The Online Photographer

I mentioned in the previous post that I spent yesterday bike-shopping (not today. Many stores in Wisconsin are closed on Sundays, in historical commemoration of the no longer in force blue laws). A few random notes, some of them photography-related:

How it hangs: A Leica M is the perfect weight and shape to hang from your shoulder while riding a bike. Unlike smaller and lighter cameras it doesn't flop or fly around, and unlike larger cameras with snoutier lenses it doesn't get in the way. It just hangs happily from its UpStrap staying in place ready to go when wanted.

The indication is: On the basis of an admittedly small sample, it appears that bike people are just as cra... um, "zealous" as camera people.

Unsaid line: A pretty young woman, talking to a friend about what they were going to do that night as she put on her bike helmet. "...I don't know if I've had enough rest. Pub-crawling takes stamina. It can go on for a while." And I think: right, from about the age of seventeen until you get married.

Sign o' the times: As I toodled down various residential streets and bike paths on the East Side of Milwaukee I naturally overheard bits and snippets of conversation from here and there as I passed people. An old man asking a passerby for a light; two college students yelling happy practiced insults at one another; two men in heavy conversation while walking on the footpath, when one of them reaches for a cellphone, saying, "Oh, excuse me, I've got to take this." Best one, in the Some Things Never Change Dept.: I was rolling on a tree-shaded sidewalk and heard a twentysomething woman say to her friend, "...Omigod did I tell you? You will not believe what I saw yesterday, but I just could not get my cellphone out in time to take a picture of it for you..!"

Bagel man: The guy at Bruegger's Bagels who sold me my lunch was interested in bikes, but more interested in my camera. He told me he still does a little medium-format black-and-white, still has a darkroom in his apartment, and had just accepted his first two paying (digital) jobs, a wedding and a baby portrait. Got a card? No. Got a website? No. My distilled advice: get yourself a business card and hand it out whenever the subject of photography comes up with anybody. Put some of your work online even if it's only on SmugMug or something and put the link on your card. And even if it's not all your best work, make sure it's all exactly the kind of work you want to do. Not the kind you have done, the kind you want to do.

At least his name, and maybe one of his pictures, would have appeared right here right now if he had already done one or both of those things.

Bike shopping resumes tomorrow. Knowing me, I will make a final decision just about when it snows.

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Featured Comment by Kurt Shoens: "Today's lunchtime epiphany: Leicas are to cameras what fixies are to bicycles.

"I'm probably the millionth person to reach this conclusion."

[Note: A fixie is a fixed-gear bike, i.e., no derailleur and no brakes, used by very skilled and experienced cyclists such as bike messengers. And cloned by hipsters. —Ed.]

[And speaking of fixies, you really should check out Carla und Henriette Hochdorfer, suggested by Hugh Crawford...not really pertinent to anything, but...amazing. —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Sandy: "I love cameras and I love bikes and I've long made a camera/fixie analogy. To me, the 50mm ƒ/1.8 prime lens is the fixie of the camera world. Cheap and simple, no bells or whistles, and it brings you back to the very basics of what the activity is all about."

Featured Comment by Tina Manley: "Re 'Put some of your work online even if it's only on SmugMug or something.' Only on SmugMug!! SmugMug is the best—best service, best rates. If you're looking for a great deal and a place to post your photos, you can get unlimited storage with the pro account. I couldn't be happier. Check them out! Great advice to the bagel guy, by the way."

Featured [partial] Comment by Stan B.: "Do not, do not, do not carry your camera on a strap while riding! No matter how comfortable it felt during your test ride, things will get considerably hairier during real life conditions...." [Read Stan's full comment in the Comments section. —Ed.]

Featured Comment by James McDermott: "I ceased to combine photography and cycling due to trauma. In 1988, on my first day's holiday at Zakynthos, I blithely (dumb, dumb, dumbly) placed my Contax RTSII in a hire-cycle's front basket and almost immediately went into one of the island's trademark 'potholes' (read: mine-shaft opening). The Contax skips merrily down the road ahead of me, staying in one piece, amazingly (small dents in the pentaprism and the lens filter ring), but requiring major surgery before it worked once more. Twelve camera-less days followed in one of the more photogenic Mediterranean islands. Then we had an earthquake."

Featured [partial] Comment by Hugh Crawford:

Scan: M. Butkus

The "Arts Beat" of The New York Times is reporting today that Annie Leibovitz and Art Capital Group have reached an agreement that will prevent immediate foreclosure of the photographer's $24 million loan. She's gotten back the right to sell her own properties and to sell the rights to her pictures. The loan isn't settled—it will still have to be repaid—but crunch time's been put off to some unspecified future date.

The article isn't particularly in-depth and doesn't say much more than the preceding paragraph, but here's the link.

End news, begin opinionation: I've read a whole lot about this case now, and I must say that the more I read, the more I think Annie Leibovitz simply got caught in a bad place when the housing market crashed like a whole bunch of other people did. If the real estate market hadn't tanked in 2008 and taken big whacking chunks of the banking and financial systems down with it, we probably never would have heard about any of her travails because she wouldn't have been in any trouble. It's quite possible, even likely, that she was proceeding rationally based on the assumptions that prevailed at the time. But she didn't know what was coming any more than anyone else did.

In fact, I've begun to come around to the opinion that most of the breast-beating and cluck-clucking and tut-tutting in the press (okay, this site included, as far as it went) about how irresponsible she is and how she mismanaged her finances, etc., really amounts to nothing more than ordinary everyday sexism and, um, "artism"...okay, oww, sorry about that, but you might know what I mean—the prejudice that all artists are flaky and devoid of common sense. I'm not convinced, any more, that any of that is really warranted. A lot of people got caught in a bad place when the housing market crashed. Maybe Annie's problems were simply on a bigger scale—and a bigger stage.

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When you get a moment, take a look at this simple but moving slide show, created by a son for a father whose life was cut short: "Artifacts," by Marc Davidson, from Burn Magazine. The photographic content of one life's detritus is nothing unusual or uncharacteristic of a man of his age and era, but it's poignant nonetheless.

When our father died in the Twin Towers attack on 9/11, my brother and I were left with the task of entering his apartment for the first time. Thinking practically, we were looking for things that would help us tie up all the loose ends of his life: a will, phone numbers, bank stuff, insurance stuff. We found much more. We found artifacts which showed us parts of our father we’d never seen before.

The inspiration for Artifacts came from a conversation I had with Bob Black while looking at my father’s ID card recovered from Ground Zero. We started talking about the powerful relationships between photographs and identity....

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Spectacular First Images from the Rejuvenated Hubble Space Telescope

September 9, 2009: Astronomers have declared NASA's Hubble Space Telescope a fully rejuvenated observatory with the release of observations from four of its six operating science instruments. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland unveiled the images today at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

"This marks a new beginning for Hubble," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, well equipped to last into the next decade."

 

Topping the list of new views are colorful, multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula...

READ ON at Science@NASA

View the complete gallery at NASA.gov

Mike
(Thanks to Ken T.)

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Now this is an expensive camera upgrade!"

Well, there must be some very, very unhappy people at Leica this morning, and possibly one poor soul out of a job. According to Scott K., the brochure was only exposed on the web for a couple of minutes before it got password-protected, but of course by then it was too late.

I'll still be looking forward with relish to the rollouts on Wednesday.

By the way, it's wise to remember that any site you read rumors on is not a site that really knows anything. That is, the sites that have been given real information by Leica, and that might have test cameras in hand, and that are preparing comprehensive, authenticated, edited reports for the official launch dates, are under NDA (non-disclosure agreements) and are not passing along rumors, leaks, and so forth. (I should add that those sites were miffed yesterday too—the leaks steal their thunder, as well as Leica's.) When you read rumors of something like the M9 on the web and yet the news isn't surfacing on the big sites like Imaging-Resource, The Luminous Landscape, and dpreview.com, you should just be aware than the information you're receiving isn't official and thus isn't fully dependable. So hold on to your skeptic's hat.

I admit that a leaked brochure gives the game away with a fairly high degree of certainty. But still, you're well advised not to come to closure, discussing speculations as though they were truths, until you have more solid verification. To get that in this case, we need to wait till Wednesday. (I do, too.)

(I should also add that I have never broken an NDA or an embargo that I have agreed to, even one I agreed to on a handshake, or "virtual handshake," and that's only half the story—I never will. If you read something like the previous post here, it means I am not privy to advance official information in any way, shape, or form.)

Le retour
In other camera news, Thom Hogan of ByThom.com, the best little Nikon site on the web, returned a couple of days ago from his monthlong mental-health hiatus, a.k.a. summer vacation—we hope well-rested and rejuvenated and a-rarin' to start getting burned out all over again. Check out his site for an astute appraisal of "Sony Envy" and an uncharacteristic off-brand review of the Olympus E-P1 that really gets it right (albeit at rather formidable length). Keep checking ByThom.com in the coming weeks for refreshed news blips in the "Quick Links & Comments" column. And don't forget they're still ramping up towards a site overhaul, too, and that will be fun to watch. Welcome back, Thom.

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Featured Comment by John Camp: "Thom's review of the E-P1 made me laugh—not that the review isn't a good one; certainly seems accurate enough to me (I have an E-P1). What made me laugh is that he said that on his Africa trip, he rarely got more than 200 shots from one battery charge on the E-P1, and so rarely got through a day without having to change batteries...although one time, he got just less than 300 shots. Since he had to recharge every night, and also changed batteries during the day, he was taking probably 250–300 shots a day with the E-P1. Then he says he was using the D300 and the D90 more than he was using the E-P1. And he was also shooting a Coolpix 6000 as his other "pocket" camera. If you take one shot a minute every minute for a 12-hour day (720 shots), you're probably shooting less than Thom was. What made me laugh wasn't that I didn't believe him, it was that I did believe him."

Featured Comment by Thom Hogan: "Just a comment on the number of shots I took, and the E-P1 on safari. First, not every day was a complete torrent of shooting, though about half of them were. In the few days I had in the Masai Mara I counted nearly 60 distinctly different cats, most hunting or on kills, three river crossings, and a host of other shoot-until-you-drop events (elephants in the mud puddle, etc.). Sometimes you hit the jackpot, sometimes you don't. This trip, I hit the jackpot both in the Masai Mara and in the Sabi Sands.

"But because I was in testing and play mode during this trip, I was somewhat insane in the amount of shooting I was doing, and most of it was outside my usual stuff, which gets the mind thinking. I startled quite a few people by bringing lighting equipment to lunch and dinner every day and taking pictures of virtually every course of every meal I ate. Heck, at one point I started grabbing the staff out of the kitchen, too. I'll bet you I had 100+ shots at dinner every night (sure does make you eat slower ;~).

"Much of my playfulness was involved at looking at boundaries and testing settings and features I don't always use. For example, with a running animal (and with so many river crossings I had thousands of models) I experimented with different AF settings, different shutter speeds, even different handholding and vehicle mounting techniques. With multiple cameras at hand, I tried each of them against each other doing the same thing sometimes.

"But with such play and shot intensity comes another problem: editing. I've already edited all that shooting down to about 2000 shots, and I'll bet you I get that down to well under 1000 or so soon, though I do have a folder of "failed experiments" and another folder of 'food' that I might use for an article someday. I was also doing a lot of editing in downtime in the vehicle.

"One of the joys of digital is that 'playing' in the field like this is rewarding. Both in terms of knowledge and output. The feedback loop between trying something and seeing the result is near instantaneous, which makes learning easier. The penalty for failing at play is essentially only that you have more images to delete.

"One reason why I do trips like this from time to time is that there's no real pressure on me to produce anything from them, thus I tend to push myself in ways I don't normally do. When I'm on assignment or doing my usual scenic work, I'm working towards something very specific and narrow my focus to just what I know works. Not so when there's nothing on the line."

Lyle Swesey sits in a lawn chair across the street from his burned-down home on Creekside Place in Auburn, Calif., Sunday, Aug. 30, as a helicopter drops water on hot spots. Photograph by Bryan Patrick, The Sacramento Bee

More pictures from The Sacramento Bee

A Los Angeles County fire helicopter drops retardant on a hot spot during a wildfire, Aug. 28, in the Rolling Hills section of Rancho Palos Verdes. Photograph by Mark J. Terrill, AP

More pictures from Pixcetera/AOL News

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Featured Comment by Richard Ripley: "Thanks for posting these links to the photos of the Station Fire. I live fairly near the fires and many of the places I hike and photograph are either in flames or have burned.

"The Angeles National Forest has been my playground for many years and though I understand this is the natural progression of things, I certainly feel for the homeowners who have lost homes or are in danger of losing homes. Even more I feel for the brave firefighters who lost their lives.

"As I write this, helicopters are churning overhead. I'm sure many of my favorite hiking and photographing areas are now blackened which of course is upsetting. Thanks again for sharing the photos."

Possibly the best documentary I've ever seen is "The Kennedys," the 4-hour epic presentation from PBS's "American Experience" series. The story is as close to classical Greek tragedy as any in American History. Ironically, Ted Kennedy, the last and, it was long thought, least of the brothers, may have been not only the one to contribute the most to American life and to leave the most lasting legacy in practical terms, but also the one who made peace with the family legacy and thus brought the epic to an equable end. I'm betting they put these words on his headstone:

After Les Paul died on August 13th, a reader asked whether people in Waukesha (pronounced WOK-uh-shaw), where I live, are aware that he was born here. We've heard, all right. When I first learned he had died, I happened to be driving down Les Paul Parkway, which is a beltway that partially encircles the town. The roadsigns feature little guitars on them. (Les was credited with being the inventor of the electric guitar, among other things.)

I've been meaning to get out and take a picture of one of the signs for you ever since, and just got around to it yesterday afternoon. I took the K20 and the Pentax DA 15mm ƒ/4 out for an hour or so to collect a few snaps. It's not that easy taking a picture of a road sign with a 15mm lens, I discovered.

My son Zander had an opportunity to play for Mr. Paul when he returned to Waukesha for his 92nd (or was it 91st?) birthday. A number of local school kids who played electric guitar were invited to serenade Mr. Paul as part of his homecoming visit. Zander begged off, feeling he wasn't ready yet to play in public, but his friend Aaron went, and played, and got his guitar signed by Les Paul. (Too bad it wasn't a Les Paul.)

While I was out, I thought I'd show you just how deep Packer fever reaches around here, since we were talking about Brett Favre (now known as "what's his name") yesterday. For those of you in foreign countries, the Green Bay Packers are an American football team, and Favre (pronounced "farv") was the quarterback (team leader) for many years, who set numerous League and team records. Since being "encouraged" into retirement a few years ago, before he was quite ready, he has been a nomad, and just recently signed with our rivals in the next state over. The Packer's team colors, as you can probably guess, are green and "gold" (actually yellow).

The 15 was too wide for this assignment, too.

One thing I didn't take a picture of: a kiosk I saw today at the local grocery store featuring Packers merchandise and clothing but nothing with Favre's name or number on it. Now that's something new.

Football isn't huge in this area, but I doubt there's any place in America where it isn't a feature of everyday life. Here's a summer football practice taking place at Catholic Memorial High School, around the corner from my house.

The skies actually look like this out here in the Midwest, sometimes. I swear I did not touch the "Saturation" or "Vibrance" sliders on this shot. Then again, people take it for granted...later, when I was walking the dog, I said to several people I ran into, "Did you see those skies earlier?" And they all said, "What skies?"

Finally, I found at least one thing that the 15mm is not wide enough for. Are rainbows always the same size from the ground? If so, you'd need something wider than 15mm on APS-C to get the whole thing in one shot. I'm glad I encountered this; after shooting with it for several weeks, I didn't think the 15mm was "not wide enough" for anything.

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This is Usain Bolt of Jamaica, Planet Earth, blowing another old world record to smithereens (his own, set in Beijing) in the 200 meters at the World Championships in Berlin yesterday. If you're not following this guy, you might want to pay a little bit of attention—he is a genuine monster, and really is making history. Check out that margin of victory. Worthy of a word I almost never use: awesome.

But that's not why I've put this up. I was amused by the 'togs along the rail and that scrum on the track staying out in front of him after the race is over. Collectively they seem to have a bit of Keystone Cops DNA, don't they? Kinda funny. They're doing their jobs well, though, no doubt.

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Forty years ago today, two Americans, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, first did what had long been considered the quintessence of the impossible: they set foot on Earth's moon.

Pop Culture's ceaseless Distract-the-Citizens Project has lately been taking an extended detour over the predictable if technically untimely demise of the King of Pederasty, and in that context it is a nice antidote to recall that "moonwalk" once meant something other than a signature dance move. On the day that this happened, forty years ago, our nation—indeed, all nations—felt as one; we felt a pride unalloyed by irony, and sensed a seriousness that has been missing from the civic sphere more lately; and we felt, briefly, that the stars—real stars, not just the metaphorical kind—were the limit.

Of course, as space travel goes, a brief visit to our own barren moon is small beer. It's but a baby step compared to the daunting task of getting a living human to another planet and back, and the merest stirring stacked against the thought of a visit to a solar system other than our own. (I've never liked science fiction's chipper vision of humans flitting between galaxies—too far removed from the mute reality of real distances for me.)

Still, it's not difficult to conjure the pure wonder of what humanity did do, forty years ago today. All any of us really has to do is remember a night outdoors, camping perhaps, nestled in the darkness, far from the masking lights of the cities, looking up at the great cathedral of the heavens and contemplating the incomprehensible gulf between ourselves and the familiar half-lit pearl that so often graces our nighttime sky. It is easy to imagine men and women so ancient they could hardly be called civilized lost in reveries at the same sight and thinking much the same thoughts. The moon was the ultimate Everest—we planted a flag and then hightailed it back to where we belong, for no real reason but because it was there. But what a thing it is to have done.

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There was an unusual problem for photographers at the British Open Golf Championship that concluded in markedly unsatisfactory fashion at the Ailsa course at Turnberry links in Turnberry, Scotland yesterday. "Location is everything," Golf.com reported:

That's a problem for photographers, however, because that stretch is among the most popular for pictures. Along with the cliffside beauty, they often capture the image of players with the Ailsa Craig and Turnberry Lighthouse—sometimes both—in the background.

"Why would I want a photo of that?" one photographer said, packing up his gear and looking for a better spot.

Fire the writers! 
Speaking of the British Open—if that had been a movie script, you'd fire the writers. Fifty-nine-year-old Tom Watson, a five-time champion who led the field off and on all week, came down to the last hole with the win in hand—a win which would have made him the oldest major champion ever by eleven years. He played into the last hole well enough, but he got just enough of a bad break that he bogeyed the hole, allowing the much younger Stewart Cink, who had played under the radar all four days, to sneak into a playoff with him. The pleasantly surprised Cink then cheerfully outplayed a deflated Watson for the title—an outcome that no one, with the possible exception of Cink and his immediate family, wanted. Seldom has such a perfect story line been so capriciously sabotaged—even in sports, which is as famous for inexplicable endings as for dramatic ones.

 
"It would have been a hell of a story," Watson said. Photo: Robert Beck/SI

Must have been the same story writer who had the bright idea of bringing Michael Jordan out of retirement to play for the Wizards. That's the problem with sports—no one's in charge of the script. Of course no one really wants sports events to be scripted. But as Thomas Boswell wrote about yesterday (Ted Johnson sent me this): "What kind of napping divinity allows such mischief, even in the devil's game?"

Mike

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of the moon shot. NASA is streaming the audio of the entire mission, from pre-launch to splashdown, in real time, online.

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Featured Photoshopping by Moose: "Interesting what a little contemporary image processing can do. The proportions change dramatically.

"PTLens fisheye correction, NeatImage, PS Healing Brush, FM IntelliSharpen II."

Featured Comment by Clinton Bersuch: "NASA has also digitized some highlights from the cockpit voice recorders. It's interesting (to me anyway) how, on a couple of the recordings, the crew spends a fair amount of time talking about what lens and shutter speed/f stop combinations to use for various photographs they want to get. It sounds like they're using some sort of 'cheat sheet' with exposure information for various film types and subject matter. In one particular conversation Neil Armstrong advises Mike Collins to open up half a stop so he can get detail from the Moon's surface. These guys were many things—test pilots, explorers, etc., but it's easy to forget that they were also very much photographers and they spent a great deal of time making sure they got that part of the mission right. I can't say that I blame them."

UPDATE from Barry Hill: "The JFK Mueseum seems to be doing the audio in realtime as well and seems to be a better site using flash photos and videos."