The Online Photographer

It's Ansel Adams's birthday! Cheers to all you Dektol-sniffing, landscape shooting, West-Coasty, wooden-tripod-using, view-camera-lugging, spotmetering Zonies today.

Ansel had a sense of humor. Photobooth self-portrait.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Hughes: "In December 1981, Evelyn and I received an invitation to attend a gala event in photography: a two-day celebration, in Carmel, California, of Ansel Adams' eightieth birthday, hosted by the Friends of Photography and organized by Mary and Jim Alinder. More than Two hundred of Ansel's 'oldest and dearest' friends were expected to attend. On Friday night, February 19th, 1982, we attended three different exhibitions of Ansel's photographs. Ansel, his wife Virginia, and their family drove between venues in his  white 1977 Cadillac with its 'Zone V' license plate. He announced his arrival by tooting his new computerized horn, which played 72 different songs. Ansel said he was partial to 'Marseillaise' and 'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy.' The melodious horn had been installed as a gift by his studio staff. At each stop, the throngs awaiting him sang 'Happy Birthday Ansel.'

"On February 20th, his birthday, Ansel was feted at a black tie dinner. Soup served was his favorite, now named Ansel's Sorrel Soup. The main course, as I remember, was pheasant under glass (although it may have been squab). Either way, it was delicious. As described in Mary Street Alinder's excellent and affectionate biography, a birthday cake that was supposed to be in the shape of Half Dome, but which more resembled Devil's Dome in Wyoming (remember Close Encounters of the Third Kind?) because the pastry chef had neither been to Yosemite nor even seen Ansel's famous photograph, was brought in to great fanfare by the local high school marching band. Champagne toasts began with a presentation of the Legion of Merit by the French cultural attache and the photographer Lucien Clergue, who had flown over for the event. Toasts continued through much of the evening. John Szarkowski was seated at our table (or we were seated at his...), and I have vivid memories, as the evening wore on, of John balancing an empty champagne glass on his head as a signal to our waiter for increasingly frequent refills. It was a side of John I had never seen.

"The celebration culminated with a recital in Ansel and Virginia's home by Ansel's favorite pianist, Vladimir Ashkenazy. In his autobiography, Ansel called it an 'unforgettable experience. His interpretations of Chopin, Beethoven and Ravel were colossal.' Ansel had, after all, given instructions to Virginia and Mary that when he died, he didn't want a funeral; he wanted instead a 'small concert to be arranged for our friends.'

"Without question, it was an equally unforgettable experience for us."

One of my football memories is watching wild celebrations in the Redskins locker room after one of their Super Bowl wins, when the camera panned around to number 65, soft-spoken defensive tackle Big Dave Butz (that's what they called him, Big Dave, because at the time he had the distinction of being the largest man playing in the NFL). Amid the hoopla, Dave sat there glum and unsmiling. "All I can think of," he said quietly (I'm paraphrasing), "is that I don't get to play football any more this season."

Always the problem with the Super Bowl. No more Great American Circus, no more inspiration from O.J. Brigance, no more Ray Lewis gassing on about God (that was getting pretty annoying, until I reflected that if God let me get away with two murders I might be grateful to Him too), no more acrobatics from Torrey Smith and Anquan Boldin, who is open even when he's not. And a big paycheck for Joe Flacco, valued as a player at last. The Ravens were this year's Team of Destiny.

It was a good year for football, too. Props to Colin Kaepernick, in only his tenth NFL start. As if he finally realized the stage was too big for his experience, we watched the wheels starting to come off...and then he got them back on again, which doesn't happen very often. Of course, he had a little help—early in the second half, deep in the bowels of the Superdome, Joe Montana was seen touching two wires together, chuckling.

And last night, I swear to God, I dreamed of driving that new Mercedes Clean-Lube-Adjust, and no, I am not kidding. I am highly embarrassed on behalf of my subconscious—if it could blush, it would. (In my dream, it didn't drive very well. Although in fairness, for part of the dream I was not driving on dry roads but through what appeared to be canals).

Worst commercial: the bizarre supermodel humiliation commercial by GoDaddy. Runner up: Budweiser Black whatever-it-was. Umpteen million dollars a minute and the best they can come up with is a guy raising a glass and saying "Here's to taste"? Fire that agency.

Best commercial: has to go to Mercedes, given my dream—although they totally blew the reveal. I'd seen the commercial five times before Sunday. Kinda made all those teaser commercials early in the day seem pointless. Runner up: the cool farmer pictures in the ad about the farmers—anyone know whose photographs they were? Brought Paul Mobley to mind for me, but I don't know. And since you do not want to pull my pin on the subject of American agribusiness, or hear my detailed and absolutely airtight argument proving that Aaron Rodgers is still the best quarterback in football, I will now graciously shut up.

Mike

ADDENDUM:
Hmm, turns out I won't shut up. (Hey, I'm a blogger. What do you expect?)

Donald Driver. Photo by Tom Lynn.

If you can indulge a local note, also over is the career of Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver, who announced his retirement last Thursday (despite an offer from the Vikings...ahem, Favre). Driver, arguably the most popular man in Wisconsin—if not, darn close—was a Packer for his entire 14-year-career. He is the team's all-time leader in both receiving yards (10,137) and number of catches (743). I also have a hazy awareness that he has something to do with dancing, although I can't tell you about that. Driver missed only four games in his NFL career. He's the second-best WR I've ever watched, after Art Monk.

The outstanding sports portrait is by Wisconsin photographer Tom Lynn, a longtime Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel photojournalist now doing freelance. It really captures its subject, in more ways than one. For more of Tom's sports photos, see here.

Original contents copyright 2013 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Featured Comments from:

latent_image: "Nothing in this post made any sense to me. It's as though a wrong switch was closed in your brain and everything came out gibberish...Please come back to normal, Mike."

Mike replies: What the post is saying is that I don't have much choice but to come back to normal.

Marc Rochkind: "The unusual game also had two plays that greatly helped in the ongoing football education of my partner, plays that I've theorized about to her but have only rarely witnessed: 1) the fake field goal, and 2) the intentional safety, brilliantly executed as the punter ran seven seconds off the clock while drifting towards the sideline, guaranteeing that no matter what he wouldn't fumble into the end zone. I can remember seeing only one other intentional safety in my life, decades ago. They're very rare. By contrast, the play calling by San Francisco on their last possession was atrocious."

Frank (partial comment—to see all of Frank's comment, please see the Comments Section below): "According to AdWeek, the farmer spot was Number One, 'thanks to Paul Harvey's spellbinding "God Made a Farmer" recording and the gorgeous work of 10 great photographers, including National Geographic icon William Albert Allard and renowned documentarian Kurt Markus. Yes, it's similar to a popular Farms.com video....' I am a fan of Kurt Markus and Allard is no slouch either.

"Good Day!"

Francisco Cubas (partial comment): "I also liked the farmer commercial and I think I can guess what you didn't say: those farmers are mostly gone, done by big agribusiness. Those good pictures reminded me of the natives of Curtis: not a real subject, but an idea."

Dan Smith: "I don't have a TV so don't watch the game or commercials. But, in North Dakota big corporations do not own farms. Family farms here—though they can incorporate for tax purposes—are still family owned and operated. North Dakota is #1 in eight major farm crops and top ten in 20. Farming money is 70% of the State economy, even with the big oil strike in the Western part of the State. Farm photography is enjoyable. Combines in green and red and blue and costing a half million each—we are loaded with them. Big 12-wheel articulated all-wheel-drive tractors, we have a lot of them. Farm implement dealers much bigger than car and truck dealers in this State. A great place for farm and ranch photography."

Tex Andrews (partial comment): "Disagree: The Ray Lewis murder thing. Let that go. The 'justice system' did its work. Here in Bawlamer we got tons of coverage on that to read when it happened. The prosecution had no definitive evidence at all on that one, just confusing circumstantial evidence. If I'd been Ray, I'd have gone to trial on it. Was he an idiot to be at that club and hanging out with those cats? Oh, mos def. Did he behave like an idiot immediately afterwards? Absolutely, criminal idiocy. That doesn't make the guy a murderer. [...] Give me a break, they had nothin'."

CKDexterHaven (partial comment): "I laughed out loud at the 'here's to taste' line. Unbelievably bad. I'm in advertising (sometimes), and have written only one produced commercial, but I know that line never would have survived even Draft One of anything my agency would have come up with. Not even in a spitballing session. Yes, fire that agency."

Dillan: "The Tom Lynn photo in your addendum is really wonderful. He captured so much with one frame. That's what photography is all about."

So did you know it's 2013?

Wow. That number just keeps getting bigger.

I have a theory that years are not equal units of time, at least not as we humans experience them psychologically—we experience "years" as a percentage of our lives. A single year is now only 1/55th of my life, which isn't very much, so it doesn't take a whole lot of time for one to go by.

This is unfair—even tragic, in a quiet, minor way. Years should seem longer as you grow older, not shorter; you have fewer of them left. Then again, if I could complain to the Cosmos, I'd have other complaints to get to first.

One thing I think is curious is that for most of my life, there was an iconic future date that somehow "stood for" the future and made you reflect on how weird and foreign the future was going to be. For the first half of my life it was 1984, but then 1984 arrived and it was just another year. Then we had 2001 to look toward as "the future." Then even that strange-sounding date went past.

Now—unless you count a really wretched pop song about "2525" that I hope I never have to hear again—nothing. 

Or is there something like 1984 and 2001 out there, but I'm just not in touch with it? Could be. As a 55-year-old white male who lives in a small town in Wisconsin and hardly ever goes to the movies, I won't claim that pop culture targets the likes of me or that I would necessarily be aware of today's 1984 or 2001 equivalents.

Maybe I should write a book called "2038."

Right.

Never happen.

Heavy, man
...Which brings me to my next subject: New Year's Resolutions. Usually, my New Year's Resolution is that I'm gonna write a book. I never do. The quintessential New Year's Resolutions, of course, have to do with smoking or dieting.

I quit smoking half my life ago. It was incredibly difficult—I've heard people say it's easier to quit heroin cold turkey and on your own than it is to quit smoking. It took me a year of trying, and I tried very hard. Fortunately, I didn't give up, and, even more fortunately, I eventually succeeded.

As for dieting...I've been "working on" my overweight problem for about two years now. The general problem fascinates me. I've been performing experiments on myself to see what, if anything, works, and I've been reading and learning about the obesity epidemic in America and what might be causing it. I've read at least 50 books on the subject.

There sure are a lot of pretty theories out there. The most fascinating recent one I've come across is that antibiotics are causing obesity. This theory holds that there are a zillion kinds of bacteria in our microbiome, we know next to nothing about most of them, and killing them off indiscriminately with antibiotics is throwing our bodies' relationship to food out of whack.

Fascinating. Did you know, for instance, that there are more bacteria in your body than cells, and that in toto they make up about three and a half pounds avoirdupois of your body weight? Consider, too, that poultry were originally dosed with antibiotics to prevent disease in the unhealthy conditions in which they are forced to live, but then it was discovered that antibiotics made them fatter, and now they're given antibiotics principally to fatten them up more quickly and further shorten the amount of time they have to be kept alive before they can become food.

All very...suspicious.

Personally, though, I've reached my conclusion, and I'm bringing my experiments to a close.

Here's why. Have you ever heard of John Snow and the Broad Street pump? John Snow was the father of epidemiology, the study of disease transmission. He's the one who figured out the mystery of cholera, formerly a disastrous contagion that rivalled the Black Death for carnage and terror. Sandra Hempel tells the story grippingly in The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera, a delightful little history of science title written for laypeople. (I have a short shelf of such titles.)

What I find fascinating about that story is that, before Dr. Snow figured out the truth, there were all sorts of very pretty theories about where cholera was coming from and how people caught it. The theories all sounded relatively reasonable, they all had adherents among the upper strata of the establishment, and rival factions had sprung up to argue the relative merits of each, championing one view and denigrating competing ones. They were argued fiercely, as if they were ideologies. And yet they were all just plain wrong.

All so quintessentially human.

Well, I've concluded (for my own self) that that's where we are in the study of nutrition. Science is just in a dark age, a crude state of ignorance, about how human nutrition functions. We are in the same condition with regard to nutrition that epidemiology was in before Snow came along: mired in a miasma of ignorance and strident disputations between competing and fiercely held wrong beliefs. We don't know what the hell is causing the obesity epidemic in America, or what the hell to do about it. All I can say is that I think everyone is wrong. I no longer believe it's caused by any one particular element that we must excise ruthlessly from our diets or any one element we must consume more of; it's not related primarily to exercise or failing willpower, or too much or too little fat of this or that type, or sedentary lifestyles, or the genetic engineering of wheat, or the rise of fast food, or eating no meat or eating only meat, or the nefarious politics of post-Nixonian agribusiness, or the relentless pollution of the entire food supply with sugar (although all of those things are bad enough). I won't run through all the counterexamples, but consider that the average weight of marathon runners has increased in the past forty years roughly in parallel with the increasing weight of the general population, and that the Brazilians eat even more sugar than Americans do but are on average thinner.

So, personally, I just asked my doctor what to do about my weight, and he said WeightWatchers has the best track record of success. So my New Years Resolution is: compliance. I'm not much for following orders; I am a freethinker above most everything else. I like to tinker. Characteristically, I have not been very compliant with WeightWatchers since I joined it a few weeks ago, but my excuse is that that's because of the holidays, and I'm stickin' to that. In 2013, my big ambition is: compliance. I.e., doing what I'm told.

You know what they say: Oh, well
I'm not very convinced of the efficacy of New Year's Resolutions, though. They've never been shown to have much power, at least according to my limited observations. Maybe it's just that the arrival of a new year allows us a brief shining moment of hope, in the same way that, say, buying a Lotto ticket buys $2 worth of daydreaming.

But there are just certain things that statistical analysis can tell us. Take smoking, for instance. There is a huge shelf in the actuarial tables right around the age of 40. Statistically, you are better off not smoking than smoking no matter your age, and you are better off quitting than not quitting at any time in your life, but you are much better off if you stop smoking before age 40 than if you stop after 40. If you're a smoker and you find yourself approaching that age, now is the time—very urgently. Don't let yourself go past 40 without quitting.

Similarly, there are just very few obese 90-year-olds. And precious few obese 80-year-olds. And the exceptions are only that. Overweight kills. Obese people die younger. Opinions vary as to whether I'm 30 or 50 or 70 pounds overweight, but I accept that it's probably not good for me to carry all this corpulence along with me as the years click past, from here on out.

Now's the time, now's the time.

Hope
But you know, now that I think of it, 1984 wasn't just another year. It was actually a great year for me. I encountered Ronald Reagan repeatedly, literally and figuratively, which formed my politics. I was in art school and (to my considerable surprise) having a blast there. And I fell in love, really for the only time in my life, with a woman who, in my solitary mid-middle age, I still think about rather too much. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in the Orwellian sense might well be here (constant, distant war; Big Brother prying into your life in myriad ways...and don't get me started on the Thought Police...), but if 2013 turns out to be half as good as the real 1984 for me, I'd be happy.

Here's hoping. I watched the ball fall last night. Today is a bright, shining new day.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

AM Townsend: "Wordsworth summed up the time sentiment:

We'll talk of sunshine and of song;
And summer days, when we were young,
Sweet childish days, that were as long
    As twenty days are now!

A number of media outlets are reporting 24/7 Wall Street's June list of "Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2013." They predicted that JCPenny, Martha Stewart's Living magazine, Mitsubishi Motors, Talbot's clothing stores, the makers of the BlackBerry, salon.com, and American Airlines will all follow Pontiac, House and Garden magazine, and Saab into oblivion by the end of 2013.

Of interest to American sports fans, they also predicting that a storied NFL franchise will have a new city (and a new name?) by this time next year.

On the other hand, their track record isn't spotless. They predicted that Sears department stores and Kellogg's cereal would be gone by now, and both are still around.

Read the original article here. Fortunately, there are no cameramakers on the list.

Mike

[CORRECTION: This article was also based on this video.]

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Maggie Osterberg: "Crikey, I have friends who work for Salon! And dammit, if Mitsubishi goes out of business, I'll only have used EVOs to humiliate with my WRX!!! BOOOOO, free market!!!"

So whad'ya get?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dave: "I completed my Graflex Crown Graphic kit with 3-cell Graflite [a.k.a. 3-cell Graflex flashgun —Ed.] and Instant film back (the Fuji PA 45). It is the 'anti-Instagram.'"

Daniel Clements: "A Pinwide 'lens' for my Micro 4/3 camera."

kirk tuck: "Son Ben got me a Yellow Brick Road Holga (from the Holgawood Collection). I guess he thinks I take the existing medium format stuff too seriously...I got myself two more Fotodiox Pro LED 312AS panels (current Gold Box deal at Amazon...) you can never have too many good LED lights around the studio...."

Dave: "I got a Mark 3!!! I had been shooting with a 5D classic since 2007 and thought I would never get a new camera—or at least not until tax returns. My wife completely surprised me Christmas morning. So far, I'm really happy with the Mark 3. ISO 800 looks cleaner than ISO 100 on my 5D classic. We have a baby due in less than a week. That high ISO performance is gonna come in handy in the delivery room."

Mike replies: Congratulations on the new baby! And on the new baby!

Dave in NM: "Nothing even remotely related to photography; just the pleasure of sharing a good meal with my little family, and the joy of seeing my daughter's face as she opened her gifts. What more could you ask for?"

Mike replies: That, plus a new camera to take a picture of her face with? Just thinking out loud. Sorry, am I being too much of an enabler?

David Bostedo: "I got Polar Obsession by Paul Nicklen :-) "

Mark Roberts: "A hiking trip in the Italian Alps :-) "

[Mike is speechless]

MarkR: "500 Cameras! Wonderful book my wife picked up for me at the George Eastman house.

"It does beg the question, however: Frank Brownell got to name the camera he designed after him, and the world got the Brownie. Arthur Crapsey designed a camera, and it got named the Signet. Unfair?"

Mike replies: I just saw a new DAC from a company called Schiit. No...er, well, foolin'.

Ann: "The Ray K. Metzker book...lovely! Plus new swimming goggles and some girlie things. Merry Xmas!"

Marc Rochkind: "After obsessing over viewfinders, selling my Olympus E-P1 for a Panasonic G3 because of its EVF, but still wishing I could see like I can with my Nikon D700...I got a camera with no viewfinder at all! It's a GoPro. I just picked up a head strap for it, and tonight I'll be playing tennis with the camera strapped to my forehead. We don't need no stinkin' viewfinders!"

Patrick: "I got my usual Christmas 'gift,' a lot of needless family drama. On the plus side, I bought my mother (who is also an avid photographer) the fish-eye lens she's wanted for a number of years. Never underestimate the power of a fun lens."

Robert L.: "I got nothing but photo opportunities. However my son (almost 6) got his first camera, a Panasonic LX-3, with a an old Petri Viewfinder to mimic my X100 (his is silver as well). Pretty sure the appropriate phrase is 'over the moon' :-) "

Friedrich: "I sold my camera, lenses, flash etc. for christmas. I realized it was making me unhappy that I didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would. I don't like having things that don't improve my life, so I finally, after a year of deliberation, admitted to myself that I am not a photographer (even though I know everything about technology and at least something about technique), and put it up for sale. Merry Christmas and a happy (and hopefully relatively unburdened by the past) new year everybody."

Christine Bogan: "I got the 15mm cap lens for my olympus pens. It's a real toy. The other present is a metz flashlight to learn more about picturetaking with flashlight. Not my prefered way of photographing up to now. There is always something to learn in photography. That's a good thing for a hobby. The best present like every year is our christmas tree."

Mike replies: Christine, have a talk with Friedrich about what a good hobby this is, would you?

JohnMFlores: "I usually discourage photographic gifts because I don't think that I can deduct them. Alas, my wife did buy me a copy of The Photograph as Contemporary Art because she was clever enough to look at my Amazon wishlist. Looking forward to reading, as I'm looking to push my photography further in 2013.

"I did set up a POV camera at the homestead on Christmas eve and made a timelapse of the children opening up their gifts."

Jefferson's Decalogue of Canons, in his own
hand, from the Library of Congress

Benjamin Franklin, renowned for the pithiness of his sayings, wrote a whole book about virtue. The most useful modern equivalent term for the quaint word "virtue," which is no longer fashionable, might be "self-improvement." The beacons of the Enlightenment were always trying to better themselves; Franklin's Autobiography is not only an early self-help book, but also a prototype of the "how to succeed in business" genre. Thomas Jefferson, with a reputation for magisterial eloquence but not pithiness, several times wrote privately to various individuals, lastly to his progeny, putting his own advice about personal conduct into a list. The list variously had ten (the "Decalogue") or twelve items on it. The most complete and polished version of the list appears to be this one (note that I've modernized the punctuation in a couple of cases):

Thomas Jefferson's Dozen Canons of Conduct in Life

1. Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.
2. Never trouble another with what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have it.
4. Never buy a thing you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
5. Take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves.
6. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
7. We never repent of having eaten too little.
8. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.
9. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
10. Take things always by their smooth handle.
11. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes.
12. When angry, count 10 before you speak; if very angry, 100.

Sorry if you thought this post was about T3i's and 5D Mark III's—"canon" in this sense means "a secular rule, code, or law," deriving from the ecclesiastical antecedent: church councils often applied the word canon to codes of conduct or rules of church law.

Some of Jefferson's canons are familiar: several are traditional and a few derive from classical sources (Jefferson was a big reader: he donated his 6,487-volume personal library—huge for the time—to the fledgling Library of Congress after the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812). Number nine could be better phrased for today, as something like "Worrying is wasted energy." One or two seem copped from Franklin's populist alter ego Poor Richard.

It's not a bad list. The one that might give us trouble is the counsel to "take things always by their smooth handle." It descends from Epictetus, the Greek Stoic aphorist born in the year 55, who says, "Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot." Julian Boyd wrote in 1957 that what Jefferson meant by this canon was that political discourse should always be civil, but Jefferson never clarified his meaning, so T.J. fans have been happily arguing about it more or less ever since he wrote it.

The pseudoholiday today
"Black Friday"—which is today, as I know most Americans are all too aware—always puts me in mind of Jefferson's fourth canon. A thing is truly cheap only if you really want it and only if you will use it. Acquiring something we neither want nor need, and thus won't use, is a fool's economy, and nothing we put to constant and long-term use can really be thought of as expensive, as it repays its cost and then some. You yourself, by your actions, can make an expensive thing cheap or a cheap thing expensive.

Retailers in general love Black Friday because they believe (on good evidence) that if they can get people started on their shopping early, they'll end up spending more. It's become an important sub-holiday of Christmas, that secular high holiday of our culture's everlasting worship of Mammon.

So go forth today, but be careful. It's easy to get carried away. Remember that Black Friday isn't actually the biggest shopping day of the season, mythmaking to the contrary (usually, several of the days in the week just prior to Christmas beat it),  and it's perfectly justifiable to spend a quiet day digesting turkey and meditating further on all the things we have to be thankful for.

Mike
(Main source: monticello.org)

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

g carvajal: "American has lost the true meaning of the Christmas holiday. This is sad."

Mike replies: A gentle warning, my friend: you probably don't want to get me started! Once you push that button it can be difficult to shut me up.

However, apropos of yesterday, I will say that none of the Pilgrims would have celebrated Christmas. Being devoted Christians, they considered it a pagan holiday, an indulgence, and immoral. I can't tell you the time period when Christmas began to be acceptable in America, but it wasn't in Puritan New England in the 17th century.

Ed Grossman: "Is anybody else taken by the irony of Black Friday being the day after Thanksgiving? One day of contented thankfulness followed by something very different. To be honest, I think that our 'simple and useful holiday' (well put, Mike) is being clouded by it's calendar neighbor. Quoting Charlie Brown: 'Good Grief!'"

Dave: "It's so fun and easy to point out the hypocrisies of our founding fathers...'Never spend your money before you have it.' After his death, Jefferson's family had to sell Monticello to pay down the debts he left behind. 'Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.' I wonder how Jefferson's slaves would feel about that one."

...To all those who celebrate it. I won't be posting any Black Friday specials until it's actually Black Friday.

Today's picture: trussed-up Christmas trees off the truck, stacked and waiting to be put out for sale on Black Friday. Taken at Bill's Trees in Brookfield. Believe it or not, the fellow working there told me that all these trees had been shipped to Wisconsin from the Carolinas. That was a surprise: we're importing conifers.

I used a tripod for this one. Just kidding.

Also a surprise: the tree lot is set up on the grounds of a farmhouse and barn on the main drag through Brookfield, Bluemound Road, a sprawling divided six-lane highway that runs straight as an arrow through a hell of strip malls, chain restaurants, gas stations, car dealerships and big box stores that goes on for miles. A vestige of fifty years ago and more. Not the only one in the area, but an obvious one. I always thought the property was owned by a holdout, too stubborn to sell: turns out the town of Brookfield itself owns the old house and barn and preserves it as an historic site. But the rumor is they're going to tear the old farmhouse down soon. They plan to leave the barn. I guess a town doesn't need but so much history. In any event, the barn and silo are going to have to be enough of it for this part of Brookfield.

Best wishes to you and your family. I'm thankful for you coming by, whether you're giving thanks today for anything or not. See you tomorrow.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Holland: "Happy Thanksgiving to Mike, Xander, Lulu, Ctein and his psittacine menagerie, The Mighty Dragoon™ and all my favourite commenters at TOP."

Mike replies: Thanks John—nice of you to mention our commenters, a.k.a. the co-author corps. I'll second that.

President Obama with Marti Kirkpatrick
yesterday in Section 60. Photo by Ed.

As you may know, it was Veterans Day in the U.S.A. yesterday.

In other years on this day, we've mentioned Sgt. Scott Kirkpatrick, because his father Ed is a longtime TOP reader. Scott got a special honor yesterday, on what would have been his birthday, had he lived. Ed's wife Marti tells the story:

Today, November 11, Scott would have been 32 years old. As always we went to Arlington to share a wee dram of the Glenfarclas 21 with him and celebrate and honor our boy. We always go early when it is still fairly quiet. A young man approached us at once, identifying himself as a photographer with The Washington Post and asked if he could photograph us and ask about Scott and we said of course, we always (well almost always) like to have any recognition/remembrance of our son. So, some of Scott's story may be in the Post.

The highlight of the day however is pictured above. As they have done so often, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Dr. Biden came to section 60 to honor our loved ones. Ed and I had the great privilege to shake hands with, be hugged by and briefly chat with both the President and First Lady. When I told President Obama today was Scott's 32nd birthday he turned to an aid for a split second calling them by name and asked for a coin. It is a challenge coin and has the Presidential Seal on the front, the White House on the back with his number, name and signature. He placed it on Scott’s stone. It's a very special birthday present and unlike everything else folks leave at his stone, this one came home to live with Scott's flag, medals, and family pictures.

It was a nice day, and Scott would have had fun.

—Marti Kirkpatrick

As Marti mentions, she and Ed were pictured on the Post site, drinking a toast to Scott as they do every year.

The Post photographer was Matt McClain, whose work Ed wanted to bring to your attention. Ed says, "We had a really nice chat with him yesterday and I think his work is quite good. He is a freelance photojournalist and his sense of perspective, design and light is very interesting. His shots of us and others made the Post’s online gallery as well as the back page of today's Metro section."

Matt's website is here.

Mike
(Thanks to Ed and Marti Kirkpatrick)

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

David Byrne's disqualified winning image

The winner of the U.K. "Landscape Photographer of the Year" competition has been disqualified for using "too much Photoshopping" on his winning image, The Telegraph reports.

David Byrne (no points off for using a famous name) was stripped of his first-place prize and, more painfully, of the £10,000 winner's check, or cheque.

Contest organizers found that there was "no deliberate intention to deceive the judges," but that "the level of manipulation means that this photograph gained an unfair advantage." The Photoshopping was said to affect the integrity of the competition.

(Has Photoshopping in photography competitions gotten to be like doping in the sport of cycling, I wonder?)

Mike
(Thanks to Jay Townsend and several other)

UPDATE From Tim Parkin: "It was myself and a colleague, Alex Nail, who looked into this last week and found the four entered images were composited in various ways. One of the images was in a category that allowed compositing but the others weren't and hence were not eligible. The details can be found at the following links:

http://www.timparkin.co.uk/2012/10/landscape-photographer-of-the-year-2/

http://www.alexnail.com/blog/news-updates/lpoty-2012/

"Both of us have no issue with the idea of composites (even if we both would prefer to see great non-composited images) so this was a purely quasi-legal issue, not a moral one."

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Slobodan Blagojevic: "[The disqualification] was not because of Photoshopping in itself, but because of compositing (i.e., adding or removing elements) in a category where compositing was specifically not allowed."

Peter Nilsson: "Pure irony for a competition characterised almost entirely by excessive manipulation (view any set of past winners if you have the stomach)."

We had too much excitement here yesterday. I was returning home from breakfast along the main road—a six-lane divided highway with stores and malls on either side, you know the sort—and an odd sort of police vehicle went careening past in the other direction: it was an armored car, but with police lights and sirens. Turns out it belongs to the FBI. Straggling behind, also with lights flashing and sirens wailing, were a black-and-white police cruiser and not one but two ambulances.

I learned later that they were among many more such vehicles converging from all directions—we'd had another of those deplorable "mass shooting" events, the sixth in Wisconsin since 2004. It happened right across from my local mall—one of those pathological ever-escalating wife-abuse incidents, except the malefactor not only killed his wife but also shot up everyone at her workplace (a beauty spa), killing two other people and injuring a number more. The killer was fleeing the building when he encountered two armed men coming toward him—hunters returning from up north who had grabbed their rifles and were going in to help. So he disappeared back into the building.

For hours, the police didn't know where the shooter was. The roads were blockaded, the mall was closed (although some of the shops stayed open, as apparently there was no coordinated effort to tell them what to do), and an entire enormous hospital complex was put on lockdown, lest the shooter try to get at the people he'd injured to finish the job. His own neighborhood, miles away, was flooded with SWAT and bomb squads. Later, he was found to have crept into an out-of-the-way office somewhere in the building where the beauty spa was, locked the door, and shot himself to death. (Apparently thinking very little of his two children from start to finish.)

All a little too close to home. The lot where I often park when I visit the bookstore was behind police lines, being used as a staging area for law enforcement operations. And an odd detail: I've snapped the very building where the shootings occurred. "Test shots" for a long-ago digicam...the Sony P150, if anyone remembers that one.

7.2 MP in a digicam was the latest thing in the summer of '04.

Pretty horrid.

It's a fad, these "mass shootings." Like nihilist assassins in Fin de siècle Europe, or suicide clusters, or copycat killers; a contagious idea. It is one infection that can't become a thing of the past too soon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 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.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dennis Ng: "Heard about this even in Hong Kong. In fact you complete the story as the last I heard of it was when their priority was to find the gunman."

Craig: "It's hardly a fad; things like this have been happening for a long time. Surely you remember the source of the '80s expression 'going postal'? And before that there was Charles Whitman, the Texas Bell Tower Sniper...I don't think humans deal well with the pressure of living in a densely-packed society of millions. Things like this are one way the stress expresses itself from time to time."

Geoff Wittig: "These horrific events just make me crazy. As a physician, I see it as a public health calamity. Yet the NRA and its malevolent allies in Congress managed to de-fund and literally outlaw the CDC's efforts at collecting data and researching the plague of gun violence. Mission accomplished!"

Mike replies: I refrained from mentioning this in the post proper, but just before the news of the Azana shooting began saturating the airwaves, I saw the one and only TV ad I've seen from "the men and women of the NRA"—I could write a book about the little ironies like this that rain down on me constantly. Incidentally, the ad was anti-Obama, despite the fact that Obama has shown little discernible enthusiasm for any sort of gun control issues (or even discussion of them).

The top lot in today's auction of Fine Photographs & Photobooks was also the top lot ever sold at New York City's Swann Galleries. A set of Edward S. Curtis's magnum opus, The North American Indian, complete with 20 text volumes and 20 folios, brought $1.44 million dollars—more than any other single lot sold at Swann in its 70 year history. In 1952, Swann conducted the first auction devoted to photobooks in the United States.

Daile Kaplan, Swann Vice President and Director of Photographs & Photobooks, said, "We were very pleased to have sold this iconic work by a major 20th century artist. The price reflects the rarity and beauty of this American masterpiece and the interest in photobooks as an artform."

Prices for other early photographs were also strong. A multi-panel panorama image of lower Manhattan from 1876, showing a portion of the Brooklyn Bridge still under construction, brought $96,000, and an album of cyanotypes of Colorado sold for $56,000.

Mike
(Thanks to Rebecca Weiss of Swann Galleries)

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jeff: "But to be clear, the auction record for the Curtis volumes was set at Christie's this past April for $2.88 million, including buyer's premium. A bargain at half the amount!"

John Brewton: "When I lived in Nashville (four years of hell in the 1980s) my next door neighbor had four or five original Curtis photos on a wall. He claimed he found them at a garage sale!"

Mike replies: Hope he held on to them. Market's been trending upward.

"One call out of the blue—$500,000—No strings attached" is how the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation describes its Fellowships, colloquially known as the "genius grants." This year, two photographers, Uta Barth and An-My Lê, are among the 23 MacArthur Fellows.

Uta Barth (Photo courtesy of the
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Uta Barth, a 54-year-old conceptual photographer from Los Angeles, California, is described as "an artist whose evocative, abstract photographs explore the nature of vision and the difference between how a human sees reality and how a camera records it. In contrast to documentary and confessional modes of photography, Barth intentionally depicts mundane or incidental objects in nondescript surroundings in order to focus attention on the fundamental act of looking and the process of perception."

An-My Lê (Photo courtesy of the
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

The award announcements say that An-My Lê, a photography professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is "an artist whose photographs of landscapes transformed by war or other forms of military activity blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and are rich with layers of meaning. A refugee from Vietnam and resident of the United States since 1975, much of Lê’s work is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation. From black and white images of her native Vietnam taken on a return visit in 1994 to pictures of Vietnam War battle re-enactments in rural America, her photographs straddle the documentary and the conceptual, creating a neutral perspective that brings the essential ambiguity of the medium to the fore."

Congratulations to Uta and An-My!

Mike
(Thanks to MM)

Original contents copyright 2012 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.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob: "Well, how about that? I was once in a class with Uta Barth, which was taught by Lewis Baltz. And that's about as close to fifteen minutes of fame as I'm ever likely to come."

Barry Myers: "Michael Kinsley (from The New Republic) on the MacArthur fellowships—from the first year they were awarded in 1981."