƒ/2, 35mm ƒ/2, and 65mm ƒ/2.

The ones that have stayed at the same price are the 20mm ƒ/2, 45mm ƒ/2.8, 50mm ƒ/2, and 90mm ƒ/2.8.

It appears that none of the Contemporary zoom lenses are yet available in a DG-only version.

Should you be interested in snagging something at the old "DG DN" price, B&H Photo still has a couple of the DG DN marked lenses that look like they're based on the lower price: the 17mm ƒ/4 DG DN, L-mount, $599 (same as Sigma list price) and the 65mm ƒ/2 DG DN, L-mount, $599 ($100 less than the Sigma list price for the old one; the new one is $769). The others are discontinued at the former prices. The 65mm has particularly nice bokeh if you're all right with the only mildly longer angle of view.

All those prices are for L-mount. Sony E-mount lenses might be different prices. Some look to be more, some less.

I really like this lens series. They have all-metal casings and very smooth operation, and metal lens hoods, even, and their performance is beyond reproach, at least the two I've tried. I've been meaning to buy a 90mm. Now is probably the time. [UPDATE: too late.]

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Jim Kofron (partial comment): "Sigma did announce a price increase due to the tariffs. I have a 90mm on backorder from B&H; I think it's supposed to come in September. I doubt that they will 'give it' to me for the original backorder price. The new I-series lenses were all getting the makeover (with magnetic caps, etc). I have a new 45mm and an older 17mm (both for my black Sigma BF). As for the Sigma BF, I'm really enjoying that camera. I've never had a Sigma that was so fast and rock-solid on autofocus—it's quite a treat!"

Posted on Thursday, 24 July 2025 at 05:29 PM in Lenses | Permalink | Comments (16)

"Kickers" and Link Hygiene (Blog Notes)

I reckon I've moderated something within shouting distance of 330,000 comments in my nearly 20 years as a blogger online. I'm sure I haven't seen everything, but I've seen most things. Commenters self-select, but they also respond to the culture of a site—if you're consistent about what you want and reward, what you encourage and what you don't, you'll get the commenters you deserve. As you know, the commenters here are one of the best things about the site.

The Commentariat, though, is a subset of the readership, not the whole readership. And people in my position shouldn't confuse the two. People who comment anywhere (discounting the 2% who just love their own poop, as my friend Phil used to say) tend to be those who feel secure discussing the subject at a useful level.

There are two ways I think that claim can be objectively verified. One is that when I bring up a separate and different topic, we will hear from some commenters we never hear from otherwise, who know a lot about that subject. So if I bring up, say, nursing, or mountain biking, people with expertise or experience with those things will join the conversation—they know more about it than I know about it, and they know they do. The other proof is, how do you yourself feel when you drop in on a forum about something you know very little about? I don't know ab0ut you, but if I go to a forum for car mechanics, or one about finance, or one about learning Italian, I tend to shut the heck up. The reason is that I'm pretty certain I have nothing meaningful to contribute.

Telltale
A sign that people are insecure about their own standing, in my opinion, is what I call "the kicker." A kicker is when someone has made their point and corrected another person they think is wrong, but then they have to ram their point home with a gratuitous insult at the end. Here's an example from a random year-old reddit thread (kicker in red):

OP: With inexpensive Chinese EV's banned in the US, I wonder if people will buy them in Mexico and bring them into the US?

1st responder: Not gonna happen. You can’t import non-US market cars that are less than 25 years old. The process to make them US market compliant is not someone an individual or even a small company can do successfully.

2nd responder: I live 2 hours from Mexican border and see Mexican license plates everyday.

1st responder: Mexican citizens can temporarily drive their Mexican registered cars in the US for 90 days. That has absolutely nothing to the with the OP’s suggestion of a US resident buying a car in Mexico and bringing it back permanently. How you failed to understand the difference between these two things is completely beyond me.

Really? Completely beyond him? Funny, because I can easily understand how the 2nd responder thought his observation might be relevant. And actually, 1st responder is wrong: Mexicans can drive a Mexican-registered and -plated car here for up to one year, as long as they have a valid Mexican driver's license and insurance that comes up to U.S. standards. But note that kicker. In effect, "How can you be so ignorant as to argue with me?"

So watch for kickers—your own or other peoples'. It could be a sign that an overly positive writer is actually unsure of him- or herself. Why add the kicker if your argument is strong enough alone?

Bogus links
Anyone can fall for a bogus link*. I'm not playing holier-than-thou here, nor am I suggesting that any specific individual is to blame for "falling" for wrong information—actually, back in '22, when I wrote a couple of articles for a national magazine, the fact checker did so. She challenged something I wrote on a subject I'm so thoroughly versed in that I knew right away where she had gotten her information—she had fallen for a tendentious website that was spreading a false narrative, and she got there by just Googling the question. I knew all about the person who wrote the site she found, a known fraud. (And she wasn't wrong to ask me to defend myself.)

But most things aren't so easy. When people include links in comments here, it's generally a big headache. If I'm being conscientious, I have to check out the link before publishing it. Sometimes, I don't know enough to evaluate the veracity of the link without doing more research. And I have limited time for such things. For that reason, sometimes I'll just remove links from comments.

And sometimes, I learn later that I should have removed a link. The other day, I published a commenter's link to a site that claimed that the "electromagnetic fields" associated with electric vehicles can have deleterious health effects on people, especially people with heart disease or pacemakers. Turns out that's not true, and the author of the site that was linked is a known fraud. But I had to hear from someone with deep knowledge of the issue before taking down the link.

I'm sure I've made mistakes like this...well, let's just be kind to me and say "not infrequently." But with 330,000 comments to vet, even over 20 years, we can't get everything right. Not everything I say is correct, either. My biggest advantage there is that I'm always willing to be corrected. If I make a mistake, I don't have such a big ego that I won't admit it. Of course, I'm also secure enough to argue the point if I still think I'm right.

One of the huge benefits of writing a site like this one is that almost no matter what I write about, I'm surely just about to learn a lot more about it...from you.

Mike

*Although I'm always surprised when I do. I fell for this when it was broadcast—I went around for three days afterwards telling people about the astonishing thing Demi Moore did despite being pregnant. Why that one? I honestly don't know. I try to remember those instances where I fell for things that are obviously tricks, though—it keeps me humble.

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Posted on Thursday, 24 July 2025 at 01:00 PM in Blog Notes | Permalink | Comments (8)

Tuesday, 22 July 2025

Bits 'n' Pieces

Terrible disaster: This Instagram post stunned me. Our friend John Paul Caponigro lost 80% of his beautiful, carefully made archive of prints to a "mold bloom" in the building where the work was stored. A tree rubbing up against the roof in the wind opened three holes that let the moisture in. The building is insured, but the contents aren't. I have to say I was shocked at those photos, knowing how much work the wastage represents. Sincere and heartfelt condolences to John Paul, and I'm sure we all wish him well in his restoration and renewal efforts. Ned B. alerted me.

Pierce is 90: Now here's a bunch of true hotshots, or should I say hot shooters. Left to right, Eddie Adams, Arthur Grace, Bill Pierce, and Dirck Halstead. (Bill goes by "Pierce" to his friends.) These guys were some of the top names in World photojournalism when this portrait was taken. You can see some of Pierce's work, including some of his famous Northern Ireland photos, at the "Bill Pierce is 90" Facebook page. Happy Birthday Pierce! (Thanks to Carl for this.)

Nicolas the Vampire: For some reason this struck me as hilarious at the time. Back in 2011, an old CDV (carte de visite) was found of a man that resembled actor Nicolas Cage (real name: Nicolas Kim Coppola; he's the nephew of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola). The logical conclusion arrived at was that Nicolas Cage must be a vampire, one of the undead. Various people then went to great lengths to analyze the photo to prove that it either was or wasn't a photo of Nic Cage, which is what I found amusing. It was proven not to be...based on comparisons of the structure of the ears.

Looking back, this had to be a spoof—most probably the original jokester didn't actually believe it was a photo of Nic Cage. He was just trying to sell the old CDV, for $1 million. Which of course makes it less funny. That and the fact that the historical personage in the photo doesn't look that much like Nicolas Cage.

Anyway, the original photo is back up on eBay—again for $1 million. And, presumably because I looked at it, the seller has offered me $50,000 off through eBay's channels! As a counteroffer, I'm thinking of offering him $214.56. Think that will be enough to nab it?

If I worked at a call center in Mumbai, I'd agree to give him a million dollars but only if he sent me the $50,000 first.

Jim Kasson's creativity: I guess you have to be a literary junkie to appreciate this, but Jim Kasson has collected a remarkable set of reviews of the Fuji GF 110mm ƒ/2 (87mm-e) from a series of eminent authors and poets. I hope it is within the bounds of Fair Use to quote, as one example, this review from Ogden Nash:

The Fujifilm One-Ten F-Two
Will do what other lenses rue.
It grabs the light with subtle force
And keeps your subject sharp, of course.
The background turns to silky slush,
A creamy, dreamy, whisper-hush.
It weighs a bit, but do not pout,
Its portraits leave no room for doubt.
It’s fast, it’s crisp, it’s smooth as jazz,
A lens that makes you shout, “Alas!
How did I live before this glass?”

I don't know how he even got in touch with Mr. Nash, never mind getting him to agree to participate. It's hard enough getting in touch with someone who's alive. Not only that, but William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Parker, James Joyce, ee cummings, Geoffrey Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, and Ovid all contributed reviews as well. Who knew that Ovid, of all people, was a GFX shooter? But we now possess the evidence, cf. the Nicolas Cage vampire thing. All are in agreement that the GF 110mm is a great lens, but then, I've always said that short teles are the easiest lenses to design well. (Hat tip to Oren Grad, and kudos to Jim.)

Mike

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Posted on Tuesday, 22 July 2025 at 12:45 PM in Around the Web | Permalink | Comments (12)

Sunday, 20 July 2025

SongRaw Moonlit: BHNs Are a Bonafide Fad, Folks

The fad from my time, in a current lens

It's official: this is an era. The era of what I've snarkily dubbed the great big honkin' normal (BHN) lens. It's a distinct fad or craze that will probably be dated one day.

Here's DPReview's article about the forthcoming SongRaw Moonlit (15 elements in 10 groups, four ED [extra-low dispersion] elements, seven HR [high refractive index] elements, two aspherical elements). It's alleged to be the first full-frame ƒ/1.2 autofocus lens from a Chinese maker. No specs, prices, or availability in my country yet, that I know of. It appears to be Shenzhen SongRaw's only product so far.

These things don't appeal to me, but there might be a reason for that. In the early 1970s (I was 14 in 1971), Olympus made the first of its popular miniaturized 35mm bodies. Then-mighty Pentax followed suit—ever held an ME Super? Even Nikon, king of pro cameras back then, responded with a few small and svelte models: not just the FM and its similar-bodied stablemates; a few diehard iconoclasts will remember the EM and the Series-E lenses. The Contax 139Q that I went through photography school with was reasonably within the boundaries of the small and light body styles of the day. (I later got the larger, heavier Contax RTS II, and, to my surprise, didn't like it as well. It was promptly stolen from me, which I accepted as a sign from the Universe.) Leica rangefinders had always been small, at least as defined at the time—the Leica CL that my high school buddy Art Elkon had was even smaller. The Leica M lenses and the wonderful OM Zuiko line were mostly very light, small, and compact. The Leica C (for "compact") lenses for the CL even more so. That was the fashion at that time. It would be interesting to put the Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.2 next to the Songraw Moonlit. It might look like an original Austin Mini next to a Hummer*.

Small and light was the fad that I grew up with, is all. It was what was cool at the time. That's probably mostly why I like it. I got a little endorphin charge when I saw the Pentax 70mm ƒ/2.4 again, that I will be sending out with the Pentax Monochrome body—130g (4.6 oz.) with its built-in hood. That's it in the top illustration—and it's bigger than the 21mm that will also be in the box.

I suspect that today's younger photography and camera enthusiasts are growing up with a different fashion holding sway—and that when they're my age now, they'll be looking back with rosy nostalgia on the great big lenses of now as "the way things are supposed to be." They'll get that little charge when they see a great big oversized lens...like an old SongRaw Moonlit.

Nothing new under the sun....

Here's the manufacturer page for the SongRaw Moonlit. Pretty images. And a slick and well-made page, complete with MTF curves for ƒ/1.2 and ƒ/1.4.

Mike

CORRECTION: The first version of this article said the Moonlit is the first ƒ/1.2 lens from a Chinese lensmaker. It is the first full-frame autofocus lens of that speed. Management regrets the error, and will fire the writer as soon as a replacement is found.

*Actually the smallest car I ever saw (and sat in!) was the original Honda Civic. A dealer had one on display. It was a little larger than, say, a suit of armor.

That's an early Doug video, by the way. He's now a YouTube multimillionaire.

Featured Comments from:

Sroyon: "I was born after the Olympus OM/Pentax ME era, but like you I'm a fan of small lenses. Nevertheless I was thinking perhaps we should differentiate between fast BHN (with a max aperture of ƒ/1.2 or wider) like the SongRaw, versus not-so-fast BHN (ƒ/1.4 and smaller). The way I see it, a full-frame autofocus ƒ/1.2 lens is bound to be big, unless they make dramatic compromises in optical quality. Whereas the not-so-fast BHN are generally big because the manufacturers wanted to make a lens which is extraordinarily well-corrected, at the expense of compactness and weight. Thus the motivations of people who buy fast versus not-so-fast BHN are probably somewhat different. Also I feel there are lots of new lenses being produced in general, especially with all the Chinese manufacturers joining the party. Including some very small lenses like the new Fuji 23mm ƒ/2.8, and 7Artisans' new 10mm ƒ/3.5. So there's a market for that too!"

Tom Burke: "Partaking as I do in a (different) forum dedicated for users of the Canon mirrorless camera that I use, I can report that a number of people buy a BHN (or the APS-C equivalent) because they’ve been told that the wider the maximum aperture, the greater the lens is. Having bought the lens, they then use it at that maximum aperture for most of their shots. Until they appeal for advice to the forum, at which point someone advises them to use a smaller aperture. But there’s a definite belief out there that an ƒ/1.4 or wider lens must be better than an ƒ/2 or even ƒ/2.8 lens, at all apertures."

BG: "Big honkin' cameras and big honkin' lenses were popular back in the SLR era, too. It's the macho I'm-a-serious he-man photographer thing. Look at the size of my cameras; it proves I am serious. Nothing changes over time...."

Maggie Osterberg: "When I was a teenager, I wanted everyone to know that I was a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER dammit! So, I had a big Nikon SLR, with a big potato-masher flash, and a big lens. Which looked pretty ridiculous on my then 5'2" frame! But by golly, folks knew I was serious. By the time I got to my forties, I figured out that unless you're shooting sports, big ≠ good. Best thing I ever did was to get a Leica, with nice small lenses, and then an X100. As E.F. Schumacher wrote, 'Small Is Beautiful.'"

James: "You could, instead of complaining, herald the Sigma Contemporary DG DN series. The 45mm is, in particular, a standout."

Mike replies: James, that's my lens.

Posted on Sunday, 20 July 2025 at 12:24 PM in Lenses | Permalink | Comments (26)

Saturday, 19 July 2025

UPDATE: Range Anxiety (OT)

I've been rather consumed by car shopping the last few days. I just wanted to comment on "range anxiety" with EVs. To add my comment to the other comments.

I've simply noticed that most of the anxiety about charging infrastructure comes from people who don't own EVs. Most people who own EVs don't consider it much of a problem. That seems fair to say from the comments here, or would you not agree?

How far do you need to drive? Some EVs have a range of 300 miles. That's the distance from Chicago to Detroit. It's also the distance from Chicago to St. Louis. Do people really think they're going to be stranded in the wilderness with a dead car because they can't manage to find a charging station between Chicago and Detroit, or between Chicago and St. Louis?

Second point; everybody who talks about range anxiety doesn't seem to mention the flip side of the coin, which is having a private gas station in your garage. Put a Level 2 charger in the garage and you can "gas up" whenever you want to. Similarly, the FUD spreaders online constantly talk about waiting for the car to charge. I don't have time to wait all day, etc. When, actually, if you charge at home, it's a lot quicker than filling up at a gas station. You plug in the car when you get home at night and unplug it in the morning. It can't take as much as two minutes. You only have to wait on long road trips. In everyday life (well, if your situation resembles mine) there's no waiting involved.

Now, of course, "your mileage may vary." As they say. Everyone's circumstances are different. But it's been more than two years since I did a long road trip. My driving goes from my house, to one or two or three or four other places, back to my house. Mostly, I drive to town and back, 15 miles round trip. Maximum mileage in a day is probably a trip to Rochester, 116 miles round trip. I drive to Rochester maybe once every two months, and it's probably less than that. Add some toodling around in Rochester, an errand or three on the way home, a meeting that evening, and I might be at a maximum of what, 160 miles for a day? That's well within the 10–80% range of every car I've looked at so far (I drove a Chevy Equinox EV yesterday). That's worst case.

I'm bitterly disappointed that I probably can't get an Ioniq 5. I love driving that thing. So pleasing. Love everything about it—how it fits me, the ride, the controls, the punchy power, the regen paddles. But I don't think I'm willing to risk the ICCU issue. So now I'm thinking of leasing a 2025 Ford Mach-e for a few years. Sort of just for the experience: I'd like to experience an electric car. Even if it's only temporary. I'm mainly simply curious. I want to find out firsthand what it's like to live with. (This is the impulse that made me into a reviewer: I want to try things for myself and decide for myself.) And I'd like to write about it. Then, 2–3 years from now, I'll regroup and figure out what to do going forward.

It would make the most sense economically to keep my current car longer, so I might. And I must say I think I'd miss it. It's been trouble-free and I'm very comfortable with it. On the other hand, YOLO. And I ain't getting any younger.

Switching to the passive voice, as people often do when talking about commitments: the decision has not yet been made.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Bob G.: "These battery or gas issues sound like the battery-dependent/manual issues back when the then 'new' all-battery cameras were starting to come in…"

Mike replies: Yes, wasn't that odd? For some reason that's something we've never really discussed. In the days of film SLRs, people so strongly desired "battery independence" that some manufacturers, including Leica and Olympus (which was briefly a leading cameramaker in the early 1980s) made specific models that were completely manual and could operate with a completely dead battery or no battery at all. And those cameras usually cost more, and were more rare, than the regular versions (the OM-3T remained scarce and prized for years). I can't recall the name of the Leica equivalent but it was an R SLR. People prized the M6 because the only thing that wouldn't work if the battery died was the meter. And many SLRs had a single shutter speed that would work manually, so that you couldn't be "caught" with a dead battery. You'd be limping, but you could still take pictures.

And those were for button batteries that lasted A YEAR OR MORE in normal use! Remember the admonition to change your camera's batteries every year on your birthday whether your camera needed it or not? The whole situation always seemed borderline crazy to me—especially because we were talking about button batteries that were tiny and weighed about as much as, what, a nickel? How hard was it to stash a backup battery (or two, if you camera required two) in your camera bag in those days? And that would be all you need to cover you in case of the apparently much-dreaded battery failure problem. I mean, even if you were going into the wilderness for a year, take a spare. You'd never feel the weight in your backpack, especially not compared to your backup body and your birding lens.

Then, after a few years of transition, everybody's like, oh, yes, these digital cameras require rechargeable batteries that have to charged virtually EVERY DAY, but we're all fine with that, no problem, we can handle it.

Huh? That was one of those "does not compute" situations. What happened to all that battery anxiety from the SLR days? Where did it go? Maybe all the people who bought all-manual 35mm cameras just switched to view cameras and a Sunny-16 chart, beats me.

Steve Rosenblum: "I appear to be a couple of days late to this discussion, but here are my two cents. I owned a 2020 Tesla Model Y for five years, and last month traded it for a 2025 Mustang Mach-E Premium with the extended range battery. Observations about EVs in general:

They are lots of fun to drive due to the instant torque and lack of transmission.
In five years nothing needed to be repaired on my Model Y after dealing with the initial problems they had with fit and finish issues. No maintenance costs beyond rotating the tires, changing the cabin filter and wiper blades, and they suggest you have the brake calipers cleaned each year if you drive in snowy places that use salt on roads.
Despite being an all-wheel-drive vehicle I found it did much better in the Michigan winter with snow tires compared to all weather tires, so I had those put on each winter.
The estimated 'range' for these cars is optimistic and I suspect they are based upon driving 65 in the summer with the wind at your back with a light foot on the pedal and the AC either off or set at 80 degrees. In the winter you lose around 30% of your range and, if very cold, more.
If you go on a long road trip you do need to plan your route considering charging options. The Tesla supercharger network is the best in terms of convenience and speed of charging and now you can charge non-Tesla cars at them using an adapter. It takes around 20 minutes to charge from 20% to 80% full at a Tesla supercharger. Going on long trips off the interstate system is more problematic.
The vast majority of the time I drive within 10 miles of home, or at most 50 miles of home and a home Level 2 charger is just the ticket.
The best compromise for those with serious range anxiety is a PHEV, or plug in hybrid. My wife has a RAV4 PHEV that can run for around 45 miles on EV mode before shifting to hybrid mode. Ninety-five percent of the time she doesn't drive more than that each day and can recharge at night. She rarely visits a gas station. If we go on a long road trip we take her car so as not to worry about charging.
My brother in law did the ultimate climate-friendly EV hack—he installed solar on the roof of his garage and powers his Tesla completely from the sun. Of course, he lives in California and the ROI on solar panels takes quite a while to catch up (soon to be worse due to recent 'Big Beautiful Bill' changes) but still, pretty cool.

"I love my new Mach-E which I have on a three-year lease. It is in all ways a better car than the Model Y. Just as fun to drive, but much nicer interior, smoother ride, excellent fit and finish, nice B&O audio system. The only defect I have detected since delivery is the exterior temperature sensor reads a bit high, so they swapped that out. Otherwise, perfect quality control. Three of my friends also have Mach-E's and they love them as well."

hugh crawford (partial comment): "On another site there’s a conversation about range anxiety, and I remembered that my father had a little Datsun 720 diesel pickup with an 80 gallon auxiliary tank for fueling farm equipment. In theory it could go over 2,500 miles but we never got it more than 30 miles away from home, and Chevron would deliver 500 gallons of gasoline and diesel to our house. I used to drive 2,800 miles nonstop a couple times a year, but that was 20 something year old me."

Dan B.: "In case you haven’t seen it, the VW ID.4 is supposedly available for as low as $99/month for a two-year lease, that’s a true giveaway and might be a good way to experience an EV at minimal cost...."

Mike replies: My experience so far is that those "offers" are just the "bait" in bait-and-switch come-ons. In every case so far where I've brought a supposed lease offer in to a dealer (four), the actual lease offer made to me has been much higher. Example: on Ford's "Payment Calculator" online I could get a result for a Mach-E Select (the lowest trim) of $330 a month with a $4,069 down payment, 36 months and 15,000 miles per year, whereas the actual lease offer at the dealer was $425 per month with a $5,000 down payment for 36 months and 12,000 miles per year.

Mileage restrictions on a lease kind of defeat the purpose of an electric car for me, because the cheaper fuel would partially be so I could feel more free to drive around photographing.

At Honda, the supposed Prologue lease of $209 per month for two years was contingent on my current car qualifying for "Loyalty or Conquest," meaning, it had to be a Honda (thus proving I was loyal) or it had to be a car from a list of Honda's competitors (meaning they want to conquer those brands). Anyway, my car is an Acura, which is a division of Honda, and it was made at the Honda Manufacturing of Indiana plant in Greenburg, Indiana. But did that qualify as loyal? No. Because Honda and Acura's financial divisions are separate and that's who has to approve the lease. My offer was $289 per month and a much heftier down payment.

That $99 figure you mention comes from Electrek, which merely said one dealer in California was offering it. Also in some cases the specific cars available with those low lease numbers are very limited. So, for instance, by the time I got around to asking about a specific advertised lease at Hyundai, the numbers of cars offered with that lease price came up for different models as "0, 0, and 0." So it seems that the makers will offer just a very few cars at one specific dealer somewhere at very low lease prices just to get those "as low as" reports on the internet. Then you toddle to the dealerships with your naive hopefulness and they get a chance to pitch you on a car.

Posted on Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 02:20 PM in Followups, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (55)

UPDATE: Pentax Monochrome Loaner

I just took the first five people who asked to be included. I've gotten lots of private emails from people asking to be considered; please forgive me for not answering you personally. It would kill an hour that I don't have to spare today.

The first five people getting the Pentax Monochrome are: Steve Rosenblum, MikeR, Rob Spring, Todd Scholten, and William Lewis. Like I say, they were just the first five to ask, no special treatment. I'll be emailing them later tonight, or tomorrow. John Camp had a nice suggestion about the timing of shipments: each person should ship it to the next on the second Monday after they receive it. That insures that each person will get the camera for two full weekends and a solid week in between. That's for people who work a nine-to-five and are free on weekends. Nice thought. We'll adopt that.

I'll include two small primes (to keep the package light), the charger, one battery, and of course the camera body with a strap. I'll also include a list of the five people and their addresses, a timetable, and a checklist of the box contents. I'm also going to suggest that the six of us open a text chat so we can talk amongst ourselves.

If this all goes smoothly, we'll do it again in the Fall with five more readers.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Posted on Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 02:03 PM in Followups | Permalink | Comments (7)

Thursday, 17 July 2025

Curious About Digital Black-and-White? LOANER PENTAX MONOCHROME

[UPDATE: All five slots are already filled. If all goes smoothly, we can do it again.]

The Online Photographer now owns a loaner Pentax Monochrome camera, brand new, that I can send to TOP readers who might be interested in trying it. v

Does that sound like fun?

You don't need to own or shoot Pentax—a complete set of all you need will be included. Except you'll have to provide your own card.

To play, you need only be an established commenter. I can instantly call up commenting history for any reader: how long you've been commenting, how many comments you've made, and all the comments themselves. There won't be any minimum number of comments or cutoff line for how long you've been commenting or anything like that. All I ask is that I be able to see that you're someone who's been around and engaged with TOP for a while, so that I know you're a "friendly" and that you know our culture. If that's the case, I'll trust you with no questions asked.

This is not sponsored by Pentax USA or any other corporate or retail entity.

Here's the deal: I'll ship it anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, along with a Pentax lens or two. You agree to treat it nice and be careful with it, try it for 10 days or fewer, then ship it along to the next person whose address I'll provide. Shipping it forward will be the only cost you'll incur.

In return, you'll agree to write a short post about your experience to share here on the blog.

The post should be standard TOP blog-post specs: 750 words give or take 500; one to three illustrations.

You can write about any aspect of it you like: what you did with it, what your experience was like, your impressions, your opinion, your feeling about the results, technical analysis of some aspect or other, what you compared it to, how you like the files, whether you enjoyed it or were frustrated by it—whatever you want. NOT ALL of those things are required; any one would be enough. Or something else. Actually nothing specific is required. It's open. You can write anything you care to about your trial period. You decide.

Don't worry if you're not an experienced or able writer, or not a native English speaker. We have a good editor (me).

Illustrations can be pictures you took with the camera; pictures of the camera; a film B&W picture of your own for comparison, perhaps; a graph or chart; or anything you think is pertinent to, or that illustrates, whatever you care to share. It's up to you. I'll include the simple specs in the box.

Let's limit this to five people, say, to begin with. If it's popular and everything goes smoothly, we'll continue.

[UPDATE: All five slots are already filled. If all goes smoothly, we can do it again.]

Call it "The Nomad Pentax."

I think that's everything. Interested readers can reply in the Comments Section (won't be published).

Sounds like fun to me.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Posted on Thursday, 17 July 2025 at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

Should I Go Electric? (OT)

I'd like your opinion.

I have a chance to buy a new 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 for $29k, which is a.) a lot of money but b.) not bad for a car these days—in general, never mind a full EV. (Local dealer has a few 2024 models left.)

Think I should?

More specifically, do you think you might enjoy reading the adventures of your quirky and Quixotic online friend Mike as he grapples with the NWO (new world order) of a full EV?

Not every day of course. Not every week. But ongoing. You know how I do—certain topics kinda recur. We'd probably check in a handful of times a year, sort of a long-term review kind of thing, plus the odd observation here and there.

The existing Mikemobile is at 11 years and 150k miles, and is beginning to show rust. Median Blue Book on it is $5,900. It's running fine and has new tires, and I could keep it longer. On the other hand, I've kinda had EVs on the brain since I drove that Mustang Mach-E almost a year ago, and it would hardly be an impulsive or irresponsible thing to do to replace the old buggy.

I am this close to pulling the trigger. Please, influence the influencer!

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Curt Gerston: "We’ve had a Hyundai Kona Electric for three years now. Love love love it. We smile as we pass gas stations; never have to change oil. We charge it in our driveway. Range is never an issue. Go ahead…join the future, and feel better about the miles you cover to go take pictures."

Mike replies: I didn't mention it because I was afraid it would sound too much like rationalizing, but that's honestly one of the motivations. If I go out for two hours looking for pictures with the Sigma, the hours seem to melt away but, day upon day, the gasoline bill gets pretty alarming. I'm not saying I'd save money by buying an electric car, but I'd feel more relaxed about staying out.

The way I calculate it, the savings on gas and oil would pay for about one year and two months of car payments over the six year life of the loan. The sale of the old Acura would also cover about one year and two months of payments.

Andre Y: "If you do, make sure you budget for a home level 2 charger, like a Chargepoint Home Flex, along with installation, which can be expensive mainly because of the copper wiring. Make sure the electrician knows how to install EV chargers too, as chargers have different demands than say a clothes dryer outlet: they run continuously at high power for hours at a time compared to 30 minutes or so for a dryer, so they have different requirements for wiring and load capacity. Get the charger hard-wired instead of using a plug because the plug will wear out, and could cause a fire due to intermittent contact and very high electrical loads."

Posted on Thursday, 17 July 2025 at 04:20 PM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (68)

Wednesday, 16 July 2025

The DOGS! Baker's Dozen

By Jez Cunningham

By Ian Marshall

By Kyle Batson

By Esa Taponen

By Charlie Dunton

By Carlos Quijano

By Don Craig

By John Camp

By Yonatan Katznelson

By Lynn Burdekin

By Chap Achen

By Mark Lacey

And one more for good measure:

Continue reading "The DOGS! Baker's Dozen" »

Posted on Wednesday, 16 July 2025 at 11:05 AM in Baker's Dozen | Permalink | Comments (26)

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Biphasic Sleep Experiment Update (OT)

Here's the ni:dr (not interested, didn't read) version: biphasic sleep appears to be for me.

A month ago I promised you an update on this today (see the last paragraph of the linked post from June 15th).

If you didn't see that post and don't want to go back and read it, biphasic sleep is sleeping in two shifts with an interval of wakefulness in between. It was most likely the common mode of sleeping in Europe before the Industrial Revolution, and it was probably the ordinary mode of sleeping in colonial America. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin are said to have slept that way. It was killed by electric lights and by the modern custom of commuting back and forth to a workplace away from home. I'd give you some links, but you know how to use Google if you want to know more.

The results
It's been a somewhat rocky month, but the upshot is encouraging and positive. I slept all but three days "biphasically" this past month. I had to experiment with several schedule changes, and I had to suffer several failures. Nothing big; just ordinary self-indulgent failures. One time I took a late afternoon nap that messed everything up. One time I stayed up too late watching tennis matches (it was an eventful Wimbledon). One time I couldn't stop writing on time and got to bed for Phase II way too late. And one time I just couldn't get to sleep for Phase II. Three times I said the heck with it and slept the old way. Or tried to.

However I really like the schedule overall. It solves two relatively large problems in my life: how to get an adequate amount of sleep, and when to find time in the day for uninterrupted long-form writing.

The current schedule
Here's where I've ended up so far:

I set (gentle) alarms for 10:00 p.m., 2:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., and 10 a.m. I try to get in bed after the first alarm between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m. and turn my lights off by 11:00 at the latest. I sleep for 3+ hours; get up at 2:00 a.m. and come downstairs, where I have the office prepared with a yellow light bulb in the table lamp and the yellow "Night Mode" color cast on the computer display turned all the way up; write for three hours; and then go back to bed at 5:00 for another five hours. Then get up at the last alarm at 10:00 a.m.

I don't cope well with alarms, because my worrying brain wakes me up before the alarm goes off—sometimes an absurdly long time before the alarm goes off. But I'm telling myself every night to just sleep till the alarm, trust the alarm, etc., and I'm getting used to doing that. Perhaps counterintuitively, I have had little problem with waking and going to sleep. I get up at 2:00 feeling perfectly refreshed and ready t0 go, and if I'm just patient with myself I can get back to sleep at 5:00 with relatively little trouble. I have various mental tricks that help.

I should add that I've had sleep problems literally my whole life. I only napped till I was barely two (source: Mom, although I have memories of getting up and escaping my crib*), and I was tested in a time-free environment in the 1970s and discovered that my natural circadian cycle was, at that time, 32 hours. That's not outlier territory but it's also not very close to the 24-hour celestial cycle**. One of my best experiences with sleep was when I was on a week-long wilderness camping trip and my entrainment got perfectly in sync with the sun—marvelous.

Last night was almost as good. I got to sleep on time, woke up at the alarm for both awakenings, and got a little more than eight hours total sleep.

To put that in context, back when I was sleeping "normally," that is, trying to sleep all the way through the night all in one go, I probably managed a normal night's sleep of seven or more hours at one stretch maybe three times a month. At best. I never kept records, but I'd bet my car that there were numerous months when I didn't make it to seven hours even once.

As far as the writing time is concerned, it's just marvelous. I love the three-hour "mini-day" (as reader/commenter AN dubbed it) in between sleeps. It's so peaceful and quiet. I can really concentrate. The three hours just melts away every night, and I definitely need the alarm (the alarms are on my iPad, which I bring downstairs with me) to signal me that time's up. At 5:00 a.m. this time of year, the birds are beginning to chirp (serving as an alarm themselves) and dawn is just barely lightening the sky. I'm working on a piece called "Autobiography is Painful" currently, which should end up at about 10,000 words.

The imperative
Writing takes discipline. Consider this passage from a recent article about crime novelist Elmore Leonard by a writer I admire, Anthony Lane:

By 1950, [Leonard] had graduated from the University of Detroit, married a woman named Beverly Cline, and found a job at the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency. By 1955, he had three children and a daily routine to match, as [Leonard's biographer C.M.] Kushins reveals:

Up at five o’clock sharp for two hours of uninterrupted writing (still two pages completed before putting the water on for his morning coffee), then showered and suited for the office—ready to wolf down breakfast and help Beverly feed Jane, Peter, and infant Christopher—then receive the Eucharist during eight o’clock Mass. Finally, he arrived at Campbell-Ewald by nine.

The sheer discipline—“the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out,” Leonard calls it—is striking. (Forbidding yourself a first cup of coffee or tea until you’ve written a certain amount, despite not being technically awake, is a brutal habit that I’ve stuck to for decades. Turns out I’ve been taking orders from Leonard all along.)

If I'm going to continue with a biphasic sleeping schedule, and use the time constructively in the service of "grinding it out," I'm going to have to be disciplined in three main ways:

Getting upstairs on time
Sticking to writing, and nothing but, during the mini-day
Stopping writing right on time and getting back upstairs to bed

It's been a fun experiment. Will I continue with it going forward? Constancy is not my best thing. Time will tell. Next update? Eleven months from now. That will be one year from when I started this on June 15th, 2025, nine days after Butters died. Feel free to remind me if I forget.

Mike

*I have many detailed memories of very early childhood, including before I could walk, and I was absolutely astonished when I first learned that most people do not.

**"Night owls" are people whose natural circadian cycle is more than 24 hours, "larks" people whose natural cycle is less than 24 hours. The average is about 24.2 hours.

P.S. How you can tell the illustration is AI-generated: look at the brickwork, especially above the mantelpiece, and the back right leg of the nightstand, mainly. There are a few other anomalies, but those are the easiest "tells." Pretty decent for one try, though.

Featured Comments from:

Posted on Tuesday, 15 July 2025 at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Monday, 14 July 2025

Open Mike II: The Must-Read

ASW wrote, yesterday: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."

I read this last night. If you've been feeling pessimistic or defeated about the state of the World and the weather, you're about to get a significant mood-enhancer. This is the most uplifting, positive, optimistic, encouraging article on any subject I've read in a long while.

The New Yorker allows four free articles a month to non-subscribers, so you should be able to access it if you are not a subscriber and haven't used up all your freebies. And if you have, August is a new month.

It appears that we are at the tipping point—it's just that America is neither leading the way nor really participating any more. But it's happening globally. America is now firmly on the wrong side of history, as well as on the wrong side of economic development and future prosperity. We've gone from world leader to actively obstructing the future.

But that doesn't mean the news is not good.

Really the most hopeful thing I've encountered recently. Thanks to ASW. And for others, coolly recommended (that's a joke. Not "warmly" recommended, yageddit? As Craig Ferguson used to say, "amused myself, and that's half the battle").

Here's the book the article is drawn from.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Dean Johnston [no relation to Mike]: "After reading that, and in the context of thinking about the world, I feel better than I have in ages."

Posted on Monday, 14 July 2025 at 02:21 PM in Followups, News and Occasions | Permalink | Comments (10)

Sunday, 13 July 2025

Open Mike: The Best Portfolio I Can't Show You

The most fascinating portfolio of pictures I've seen recently isn't art. It's called "Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects," and unfortunately it's behind a paywall. [UPDATE: Many readers are reporting that the content isn't walled off for them. So give it a try! —Ed.] Absolutely mind-boggling.

Solar energy is a significant fascination. The best short primer on energy I've ever read (not all I've read on the subject, of course) is the first 98 pages or so of a book called American Theocracy by the late Kevin Phillips. The section, Part I, was called "Oil and American Supremacy." It is in essence a long essay. As with other Phillips books, its connection to the rest of the book is rather loose—some of his volumes are redolent of collections rather than concerted, coherent, through-going argument. So the essay can stand alone. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall too—you'd have to buy the whole book in order to read that one little section. In the late 2000s, ever a Don Quixote, I wrote a letter to Mr. Phillips and Penguin, his publisher, suggesting that "Oil and American Supremacy" really should be issued as a separate small volume at modest cost. Penguin at the time had a series of pamphlet-style semi-miniature books that featured important short-form writing from the past and present. Here's one of them:

I also have the translation of Ecclesiastes from the same series and one or two others, but I can't find them. Frustratingly, the books, which I saw in a bookstore display and which all had similar-but-varied form, format, typography, and cover design, don't seem to have been given a series name, and I can't find a page for them among Penguin's far-flung constellation of imprints, house names, and web pages. (There are only five major publishers in the USA, of which Penguin/Random House is the largest.) It's possible they simply under-performed and were unceremoniously dumped. Doesn't matter. Long and short, I thought "Oil and American Supremacy" would fit perfectly in the series, and it's one of those things—you know how it is with those things—that I urgently felt every citizen ought to read. But by now, Penguin's had 20 years to get back to me, which kinda makes my hope for a reply grow dim. (I'm joking.) And Kevin Phillips died in 2023.

Kevin Phillips was an interesting fellow, by the way. He was one of the founding theorists of Movement Conservatism and post-Goldwater Republican strategy—usually credited with originating the Southern Strategy—who later moved toward independence and became an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. In other words, he actually thought for himself, which would make him stick out like a sore thumb today. I went on a deep dive into politics during the Bush II years—I probably read 150 books, all of them except one now slumbering in boxes in the attic of the barn. Kevin Phillips, the essence of an iconoclast, was the best find. (Well, Thomas Frank too.)

Anyway, one of the points Phillips makes in "Oil and American Supremacy" is that rich and powerful national economies have historically had trouble moving away from the energy sources that made them rich and powerful in the first place. The Netherlands and wind power, Britain and coal. The Dutch windmills peaked in the 1600s and 1700s—yet there were still 9,000(!) windmills in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century! (There are some 1,200 left today—believe it or not, only partially for tourism.)

Assuming the pattern plays out, America is going to have a very hard time moving away from oil. We have long been the global powerhouse. We tend to think of the Middle East when we think of oil production now, but on this very day (and for years now) the United States is the world's largest producer of oil. Our big problem is not that we don't produce huge amounts of oil, it's just that we use even more than we produce—that's what gives Saudi Arabia such pull over us, and it's why we have willingly gone along with the largest transfer of wealth in the history of Planet Earth—American wealth shifted to the countries that make up for our oil shortfall. It's why our military budget is so huge—to protect the shipping lanes for oil coming from the Middle East. (If the military cost of protecting global oil extraction and importation were passed along directly to the pump, a gallon of gasoline in America would cost somewhere roughly between $13 and $18. That's including the offset for supplementary biofuels.) It's why we fought the Gulf War—by historical accident, Iraq has the largest and least exploited oil reserves left on Earth, and, consequently, America now has a dozen huge military bases in Iraq, all of them strategically "protecting" oil fields, oil production facilities, and oil shipping hubs. Of course that it is not their stated purpose, but it is their purpose. Never mind a wholesale switchover—it would make incredibly good sense for us to make it our national purpose to simply gain enough alternative energy production to attain energy independence. It would solve a large number of complications and eliminate vast expenditures of national resources.

Meanwhile, China has no such sentimental, historical, and institutional attachment to the energy sources of the 20th century, and the Chinese are killing us in the race to harness and develop solar. We've allowed them to get way, way out ahead of us. Photographs aren't proof, and photographs aren't argument, but what they certainly are is illustration, and I've never seen a more stunning illustration of China's emerging supremacy in what will surely be the dominant 21st-century energy source. No one sees the future, least of all me, but oil will not be the world's major source of energy in 2100—that much is easy to predict, simply because there's not enough of it left. With its electric cars improving by leaps and bounds (BYD just passed Tesla as the world largest EV producer), its battery research lapping us, and its solar power technology, implementation, and deployment crushing ours, China is setting itself up to rule the future. (Germany and Brazil are also well ahead of us in alternative and renewable energy.) One word describes the U.S.: behind.

I wish I could link to this set of set of pictures. The most symbolic one is captioned "Floating solar panels stretch across an aquatic farm built on land that subsided after extensive coal mining, in Suixi County, Anhui province, China, on April 28, 2025." But oh well. For those of you who subscribe to The Atlantic, be sure not to miss it.

Mike

P.S. I'm watching this morning what are indisputably the two greatest tennis players alive on our planet. Back to the tennis!

Featured Comments from:

John Shriver: "Dan Yergin's book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is also a great treatise on how the whole western world is wrapped around oil. I was half way through the book when my mother died in 2020, and had just gotten to the end of the Second World War. The Allies won that war much because of their control of oil. The Allies starved both Germany and Japan of oil. I took a course from Dan Yergin at the Kennedy School of Government on this topic about 1980, before he wrote the book. (Cross-registered from 'the small trade school down the river.') Very interesting; an enormous amount of reading. There's also a PBS multi-part series based on the book, which is accessible online. Here's the first part."

Mike replies: The Prize is now a trilogy: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2008); The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2012); and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2021). The trouble is, their combined 2,336 pages (six and a half pounds of paper in the print versions, according to Amazon) isn't bathroom reading. I put a high value on primers (the word is properly pronounced to rhyme with trimmer) because they might actually be read, which is why I like Kevin Phillips' entertaining backgrounder. However, all you have to do is read the first page or two of the sample of The Prize at Amazon to realize that you're in the hands of a compelling and capable writer in Mr. Yergin. History well written is the only true page-turner. Like you, I read a lot of The Prize when it was more or less new, before ultimately being defeated. (I tend not to like histories as they butt up against the present, because they get less and less authoritative the closer they get to now. I learned that reading histories of photography.)

Jan-Peter Onstwedder: "I think you need to fact-check some of your post. The US imports crude oil, true, despite producing a lot. But it also is a net exporter of refined products. So imports + domestic production is greater than domestic demand, the balance being exported as fuels, plastics and other petrochemical products. It used to be true that OPEC had significant influence over prices and therefore US economics, but that influence is much smaller since US production has gone up so much. And the US now uses far less energy per unit of GDP than 20–30 years ago. All in all, oil is still important but no longer an excuse for meddling in other producing countries’ affairs."

Mike replies: And yet we still do. Oil imports have hardly abated. I admit I'm not up on "the Shale Gale," but the go-to book on it is for those who are interested is probably this one. Bear in mind that fracking in general might well be a sort of financial shell game: it succeeds by attracting huge amounts of speculative investment from the excess amount of capital "sloshing around the world" (a consequence of wealth hoarding) and has yet to prove that it's actually sustainably economically viable. At any rate, I'm not interested, because when the world is burning the last thing we need is more fire.

ASW: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."

Mike adds: Here's a brief clip: "...Even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as 'alternative energy,' a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world."

I just read it. It's an incredibly hopeful article. And from Bill McKibben! (Who at times has sounded like the most pessimistic person on the planet.)

Posted on Sunday, 13 July 2025 at 12:03 PM in Around the Web, Exhibits, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (32)

Friday, 11 July 2025

Ctein Dye Sale Shipment Update

Dye transfer sale: Ctein has written to say,

"I've shipped the prints to everyone who's paid me. Everyone who has paid should have either received their prints or a tracking number from the USPS. Anyone who hasn't received one or the other should get in touch with me at [email protected] ."

We've heard from several people who have already received their prints and they were glowing in their praise and satisfaction. Our print sales over the years have been a lot of fun and very gratifying. Thanks again to all.

Large-format printer for sale: Ctein, as you know, is moving to Montana soon; he's gonna be a dental floss tycoon. Er, no, I mean he's moving Ireland soon, and it has nothing to do with dental floss. I lifted this from his most recent newsletter: "I am still looking for someone who is interested in buying my 44-inch Epson P9000 printer. I'd like to keep it until shortly before I leave. It should be someone local (this is not shippable!) and I'm offering it at an extremely good price, like less than half what a new one would cost, with over a grand worth of ink and paper."

[He means it when he says it's not shippable. It weighs in excess of 300 lbs. and it's huge—when Epson ships these to trade shows, the reusable crate they use costs as much as the printer itself. For this reason, the sale would have to be local in the San Francisco area. —Mike the Ed.]

"I've also got a 17-inch Epson P800 printer for sale. Available for immediate pick-up with a decent ink supply, and I think you'll agree the price is right at $500."

Same email address as above.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh 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.)

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Posted on Friday, 11 July 2025 at 03:18 PM in Ctein, Print Offers | Permalink | Comments (8)

Thursday, 10 July 2025

Rust Never Sleeps

Real quick—just wanted to mention that yesterday, not long after the post about weird stuff you use your phone camera for, I went to the local mechanic's shop, Marbles, to see if I could get an estimate. My car has some rust at either end of the rocker panels, and I wanted to see if it could be fixed, and, if so, how much it would cost. The guy who does the body shop estimates is the owner, Paulie Marbles. I thought he had retired but he assured me he hasn't, although his son now occupies the big office. Anyway we're standing there discussing rust and rocker panels, and Paulie apologized for not being able to get down and look up under the car, saying he isn't as nimble as he used to be, or words to that effect.

So I got the phone out, reversed the camera, and stuck the phone under the car. We were able to see the extent of the rust just fine, with me on one knee and him standing up. I just thought it was funny that this happened right after we were talking about it here.

The verdict, by the way—he doesn't really do rust. He says no matter how good a job you do, it can still keep coming back. Reminds me of my friend Jim, who kept a favorite Subaru station wagon for 11 years through the snowy, salty Vermont winters. He would have kept it for longer but rust got the better of it. That was a while back—cars are much more rustproof now. But still, you know what Neil Young said:

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh 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:

Posted on Thursday, 10 July 2025 at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Wednesday, 09 July 2025

Mystery Man

Who is this?

(I'll hold off a while before posting the answer, to allow more people time to guess.)

Mike

ANSWER: As many of you guessed, it's Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, supposedly taken two months before he was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Lakota [Sioux], the Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes. Greasy Grass was their name for the Little Bighorn and the surrounding area). Custer earned the temporary rank of Major General of Volunteers in the Civil War, and also the brevet rank of Major General in the regular Army; "brevet rank," sometimes called a battlefield promotion, was usually awarded for bravery, valor, and combat leadership, and also as a way of filling vacant leadership posts without incurring the cost of permanent promotions—recipients were paid at their regular Army rates. At the end of the War, Custer reverted to his full regular Army rank of Captain. He was then promptly promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1866, and that was his rank when he was in command of the 7th Cavalry (several readers picked up on the "7" on his epaulet) and when he was killed in 1876.

There isn't much good information about this particular picture online. Most of it comes from a January 2014 "Collector's Edition" of True West magazine called "100 Best Historical Photos of the American West." The contents are online. The TW title was "Custer’s Last Photograph" and the full caption was, "A vain man, George Armstrong Custer posed for more than 150 photographs in his lifetime, including this last photo, taken of him two months before the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn that would end his life." The same caption accompanies most other appearances of the same picture online. It is most likely a carte de visite (CDV in auction listings) or cabinet card (the difference is only size, cabinet cards being larger), probably produced in volume to be sold as souvenirs after his demise.

The interesting thing about it is that his hair is cut short. He was a notorious dandy, and wore his dark blonde hair long and scented with cinnamon oil—the Indians' nickname for him, one of them, was "Long Hair." Here is the image that is perhaps the most iconic. It's not known why he cut it: some claim it was because he had premonitions of his death; other sources claim his wife Libbie had been urging him to cut it because she was afraid his long hair would make him more conspicuous as a target for scalping or mutilation; some say that maybe he just decided to. Or perhaps Thomas Berger, the author of Little Big Man, was correct when he had his fictional protagonist Jack Crabbe say that the 36-year-old Custer was beginning to go bald. No one knows for sure.

The print is identified as having come from the Robert G. McCubbin Western Photographs Collection, which was broken up at auction in 2019.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh 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.)

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Posted on Wednesday, 09 July 2025 at 03:24 AM in Random Snaps | Permalink | Comments (39)

Tuesday, 08 July 2025

All the Things We Use Cellphone Cameras for that Aren't Photography

Charlie Dunton wrote, yesterday: "Now that I am in the middle of my 7th decade, I've found another good use for my iPhone. When I find myself standing in front of a food vendor and his menu is too far away, or otherwise too difficult to read, I pull out my iPhone and snap a picture of the menu. I can then quickly zoom in and read it with ease."

Mike replies: I wonder what a list of "all the things we use cellphone cameras for that aren't photography" would look like. I recall years ago seeing a young woman behaving strangely. She was waving her phone high in the air and posing like a model, her free hand flicking at her hair. It turned out she had the camera on her phone reversed and was using the phone like a mirror, fixing her hair.

I use the phone to read very small text, especially when the text is molded into same-color plastic, which I have difficulty seeing. The "magnifier" mode is accessed by clicking the on/off button three times quickly. In the past I've used it to see things I can't get my head in position to see, for instance the back panel of my computer. Lately, when I suspect that a cashier might dispute the price of a sale item, I snap a quick picture of the shelf label so the clerk doesn't have to "go check" when I tell them what the item was supposed to cost.

Sometimes things sitting right above a pricetag of $39.98 have
morphed to $48.98 by the time they get to the cashier.

And of course I use it for copies—I sent in a water testing sample this afternoon and snapped pictures of the documents before I enclosed them in the package. I use it for notes, like ads, phone numbers, cards on community bulletin boards, etc. But I'd guess we all do that. Around here, I actually find tradesmen by noting the names on the doors and side panels of trucks, which I'll then snap a picture of.

What else do you use your phone camera for that isn't pictorial photography? Anything else you can think of?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh 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:

Mike Plews: "My bank app lets me deposit checks with my phone camera. Handy."

Dave Hsberman: "Frequent use for iPhone: Taking photos of books so I remember to see if our library has them."

Marc (partial comment): "I live on 300 acres of mostly bushland, and use my phone's camera for GPS coordinates of maintenance jobs. For example, I'll note holes for repair along the western fenceline, where the electric deer fence runs, where deer, wallaby, kangaroo and wombats have found a way to push through to avoid the zap. Also, for summer weed spraying, I'll note small outbreaks of St. John's Wort for attention (or horehound, or mullein, or thistle, or...but mostly wort)—it's as easy as just taking a photo.

"(Nothing stops wombats—they are the D9 tractor of the marsupial world. But I persist.)"

Ken Royce: "When at the market and am unsure exactly which brand or size or a product my wife requested, sending a quick text with a photo of the choices quickly resolves the matter...."

Rick Popham (partial comment): "I work in hospital maintenance. When we go into an office for painting, new carpet, etc., I take a picture of the walls so all the pictures and diplomas are put back in the right spot and any books are put back on the shelves in the right order."

Ilkka (partial comment): "The later model iPhones can see in the dark. It can be helpful if for example planning to make repairs in a dark place. I remember taking some pictures of a false ceiling to see how the wires and pipes went."

Henry White (partial comment): "Many younger travelers use their phones, in conjunction with Google Translate, to read signs in other languages with a quick conversion to English. Very helpful when visiting places like Japan and South Korea."

hugh crawford (partial comment): "Back in 1996 I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus D300L with a whopping 780,000-pixel sensor. Among other things, I used it to take pictures of expense receipts for a project at IBM that I was a freelance contractor on. It took about a week for them to figure out how to deal with them. I may have been the first person to submit digital photos of receipts at IBM. It hadn’t really occurred to me until now."

Albert Smith: "Parking space recall: in large lots or multi story garages, you can avoid an entire episode of Seinfeld by snapping a photo of Orange 43. Unless you like carrying a heavy air conditioner for 23 minutes. 😉 "

Bob Keefer does the same thing with trail photos, to help him find the way home again. —Ed.

Kodachromeguy (partial comment): "I use the phone camera to document parts of the house before going to the lumber yard or building store. It helps me explain a repair or project."

Sean (partial comment): "I travel internationally. Instead of carrying my passport, which I can safely leave in a hotel safe, I take shots of the current visa and other pertinent pages."

Posted on Tuesday, 08 July 2025 at 05:04 PM in Visual Culture | Permalink | Comments (20)

Monday, 07 July 2025

...And 5 Things I Dislike

Here are the five things about my camera I don't like:

You have to look through the viewfinder to make any settings, check the battery, etc. The chimney finder just magnifies the viewing screen. So you have to turn the camera on and look through the VF to set or change most things.
There's a cover for the huge eyepiece (illustrated below) that has to be snapped on when you're not using the camera. The problem is that direct sunlight through the magnifier could damage the viewing screen. Although it's not something I've ever had to do before on any other camera, I actually don't mind it in practice. Cameras are quirky; you get used to the ones you use.
Electronic shutter only. As far as I know rolling shutter is possible. I haven't experienced any problems with it yet. I might have to do some tests.
The conversion probably spoiled its resale value—I'll never get my money back out of it. I don't currently want to; but still, if I wanted to, I probably couldn't.
The worst problem by far is also no problem at all: the crucial difference is that you have to know about it. Here it is. If you're reviewing a picture and you enlarge the review image as much as possible to check focus, it will look unsharp. That does not mean it is unsharp: when you get the file back to the computer it will be razor sharp. But if you don't know about it it will throw you for a loop when you first encounter it. I've actually read of people returning this camera after purchasing it because they are convinced it won't focus and everything is unsharp at the level of fine detail. That's an illusion. Of course, once you know about it, this is not a problem. [UPDATE: See Henry White's Featured Comment below.]

The eyepiece cover. Remove for use and replace when you're done.

There's actually one more problem, which is that some people give me a hard time for having/wanting a monochrome camera. But that's not the camera's fault. And I don't mind it, to be honest. I yam what I yam.

Do I recommend this camera? Probably not. Not as a monochrome conversion anyway. I'd recommend getting a factory Pentax K3 III Monochrome or a Leica Monochrom to preserve resale value, or getting an older camera converted, one you already own (although conversion is expensive, so don't convert one with tons of shutter actuations or lots of wear already on it).

As a color stills camera? Hmm. Obviously I've never used one that way. But it has a cult following, and supposedly there's magic in Sigma's color science, and as far as the form factor is concerned you'll either love it or hate it, which means some people will love it. So maybe.

Reducing friction
After yesterday's post, Rob L. mentioned, "Barely comes up, but reducing friction makes life more fun." He's gone down to one lensmount and configured his cameras to make them easier to use—that's what he means by reducing friction. That's probably the main thing I'm experiencing with my FP-m: I've got it set up so sweetly for my uses that it really reduces friction.

There might be one problem I haven't mentioned—now that I'm happy, I don't really look around at new cameras any more. And that leaves a void where GAS used to be. But you know what they say—oh well!

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Henry White: "Workaround for camera finder unsharp imaging on review: The camera, when shooting in raw, creates a very, very small JPEG from the raw file to show for review. If you want a big, sharp review file, then shoot with the camera set to raw+large JPEG. Upon review the camera will show the large JPEG.

"This is the case not just with the Sigma camera but across other brands as well. It's an easy fix and if you are so disposed you can just toss the JPEGs when you download the files to your computer."

Mike replies: So that's it. I figured it was because the review JPEG was too small, but I didn't know the correction. Thanks.

robert e (partial comment): "These two posts were really interesting. It's much more enlightening to read how a person gets along with a thing while they do what they want to do than to read about how the thing is designed to work for generic uses."

Erwin Frank-Schultz: "This comment is somewhat cheeky on this post as it refers more to the Phone post than this one...but one thing I don't like about my (phone) camera is that it is an internet connected computer. I recently finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (highly recommended)—one of his ten recommendations at the end is to use single use devices, to not get distracted. This struck a chord; whenever I use my phone to take a photo, there is a temptation to look at that e-mail or WhatsApp that just came in. Not a problem on my XE-3 and certainly not on my FM2."

Posted on Monday, 07 July 2025 at 02:46 AM in Photo equipment | Permalink | Comments (13)

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