The Online Photographer

I forgot to post comments from the Chris Killip post. Here are the Featured ones; the rest are published under the original post. 

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Trevor Johnson: "I have been an admirer of Chris Killip’s work since I first came across him in the late 1980s. By the time the early '80s came, I was working in London and the South East, but had spent five years as an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and worked there for a year before moving, so I was very aware of the places he documented and the undoing of social fabric in Tyneside that was taking place.

"In 2023, Shirley and I visited Newcastle to view his retrospective exhibition at the Baltic, Gateshead, which is just over the river from Newcastle. We were both stunned at seeing the printed images, not only the content, which we had some awareness of, but the quality of the images and prints was simply outstanding. This was carefully considered, yet simultaneously spontaneous photography with medium- and large-format cameras.

"Afterwards, I again considered whether such documentary photography can exist today. What set apart, for example, the Skinningrove series, was that Killip lived, worked, ate and breathed amongst the community he documented. Another photographer who did the same was Tish Murtha, who lived in the west of Newcastle. One of the ironies is that I bought her book Elswick Kids from the Side Gallery in Newcastle, which Killip cofounded. But the Side Gallery closed in 2023, due to a reduction of its Arts Council grant. I hope it is a temporary closure but can imagine that if the Side was in London, it would still be open."

Nigel: "I have In Flagrante Two published by Steidl, 2016,which is also out of print, but maybe easier to find. Killip's book is very good if somewhat depressing look at the North of England, shot in the golden period of British documentary photography. This hard-hitting style of social photography has gone right out of fashion; younger photographers seem to want to talk about themselves, if what I see on the contemporary scene is representative of modern concerns. "

Michael Wayne Plant: "I first encountered Chris Killip’s work when I was at University doing my MA in Photography and Urban Cultures, they had a copy of In Flagrante in the College Library and it opened my eyes to what a committed photographer deeply engaged with his subject could do. He worked with a mix of cameras and even brought a caravan to be able to stay closer to his subjects while making a lot of the work that appeared in that book. I can only recommend that every photographer spend some time with the work that is in the book. The way it is presented in the book adds to the strength of the images. I have since brought his Seacoal book, which is great and beautifully printed.

"I do not like his colour postcards book on Ireland, it does not sing to my soul like his black-and-white images do. I for a long time felt that his move to America and to the hallowed halls of academia was such a waste for a photographer of his talent, as he really should have been spending more time making images."

Chris C: "Some of them are the time and places I grew up with, but he seems to make it look a bit grimmer than I remember."

Stephen Woolford: "Less difficult to find than the original is In Flagrante Two which was published by Steidl in 2015. The design and print quality are much improved, plus there are additional photos; but no essays. Killip worked in and around Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s and 1980s, moving to the USA in 1991 to teach at Harvard. Before he died in 2020 he donated 'The Last Ships,' a set of images of shipbuilding on Tyneside made between 1975–77, to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle where they are permanently on display. Pony Box created a newsprint 'zine to go with the exhibition. I noticed recently that signed copies are still available from the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. Chris Killip photographed in the north east of England at a time of considerable de-industrialisation and hardship. The landscapes he worked in have been tidied but the adverse effects of those times are still felt by many communities.

"Hope you are making a good recovery."

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My apologies to all whose comments didn't appear in a timely fashion.

—Mike the Ed.

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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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

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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[Ed note: This post relates to photography, I promise. It is not about what it seems to be about at the beginning! As you must often do on TOP, hang in there.]

For some strange reason I suddenly seem to own about 17 more cheap ballpoint pens than I did a week ago. How did that happen? Many are duplicates, because you're forced by the packaging to buy two, three, five, or a dozen pens in order to try just one. It's been interesting. I'm coming around to liking gel pens more and more, and I made at least one self-discovery: with the new instant-drying inks, I can write with the heel of my hand resting on the paper and thus on the desk as I write, without smudging the ink on what I've just written. All my life I've written with just the knuckle of my pinkie on the paper and the rest of my hand suspended above it, to avoid smudges. (I'm a leftie.) I wish I could say that this new discovery instantly improved my handwriting, but it did not; instead, it immediately gave me cramps due to the new and unfamiliar position of my hand.

But enough about pens. I'm going to admit here that I think I suffer from mild obsessiveness—and that's the subject here. [CORRECTION: At the suggestion of Aaron in the Comments, I'm going to change some of the instances of "obsession" in this article to "fixation"—"a strong, perhaps excessive, interest in something, not necessarily negative."] This pen thing is not OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) despite the everyday currency of that expression. I used to think I had OCD, but then I read a book about real OCD, and—oh my, do I ever not have it. Saying you have OCD when you're temporarily perseverating or fixating on an interest is like saying "I'm starving" when you're a little peckish or "I'm so depressed" when you're feeling a bit on the low side. No, no, and no. In common usage, used casually and non-technically, these are intensifiers. Intensifiers, like the way we have a hundred exaggerated ways to say "good," are an all-too-human tendency in speech—emphasis by overstatement. A recently popular intensifier for "good" in American English is "insane." I have a general rule not to amplify ordinary "dislike" into "hate"—a common intensifier—but I have to say, I hate that one.

But yeah, a little fixated. I'd say I'm going to quit buying and trying pens, but maybe after the six that are en route as I write this get here. Heh!

Settle down, Mike.

Here's the thing, though: I've long been aware that I've put my obsessiveness, or whatever you want to call it—"excessive focus"? "Unhealthy preoccupation"?—to good use. For instance: I never could have kept up my interest in photography for so long if it were just a casual, superficial source of interest and pleasure. And I never would have been able to write a more-or-less daily blog for twenty years if I hadn't been more than a little bit excessively focused or unhealthily preoccupied.

For instance, I re-wrote Tuesday's post on Wednesday morning, adding several hundred new words and an illustration. Why? Because it's the way I am. And in that post, I mentioned that Richard Nickel died documenting Chicago buildings that were being torn down (I have not one but two magnificent books of his I never look at—who can stop at one?—both notated by Amazon as "Purchased Jan 2011"). And Jamie Livingston's PAD project was only ended by his death. How could they possibly have kept those activities going if they weren't in some sense obsessions? Sometimes, I think I see signs, in others, that fixations really are rising to the level of OCD. I could name two examples I know of—one a stereo guru and one a coffee nut—but it would risk insulting real people in public and I'm unwilling to do that.

Cavemen and -women
I've always thought that subject specialization is an innate instinct of the mind, because the primordial tribe in the ancestral environment, ten thousand years ago, needed specialists. One guy is great at chipping rocks into sharp edges; he makes the tools. A woman knows all about turning animal hides into robes. Someone else teaches the children. There's the medicine man, who plays the placebo effect for all it's worth and knows how to comfort the sick and dying. Another guy is the best tracker. Another has a knack for leadership; another is strong, competitive, and a psychopath, and feels no fear in battle nor much compunction about killing the group's enemies. (The Sioux in their natural state had separate chiefs for peacetime and wartime. The UK did that in WWII, letting Churchill be their war leader but booting him out as soon as the war was over.) All these tribal specialists are needed. In an evolutionary-biological sense, that's why modern society has grown-up men who are fixated on NFL football or the Marvel Universe, chefs, Jay Leno, the guy who made the biggest ball of string, serial killers, and a guy I met when I worked for Model Railroader who had turned the whole second floor of his house into a giant HO train layout and organized every aspect of his life around model railroading. (When she came to the door, his cheery wife—clearly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome—was wearing an engineer's hat and striped denim overalls like an old-timey engineer. Instead of "come in," she opened the door wide and said, "all aboard!")

And what of my interest in photography? Not truly obsessive, I suppose, by the clinical definitions. But it's also not normal or balanced in the usual sense. I've been into it for most of my life. I've "harnessed" my naturally fixating or obsessive nature in the service of that interest and involvement, you might say, and put it to good use. If you can turn it to good use, a little obsession helps. It helps you get the work done.

The biggest change in my involvement with photography that's happened over the past handful of years is that this longtime preoccupation or fixation has begun to subside. More and more sub-topics bore me now. It's harder to get excited; I've seen it all before. Over the years I've witnessed several friends and acquaintances "emerge" from formerly vigorous fixations. I knew an audio equipment importer once, for example, who had followed his audiophilia to extreme lengths. He eventually simply tired of it all. He stopped chasing perfection, de-accessioned everything except a small but high-quality system that was not very expensive by his standards, and settled down to listening to music.

The moving ballpoint, having writ, moves on
As for the cheap ballpoints, well...they're all just pens. Yes, I'm "looking into it" at the moment—demystifying the subject, to use Oren Grad's term. I did the same thing with quartz watches a few years back, and came away with one watch I really like and wear every day. I did the same thing with shaving a while back, and settled on a simple routine that satisfies me. I did it with keyboards, trying your patience in the process, and ended up coming back around to the current version of what I've always used. (I had a wiring problem—I couldn't rewire my mind and my hand-eye co-ordination.) I'll do the same thing with ballpoints I'm sure. I'll learn about it for a while, settle on one or two products I like best, and that will be that. That's not obsession even in the colloquial sense. It's just "buying-and-trying"—a somewhat more involved version of shopping.

I'll leave it behind. I'll bet money that if you ask me a year from now, months and months will have gone by without me buying a single new pen. It's not going to remain an interest.

Not that there's anything wrong with it if it did. To each their own. But for me, these little shopping interests come and go; they're fun, because I like learning, and I like trying things for myself. Obsession, however—that's on another level altogether.

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 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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Jeff Sprang: "Interesting take on obsession. My experience with a model railroader's wife was completely different. On assignment to cover the guy who had converted his entire basement into a model railroad layout, I was greeted at the door of the home by his spouse who waved towards the basement door with a curt 'he's down there' and went back to reading her romance novel. Did another photo story on a guy who restored old Silver King tractors. His very nice ranch style house had been taken over completely by parts and tools. He cheerily told me that his wife with the kids had left him over it, like that was a good thing—to him it apparently was."

Rob de Loe: "There's a nice intersection between this post about obsessions, and your previous post that focused a lot on projects. To do a big project well, I think you have to be a bit obsessed because you may need to work at it beyond the point of common sense. I know when I've reached that stage when I'm obsessing about things that I know with certainty that nobody else will notice or care about. As a side note, my answer to the question someone asked, 'How do you know when the project is done?' is, "Big projects are never finished—only abandoned.'"

MikeR: "I'm glad you wrote that about OCD. My firsthand experience with true OCD came from living with it, embodied by my late first wife. It is a sad and horrifying thing to witness, as though a person has been possessed. Not even remotely funny, the way it's been depicted in Monk and As Good As It Gets. And by the way, I've seen a Venn diagram that illustrates an overlap among OCD, ADHD, and Autism. I think obsession is too strong a word for what you describe. But, it's more than curious, or interested. Open to suggestions."

Mike replies: I modified the post slightly to include the word "fixation." I wonder if that serves a little better.

Tony: "Sometimes obsessiveness can definitely be useful in photography; there’s a bunch of prints I have lying around that couldn’t have been possible without me going all-in on learning the ins, outs, and quirks of my system of choice. However, my current obsession is flash bulbs—a particularly expensive and insane thing to be diving into in the 2020s—and while I’ve had some successes that couldn’t really have been done with electronic flash, the jury is still out whether this obsession is going to be worth the hours of research and testing I’ve already sunk into it!"

Stuart Hamilton: "The late Kurt Stier, a brotherly friend for 60 years and a professional photographer through the annual reports years, worked in his early photo career as an assistant and darkroom printer for Irving Penn. He once told me, quoting Penn, that nothing great is ever achieved without obsession."

Sean: "People who say they're a little bit OCD will be cured by reading David Adam's The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought."

Moose:

"Pens In Mug (mug by high school art student.)"

David Comdico: "Scorsese has said, paraphrasing a bit, that Art is making other people care about your obsessions."

David Dyer-Bennet: "The study of psychology seems to have identified a lot of things that everybody does to some degree, which if done to excess can be problems. Fixations and ADD come to mind. Even bipolar disorder is a cycling between exaggerations of normal states, rather than something entirely unique. We talk about autistic people as being on a spectrum, and part of the deal is that neurotypical people are at one end of that spectrum (or towards one end; there's variety among the typical). The clinical definitions nearly all include a requirement that it interfere with functioning (caring for yourself, holding a job, maintaining relationships are all part of 'functioning'). The difference between 'focus on your professional work' and a 'fixation' is...kind of subjective, really. Not at all sure that successful professionals can reliably turn that focus on and off on demand.

"At least to some extent, we all make lemonade with the hand we have been dealt. The hands differ, and what society rewards is somewhat arbitrary, and there's also a lot of luck involved."

Eric Brody: "As a physician who spent many years training young physicians, I found that the best had a bit of obsessiveness or whatever you choose to call it; the worst were in a word, cavalier. Those who would meticulously review a chart and find what others had missed were my heroes and in my other role as a recruiter for my medical group, I sought them out and invariably they were successful. This is true so long as they also had the most important characteristic of a great physician: empathy."

Today I thought I'd address a few of the questions and comments about "The Wrong Camera" posts, Parts I and II.

John: "I have issues with going for some kind of consistency. I shoot many different things and I want to keep shooting many different things. I’m not a pro. Why then do I always hear that I need to be consistent? Why can’t the only consistency be that I took the picture?"

Mike replies: This is important, so it bears repeating every time it comes up: do whatever you want. You own your photography; you decide. My position is that as long as people aren't being evil or hurting anybody, anything goes. My only suggestion, and a suggestion is all it is, is that you might want to make your choices consciously and thoughtfully. But even that's up to you.

J. Paul Thomas: "Your comments on 'the wrong camera' were most interesting. I am of the old school and greatly prefer to take my photos with a 'real' camera. However I do not always have it with me as I do my iPhone. Being an eternal optimist I hope every picture I take will be worthy of framing and hanging on the wall. My question may be impossible to answer, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on just how large a photo taken one of today’s iPhones can be enlarged. I realize that many factors can influence the answer, but I am interested in an idea of the upper practical limits."

Mike replies: The answer is a moving target, for many reasons. For instance, which phone? Then: for what usage? What's your standard for image quality? How far away will the print be viewed? (They've made billboards featuring iPhone photos.) How much post-processing expertise do you have? How good are you at printing? Really the only way is to set your own standard: experiment with your equipment and materials, your skills, and your sense of what's good enough (for you!) and what's not. With my first DSLR (the Konica-Minolta 7D of sainted memory) and first pigment digital printer (the notorious HP B9180, which not only discouraged me from continuing to learn inkjet printing but also drove HP out of that segment of the printer market), my standard was that I'd print up to about 15 inches in the long dimension and that was it. But I have a print made from that camera on my wall to this day that is 32 inches wide (sorry about the rollover text, I didn't notice it until too late and I'm not going back to fix it). It was made by an expert printer, Paul Butzi, who recognized that it would work at that size because only a very small portion of it (surrounding the droplets of water in the reflection area in the center of the image) were, or needed to be, sharp.

Nick: "Re your unfinished projects, is there another piece here about how to know when a project is finished? Or if not finished, just enough? So you have figured out a style and method of working and getting some good results. Is 12 excellent images a finished project? Since it was certainly finished as a time period of that work. Or are you thinking of how many images you would need to make it a book? Twelve images could certainly be enough for say a group show...but it doesn't count as finished unless it's a solo show or a complete book? Maybe having a target at the start would help people motivate to achieving that number?"

Mike replies: A question for the ages! It's really part and parcel of the art. Method is something not talked about enough, here or anywhere else. In art school, we were told there is no real answer, but maybe 40–60 pictures is a good body of work. But then, William Eggleston considered that his "Democratic Forest" project might end up being 10,000 images, and Jack MacDonough took a picture of a magnificent oak tree from the same vantage point in all four seasons, and the set has sold many times and earned him a ton. Is that a piece or a project? I think the case can be made that it was a four-picture project. Some photographers move decisively from one project to the next, with hard boundaries between them, and others could be said to be pursuing one project for their entire lifetimes—this might be especially true of portraitists, like Yousuf Karsh, Jane Bown, or Arnold Newman. Some photographers photograph many instances of the same idea, like the Bechers and their industrial structures or Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes series, while others have big, sprawling bodies of work with many different kinds of pictures included that they attempt to bring under one big umbrella, like Weegee's Naked City or Steve McCurry's multipartite portrait of Asia, Asian cultures, and Asian peoples. Some demarcate projects in terms of distinctive sets of equipment and materials; some use periods of time. A few use intervals of time, like PAD or PAW projects (a picture a day or a picture a week), all the way up to Jamie's Livingston's Some Photos of That Day, for which he took one Polaroid every day for eighteen years until he passed away. Obviously, a lot of photographers, artists and amateurs alike, use place—Paula Chamlee's High Plains Farm work, or Joel Meyerowitz's St. Louis and the Arch, or an enthusiast's pictures from an African Safari or a hiking trip in the Arizona mountains. Some are constrained by the availability of the subject—Richard Nickel was driven to photograph magnificent Chicago buildings that were being torn down, meaning he had to work as quickly as he could and settle for less than perfect portraits of old buildings—the project killed him—and Larry Sultan's elegant documentation of his parents after he was a adult. Still others consider the "energy" of a project—how long do they stay interested? When do they start to get bored? I would say for most people that they can't force it. If something doesn't have enough energy to propel itself along naturally, you're not going to get very far on willpower alone. Other things just aren't very good ideas, like a dreadful book I saw once called Sunflowers that was just an endless succession of boring snapshots of, you guessed it, sunflowers. And how conscious is it? Maybe you're just going along doing what you like, like Saul Leiter, and the commonality between the photos is just in the distinctive way you see the world. Others are doing jobs, but doing it in their own distinctive way, like Irving Penn's fashion and professional work, which managed to show his particular inimitable style. The list goes on. The variations, and how you can best match up ideas to your own skills, commitment, aptitudes, and opportunities, is all part of the fun.

John gillooly: "Mike, really enjoyed this one. Do you think that creative outlets of today, like Instagram and other social media platforms, allow for a more rapid completion of projects?

"When I started using Instagram several years ago, the medium sort of gave me some incentive to edit, finish and present small bodies of work. Many times that simply means me making an edit of my favorite 30 images after a PGA event or other work assignment. But knowing I had that outlet absolutely reinvigorated my photography as it gave me a readily available presentation place. As you mentioned in this post, before 'social' platforms, you were sort of limited to 'show' and 'book' which required an entirely different level of completion."

Mike replies: I have no idea what the answer to your first question is, except...they ought to. But, knowing that it invigorated your photography pleased me to hear, and seems like a positive indicator! It raised my spirits the day I read it.

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 through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Nick: "Mike, thanks so much for answering my question in depth! And I'm thrilled and not at all surprised to hear that the answer to 'how long is a project?' is 'it depends'! I see that just means the project is done when you say it's done, whether that is 1 picture or 10,000, or upon your death. And I was wondering whether you could actually consider your 12 good portraits to be a finished project, since 12 is a decent number for excellent images—but clearly it is not finished if you just didn't feel like you'd finished the work! Very interesting, thanks."

Richard Alan Fox: "This post takes me back fifty one years to San Francisco, 1974 (according to my artist resume). I enrolled in a photography class at the University of California extension in San Francisco. Larry Sultan was the instructor. This was his first class. I was photographing with Polaroid positive negative film, my subject was my face; some images were blurred, others grotesque in the manner of 'film noir.' Larry arranged for me to exhibit the work at the school's gallery. This was my first photo show. I printed 11x14 inch prints from the negatives and mounted a grid of the Polaroid Positives on the wall. The invitations for the show were contact printed post cards. That was a beginning for both of us, different paths, different lives. Sadly he passed in 2009. Thank you for mentioning him; may his memory be for a blessing."

Charles Rozier: "Sylvia Plachy used quite a few different formats—I remember her saying that while she was very strict with her private life, she was quite promiscuous with her cameras."

Jeez, nobody liked my Valentine's Day story. Crickets.

I have one more point to add to the "Bones" series of posts. (Why did I give it that title? I don't know. Oh, yeah, Yorick!) It's that you should do what you can to not spin your wheels. Here are the first four articles:

Bones Part I
Bones Part II
Bones Part III
Bones Part IV

If you can manage, "by hook or by crook" as my grandmother used to say, to get a little more focused on your photography—knowing who you are and what you're really up to, what subject lights your fire and what kind of results do it to you / sock you in the gut / get you where you live, etc.—you avoid what I consider possibly the worst fate for anyone in an art-related or creative pursuit: spinning your wheels.

Life isn't too short to spin your wheels—in fact I think we need to do a fair amount of it, to explore options and gather experience to make decisions. What you want is to not keep doing it. Certainly not keep doing it forever. I remember one friend, a generation older than I am, who had four sons. His youngest son started out with a talent on the guitar and for singing, and devoted himself to the idea of a career as a famous musician. The trouble was, when I heard about him, he had been trying for twenty-plus years, he was into his forties, his hair was turning gray, he was still having a struggle getting booked at tiny local coffee houses, and he couldn't support himself. His parents worried, and all but considered him a lost cause. Talk about spinning your wheels—that poor guy was up to his hubcaps in mud.

I sometimes like to translate colloquial expressions into English, so "spinning your wheels" would be "to waste time doing things that achieve nothing" (Cambridge); "to continue trying to do something without having any success" (Longmans); "To waste one's time or energy idly or frivolously" (Free Dictionary). Curiously, we have an expression of the opposite quality that's just as figurative: being on a roll. Some artistic people spend their whole lives spinning their wheels. Compare the guy I described above to a childhood friend of mine who had been accepted at Stanford School of Business, but really wanted to be a singer-songwriter. He gave himself two years in Los Angeles, and worked as hard as could during that time to advance his music and his musical career. Having made no progress at all at the end of the two years, or not enough, off he went to Stanford. That's an example of not spinning your wheels.

Self-knowledge, direction, and having a purpose that suits your talent, n.b., says nothing about what you have to decide! I know a perfectly happy photographer who has decided that he just likes to snap pictures. He doesn't even care about looking at them. But he's clear about what he enjoys and why he does what he does. And by the way: one gadfly professional-photographer reader of ours (I won't say his name, but his initials are Kirk Tuck) pooh-pooh'd the whole idea of having to have ideas, saying, "ideas are the currency of philosophers, not photographers." I disagree, because he himself had the clearest of ideas: for many years he took pictures people were willing to pay him money for, making sure they got what they wanted for a price they were willing to pay, and had a good enough experience doing it that they'd hire him again and tell others to do so as well. That was his idea. And it's also the opposite of spinning one's wheels. It doesn't have to be the currency of philosophers to be an idea.

The second coming of David
At the risk of returning to a party I've already been kicked out of, one more story about Johnson's Flower Center. There was a guy, David, who worked in the houseplant section. He was skinny and unkempt, had a thick, frizzy black beard, unbarbered black curly hair, and a stereotypically New York attitude, or 'tude, as we might have said in those days, along with his New York accent. (New Yorkers kind of stuck out in D.C. in 1980.) Never smiled; looked down his nose at you and everybody; smarter than anyone else in any room, at least according to himself; cynical and sardonic, critical of ev-er-y-thing, definitely not afraid to crack a wicked, cutting joke about people he worked with—or even you, to your face. There might have been a hundred employees at Johnson's, and David was probably the laziest. If he was asked to do something, he would do it, but as grudgingly as if each arm and leg were as heavy as a potted ficus. Every task was beneath him. As he was quick to tell anyone who would listen, he had a Master's degree, which he was sure none of his co-workers had. (He was probably right about that.) His major activities were standing around sucking on cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling not looking humans in the eye, avoiding helping customers, scowling, and being miserable about the fact that his life in no way rose to his standards. He and I had conversations on academic topics, when the boss wasn't looking. He loved to vent his bitterness about the paucity of decent employment opportunities in his "field," but his plight, I might have suggested, was not entirely something imposed on him by an uncaring world, because his Master's degree was in "managing a student center at a large public university." Not something there was a lot of call for. There were literally more jobs available locally for master medieval-style stone-cutters and stonecarvers—the National Cathedral had not yet been completed at that time, and employed stonecarvers. I had a few cynical, sardonic cracks of my own about the wisdom of David choosing such a specific course of study in the first place. It sounded to me like a program designed by the University to get people to help at the student center without having to pay them! But I kept my own counsel. Regardless, for David, selling houseplants was slumming, a holding pattern, a matter merely of necessity, below his station, a waste of his education.

Eventually he disappeared. He had quit. Naturally, I assumed none of us would ever see him again.

Eight months later, though, who should reappear in the houseplants section but a new guy who reminded me in a curious way of David. And it was David! The very same guy. He had gained a few pounds, had a neat haircut, no beard—and, amazingly, a completely transformed attitude. His mien, his outlook, and his method of dealing with others had been transformed. He looked, sounded, and acted like a different guy: friendly, happy, eager. What in the world had happened? I had to know.

It turned out he had had an epiphany. After a period of unemployment and job searching, not to mention misery and many cigarettes, he discovered that he missed his old job at Johnson's, and that, actually, he loved working with plants. So he threw himself into learning about plants, and was in the process of enrolling in a graduate program in horticulture. He had come back to Johnson's to work until school started. He had decided to devote the rest of his life to working with plants. And he was over-the-moon happy about all this. So there he was, in the exact place he had been eight months earlier, doing exactly the same work for the exact same pay, but with an attitude that was 180° the opposite from what he'd been before. It was as vivid a spiritual transformation as Mr. Scrooge's on Christmas morning. All it took was a different perspective. Embracing rather than rejecting. Replacing surliness, hostility, and pessimism with enthusiasm and willingness. Laziness replaced by vigor. And no more smoking, even—he had quit.

Really made an impression on me. I didn't know the guy very well, but I've never forgotten this story.

So it's not what you do that counts; what's important—vitally so, I'd say, and I say it advisedly—is to be conscious, be positive, make decisions, commit—and avoid spinning your wheels for any longer than you have to.

Mike

P.S. I probably could have said all this in four well-worded sentences. But where's the fun in that?

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Dave: "Bragging that you have a Master's degree while you're working at a job a high schooler could do isn't exactly going to impress anyone!

"Robert Roaldi reminded me of my days at a nationally-known ice cream franchise inside a mall. During Christmas, we would have a full counter with half of the people claiming they were next. So you would go over to them and ask which of the 31 flavors they wanted and they'd say, 'I haven't decided yet.' It was these people who received the regulation size scoop on their cone. (I called that a 'tension reliever.') We generally added a bit to each scoop, since they were pretty small for the price you were paying.

"Added to the crowd of people at Christmastime was the incessant roar of the water fountain. Generally once each holiday season, one of us would take off his uniform and change into street clothes, pour a small amount of dish-washing liquid into a courtesy water cup and discreetly pour it into the fountain water. This forced the maintenance people to shut off the fountain, lest the foam run all over the floor. We received dirty looks from the maintenance guys, but no one ever caught us doing it.

"One guy was pretty quick with clever comments. We had started charging for ice and water, mostly to pay for the cups. One 'customer' wanted a large cup of ice water and was complaining about us charging for it. The clever worker said, 'The water's free and the ice is free—but what are you going to put it in?'  :>)

"If you think these doings were too extreme, well, none of us murdered anyone in a fit of rage, so it all worked out to relieve the tension every so often."

My present infirmity is a perfect microcosm of my experience of older age so far: unpleasant at times, but also interesting.

I took a bad fall on Monday night, late, and here it is Friday morning, and I've gotten worse every day. My body must be healing, but it needs me to stand down while it works at the job. Last night I slept 9 hours and 27 minutes (the CPAP machine keeps the time), and had a great deal of difficulty maneuvering my body into tolerable positions to sleep in. And this morning I am more stiff and sore than I have ever been in all my entire life before this. I want to add five exclamation points but the style sheet doesn't allow that. I inched out of bed as nimble as if I were a hundred and five. Took me twenty minutes. Getting dressed was an ordeal—I had to find an old pair of socks that were easier to put on. Once downstairs I made a beeline for the 8-hour Tylenol—the effects of the dose I took before bed had had time to wear off. I had great trouble bending far enough down to put the dog's food dish on the floor. Had to stand up from my chair to turn the desk light on.

"Old age isn't a battle," writes Philip Roth, in Everyman, "it's a massacre." And I'm not even all that old yet!

Aged P
I've always liked old people, though. We were talking about Great Expectations the other day. The greatest delights of reading Dickens are his minor characters, and my favorite character in Great Expectations is "Aged P," also called the Aged One or just the Aged, the father of John Wemmick, lawyer Jaggers's clerk. Wemmick greets him by saying "How am you?" Dickens turns Wemmick into a broad-brush embodiment of the split between one's at-work and at-home personalities, and accordingly has him living in a cottage that's been transformed into a castle, complete with moat, drawbridge, and a small cannon nicknamed "the Stinger"—a man's home is his castle, geddit? Wemmick's father, Aged P (pronounced AGE-ed, and P for parent), is a cheerful optimist whom age has transformed into a fool. But an entertaining one. It's almost a shame to make Dickens stories into movies—he needs the more easygoing pace of a lengthy novel to draw the minor characters out. Aged P makes a cameo in the movie, but is better read.

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in the arbour; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of perfection.

“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”

“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a freehold, by George!”

“Is it indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”

“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged. Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not in any way disagreeable to you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. I don’t wish it professionally spoken about.”

Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and talking, until it was almost nine o’clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe; “it’s the Aged’s treat.”

Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker, with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand until the moment was come for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and repair to the battery. He took it, and went out, and presently the Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little box of a cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made every glass and teacup in it ring. Upon this, the Aged — who I believe would have been blown out of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows — cried out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see him.

[Great Expectations, Chapter XXV, p. 196–7]

What the dickens
Here's Dickens in a photo by P. Edouard Rischgitz, a Swiss painter who moved to London sometime before 1878:

Charles Dickens by Edouard Rischgitz, c. late 1860s

Have you ever noticed how many famous people in the 1800s couldn't be bothered to even comb their hair prior to sitting for a portrait? I've seen tramps, bums and drunkards with better grooming than Dickens here. There was a fad in the late '90s for young men to deliberately wear their hair a bit longer than a crew cut and sticking up every which way—the style was simply called "short and spiky," which is a description, not a name—you still see it from time to time. I thought it was uncommonly ugly. But those guys don't have anything on Charles Dickens for unappealing haircuts. Guy hasn't trimmed his beard since he wrote his first novel. Barbers probably grumbled as he went by.

Here's an idea
This post, if it were a high school paper, would come back marked C—"poorly organized, with no central theme and no thoroughgoing argument"—but if I'm skittering from here to there I'm also touching again on a series of topics from the past few days. So I'll point out one very successful "idea" for shooting projects, since that was our topic a few days ago. It's to gradually collect portraits of famous people. It often works admirably on a practical level, because famous people are often, let's say, a bit into themselves, and tend to welcome the attention. Many photographers have used this idea over many years. The two I can think of right off the bat are Bill Jay and Arnold Crane, who both made long-term projects photographing famous photographers. Neither portfolio is online, but both are excellent, and fascinating if you like photography and its practitioners.

The Tylenol is turning the firehose on my inflammation now [UPDATE: See Dr. Taylor's comment below], so I'm feeling more myself. You know who's to blame for my doddering infirmity this morning? That would be me. I resolved ten or twelve years ago to be more careful with my footing and balance because I was falling too much. I've only fallen three times since. I tend to pay attention and not take chances. But on Monday I wasn't being careful at all, stomping across the frozen snowy ground late at night without a moon to guide my way. Serves me right to go arse over teakettle in the dark, I suppose. But the punishment is turning out to be more severe than I deserved! Compare old Mike to the young guys playing American football. Those guys throw themselves around with abandon. The move that always astonishes me is when a guy running to the end zone just takes a little hop, tucks his head, turns a flip in the air, and lands on the ground on his back. (Watch Golden Tate at 1:38 here.) That would probably be the end of me if I did that. I once heard that when players are young, they need a day to recover from a Sunday game. In mid-career, they might not recover till Wednesday or Thursday. And when they aren't recovered from the last Sunday by the next Sunday, well, that's when they know it's time to hang up the cleats.

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 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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Geoff Wittig: "Love that photo of Dickens. It looks like casual grooming was a common affectation of artsy-types in the late 19th century. Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain was a bit shaggy. George Inness, probably the greatest American landscape painter ever, was coiffed exactly the same as Dickens, down to the scraggly beard and long unkempt hair, matched with the same kind of over-the-top vest and lapels. On the other hand, artists who catered to the carriage trade were far more tightly groomed. John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase were both famously dapper, right down to the meticulously folded kerchief visible from the breast pocket. They knew their customers and dressed to match."

Mike replies: It didn't even occur to me that it might be an affectation! But, of course. Artists, after all.

Jeff Markus: " Your comment about football players is right on the mark. I have a cousin who was an offensive lineman for the Chargers. He was over for dinner one night not long after he had retired and my father asked him how he had decided that the time had come. He said that the first couple of years he would wake up Monday morning feeling like he had been beaten up by a bunch of guys, but by the next day he would feel okay. The next year it took him one more day to recover, and for each year thereafter it took him an additional day for recovery. And by his ninth season he couldn't get any relief until the season was over. He did a tenth season and, before it was over, decided that this was no way to live, and retired at the season's end.

"He enjoyed retirement for a year and then signed with an NFL team for a year! Later on I asked him why he would do such a thing. He explained that they kept making him offers and he kept turning them them down because he just really didn't want to do another year in constant pain. That just wears a person down. But then he got an offer that was so good that he would have felt like an idiot if he had refused it, so he didn't. As it was, he had an injury early in the season that kept him from playing very much.

"He's been quite fortunate in that he never had any serious injuries that disabled him later in life. No blown-out hips or knees, no head injuries, no CTE. Many of his friends from those days were not so lucky."

Edward Taylor: "Re 'The Tylenol is turning the firehose on my inflammation now'—I probably should not comment as this may seem petty, but in the interest of science, may I point out that Tylenol does not have any anti-inflammation properties. It is simply an analgesic and an antipyretic. NSAIDS (like ibuprofen) are anti-inflammatory."

Mike replies: Not at all; I'm happy to be corrected.

Joseph Kashi: "A bit of levity that hopefully doesn't cause laughter to the point of further damaging your ribs. I've cracked my ribs several times, rarely from any mundane cause. The first was the silliest: We had a horse, and every Sunday afternoon, my chore was to clean up the corral area. Horse poop freezes really solidly to the ground in Alaskan winters. I usually had to use a heavy ice chipper to break it loose. One time, the horse sh*t was frozen so thoroughly, and I was chipping so vigorously, that I cracked some ribs. My doctor, who was a former military doc, laughed uncontrollably when I told him how it occurred.

"Another time, while sparring at the karate dojo, I carelessly hit someone too hard. After they recovered, I got a retaliatory roundhouse kick to my floating rib, which promptly 'sank,' and the sensei yelled at me for my careless initial strike (which was deserved). A third instance occurred while trying to retrieve our old, blind golden retriever, who fell down an ocean bluff covered with with large fallen spruce trees over a lot of ice and snow. Hauling the blind dog over the big tree trunks on that steep, snowy slope did my ribs in again.

"Good luck."

James, in the comments, gave me the idea yesterday that my monitor might have more ports on it (I've already been using the one on the side). So I checked—with a flashlight, craning my neck in ways it was not designed to bend—and sure enough, way back in an indentation where they face the wrong way, it does. Has two, in fact. Plugged the mouse into one, and it works. So that allowed me to free up a Thunderbolt port, because I had one in use that was only serving as a small, cheap hub for the mouse, and as a card reader. Which in turn allowed me to plug in my fancy dedicated card reader, which is awesome.

The monitor requires two ports, one Thunderbolt and one USB. At least, I think it does. Honestly, it's an absolute wonder that I ever got this monitor hooked up and working in the first place. Take a look at the only place in the manual where it tells you how to do it:

For god's sake. I can't make hide nor tail o' that even when I concentrate. That's useful for telling someone how to do it only if they already know how to do it. Anyway, the monitor works with two separate cables going from it to the computer, and if one of them is extraneous to purposes, or if a different single cable could replace the two I'm using now, I'm sure I will never know.

Power-ful wisdom
I'm very happy with my all my photography-related gear and stuff right now, I'll tell you that. The late Mark L. Power, one of my teachers at the Corcoran School of Art, told me a secret once that I've never forgotten. I was acting lab manager, and hung around school a lot, and thus, heard a lot of student complaints. I figured out some possible responses the school might make to some of them, and presented them to Mark one night when he was waiting for some prints to wash. He listened patiently. Then he said something to the effect that over years of teaching—he was one of the founders of the program at the Corcoran—he had discovered that when students had something they were excited to be working on, they didn't complain. The complaints proliferated when a person was sitting around fallow, not excited, not working on anything—didn't have a project, wasn't excited visually, wasn't shooting, wasn't engaged. "Whenever someone complains about anything, I ask them what they're working on." Whatever the complaint, work is what cures it. Even if it doesn't seem to be related. So if I'm not happy with my photography, it's up to me to figure out how to get up, get out, and get going.

I'll tell you about my super-duper card reader when B&H reopens after Succos, because Amazon doesn't sell it. (I need to attract all the affiliate sales I possibly can, even though I hardly ever think of that.)

Mike

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

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A couple of recent comments that I think deserve your attention. I know you might already be tired of the topic of real-estate pictures, but I think it's always a good idea to take advantage of the vast expertise and experience that exists out there among our far-flung audience; it always interests me.

And on the topic, the World's Best Photography Magazine (does it still deserve that title since "Lens" went dormant?) has an article this morning called "A Camera in the East Village, Capturing the Now and the Long Ago." Its summary is "The photographer Susan Schiffman shoots rent-stabilized apartments in the neighborhood intended as portraits of the unseen tenants who live in them." Do you remember that several artists made books of "found" images they culled from Google Street View when it was new? I will confess that the idea crossed my mind of doing the same thing with selected real estate photos found online. But of course, with me, the ideas come easily and the execution comes hard. Without further ado:

John McMillan: "That's a very nice first effort, Mike. As someone who's done this in around 3,000 homes since I was using a Konica-Minolta 7D [2004–6 —Ed.], I'd be happy to correspond with you in depth, but here's a few quick thoughts:

"The tonality of your interiors has a calm, artistic softness that may be suitable for framing, but seems less effective at catching a buyer's attention when arrayed with competing listing photography. At minimum, I'd raise the LR Clarity control, or equivalent, for a little more pizzazz. Bold, bright and colorful is the prevailing style (which can be difficult because new homes are painted and decorated just the opposite).

"Most real estate work these days is done with HDR or layered editing. A single exposure just can't compete, especially if window views are involved. Forget the early days of overcooked, oversaturated HDR—the quality level of most photos in major markets I see is quite high. I outsource my HDR editing, because I never got comparable results. For a lower price, I also offer a single-exposure package, using supplemental flash. This does a good job in most homes, too. With the broad DR of my Pentax K-1 and a big old Metz flash aimed at the back wall, I can handle most interior scenes and preserve some of the window views.

"Your pricing seems good, but as a pro, you would have to cut down the time per job. Going back twice for a twilight shoot is fine, with an extra charge. Going back four times is a fiasco. Agents will call you Wednesday and expect to list, pictures in hand, on Friday night. Few expect perfect photos; most want good photos quickly.

"Regarding perspective correction, please just do it. Houses are supposed to be upright, boxy and straight. Anything else creates unease in the viewer, who might already be wary about structural problems in an old house. The photo of the back door with shovels and brooms is one bad example that doesn't fit with the many other photos you've corrected. As for the bathrooms, bend your knees and lower your viewpoint. Not every room should be shot from eye level; think about how you use the room.

"You'd likely enjoy this work. I know I do. It's candy for the curious eye. But like other photo trades, it's oversaturated with competition, dominated by large corporations (I work for the biggest), and always threatened with technical disruption."

And on the topic of pay for lower-end work:

Robert Roaldi: "In 2005 I was between jobs and landed a fluke contract taking pictures of used cars at dealer lots for a web-based company that produced online ads for dealerships. I was paid per car, taking a set of standard photos of each. The dealership staff are all self-employed and none of them laid a finger to help, even though getting good photos was presumably to their benefit. I had to locate the cars, find keys, take photos, rinse and repeat. I was lucky to do 6–7 cars per hour. I had to have a computer and a car and barely made minimum wage, not counting expenses. I did not make enough money to pay for oil changes let alone other maintenance of my own car, so, like many jobs in the gig economy, it was fundamentally unsustainable. It cost me money to go to work. I used a 4-MP Canon G3 to do that job, by the way—nice camera for its time. I see that some dealership sites now show 15–20 photos per car; no idea how they manage to do that. Anyway, I become buds with one of the used car managers and got a good deal on a used Mazda Protégé, so there was that."

Thanks to John and Robert, and everyone else who commented.

Mike

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

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