The Online Photographer

...Is there such a thing as a high-quality, reliable external hard drive that spins up quickly? I probably sit here forty times a day drumming my fingers waiting for the darn hard drive to spin up. Each time isn't so bad, but in the aggregate it sure wastes a lot of time. Any opinions? Thanks in advance,

Gordon's "Umbrella Lady" picture taken with the K-7

We're planning to post the third and final installment of the Pentax K-7 review by Gordon Lewis either tonight or tomorrow.

In a related matter, I want to alert you to a plot that's a-planning. There was a great deal of positive response to the picture of Gordon's that we've informally dubbed "The Umbrella Lady," from Part I of the review. So much so that Gordon has agreed to do a TOP print offer. We're trying to announce it within the next week or two—basically as soon as we can work out all the details and he can get the master prints made at his preferred custom lab.

As usual, we'll take orders only during a short window of time—five days this time—and then the prints will all be made in one run to fulfill however the orders. This enables us to sell prints for radically lower prices than would be possible in a traditional gallery setting, where the prints are sold one at a time and the prices have to be many times higher—it'll be a lot closer to $80 than $800. However, it means you have to be on the lookout, because once the window closes, that's it.

At least one of Gordon's prints—the umbrella lady—will serve double duty as a Pentax K-7 sample. With my didactic side showing, I might add that having a print of a picture that's been featured on the website is a good way of "calibrating" your sense of the difference between looking at a real print vs. a small online JPEG. I'm just sayin'.

More anon; stay tuned.

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Traffic, yageddit? Sorry, that's lame, but I've had classic rock on the brain since the Bron-Yr-Aur post.

TOP seems to have reached a certain stately maturity if our traffic is any indication. Take a look at the bar chart of our daily visitors over the past seven weeks or so:

Pretty consistent, eh? The flat patch on the left is when I was on vacation in August; the low point of each week is generally a Saturday, although a couple of them are Sundays; and the healthier bumps at the right represent the beginning of the school year, when summer's over, and Europe (20–30% of our readership) is back from holiday, and the world gets back to work again. We're slow in the summer and always ramp up again in the fall, although the last two weeks haven't yet reached the norm of last Spring. The lowest bar on this chart represents 10,008 visitors and the highest one 35,746.

By the way, these numbers are basically only relative. They tell me how I'm doing from day to day and week to week, but they really shouldn't be compared to anything else. I use two counting services, and the other one, which I pay for, is a good deal more subtle, although when all is said and done it agrees with this one to within a few hundreds. I have the metrics set to ignore visits of less than 30 seconds' duration (to avoid counting visits by avid readers who are just checking in to see if anything new has been posted), and it counts as a "new" visit anyone who hasn't visited in the past two hours. If that seems unfair, remember that some people check in only once every few days, or every week, or month, and scan down through lots of posts; they're under-counted, in the same way that a guy who visits three times a day is over-counted. Internet head counts are just very approximate, is all. The numbers are much less "reality-based" than magazine circulation numbers any way you cut it.

Also, I don't count views of separate pages on the site, only visits to the main page. Nor does the above chart include the ~15,000 or so people who have signed up to get full RSS feeds. Seems unfair to count them as readers—all of them, anyway—because some of them, I'm sure, click through to the site (where they'll be counted anew), and just because some others get the site via feed doesn't mean they actually read it.

I keep meaning to establish a habit of taking Saturdays off, given that Saturday is consistently our slowest day. But the darn thing is, I enjoy this.

I'm happy to say that Sean Reid of Reid Reviews and I have had an exchange of emails and have come to an understanding. He says I misunderstood him regarding the lawsuit issue. It's true that he never said "I intend to proceed with a lawsuit against TOP." What he said, specifically, was that he would consult with his attorney to see if what Howard French wrote on my site was "slander" (libel would really be the correct term) and actionable. I interpreted several such comments to be a threat of legal action against TOP. He says he never had any intention of suing TOP, which I accept.

We both regret the many misunderstandings and miscommunications that have characterized this disagreement from the start.

I still read and recommend Reid Reviews. Please note that at no time did I ever mean to impugn Sean's professional integrity, directly or indirectly.

TOP will continue to publish a variety of divergent viewpoints from a variety of guest authors and readers.

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[Disclosure, Dept.: I censored a few comments from this post. Not very many. A few critical of Sean, at least one critical of me, a few critical of the whole situation. But Free Speech today takes a back seat to No-Salt-in-Fresh-Wounds Day, y'know?—there's no Amendment for that, but I'm just tryin' to let this blow over. I read all the comments, and thanks to all who left one. —Ed.]

I was surprised and pleased the other day to have a new ad arrive, over the transom*, from Rivendell Bicycle Works of California. TOP, of course, is a photography site, and we haven't gotten very many ads from companies that don't have much to do with photography. Rivendell sells handmade bicycles, made in America,...

...As well as a not-inconsiderable selection of clothing. Clothing with a difference, though. Take a look, for instance, at the "railroad shirt" and its write-up: "...This is the shirt that built the whole country, and you've seen them before, most often on railroad men (never railroad women), and all kinds of craftsmen. I've worn this shirt for about fifteen years, after pal Jeff reintroduced me to them. He's an ironworker, and this was the shirt of ironworkers...." It goes on to describe in detail all the hoops they had to jump through to get a functional replica of an authentic American workingman's shirt made in America, in this day and age. Hmm. Definitely something more going on here than pure profit motive.

Mr. and Mrs. Hill's hearth. (Note book on coffee table. The one on the right.)

I'm not a bicyclist myself, despite having tried to get into it several times. (My brother teases me about the fact that he inherited one of my disused bikes and my son inherited another. He told Zander, "So you got this one? I got the last one." My bikes never seem to fit me, although I am man enough to entertain the notion that maybe it's the other way around.) Can you get into biking at age 52? In Wisconsin, where the roads are covered with ice for, seems like, ten out of every 12 months? (You'd think, as a guy who likes to wander around taking pictures and wants to be both a golfer and a cyclist, I'd move somewhere where they have more sun and less snow. I digress.) Anyway, I contacted my friend Mr. Hill, who is a devoted, veteran bicyclist (as is his wife, Catherine), and he tells me that Rivendell bikes are "very high-class rides" and "have a reputation for craftsmanship." So I went off to read more, and ended up perusing the write-up about the A. Homer Hilsen. The essay—for that's what it is, not advertising copy—defines a "country bike," apparently a new category, then wends onward like a long country ride, finally settling like a bird on a description of the naming process: "We considered names from the usual sources—Middle Earth, geography, birds, fish, and mammals. The good ones were all taken, and besides, they all get lumped together. I never liked combo-computer names, like Lexuva&Futura&Diamante, that sound precise, smug, and high-tech. As bike names go, A. Homer Hilsen is their antithesis, and that's why it won. It's kind of a filter, actually. That may not be a great thing, but it's a useful thing."

I find I fall right through that filter with a hard plunk.

Finally, as if just for me and the needs of this post, it turns out there is a Rivendell Bicycles group on flickr! And we wend back to photography again.

*A transom, in this case short for transom window, is a window, usually wide and not tall, set above a door. They were much more common in the days before air conditioning, when they were needed for ventilation when the door was closed. Since they were often open when the door wasn't, mail, gifts, borrowed items being returned, and other sundry deliveries might come sailing over at any time. So in editorial circles, something that arrives "over the transom" is a submission or anything else that arrives unexpectedly, without being commissioned or encouraged or sought.

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UPDATE: Michael has accepted my apology and the two of us consider this matter between us closed. Sean and I have worked together to resolve our differences, so we're good.

A brief plea to our readers who would comment: We very much appreciate hearing from you, but please read your comment over one time after you write it, to make sure it actually says what you think you wrote.

Thank you,

Signed,

The beleaguered Comment Triage Committee

-

(P.S. I have to admit that I'm something of an aficionado of the finer examples of internet typos. Not just sloppiness, illiteracy, texting-speak (u r a mron 2), double double or extra words, but nice slips like this one, from a tennis site:

I would like to address the attention given to women’s verbalizations during their tennis matches by the commentators. There are several men players who also are noisy when playing their best competitive tennis. I can’t help thinking this is the one of the last bastions of discrimination against women in tennis to discuss this issue to such an extent and in particularly in relation to certain women players.

No one comments on the differences in the professional players’ tendencies to sweet. Perhaps vocalization should be seen as part of an individual’s make up and the problem that the viewer has with it is the personal problem of the viewer. Donna

Sweet? What?

It's possible that Donna couldn't have screwed up this comment more by getting any other single letter wrong. The principle there is, if you're going to make a typo, don't make it in the one word that makes your whole point make sense.

And this one, from a golf site:

I am sorry to be blunt, but I am so sick of the argument that Jack had greater competition than Tiger does currently. For anybody that believes that, you have an ignorant understanding of golf. Simple.

People compiled larger numbers of PGA Tour wins back then because there was far less parody in pro golf. Is that so difficult to understand?

Well, now that you mention it, that is rather difficult to understand....)

Mike

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Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "And the hardest thing to proofread (or poorfeed) is your own text, just written. The spillchucker only goes so far, and often misses the most egregious errors."

Featured Comment by Peter Robinson: "This post couldn't have come on a better (or worse) day for me as my wife today pointed out a typo on my Mother's gravestone. It's only taken six years for us to notice...."

Mike replies: Peter, that's really too bad. Although not something so personal, my prep school had a funding drive in which they allowed everyone to buy bricks for a new walk, engraved with the name and year (written: '75) of the donor. Each and every brick has the apostrophe in the year facing the wrong way, with the tail of the apostrophe facing the numeral, which is wrong, instead of facing away from it...I have no idea whether they realize the mistake. I haven't had the heart to point it out.

Ctein by Kyle Cassidy

Kathy Li tells us that if you're curious to see the fruits of Kyle Cassidy's Worldcon labors, he's put quite a few of them up on his Flickr stream, including this shot of Ctein—and two of Jon Singer.

Update #2 (Polychrome)
Re the illustrations in "Polychrome," Ctein says, "Mozilla just released Firefox 3.5.2, and the release notes mention that this releases fixes some problems with rendering profiled images. Indeed; I just installed it, and now the full-size photos (viewed by clicking on the in-line illustrations in the column) shown in the browser are reasonably close to correct  in terms of color and saturation. Not perfect, but good enough for 'magazine work.' Readers who are curious abut whether their pet browser is doing a good job of rendering profiled images should run the comparison I described in the P.S. to the post."

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Featured Comment by Bahi: "That really is a cracking shot of Ctein; I did wonder, before seeing it, whether post-Worldcon elation led Ctein to exaggerate the strengths of Kyle's results. Nope."

Featured Comment by Mikko Moilanen: "Lol u look like 2000 century Gandalf."

Featured Comment by Jared: "You mean Ctein is a math genius and a hippie? I think I've found my new role model."

*(Just for a few days)

I'm not the best fundraiser. Not more than once a month, and sometimes less often (because I forget), I've tried to selfishly remind people how they could help support TOP.

It's not so hard. The three main ways:

I usually take this opportunity to thank everybody who helps out in any of those ways. Which I hereby do, again.

However, a new book has convinced me that YOU should really thank these people, too! Assuming, that is, that you're one of the many who read this site without ever pitching in. According to the new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, who's been making the television talk show circuit lately, the magic of digital distribution is that overhead is so low that lots of people can now enjoy something that is paid for by only a few.

...Which sounds good, I admit, if you're riding in the fat part of the canoe and never dipping a paddle in. If you're drafting behind the leader. If you live to put the lie to that old saying about the free lunches. But don't forget, I still need to pay my time, and times are tough as I'm sure you don't need to be reminded.

And the important thing is, it needn't cost you anything. If you are going to buy a camera or a lens or any one of thousands of other photo-related products, please consider buying it from B&H Photo. Or, if you need to buy a book or CD or piece of software, just check out Amazon first. (Here for those in the U.K.) And, pretty please, remember to use our links when you do buy from B&H or Amazon. It helps. A lot. Really.

Or click on our advertisers, or consider a subscription.

But seriously, thanks to all of you who have helped. You are very kind, and it's very much appreciated.

Vacating
Meanwhile, it's that time of year again—I'm closing up shop for a few days to get some old-fashioned August R&R. (The cheek—sticks his hat out, then goes on holiday.) TOP will resume its merry ways on, around, about, or in the vicinity of August 10th. The payoff for your patience? I am at my least curmudgeonly when I return from vacation. Although I admit it can be hard to tell.

In the meantime, why not delve into the Archives a bit? There's lots of fine stuff moldering away in there lonely and forgotten and not doing anybody enough good.

See you soon.

**By the way, quite a number of these have been canceled. When this happens, I assume it's something the subscriber did on purpose; but I've found several times that it comes as just as much of a surprise to the subscriber. So if you signed up to contribute and your subscription was canceled out of the blue and it was nothing you did, well, it was nothing I did, either. I don't know what's causing it.

I should just point out that the post "Fake Photojournalism Wins" from two days ago was the purest example yet on this site of automatic blogging. Michael Walker appended the link to a comment he made. I checked it (as I check all the links in the comments) and thought it was interesting, so I posted it. You then took over.

I thought the discussion that ensued was really good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it—there were some really thoughtful, subtle, intelligent comments on many aspects of the case, and from both sides (approving and disapproving).

And I didn't have to do anything. Except flip the switch.

I'm just sayin'.

Not many people can say truthfully that they've been published in The New Yorker: I noticed that our own Geoff Wittig, who has written many book reviews for TOP, got a letter published in that magazine this week, in the context of his formal expertise (Geoff's an M.D. in real life). Nice going, Geoff!

In case anybody has had trouble lately with the site loading slowly, I think I've figured out why that might be happening. It has to do with how I've been loading illustrations. It will take a few days for the old method to clear off the front page, but things should improve after that.

Also, yesterday we passed 30,000 comments on the new site (you might remember the original site was over on Blogger.) The author of the 30,000th comment was Arghya Mukherjee.

Featured Comment by Arghya Mukherjee: "That is serendipity for you—that was only my second comment on the site in two years.

"Thanks, though, for a superb blog—a daily dose of photographic sanity and balance that I would find it hard to do without."

Featured Comment by Adam McAnaney: "I'd like to thank Mike, but I have already thanked him enough. So here is a big THANK YOU to everyone who comments here. I just read all 107 (and counting) comments on the Pentax K-7, and I assure you that there are very few (if any) websites out there where I would be willing to read more than 20 comments at most. There certainly aren't any where I read all of the comments with any regularity. I really appreciate the intelligence, knowledge and wit that the T.O.P. commenters share here and hope that you will all continue to make T.O.P. such an inviting and informative place.

"Thanks, y'all!"

Mike adds: I'll second that. And I read all 30,000+.

Strange though this might seem given what I said the other day about my attitude towards contests, it's now pretty certain that The Online Photographer will be staging one...except I've decided to call it an "event" rather than a contest*.

I've got some great judges lined up. There will be an entry fee—to help keep the numbers of entries down and the entries serious—but it will be modest. At no time will TOP or any entity associated with our event make any claim to any rights relating to your work—you'll retain 100% ownership at all times, including the right to withdraw your photo at any time.

The Event (it will have a name, but I won't reveal that just yet) will have several interesting stages; one might even call them "twists." The top prizes will not be specified exactly, but they might well be quite lucrative. Entrants will be limited for this event, although you'll be on your honor as to whether you qualify or not. (I'll explain what all this means in due course.)

I must say it's been very interesting designing this Event; once I settled a few key problems, everything seemed to fall into place.

I need to run the mechanics of the Event and the text of the announcement past the judges for their input, but once I hear from them I'll post the details. After that, we'll start with profiles of the judges. Stay tuned!

I hope this will be fun....

Featured Comment by Andy Burday: "Kittens? Bumblebees? Puppies? Pshaw. I have a picture of a sunset that I took with my 14–24mm set to 14mm on FF. It's looking over a crystal-clear lake with a range of rugged, snow-capped mountains beyond. There is a canoe on the near shore, set at an attractive diagonal so as to draw the viewer's eye into the frame. I stacked a CP on top of a 2-stop GND filter. I set WB to fluorescent and turned contrast and saturation up to 11. Read it and weep, also-rans. Your kittens are terminated."

Featured Comment by John Bates: "Please, please, please let the judging rules involve the Prisoner's Dilemma."

This morning—influenced, as I too often am, by John Camp's enthusiasm—I find myself mulling over the idea of having a photo contest on TOP.

The details would need to be worked out, of course, but I have a few ideas. For one, because "polls" are so easy to set up on the site, we could let the judges pick the finalists and then leave the final choice up to readers, "American Idol" style. It also seems to me that we could also tie it to a print offer somehow.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that I wouldn't want to use it as a mechanism to generate income for TOP. Entry fees are useful for contests, because they tend to discourage frivolous entries that simply waste the administrators' time. But given that I object to contests that exploit the entrants for gain, how could I turn around and run just such a contest? One of the things I like about TOP is that nobody is directly exploited—we make money from you when you buy things from Amazon and B&H through our links, and when you "subscribe." But those are things you do voluntarily, and you don't get anything extra for doing them.

Granted, nobody would be "forced" to enter a contest, either, but I think I would consider it a conflict of interest if the site were making money from it.

Ross Chambers, in the comments, linked to an article about corruption in the judging of piano competitions. It got me to pondering what contests are good for when they work like they're supposed to—when the judges are fair and impartial, the winners well considered. And it seems to me that the best outcome of a contest is for the winner to become better known. If that's true, then that's one thing a TOP contest could certainly be good for, because we have a large enough audience that the winner would receive significant publicity.

Definitely something to think about.

Mike

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You know, I'm never going to be able to afford that A900 I want if I can't get a few more people to hit the black box. (The black box in the right-hand column, that would be.) If you haven't, would you at least consider it? You can choose from one of four levels, from 25¢ a month to $6. Most people choose $1 or $2. I mean, what would you pay for a magazine subscription? That's what you would pay for a magazine that comes once a month, or even once every two months. Isn't this better? I work weekends, after all. Think of T.O.P. like a magazine that comes in little daily increments.

I want you to fully understand where I'm coming from here. Last April 14th, I called the nice man at the IRS, because I didn't know if I had to pay taxes on what I was calling "subscription donations." I described the situation as honestly and forthrightly as I could. He said, "that's not a donation." He described to me (in, um, great detail) what "donation" means in the eyes of the IRS and what I had to do to qualify as a charitable entity, blah blah blah. Then he said, "Is there incentive for them signing up, or is it totally voluntary?" No, I said, it's totally voluntary. "Do they get anything extra for the contribution?" Exactly nothing extra.

There was a long silence. "Then, technically, those are gifts."

Are you, um, getting the significance there? (It took a while for it to dawn on me.) You don't have to pay income tax on gifts.

Can you understand better now why I'm, er, eager to get you to pitch a buck or two a month into the hat?

By the way, if you're some sort of tax ninja and you don't agree with the nice man, don't tell me. Seriously, don't. I won't hear you, because I will have my fingers in my ears and be blabbering "SONYA900SONYA900SONYA900SONYA900!!!" real loud.

Please, subscribe!! Do it today. If you do, or if you already have, thank you.

Okay, PBS mode off. And, thanks for your support.

I've just completely populated the "Book" category (see the Categories list in the right sidebar column) with all of the content we've ever published on books here at the TOP TypePad blog, going all the way back to Day One.

It took me all day to get it done. Seriously.

It was such a slog that I doubt very much I'm going to ever succeed in "categorizing" all of the site's past content, although I won't give up that idea just yet. Next up, I'm going to try to populate the "Random Excellence" category.

At the very least, though, I'll try to add a category to all the future posts so that eventually most posts will be searchable by category. In the meantime, check out "Books."

Today is pretty much a housekeeping day, I guess.

In response to reader suggestions, I've redirected the domains so that both

"/theonlinephotographer.com"

      and

"/www.theonlinephotographer.com"

And I'm trying to hire a real graphic designer to re-do the header bar. Not much movement there yet. (Too small a job?) Stay tuned.

You probably noticed that "Categories" have shown up in the right-hand column, to make it easier to find older posts. The problem is that not very many posts are tagged with categories yet. For various reasons it's not easy to tag large numbers of older posts quickly, so it will take a while before the categories are useful; but from now on I'll at least be putting category tags on all the new posts.

Also, by popular demand, the lynx is back. She's the tab for our not-very-expansive links page. I'd promise to work on that page, too, but, as I always say, I have a lot of things to promise to work on.

UPDATE: I've received many kind offers of help with graphic design, which puts me in a position of having an embarrassment of riches on that score. Sincere thanks to everyone who offered or is thinking of offering—the offers are extremely kind—but please note that help is no longer needed.

Lost comments
Apparently, two or three days ago, I must have mistakenly deleted a small batch of comments, probably no more than six or eight. If you wrote a comment recently that wasn't posted, it was most likely not "disallowed," but merely lost. Guess I must have hit the wrong button by mistake. Sorry about that.

Subscribers
I'm pleased to report that the "subscription drive" the other day went splendidly well. No fewer than 121 people ("True Fans" of TOP, according to Ctein's lingo) signed on to make "voluntary recurring contributions." Here's the breakdown:

Averaged over two years, that's $300 per month, minus PayPal fees of about $25, for a net of about $275 per month of income that I can more or less depend on as a regular thing. I don't think that quite qualifies me as an internet tycoon (still workin' on that), but it'll cover some groceries—so thanks very much to everybody who signed on! A Mike stimulus plan, indeed. I confess I didn't expect so much participation, so I'm feeling complimented. Thanks.

You'll notice I've posted a new link to the Subscribe page at the upper right. If you haven't done so already, I hope you'll consider subscribing, especially if you're someone who reads via our full feeds and seldom visits the actual website.

A fair number of people experienced problems with PayPal, for which I'm sorry. Er, very sorry, for obvious reasons! When a payment service actively discourages motivated buyers, that is not good service. I've been looking into a way to implement recurring payments by credit card without using PayPal, but not making very much progress yet (most of the available options are for far more elaborate operations). I'll keep you posted.

New Amazon portal
There's also a new Amazon portal at the upper right, including quick links. And thanks again to everybody who makes Amazon purchases through our links—that really helps out too.

Categories
I'm also beginning to implement categories for posts, to help you locate older posts. It will take a while to get this fully implemented, but I'll be working on it. I'm also thinking of putting together a page of favorite posts. That might take a while too.

Movies
The "off-topic" post the other day asking for movie recommendations elicited more comments than any other post in TOP's 3-year-plus history. Whew. I used the suggestions to amass a list of about 13 movie scripts to read. I'm toying with the idea of writing a screenplay, because I have too few things to occupy my time that are highly unlikely to result in income. I'm being sarcastic. It's just one of the things on the bucket list, is all.

I also put together a short list of movies I want to watch based on the recommendations. I've added those to my Netflix queue. Thanks to everybody who passed along favorites.

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