Well, back from my day of doctors. One thing I learned—my hearing is no longer perfect! I scored at the upper limit in all the tests except I was one tone down in the highest frequencies in my left ear. (I do think I heard it, I just wasn't sure.) I've always had very good hearing.
I blame Butters. He sticks his head right next to my left ear in the car, and then when he thinks I might be preparing to get out, he barks frantically, right in my ear. There's nothing I can do about it.
Maybe I could wear industrial earmuffs when I drive with him. (Geeky note: when I had my pool table, whenever I broke the balls I'd put on earmuffs. Too loud otherwise—I can tell when something's not good for my ears. I do take as much care as I can to protect my hearing. Short of getting rid of the dog of course.)
Anyway, back to the GX8. Mike N. wrote yesterday:
"The Internet's most anticipated (camera-based) will-they-won't-they finally ends in full-blown romance. It's nice to see someone who really knows cameras and photography look down the barrel of full-frame temptation and plump for an out-of-date small-sensor device on closeout. Especially amidst the endless heat generated by supposedly better cameras, and all because he actually just likes the way it works and looks. Common sense breaks out...."
Heh. Made me smile.
I went to "Cruisin' Night" in Penn Yan last night and took a gazillion pictures of all the cool cars and all the other great things on display. I sure made the right camera choice for me, that's all I can say. There's something I love about the IQ of the current 20.3-MP Micro 4/3 sensor. It has such a crisp-but-clean look, and such a "film grain" look to its noise, that I just love wading around in the images at 100%. I find it very gratifying. The D-o-F is just right for my taste, neither too much nor too little. And I'm a big fan of the bokeh of Panasonic lenses.
Naturally there are some limitations.
This one's an iPhone pic, taken in between doctor's appointments.
We have clear days in the Finger Lakes, and then we have really clear days, when the air is clean and things far away look close and the sunlight is so strong it feels like you're on a different planet. We had a day like that two days ago, so I took the GX8 out at midday and took a number of different torture-test exposures of the white shed with the doors open to the darkened interior. (Essentially a "black box" test like we used to do with B&W film.) I found that on the exposure with the sunlit white cladding barely holding, the interior still dipped too far into ugly noise—and with the interior just barely holding, I couldn't recover quite enough highlight detail. So I agree that the proper exposure is important with the GX8, and when the subject brightness range (SBR) is as high as you'll encounter in daylight, a single exposure won't quite hold all parts of the range.
And then there's ISO 1600...looks fine, prints well, but...not quite there for pixel-peeping. Just kinda takes the shine off the IQ. I don't mind using it, but it's not going to show off the sensor at its beautiful wonderful best. But for most picturetaking, staying within the generous sweet spot of the camera and sensor, well, I love the 20.3-MP sensor's look.
It gives me what I want to see, is all. It's good, and—even better—good enough.
Needed doing
But never mind all that. Here's the important info you need to know:
The 85-year-old guy in the tractor picture used that Farmall "M" to farm 2,000 acres. He had 240 milk cows. Even with eight kids—four boys and four girls—he worked 20 hours a day for years. "It needed doing, and I just kept going," he told me. Finally the engine block cracked, so he put the tractor in the barn.
Some time later, he was buying a snowplow attachment that happened to be attached to an old, worn-out truck, and for a few extra dollars the seller threw truck into the deal. The farmer's son suggested that it would be fun to do an engine swap and put the Chrysler V8 into the old Farmall. So they did.
They eventually sold the tractor, and the new owner used it for a number of years. But that second owner used hired farmhands (the man in the picture never did), and he discovered that his hired men were taking that V8 tractor out on the highway and running it up to 50 miles per hour. He didn't want them doing that, so he took the battery out of it and locked it in the shed.
Some years later, the original owner (I didn't get his name, sorry to say) ran across the new owner, and he and his son got to see their old tractor again. As they were driving away, both men agreed that they never should have sold it and that it would be great to have it back. So they turned around, drove back, and asked the guy what he might be willing to take for it. The guy said he wasn't using it. So their old tractor came home again.
After a restoration that put it into County Fair and town-parade condition, the old fellow told me that it'll never find its way into a museum because it's not stock, but that the crowds love it for that very reason. "An M is an M, and after you see ten of 'em go by it's not very exciting. But then this one comes along with its chrome pipes stickin' up and the crowd claps and hollers."
He sorely misses his late wife of nearly 60 years. "I was married at 19. We had hard times, she and I. But the harder the times you go through," he said, making a twisting motion with his fist, "the tighter you pull together."
He no longer farms—sold the 2,000 acres and the 240 milk cows in the '80s. But he still has the old tractor that he bought new in '54. Oh, and he has 54 great-grandchildren, too.
As for the picture? It's not perfect. But it's good enough.
Mike
UPDATE: I might have been a little too hard on the GX8's ISO 1600. Here's a sample—the detail will be at 100% after you double-click it. We would've been ecstatic to have an ISO 400 color neg film this good back in, say, 1985.
Original contents copyright 2018 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.
B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Severian: "Cool story you provided there, thanks. I've driven tractors like that, with row crop front end (very narrow front wheels, close together). Anybody driving something like that at 50 mph has a serious death wish. Our old IH Farmall 'H' was scary enough at 30 MPH."
David L.: "Anyone would need industrial strength ear muffs to be around that tractor running a V8 with straight exhaust stacks."
Mike replies: Now that you mention it, it made quite a racket when he left.
Mike Plews: "Good news on your hearing. Wish I could say the same but four years as a Morse interceptor in the Army pretty much roached my hearing. Finally got some hearing aids this year and lo and behold I don't need to recap the family Sansui or look for fresh tweeters. Interesting to learn that I could still detect high frequencies but my hearing above 2000 Hz was so so low it was effectively gone. Fortunately it was entirely correctable with hearing aids. Went home, fired up the hi-fi and it completely blew me away. Almost afraid to put the Casals Bach Orchestral Suites on the TT. I might start bawling over what I've been missing.
"Hearing loss is insidious and TOP readers over a certain age would be well served by following your lead and getting their hearing checked."
Mike Plews adds: "A little something I should have mentioned in my comment is that a comprehensive hearing exam should include a Maryland hearing test, not just a test of frequency response. The Maryland test checks your ability to understand normal conversation. I flunked like a champ. Now I can hear my grandkids clear as a bell, sweet. My hearing loss was starting to make me become isolated and that's not good."
Mike replies: As far as I can tell with a little spot research, in the Maryland consonant-vowel nucleus-consonant (CNC) test they play static into one ear while saying "say the word 'odd' [or whatever]" into the other ear, testing your ability to distinguish vowels when preceded or followed by various consonants. Happy to say I scored 100% on that.
The hearing loss I'm aware of is spatial focus, which they don't test for. From an article in The Hearing Review: "Spatial information is conveyed by subtle acoustic cues that can indicate the origin of sound with regard to three-dimensional space. Therefore, spatial perception contributes to a listener’s ability to navigate her physical surroundings. In addition, in situations where there are multiple competing signals, such as at a cocktail party, spatial information effectively allows people to 'zoom in' on a particular signal of interest. This has been demonstrated in a multitude of studies." I used to be very good at that "zooming in" ability, but it deteriorates with age and I'm conscious of being much worse at it than I used to be. I used to have a seemingly freaky ability at restaurants to focus on one conversation across the room, then focus on a different one—and while focused on one I couldn't decipher the other. It made eavesdropping in public pretty entertaining. I essentially can't do it any more.
Speed: "Wikipedia on Farmall:
'Farmall was a model name and later a brand name for tractors manufactured by the American company International Harvester (IH). The Farmall name was usually presented as McCormick-Deering Farmall and later McCormick Farmall in the evolving brand architecture of IH.'
"A few years ago I attended the annual Red Power Round Up—a county-fair-like event without the animals. If you like old iron or seeing how your camera reproduces red tones, it is worth a day or two. This year's 29th annual Roundup will be held in Montgomery, Alabama, June 13th to 16th. Oops, maybe next year."
UPDATE: And how's this for a nice coincidence? I'm not sure I'd ever heard the word "Farmall" before two days ago, but coming home from Waterloo yesterday evening I had to stop to take a shot of this mailbox. Another Farmall fan!
Obviously the stylist was asleep on the job for this shoot. Sorry about that. Oh well, into every rural Upstate New York life a little birdshit must fall. —MJ
Mark: "'Round here they have vintage tractor plowing competitions where the old-timers on the tractors are often older than the old-time tractors themselves. Lovely people full of stories, like your farming friend.
"A camera is such a good way to get out, do things, meet people—all just as or more rewarding than the photography. It’s the experience, not the camera."
Mike replies: Amen.
MHMG: "I Googled it and found the McCormick Farmall mailbox you photographed available on both eBay and Amazon. Thanks, Mike, I should order one myself! The history books all say my great-granduncle Cyrus singlehandedly invented the McCormick Reaper, but I have to say the invention was very much a family affair with my great-great-grandfather, Robert McCormick, setting up all the critical conditions whereupon his son, Cyrus, would be able to go on to make a commercial success of the McCormick Reaper with the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, Illinois.... This in turn leading to contentious business mergers and acquisitions culminating in International Harvester and the legendary McCormick Farmall tractors so popularly restored and collected today. Thank you, Mike, for a trip down memory lane. Kind regards, Mark McCormick-Goodhart."
John Camp: "About that spatial focus business—when I got my first hearing aids probably ten or twelve years ago, I put them on and went out to the golf course. I immediately noticed that I couldn't tell where birds were. They'd be chirping from trees along the fairway, but I couldn't tell from where, since the information I was getting was from a multi-directional microphone that sat behind my ear. It was disorienting and a bit disappointing, since I like to look at birds; but at least I could hear them.
"My decline in hearing is mostly attributable to age and genetics, but in my right ear, which is worse than my left, a good part of it was due to once (and only once) firing a .44 magnum Ruger auto-loading carbine without ear protection. It was like being slapped hard on the side of the head; I had immediate tinnitus, and it has never gone away."
Mike replies: You occasionally see evidence of idiots (and I use the term advisedly here) playing a "joke" by sneaking up on their friends and giving them a blast right in the ear with one of those compressed-air horns. I've wondered how many peoples' hearing has been permanently damaged by that asinine "prank." In my (yes, liberal, regulation- and big-government-approving) opinion, those compressed air horns should be vigorously banned and that particular kind of attack should be classified a felony assault and battery. But then, as you might have noticed, I have stronger than average opinions about noise pollution.
