The Online Photographer

Okay, sorry about the horrible pun in the title. (And right after I ranted about such things, too.) And, lest the phrase bring up any unwanted mental imagery, it's you that'll be going TOPless—but only briefly. This is to let you know that I'll be temporarily shutting down The Online Photographer (TOP) come Thursday for a short summer break. I believe I'll be off for a week, but it might be as long as ten days. I have in mind several projects for that time (but then, I always have in mind several projects).

I'm hoping to set up a few "automated posts" today and tomorrow to help you rummage around in the archives. So do check back, even though I'll be silent and things won't be as usual.

It's only temporary. August is actually a big month, with our next print offer coming up among other things. (It will hopefully be the first of four print sales between now and late January 2012, if all the many puzzle pieces come together.)

—TOP Maestro Mike, unchaining ankle from leg of desk

Well, this doesn't happen often, but I bit off more today than I can chew. Too large a subject to write about in one day. (I was asked yesterday what I would do if I were starting in photography right now. I know exactly what I want to say, but it's a big river with lots of turnings and tributaries.)

But I need to mention that Ctein is on vacation this week and next. His regular column will resume on July 13th.

Mike

One thing I left out of the "Let's Fight About Copyright!" post from yesterday: I believe TOP readers are the best group of people on the entire far-flung World Wide Web. Yeah, I'm prejudiced, but that's what I believe.

Even people who get full-on pissed off—a rarity—will usually turn friendly and nice if I remember to keep my own calm. And our commenters, who are only a small subset of the audience—well, they're the people who keep me interested. They educate me every day, contribute to every discussion, lend credibility to abstract discussions with firsthand knowledge and experience, help me write the material for the website, tip me off to things I had no clue existed, and make me laugh with their wit, drollery, or singular skill in self-expression.

No one who writes for the web would mind more readers, but the ones I've got are the best there are, and please, never let my occasional kvetching imply otherwise.

Cheers,

Mike the Moderator

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Normally I like thunderstorms. We just had a doozy pass through here. The thunder was right on top of us—no time lapse between the lightning and the (very loud) thunderclaps.

It must have caused some problems once it got to Milwaukee, though, because a few minutes after the rain stopped I lost the internet...and today's post. I guess it happens to everybody every now and then. The funny thing was, I saved the post before I closed it. The save just didn't work, is all.

Oh well. Fotrunately I can reconstruct the post (it's a camera review by TOP's Croatian Editor-at-Large, Vlatko Juric-Kokic).

Should be easier to do the second time, though. I don't have any more time today, but it will be along on Thursday or Friday.

One of my friend and former studio partner Paul Kennedy's favorite sayings was, "You know what they say: Oh well." I can often hear him saying it, in my mind's ear.

Mike

If anyone is curious, TOP has now published 3,950 posts since 2005 (this is the 3,950th), and tomorrow we will pass 78,000 comments.

Mike the Ed., still chained to the leg of the desk

It's been really nice around here lately...last week we had three consecutive days over 70°F (~21°C) for the first time since early October of 2010. We had a lot of snow and a slow, steady melt this past spring, so the blooming plants were well-watered. It's been a cold spring but a pretty one. And yesterday, a good friend came to town—the guy who suggested I start a blog seven years ago. He's been a lot of help with TOP over the years of its existence. It was great to see him.

Vis-à-vis yesterday's post, anybody want to tell me where the image sites are that are edited (moderated), where serious photographers present redacted bodies of work? I've heard that the founders of Facebook, flickr et al have raked in millions; now what we need are people willing to run some sites to present serious photography in a serious way and rake in thousands.

For those who suggest I should do it—yeah, right. Ha! When I become a real internet tycoon, I'll think about it...in the meantime, nobody in here but us bloggers.

One day I am going to write a post called "How to Earn a Million Dollars with a Blog," though. (The short answer, as I may have mentioned, is "start a blog and work really, really hard on it every day for fifty years." Bah-dum-pah.) Here's something that might sound strange to you: I could earn a lot more money with TOP than I do. I know how. It's just that then it wouldn't be as...interesting. It wouldn't be what I want to do any more. (Cue Neil Young singing "Man Needs a Maid....") It's true that the siren song of housekeeping help beckons like a voice from the promised land of financial success...not many of the trappings of wealth are at all seductive to me, but...a maid. Now that's luxury. Must resist, must resist...also must go do the damned dishes....

Oh, and one more thing about blogging: you'll get every criticism you can think of and then you'll get a lot more. Yesterday I got accused of mythologizing Sanskrit. That was a new one. Something I never could have imagined getting criticized for. I didn't even know it was something you could do from Wisconsin. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what it means.

Unfinished
A few people also asked yesterday about the status of my darkroom project. Here's the sad report: stalled. I balked at the price of the ventilation fabrication, and I haven't had the nerve to tackle it myself. Having had some lung problems in recent years, I'm no longer willing to attempt any darkroom work without proper ventilation.

The ventilation was to be the next-to-last step, and then the last step was getting the plumbing done, although I could get started working without that. I also need to build a drying rack, which I haven't yet done. A darkroom is a really extravagent photography accessory. Especially when it's no longer necessary.

Yesterday I had a film camera with me, as I seldom do, and I butted up once again—as I always do now whenever I shoot film with a handheld camera—against what is for me film's Achilles' heel: sensitivity. Can't beat those high ISOs.

Right now we've got a farmer's rain going. I love that term, farmer's rain. It's the opposite of the kind of rain that causes flash floods, the opposite of "downpour." It means a slow, steady rain that soaks the ground and gives the growing things just what they need.

A rainy day, gray and softly glowing green, but good weather all the same.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Tom Robbins: "Farmer's rain—interesting phrase. Growing up in corn country I can certainly understand the idea, but can't recall hearing it used to describe rain. Despite a few decades of TV and almost a couple decades of internet (who is greasing these rails, anyway?), local accents and expressions still exist. Thank goodness. Farmer's rain might be a good example of this.

Tom Robbins, Weber Farm, Carroll County, Illinois

"At any rate, such a rain had just fallen when this (or tat, heh-heh...) simple photo was taken Sunday."

Featured Comment by keanesean: "Just got back from my first-ever camping trip. We camped next to a farm, I was hoping it wasn't going to rain on our first-ever camp but of course it did. It really was farmer's rain and you've got to make the best of it. So what do you and your girl do in a tent, in the dark and rain?

Sean Keane, Camp Light

"You take pictures. What else is there to do?"

Yesterday's post came off a little...angry. Not intended. It's nice that somebody thinks a fading C-print is worth nearly four million dollars—it should come under the category of "You've come a long way, baby." It's been only two-thirds of a century, give or take, since Ansel Adams was selling prints for $25 and Imogen Cunningham was asking $10.

And as for Cindy Sherman—why not? The salient point is merely that her picture was the latest more-or-less arbitrary object of contention amongst at least two of the Masters of the Universe. There were other such pictures before hers—more or less arbitrarily chosen also—and there will be others to come. The source of my irritability—if that's how it struck you—is merely this. You know how some of your friends will declare their political position as being some quixotic little tributary of mainstream politics? You know, brother Bill is a libertarian, Aunt Gracie is a millenniallist, that sort of thing (every vote she casts is to encourage strife in the Middle East because the Bible said Palestine has to drown in blood three cubits deep before the Lamb can return, and she'll tell you all about it in the car, when you can't get away and the gesture of clapping your hands over your ears would not go unnoticed)—well, I'm an egalitarian. You do not want to wind me up and trip the go button on that subject with me. It's not the idea of someone spending $4 million on a Cindy Sherman C-print that galls me—it's the idea of someone having $4 million to spend on a C-print that I find appalling. Wealth disparity that extreme is merely a symptom of a broken social system, one in dire need of readjustment. But for the record, all such examples of conspicious consumption get my goat equally—$70 million mansions, $400,000 cars, $80,000 parties.

I'll keep the comments to this post hidden, because we definitely don't want to waste our time today getting hot and bothered about politics (if my own allegiance agitates you, just remember that I'm not in charge of anything, and I don't get to say). I just felt I maybe owed you an explanation for yesterday's apparent dyspepsia.

Mike

Apologies to any non-U.S. readers who aren't able to access the video in the previous post. Not my fault; I'm only King of the World in my head, which is of course the best place to be King of the World, since everything works out in my favor that way and all is always for the best. There are no inconvenient insoluble problems for the KotW as long as he's imaginary.

I do have to say I don't like the "national ghettoizing" of web content that seems to have quietly gained its ominous foothold. But the pipers must be paid I guess.

Mike

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "That King of the World thing works out fine, it's just that somehow I'm married to the Queen of the Universe."

Featured Comment by erlik: "Yep, I'm a honorary American, too, it seems. :) But that idiocy with blocking IP ranges is galling. And stinking to high heaven. Various series, okay, I can understand that. But music videos—So-and-So is the owner of the content and they blocked it in your country. It's promotional material, for Pete's sake. Do they understand the meaning of 'world wide web' and the concept of promotion? Even worse if it's the really real promotional material. I've had a film trailer blocked because of my location. A. Film. Trailer. Words failed me."

Well, this is fairly unusual—it appears that yesterday, in the comments to the "Another Internet Canard" post, both Ctein and I were wrong at the same time—usually one or the other of us has the situation covered even when the other makes a mistake. (Okay, okay, usually it's me who makes the mistake and Ctein who covers me.)

With some viewfinders (or, more precisely, viewing screens), faster lenses do not result in a brighter viewfinder image. As Oren explains, "it's because the screen in an AF SLR isn't a randomly diffuse ground glass (or ground plastic), it's an engineered light pipe with microlenses designed to accept light from a narrow field of view."

Okay. Sorry. But...everyone who's saying that a good test of this is to take a fast lens and watch the viewfinder as you stop down has still designed a bad test. Slow lenses have different geometry, different nodal point positions, and collect light from different angles than fast lenses do. If you want to compare the finder image of a slow lens vs. a fast lens, the best way to do it is to look at the viewfinder image of a fast lens and a slow lens, not the image of one fast lens at different apertures. Test what you are testing, not something else.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm starting to like the gamey taste of crow (although I still don't like the taste of my own foot in my mouth).

I have modified the post accordingly.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "Having just finished writing a 'cheatsheet' for Canon's Digital Learning Center on EOS focusing screens, I knew that Mike's bold statement (now amended) about how ƒ/1.4 lenses make the viewfinder brighter and easier to focus would soon result in his picking bits of crow out of his teeth. I wasn't so sure about Ctein, if only because he could be a vegetarian.

"The only thing of value I can add at this point is that Live View (for cameras that have it) is an excellent way to see exactly what depth-of-field you'll get at any given aperture. Just remember that you will have to manually stop the lens down to the taking aperture to preview depth-of-field, otherwise all focusing is at maximum aperture.

"Also keep in mind that if the display is set to auto-gain it will maintain the same brightness as you stop down. Some cameras let you set the display so that it's linked with the exposure histogram and so if the image likes 'just right' on the display it should look the same way in the actual photograph.

"In either case, if you have your camera mounted on a tripod, use 10X magnification, and focus manually at the taking aperture, you're practically guaranteed tack-sharpness at the plane of focus. You can even see whether your ƒ/1.4 lens has focus-shift. As for whether it's a good idea to use an ƒ/1.4 lens at maximum aperture, well, that's purely up to you."

Featured Comment by Ctein: "Yeah, I wrote my mea culpa under the original thread, for those who want to see my flavor of the humble pie. Based on some of the comments here, though, I think there are some people who are still a little confused. The bottom line on this is that it depends on the design of the focusing screen (and possibly the design of the viewfinder optics and lens). Some focusing screens will not show a loss of brightness until the aperture is smaller than X, where X is frequently ƒ/2.8, but that's no hard and fast rule. Others will."

Featured Comment by Bernard Piechal: "As for the focusing screen brightness, I've just checked it. On the camera that Mike sold just recently—Olympus OM-4. The simple result is: on the now-obsolete, traditional screen, ƒ/1.4 gives brighter image than ƒ/2. On the contrary, if I changed the screen for the 'modern' (#2–4, for OM users), the screen at ƒ/1.4 is not any brighter than at ƒ/2. The explanation is simple: the modern focusing screen is not groundglass, but the series of microlenses (on OM screens the lenses are even hexagonally spaced, not randomly). And these microlenses have their own numerical aperture (which defines the angle of acceptance of light rays, the more general 'version' of the f-number). Any rays coming on such focussing screen at bigger angle than angle of acceptance doesn't make it to the eye. When one opens the aperture all the additional rays comes at bigger angle of incidence, because that's what numerical aperture in optics defines. Also, yes, the optical situation of the ƒ/1.4 lens set at ƒ/2 is the same, as ƒ/2 lens wide open (as for the checking the difference in finder brightness between the two)."

We're off this week—TOP will resume publishing next Monday, April 18th. See you then!

Mike

Sorry to say, TOP will be on hiatus next week, between Monday morning's "Book of the Week" post and the following Sunday, April 17th.

Nothing dire or portentous; I just have to (reluctantly) put down the can opener while I pay taxes and take care of some other personal logistical issues.

—Mike, Overworked TOP World Headquarters Head Housekeeper and Sole Staff

Brief update...belatedly, I'm off to Chicago to see "The Woodmans" (the trip had to be scrubbed yesterday). The sale is going swimmingly—the 200 mark is in sight. So far, Charlie has been content to let it run—he printed 50 or so prints in advance of Sunday's announcement and ordered 100 sets of packaging, so he was well underway before the sale even started. I've been swamped here, little time even to answer email. Almost too much excitement for me—my idea of a good time being to sit on a grassy knoll in the shade of a tree in the summertime, thinking.

I'm especially pleased to see so many names go by that are familiar from past sales. Seems to me that people wouldn't buy from us again unless they were satisfied with what they'd received in previous sales, so the numerous repeat buyers feel like a vote of confidence to me, which I appreciate.

More anon.

—Mike, TOP Bookkeeping & Review Research Depts.

TOP world headquarters about half an hour ago (5:24 local time).

Finally, a little weather for us. We've gotten about eight inches of powder today (a very pretty day—as I was shoveling, I kept hearing Gabriel Iglesias—"it's fluffy!"), and the kids arrived home after school today reporting that a snow day had already been announced for tomorrow. That's fairly amazing. The schools here don't close just for blizzards—they have to be strategically timed blizzards. We can go a whole winter without a snow day, and I don't think in the ten years we've lived here they've ever announced a closing the afternoon before a weather event—a grudging closing at 6:30 a.m. is more the norm. Kind of makes me wonder what the heck could be on the way.

The light you see burning in the window in the picture above is my home office, from whence I blob on the ethernet all day. As long as the power stays on, no closings here.

Mike

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Featured Comment by marty: "Meh. Wrecks my whole mental image of stately TOP manor. I imagined it clinging precariously to the side of craggy cliff above a raging black river...but it seems I was accurate about it being cloaked in perpetual night."