The Online Photographer

There are not one but two biopics of eminent and worthy female photographers either out now or upcoming, rare luck for those few able to see both.

Photo by Tish Murtha

"Patricia Anne 'Tish' Murtha (14 March 1956–13 March 2013) was a British social documentary photographer best known for documenting marginalised communities, social realism, and working class life in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the North East of England." (Wikipedia). "She had so much talent, and...she just couldn't make a living from photography. She just couldn't do it." (from the trailer). "My childhood was not what you would call 'conventional' but it was filled with fun, laughter, music, photography and creativity. I used to wish I had a 'normal' mam who wore nice dresses and shopped at Marks and Spencer, instead of having short spiky hair and baseball boots—but the idea of that horrifies me now! For as long as I can remember my mam always had her camera around her neck, it went everywhere with her, like it was a part of her. She loved to develop her stuff, it was an art-form." —Ella Murtha, Tish's daughter and the keeper of the flame (from the website).

The movie, a documentary, is out now but apparently not available to be seen except in limited theatrical release in the UK. Here's hoping it migrates to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Vimeo, YouTube Movies, or something soon. Or DVD. Unless it's screened at the George Eastman Museum, it will never be anywhere near me. Despite which, I'm determined to see it if I can. Tish was the real deal.

Sadly, Elswick Kids (2018) is out of print.

Lee Miller. (Left, fashion photograph by George
Hoyningen-Huene, Vogue, June 15, 1931;
right, U.S. Army photograph, 1943.)

Lee Miller, much better known, "was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau" (Wikipedia). Lee is a big-budget mainstream film starring Kate Winslet, no less, scheduled for release on December 6th. Despite her fame, Lee Miller's stature as a photographer is often downplayed, as often happens to female photographers. She deserves this tribute and I hope she enjoys a "moment" from it that will permanently elevate her reputation.

I also fervently hope the movie turns out to be good! And somewhere within a stone's throw of accurate.

There is a beautiful brand new monograph from veteran photobook publishers Thames & Hudson that's been prepared and released in conjunction with the film. (Funny how the situation with the books mirrors the scale of production of the two movies and the relative renown of the two photographers.) I haven't seen it, but still, I'll go out on a limb and recommend it; she's a great story and a great photographer.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Andrew Lamb: "A friend of mine is one of the writers on Lee and they went to a lot of trouble to keep it accurate. Fingers crossed it comes across like that. Incidentally, the budget wasn't huge by Hollywood standards."

Sean: "I showed Tish's Pictures to my sister the other day, and we both agreed that the kids in the photographs were our stand-ins, as we spent much of our childhood bouncing on cars and jumping from brick walls onto dumped mattresses, something working-class kids did up and down the country. Shirley Baker photographed kids in inner-city Manchester, where my sister and I grew up, with the same tenderness and compassion as Tish. Looking at their work, you know it isn't poverty porn or exploitation. It’s understanding."

Zyni: "I have seen 'Tish' twice. She was as you say the real deal. And here is a thing: she used one camera and (I think) one lens. Not one sort of camera, one camera. Anyone who thinks they need more should look at what she did and think more."

John: "The UK’s weekly Amateur Photography magazine recently published an article about David Hurn's Newport Documentary course. Tish Murtha was one of the earliest students. Apparently her selection interview went as follows:

David Hurn: Why do you want to join the course?
Tish Murtha: I want to learn how to take photographs of policemen kicking kids.
David Hurn: You’re in."

John Camp: "Lee Miller took a haunting photograph of an SS guard floating underwater in a canal around one of the death camps; and she took some war photos that almost nobody else did—of GIs wounded and being treated near the front lines in really bad conditions. She took photos of military and resistance women fighters that nobody else did. She also had a picture of herself taken (nude) in a bathtub in Hitler's apartment in Munich, a photo of Hitler himself propped in one corner. All this from Lee Miller's War, Thames & Hudson, Inc. My copy is from 2005. It's still available on Amazon along with a couple other books about Miller and the war. (Go for the full-sized one, not the compact.) Before the war, she'd been a not-very prominent fashion photographer and a lover of Man Ray. There's another, bigger book called The Art of Lee Miller from Yale University Press that covers the earlier period and also the war, but I like the war book better. The Yale, in paper, is also at Amazon, but for $117; I have the hardcover edition but I don't think those are readily available anymore. I didn't know it, but there are a number of books about her and her photography, but most of them look a little thin both physically and conceptually.

"I write novels for a living but have tinkered with the idea of writing screenplays, though I never have done—but one I thought about was a biographical screenplay about Lee Miller. You don't have to mess with the material—it's very strong all on its own. She was apparently raped and given gonorrhea when she was just a child, and fought it for years. She knew everybody in post WWI Paris. Beautiful woman, great stories."

hugh crawford: "Crazy how that Lee Miller movie came about. But I’m excited to see it; she’s one of my heroes. Now for a Margaret Bourke-White biopic. Who else could convince Walter P. Chrysler to let her live in the top of the Chrysler building with two pet alligators?"

Trevor Johnson: "I bought the hardcover version of Elswick Kids from the Side Gallery in Newcastle, in 2019. Very sadly, the Side Gallery, devoted to chronicling photography, particularly around the North-East of England, is tempoarrily closed due to cuts in public funding.

"I was at Newcastle University from 1974 to 1979 and worked there for a year afterwards. There was a great deal of social inequality then, even though it still had its heavy industries, which the Thatcher government, et al., removed soon afterwards. I was at an annual board meeting held at Guy's Hospital this time last week. Guy's is right next to that monumentally hideous expression of greed, the Shard. How things never seem to change.

"Tish Murtha used an Olympus OM1 with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 lens, but had to take out a loan to buy it. We still need people like Tish to document the open and hidden inequalities that exist, more now than ever before."

One of my character flaws, historically at least, is self-pity, which is both a bad habit and a bad impulse. In effect, it's egotism inverted; the reason I pity myself is because I have some baseline assumption that everything ought to go well for me and that I deserve some sort of redress if it doesn't. Spiritually healthy people have gotten over that childish expectation. They can handle all manner of setbacks, deprivation, and misfortune with either equanimity or an appropriate response.

I've found you can stop self-pity in its tracks if you learn to recognize it. Myself, I was given a mini-mantra against it. It came from my late friend Loyle, a pool buddy who died at the age of 93 a year ago. Loyle was the man who never complained. (I tried to go a week without complaining, and found out it wasn't as easy as he made it look.) If someone around him complained, Loyle would put up with it for a while and then say, "oh, too bad!" I say that to myself a lot now. It helps me laugh at myself and stop feeling sorry for myself.

Gratitude works, too. Gratitude is incompatible with self-pity. So when I'm feeling sorry for myself, I try to start thinking about all the things I'm grateful for. These can include something as impermanent as a good mood, as natural as fresh air to breathe, or as trivial as a kindness offered to a stranger. If I really manage to genuinely feel grateful, self-pity disappears. Making a "gratitude list" is something I usually do in my head. However, I think I'll make a real one tonight, pencil to paper.

Oh, and that painting up above? Definitely a sign of the times we're in—first of all, I had to pay $3.99 for it on Etsy, and second—well, don't look too closely at the hand of the man on the lower left or of the woman on the lower right. And what exactly is that "dish" in the foreground? Ersatz, all ersatz.

Thank goodness our feelings are still real! I'll be grateful for that. Happy Thanksgiving to you—wherever you are, whomever you're with, and whether you're American, and celebrating our holiday, or not.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Vijay: "Gratitude lists are good ideas. Someone once gave me a trick to keep the daily list fresh, which was to keep it to 3 things experienced in the last 24 hours. Happy Thanksgiving!"

Mike replies: An excellent idea. A side benefit of a gratitude list is that it puts you on the lookout to identify more things in your life you might be grateful for.

gary bliss: "A sure cure for self pity is to spend 30 or 40 minutes in the waiting room of an oncologist. I spent my career in the national security and it has been my honor and privilege to work with men and women that are combat disabled or (earlier in my career) spent years of their young adulthood as honored guests of the Hanoi Hilton. There is never a peep from them; every last one of them i have known have always been focused on what can they contribute going forward. I love them all and even our vain-glorious and ill-advised politicians can do nothing to stain them in my heart."

Mike replies: Whenever Loyle said "oh, too bad," I always imagined it was what he heard as a child from his father whenever he whined or felt sorry for himself. Ignoring tantrums and not responding to gambits for pity is good parenting advice, remembering that we always need to distinguish it from the child's real needs for emotional support and sympathy. Loyle's father, Fred, served in the military for every day of both WWI and WWII—not just every day of US involvement, but the entire span of both wars anywhere—and Loyle himself managed to sign up just before WWII ended. He was a Navy man, and an electronics specialist. When the Korean war began, the military sought him out for his expertise, and he served then too.

Here's Loyle, as a giant and a midget. (Both pictures shot with the .5X lens on the iPhone.) I told the story about Loyle and the lawnmower somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can find it.

Rand Adams: "There’s a great cure for self-pity. Thirty years in the fire service. Whingeing on, in the fire station, is immediately followed by dimes flying at you from every corner of the room. Signifying, of course, 'Call someone who gives a damn.' This tends to put one’s pity-party in perspective."

Robert Fogt: "Oh, come on! The woman in the lower right merely has her hand stuffed up the, um, backside of her latest sock puppet. And that's what is making everyone smile. Photographers have employed this old trick forever!"

Two longtime friends o' TOP have some news to share:

Peter Turnley has recently been honored by two public shows in Paris, France. The show "A Love Letter to Paris" has been up at L'Hotel de Ville (the Paris city hall) where it is closing in a few days, but the other, at La Belle Hortense, 31 Rue Vieille-du-Temple, a wonderful literary wine bar in the Marais, will be up until until Oct. 30th. Peter also has an excellent new book coming out (I've seen the digital maquette), which I will tell you about when it drops.

Ctein has been hard at work restoring his archived TOP columns from the original Blogger site, which has been down and off the web since my unfortunate misunderstandings with Amazon Canada in March of 2020, the month that COVID-19 really hit. Most helpful is something I wish I had here—a titles page. He intends to republish his columns from this TypePad site as time goes on, too. Take a look! Very nice.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

David L.: "The L'Hotel de Ville is the Paris city hall, a municipal building. This adds to the importance of Peter Turnley’s exhibit. I have always loved his photography and happy for him with this recognition."

Mike replies: Thanks. I added this to the post.

Jeff: "You wrote: 'I've seen the digital manque.' Maquette?"

Mike replies: Sheesh, I'm losin' it. Thanks. Fixed now.

Grant: "WARNING! Do not click the 'a titles page' link. Oh this is good. This is really good. I may never get up from my computer again. THANK YOU CTEIN!"

I needed a pair of thick work gloves recently, to deal with locust seedlings.

If I had the money, I'd chop down the locust tree on my property. Very aggressive reproducer, that ornery son-of-a-bitch, and its progeny are vigorously defended by long, stiff, sharp thorns. The local Tractor Supply had gloves like I needed, but for more than $20. Inflation's been killing me. So I went to the local thrift shop and asked. They might have some, the lady allowed; upstairs, third room on the right or whatever. When I got there, there was one pair of work gloves, just sitting there all by their lonesome, and they happened to be exactly what I needed. And they fit. Back downstairs at the counter: 20¢. I gave her $2, in furtherance of their mission. One-tenth the price of new still seemed like a stellar bargain to me. 

That's how I get lucky at thrift stores, and it seems like it often happens. I'm grateful!

But my luck pales on comparison to the luck of a woman who was browsing through the framed art in a thrift store in New Hampshire and happened upon this:

She didn't recognize the artist...but I would have, instantly. I loved illustrators as a boy, and I knew N.C. Wyeth from his many illustrations for a series of books called Scribner's Classics, big black hardbound books with letterpress pages and tipped-in illustrations. I can tell a Wyeth from thirty feet. He illustrated titles like Robin Hood, Treasure Island, and The Boy's King Arthur. He inspired me to commit larceny once: I liked one illustration so much that I carefully detached it from the school library book where I found it, and stole it!

The woman who found this painting made the right move. She purchased it. Price: four dollars. It ended up at her home buried in a closet with some other stuff. Eventually she found out who painted it, and learned that it was the original. You can read more about that here. It's called "Señora Gonzaga Moreno and Ramona," painted as an illustration for Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona.

This story has not one but two happy endings. After feeling guilty for a good long while—more than a year—I signed out that library book again, carefully glued my pilfered illustration back in where it belonged, and resolved not to be the kind of person who vandalizes books. And "Señora Gonzaga Moreno and Ramona" was successfully auctioned by Bonhams Skinner a week or so ago for $191,000 including premiums. Now that's thrift-store luck!

The fate of art
Personally, I'm glad for her, but you know what I'm most grateful for? That the painting didn't perish. The fortunes of art in the world are various and perilous, and you never know where things are going to end up or what their fate will be. For every valuable old painting that's found on the curbside in the trash awaiting pickup, there's probably another than actually ended its existence in a landfill.

An item on my bucket list: to pay a visit to the Brandywine River Museum, which has many of N.C. Wyeth's paintings. Yes, it will be nothing but indulgent nostalgia, but what's wrong with that? Jim Schley suggested to me that each of us—all of us who like art—should "engage" with a few selected authors and artists in our lifetimes, really get to know them and their work, simply because it's a good way to get to grip with art and we can't do it with everyone. Newell Convers Wyeth is one of those touchstone artists for me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

David Lee: "I friend of mine ended up with an Edward Weston print, right out of a box that belonged to his father. He had no idea that it was valuable. His wife just hung it on a wall behind the bar. I am pretty sure I already shared this story here, so I won’t bore you. The print was a gift from Weston to my friend's grandfather."

Mike replies: I'll just point out that Matt Witkovsky, Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago (to whom I was introduced through Ken Tanaka), once said to me, "You can't get a good Weston for less than $800,000 these days." And that was probably ten years ago now.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Didn’t you recently announce that off-topic posts would be henceforth limited to Wednesdays?"

Mike replies: I'm not scolding you, but can't see how this can be considered off-topic. Goes to interacting with art, the visual life, caring about images, personal influences, the place of art and artists in our lives, the fate of art-objects, looking at art, recognizing style, etc. If this is off-topic, then I'm writing the wrong website.

Jim: "In the early 1970s I was a poor photography student. Driving around near Waxahachie, Texas, I was driving down a dirt road when I passed an old barn. In the open door was the unmistakable front of a Rolls-Royce! As I was getting out of my vehicle, an elderly lady came out if her house. She asked if I wanted to see the Rolls-Royce, which I certainly did! It was a 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom, which I recall as being like Scrooge McDuck’s vehicle. The chauffeur sat in an open cockpit, while the passenger rode in sumptuous splendor, surrounded by beautiful woodwork and luxurious velvet. The lady told me it still ran, as far as she knew, and I could have it for $4,000. At the time, I would have had to scrimp to come up with $40!"

Today and tomorrow at the Javits Center in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan is the B&H Photo BILD Show, a major expo for photographers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of B&H Photo. (Note that "for photographers." I.e., not for the industry. It's for you, their customers.) Here's how B&H describes it:

• Over 100 World-class speakers
• Portfolio reviews
• Photo walks
• Photo and video experiences
• Tri-State accessibility
• Audio experience
• Contest and prizes
• Learn new skills
• Show specials on gear
• Network with the premier photographers and videographers In New York

If you are in the Tri-State area, don't miss out! (The Tri-State area, for those of you not from here, is the metropolitan area of New York City, the largest metropolitan area in the US and the most populous area in the US, sprawled over big chunks of the States of New Jersey, downstate New York (including Long Island*), and Connecticut. A whopping six percent of the entire US population lives in the Tri-State Area—more than in the entire States of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Missouri combined.)

For more information, head over to the B&H Photo website. Or just head to the Javits Center!

Mike

*Pronounced "long-GUY-lund"  :-)

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Jeff: "I’m always hoping for some good BILDs. Pictures, that is (Yiddish)."

Well, I'm tired of Labor Day weekend already. The shore is teeming with people—the road, up and down, clotted with a jumble of parked cars. Most of the vehicles are pickup trucks, vans, and those tall but squat station wagons that nowaday-people call "ess-you-vees." They're really just vees. My window is only three meters or so from the road and thus cheek by jowl with the constant parade of cyclists, walkers, joggers, stroller-pushers, mopeds and e-bikes, one particular small kid riding in a plastic miniature motorized car that goes about .8 miles per hour, and of course dog-walkers. It's a peaceful, contented parade, though. Sometimes the solitary walkers are the loudest talkers, carrying on an animated conversation with some invisible but electronically-connected counterpart. I still find these people unnerving, as if they are mentally not quite hinged and loudly narrating their concerns to themselves.

With all the dogs going by, Butters is on a simmer of alertness and excitement, jangling my poor put-upon nerves at unexpected intervals with an explosive sort of bark-howl, the kind of noise that in the misty past was intended to signal, "The enemy is creeping up on the encampment! Turn out! All hands! To arms!" You'd think I'd get used to it, but it startles me every time. Did you know that enjoying scaring people is a sign that you might be a psychopath? Except on Halloween. Or, if you're a dog—then it's your job. Or was, in hunter-gatherer times. On the good side, the home fireworks (I am sure to die without ever comprehending the appeal of home fireworks) have been kept to a minimum this year, so far, and the teenagers haven't kept me awake with their into-the-night chattering. At least the weather is nice—hot, in the high 80s, like the vacationers like. And very sunny, with clean, clear air. Made for vacation weekend weather.

I tolerate it all. Even the heat. Even the talkative teenagers. (Not the barking, as much.) But I also keep in mind the words of my neighbor Kenny, who says, every year, during the first few days in October: "Now we get our lake back."

A parade of...portraits
What I should really do is make a sandwich board sign that says, "FREE PORTRAITS! Just call up through the window to the guy on the porch." Then when the light is right I could put my sign out front, open my window, and see if I get any takers. I could even sit outside on the big rock by my front steps and and approach them, asking if they'd like a portrait. Some of the street portraitists on YouTube are good models for learning ways of approaching people. They worked it out by doing it a lot, and I could copy them. I see so many couples, parent(s)-with-kid(s) combos, teen friends, old people with canes or walkers, multi-generational groups—every second or third one I think, "they would make a great portrait." I'd just herd the cats in front of a backdrop of forsythia or over by the woods, make a few shots with the B&W Sigma (I've even received the 65mm ƒ/2 on loan, to try), and deliver the product by email for them to use on their social media whatevers. I think a lot of them would enjoy having a record of themselves looking so relaxed and happy, and in the company of the company they prefer to keep.

On the other hand, I probably don't need yet another distraction from work. And do I have the nerve to do it, anyway? Could I overcome the inertia that keeps me not doing it? Do I have the social skills, the je ne sais quoi, the savoir faire?

Let's just say I haven't tried it yet. Maybe next year.

Happy Labor Day!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Dan Khong: "Mike, 'free portraits' is such a nouveau idea of people approaching you instead of the other way round. You can make new friends and grab some funny poses. With digital and email, all you need is some processing time and coffee. Go for it! In no time, you will be famous as the Magnum of the Lake."

Ken Bennett: "The problem with offering 'free portraits' is the lack of takers—people think there's a catch. The portrait is free but I'll sell you the prints at a high markup. Or some other way of separating you from your money. I helped organize a Help Portrait event for first responders a few years ago and we had a hard time getting anyone to show up for this reason, even with our police and emergency response folks promoting it. No, really, it's free and we send you the photos. Really."

ASW: "Your description of the cell phone talkers made me laugh at an old memory that hadn't crossed my mind for quite a while.

"Many years ago before cell phones were ubiquitous and we had grown used to being surrounded by one (loud) side of conversations, I nearly embarrassed myself out of graduate school.

"A prominent scholar in my field of study was visiting the university for a couple weeks to give a series of talks and lead several workshops, which I was participating in. After about a week I finally built up the courage to introduce myself and my research and ask a few questions. But when?

"While walking across campus one day I saw that our paths were about to intersect. As I was about to say "Hello" he beat me to it.

Scholar: 'Hello. How are you?'
Me: 'Oh! I'm fine. How are you?'
Scholar: 'Good, good, things are going well here.'
Me: 'I'm glad you're enjoying yourself. It's great to have you here.'

"Obviously I don't remember the exact words we said, but after several more rounds of increasingly personal back-and-forth he turned to me and with a frustrated look on his face and said 'Excuse me, I'm trying to talk to my wife!'

"I'm not sure if he recognized me throughout the remainder of the workshops, but I was too embarrassed to ask questions or even participate in discussions. I mostly spent the time imagining him complaining about me to my graduate supervisor. Something like: 'You let this guy use computers? By himself? He doesn't even know how phones work.'

"It's funny now but it certainly wasn't then."

Mike replies: That is pretty funny now, but also tragic for you! I'm sorry you didn't have a better interaction with that person you admired.

I had a somewhat similar interaction when I was in my early twenties with Daniel J. Boorstin, who was the Librarian of Congress at the time and an historian who had written a number of well-received books. I wanted to be a writer and was in awe of authors. He and his wife happened to be my customers when I was working at a garden center selling bedding plants. We would tally customers' boxes of bedding plant "starts" outdoors, jotting down the charges on small pieces of paper, and then take their cash or credit cards indoors, stand in line at the cashier, and then bring them their change. When I saw Mr. Boorstin's name on his credit card I acted like I was meeting a celebrity. We had read one of his books (The Discoverers) in a high school class with a favorite teacher back in the Midwest, and as it happened, right at that moment I was in the middle of reading another volume of his trilogy "The Americans," which had been getting a lot of press at the time.

I told him all this, and he seemed complimented. But when I got back outside with his change, he looked at the bill and said, almost angrily, "Where did you say you were prepared?" At first I didn't understand the usage; I had attended a private high school, which were known as college preparatory schools; their purpose was to prepare young people for university. He was asking me to tell him again where I went to high school. I answered, and he said, cuttingly, "it must not be a very good school, because they certainly didn't prepare you very well!" So saying he handed my little chit back to me. Again, it took me a moment, but I saw I had made an error of a few cents in adding up his bill. I was crestfallen. Not only had I made myself look bad, but I had drawn the ire and the odium of the Librarian of Congress, no less, down upon the reputation of my beloved and blameless alma mater! I think his wife interceded at that point to smooth things over, but all I remember is that Mr. Boorstin turned away in disgust and didn't look at me again or say another word to me.

He was probably just having a bad day, when I think back on it.

Of course I had to go back inside and stand in line again to remedy my error, have the change on his card reversed and redone, and that took a few minutes. I felt very ashamed. I didn't finish that book of his I was in the middle of, and never read one of his books again. Not out of spite; only because of the feelings it would dredge up.

It did help me to formulate a principle which I still think is good advice: "Never meet your heroes."

Graeme Scott: "Meters! Meters! You said 'Meters'! There's hope for your nation. Of course it should be spelled 'metres.'  😄  Belated Happy Labor Day wishes."

Robert Roaldi: "If they only show up for a day or two, that's not so bad. You'd best hope your area doesn't become the new 'it' place where the rich(er) buy their third or fourth home and drive the locals out. It has happened elsewhere.

"As for people on cell phones, I was criticized the other day because they were trying to reach me when my phone was powered off. But I tell everyone that my phone is almost always off and it's a waste of time trying to contact me that way.

"Try putting up a sign by the roadside that says 'Quiet Zone'; it would be fun seeing if it's respected."

Mike replies: Oh, we get summer people all summer long, not just on the Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day weekends. I would say three-quarters of the houses around me are summer-only residents. Just guesstimating.

I think that first thing you mentioned is happening—there are a lot of lavish new houses being built around here, even on the hillsides above the lake, and there is a critical shortage of houses for sale—at this moment, there are only four houses for sale in town, and only six houses for sale on the entire 60-mile shoreline of Keuka Lake!! Which has no zoning and is jammed with houses, by the way. I've seen lake houses here so close together that you can't walk between them. And this is the season when people sell their lake cottages, too. On the good side, the value of my house almost doubled earlier this year, although it has gone down a bit since then. (I'm sure Dave Ramsey would tell me to sell it immediately. I often hear his voice in my mind's ear giving me financial advice and saying "The house is gone. Sorry, I know you probably have some emotional attachment, but the house is gone.") The vacant hillside lot next to me was offered to me for $20k in 2015, and recently was listed for $99k!

You know what I'm most nostalgic for?

No, not film; not the intrepid globetrotting hero photojournalists of yore (no one ever took those away from us, even if the heroes now are Instagrammers and influencers); not the image coming up on fiber-base paper in the developer tray; not for metal, manual, mechanical cameras; not for Contax or Bronica or Konica or Olympus-made Olympuses. I'm nostalgic for the peak years of the digital "frontier market," the years on either side of 2012. I was there.

Back then, digital cameras were white-hot-selling products. Everybody wanted one, and then another one—they were hip and happening, and fun, and popular. Waves of traffic arrived on photo websites everywhere from shoppers, alongside the mavens and the veteran Photo-Dawgs and the enthusiasts. And almost every time anyone held a sale, a digital camera was featured right at the top of the list. Sometimes the only thing in the sale. And sometimes they sold out before the sale was over. Nostalgic sigh.

Cooler than a camera? I think not.

Well, it's Amazon Prime Day today—for another 12 hours or so—and on the Prime Day pages I had to go to the bottom of page three before I got to any photo stuff. (Yes, I'm going to post a few links, but I'm still a bit grumpy about this.) Cameras used to be featured at or very near the top of all the pages of deals. This year, they list Apple watches, Dyson vacuum cleaners, computer monitors, DeWalt power tools, WiFi6 and mesh systems (which are great, by the way), battery-powered lawnmowers and garden tools, Vitamix blenders, portable iPhone recharging batteries, Gillette razors (I love the Fusion5 shavers even though I decided I can't afford them), Instant Pots (yay), personal DNA tests (these are fun—I found out I'm 12% Spanish, which came out of left field), and Google Nest thermostats before they finally get down to "Camera Essentials from Top Brands." Bah. We used to be cool! I wish I had known enough to enjoy those days more. I didn't realize they were going to go past us so fast.

But still, I've got the camera I love, and that's enough for me.

Mike

P.S. And by the way, B&H Photo is fighting back with a great sale on M2 MacBook Airs.

P.S.S. Also by the way, most of the links are to things I use, have tried, or have written about before.

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Sinan Çakmak: “Re 'I'm nostalgic for the peak years of the digital "frontier market," the years on either side of 2012. I was there.' Me too! Looking back on those years I can’t help but think of the late Michael Reichmann. He was a great advocate for all things new! But not only that; It was also through his website that I got acquainted with your articles. I feel your blog is the only connection I have left to those (good old?) days when I was making a living with the kind of photography I loved, in Turkey, the country that I loved. I don’t photograph and I don’t live in Turkey anymore. But I read you. I hope you keep writing for a very long time!"

Mike replies: Thanks Sinan, and I hope so too!

Albert Smith: "Last year on Prime Day, I bought on a whim an Invicta Pro Diver automatic watch for $59. It's 200 meters submersible, has a Seiko movement (4R35) and it cost less that some of the straps that I put on my nicer watches. It is a true beater and I abuse it without fear, yet it maintains flawless operation and has accuracy that shames many of my multi-hundred-dollar watches. This year, it is $48. I bought two just to throw in the cupboard. I never would have known about it without Prime Day."

robert e: "I know what you're really missing. Those were the days when we were fielding half a dozen questions a day from friends, family, clients, even random strangers—about what to buy, about how to use what they bought per your advice (or against your advice), about how does this photography stuff work, anyway? etc.

"We were heroes! Gurus! We were needed. Because many cameras in those days were awful. And the good ones required skills.

"Now? The crappy cameras are gone (except the ones that are intentionally crappy for aesthetic reasons). The good cameras have more expertise than any single person ever had, and do it all for you. No one needs us to show them how to get good exposure and focus. No one needs those cameras anyway because the cameras in their phones are so good and just as smart. Or because they're still happy with the camera you advised them to buy ten years ago, when they can be bothered to fish it out of the closet.

"For all those reasons, few people need to shop for a camera, and if they do, they don't need much help or advice.

"I dunno. I'm kinda grateful for the peace and quiet, and the extra reading time. Especially since, for pretty much the same reasons that no one needs my help shopping for a new camera, today's cameras just aren't a lot of fun."

As you can read and hear all over the Internet (for instance at The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, and NBC), Instant Brands, the maker of the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Or, as the CEO put it, they are "positioning the company for its next phase of success."

The guy must be kind of embarrassed. It's been an unusually successful product. Sales were only $344 million last year, however (according to The Verge, via USA Today), and who can make a go of it on that? The article in The Atlantic is even entitled "The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product."

I like and depend on mine, and I reacted to this news with a moment of panic: what if mine breaks? My first impulse was to buy a second one as a spare. The impulse passed; the one I have still works fine. The Times references Smrity P. Randhawa, a clinical accounting professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, who notes (this is a quote from the Times, not a direct quote from Dr. Randhawa) that "part of the problem for companies like Instant Brands...is that they produce durable products that do not need to be replaced regularly." (Would that include cameras?) Not sure you need a professor of clinical accounting to tell you that, but then, I don't know much about business. The Instant Pot was launched in 2010 and the company was purchased in 2017 by a New York-based private equity firm called Cornell Capital LLC. Doesn't "private equity firm" pretty much mean that you're a company that's only good at business? They did manage to keep a company with an unusually successful product going for a whole five years before going bankrupt. Strike up the band.

I know, I'm being snarky. I understand the business problems. Too much debt, not enough cash, falling demand, supply chain, those damned fickle consumers, yatta yatta. The holistic underlying problem, though, seems to be that business is very good at growing but really sucks at weathering downturns and slowdowns. Pretty much everything in the world has its ups and downs, as anyone who's been here knows, but apparently they only teach the "ups" in business schools and haven't wrapped their minds around the "downs" part yet. Maybe they should study that a little. Downturns seem to persistently flummox businesses, like none of them could ever imagine it happening. Shouldn't every business have a plan for what they're going to do when sales halve? The way I look at it, actually, humanity as a whole had better get a whole lot better at dealing with the downs part of ups and downs, and quick. Constant, mindless, unending growth is not the way things are going to work forever on a finite planet. Whoops, just slipped into cranky mode.

Instant Brands also includes Pyrex, Corelle, Snapware, CorningWare, Chicago Cutlery, and Visions cookware.

But back down to Earth. I wonder how similar Instant Brands' predicament is to what the camera industry is going through. A mere ten years ago, things were so exciting in the camera business that I literally bought three cameras I didn't need all at once just because I thought each of them were too cool to not own. Had to have 'em. Waste of money, but I was happy. Now, I feel like I have what I need and can use it till it breaks, and I'm pretty jaded and blasé about the new things coming along, which are too expensive to be fun anyway. I would really love to read a well-researched analysis in a business publication about the current state of the camera industry as a whole. That's something that's not all over the Internet. Or maybe I just haven't found it yet.

Soup rules
Here's a tip for making bean soups in the Instant Pot. Put in the unsoaked beans, water, and the celery (if you don't want it to be crunchy) for 35 minutes on high, let the pressure go down for 10 minutes naturally, then add the other chopped vegetables and spices and cook for another three minutes, releasing pressure the same way. I use the soup as a basis for one-pot meals, adding boiled sweet potatoes, or brown rice, or steamed vegetables, or whatever I have on hand that day, and additives such as different spices, wilted arugula, a clove of minced garlic, whatever. I've experimented with all kinds of methods for making homemade soup, in slow cookers and dutch ovens as well, and this one's easy and foolproof.

The Instant Pot is (was?) a great product. The company says it's going to keep selling them. Don't know how much I would trust those guys, though. If you've been thinking about getting one but haven't, better do it now, just in case.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Albert Smith: "Re: '...moment of panic: what if mine breaks? My first impulse was to buy a second one as a spare....' Don't dismiss this thought. It has been my methodology for years for many products. I have been bitten many times when some item has died only to find that its replacement has been out of production for years. This could be as lowly as tennis shoes up to cameras. When I find a perfect shoe, I buy three more pairs and keep them in the box, sequentially bringing the next pair out when the current pair wear out. I have a new-in-the-box X-T3 waiting in the event that my current one fails, after seeing that 26mp is not going to be offered in the future. And don't even ask about my duplicate watches...just in case.

"If you like something, really like something with a life span that is finite, then have a spare in reserve. History shows that it may be impossible to find the exact product in the future."

Mike replies: I do the same thing! Just with a few things. Found a favorite shirt, and bought seven of them. They're all wearing out now. Comfortable shoes I've also done it with.

I also do it with things I like that were hard to find: my ex-girlfriend had a chef's knife that I really liked, and when I went to buy one it was discontinued everywhere. Finally found it, after much searching, and I bought two, just in case. I suppose my son will inherit the unused one!

James: "Private equity firms are not good at running businesses. They don't care about running businesses. They only care about making money. To quote Cory Doctorow: 'PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses into gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind.' I highly recommend reading the whole post."

Dillan: "I am more concerned with Corelle, CorningWare and Pyrex. I am a fan of all three brands. My kitchen is full of these products. My mom's kitchen is full of these products. I hope they can continue to produce them."

John: "Private equity brings us back to the '80s when investors bought and killed companies. But you can’t compare this company to most camera and lens manufacturers. Instant Brands failed to branch out fast enough, so it only had a role in a narrow segment. Most camera makers, even Nikon, are active in multiple industry segments that hopefully provide some kind of hedge against each other."

Aaron James

I mentioned that I got to meet one TOP reader on my recent trip to the Midwest. I had an extra day between visits to family members, so I made a short drive to Peoria, Illinois, to look into real estate, thinking that one day I'll move closer to my son and his family. The opportunities are limited right at the moment, but life comes in waves. Aaron James, a philosophy professor from Peoria, was able to meet me for lunch. It made my day, literally. The Indian restaurant we wanted to go to was closed on Mondays, so we ended up at a little hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant that looked almost comically tacky and cheap; but when we walked in, all the patrons looked like they might be from that part of the world. That's usually a good indication of authenticity at an ethnic restaurant of any sort. Sure enough, the food was excellent, so good that it fired up a hankering for Indian food that I'm still feeling. My son took me to a fantastic Indian restaurant in Bloomington, too. There are apparently a lot of choices in that area. You wouldn't guess that central Illinois, with its endless flat farm fields, would be a hotbed of great Indian food, but it appears that it is so.

Aaron brought photographs. He has an eye for finely considered, gentle compositions, and the color palette he prefers is clean and delicate. He does his work for himself and I could see why he gets enjoyment out of it. I always enjoy seeing work.

We talked for several hours, which managed to seem too short. I always worry that readers will be disappointed when they meet me—Joan Didion once talked about the way people think they'll get something more and better from writers in person, like there's something more and better hiding behind the written words, when actually it's the opposite. I think she said something like "you get the best of me on the printed page."

I told Aaron that I am to philosophers what George Costanza is to architects. I took enough of it at various colleges to learn that I have only a sidewise aptitude for it—the enthusiasm of the wannabe, the admiration of the hanger-on. We got to talking about what kind of philosophy books I like to read, and I said I had trouble reading original writings but enjoyed general nonfiction on the subject. Guided tours, I think I put it, by someone knowledgeable about the subject but who could explain it to be from a contemporary and more distanced perspective. I need it to be put it into context for me.

Here's what Aaron sent me along those lines a few days later (passed on to you with his permission):

Here are a couple of philosophy book recommendations if you're so inclined. They're both books by professional philosophers aimed at a general audiences. So, they're deep (if you will) without being technical. They both relate to life and wisdom, or meaning in life, or what a good life is like, or some such. Those were major preoccupations for ancient and medieval philosophy, less so in the modern period. Some contemporary philosophers are returning to those questions now.

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations published originally in 1989. Nozick was a Harvard prof probably best known for his political philosophy, but also influential in epistemology. As the title suggests these are his meditations on topics like dying, parents and children, love, reality, enlightenment, and so forth. Although not jargon-filled it's best read slowly.

Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning, Penguin, 2022. Sullivan and Blaschko are Notre Dame profs who based this book on an introductory class they teach. They're both practicing Roman Catholics so it has a religious slant, but it's not intrusive. Not sure what your religious sensibilities are (or aren't) but there's plenty of engagement with lots of philosophers throughout history and other religious traditions.

It's always great to meet readers—I wish I could do more of that, too.

Portraits and photo stores
By the way, the portrait above is an example of an unofficial genre you might be familiar with—"the photography friend across the lunch table." You know how it is—you meet a photo-buddy, one brings a camera to show the other or just has one with him, and one or maybe even both might take a quick snap, one and done (I took two here, but they're identical). Another genre I used to have a lot of is the "photo-store counterperson being an unwilling model for a test shot," but I don't know how long it's been since I've been in a photo store. I miss 'em, I'll be honest.

Aaron asked me what I would do to make portraits better, and I said "two hours, a number of different setups, several different shirts, and lots more exposures." The full portrait file of Aaron has wonderful properties, though—I should do more portraits with the fp-M. I'm already looking at that Sigma Contemporary 65mm ƒ/2. As as aside to this aside, one of the nice things about the fp-M is that the giant viewfinder makes it a pleasure to show people pictures right in the camera. I'll even make the offer to strangers who ask what I'm doing, and they're usually favorably impressed.

I think that's it about my trip. I felt fine for the whole trip, with adequate energy and good focus, but it's taking me a long time to recover. It's also surprising how much work it's been to get back into my daily routine. But I'll get there, I'll get there.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

David Aiken: "I did two-thirds of my BA in the Philosophy department of my local state university in Australia and I'd add another book to Aaron's list, a book that my favourite philosophy lecturer borrowed from me for several months when he discovered I owned a copy. It's Peter Heath's The Philosopher's Alice which is still available on Amazon but at a prohibitive price.

"It contains the text of Lewis Carroll's two Alice books with philosophical annotations by Heath. In real life Carroll was Charles Dodgson, an English Anglican priest and lecturer in logic amongst several other things, and he packed the Alice books with every form of paradox and logical fallacy that he knew. The Alice books have long been a favourite hunting ground for philosophers and logicians looking for examples to use in their lectures and writings. You don't need to be a philosopher to appreciate the footnotes, but they'll bring many smiles to your face as you see what Carroll was playing with as he wrote the Alice books. It will totally change the way you view the Alice books and it may well change the way you read a lot of 'normal,' i.e., non-philosophical, writing. It's definitely on a par with Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice for those who like the Alice books and are bemused by many of the goings on in them.

"Philosophers do know how to have fun."

Aaron: "I had a great time at lunch, too. I'm very glad you let us know you'd be stopping by Peoria. I think your readers won't be surprised by this, but you're as interesting and amiable in person as you seem online. I get what Joan Didion is saying, but the pleasure of meeting you in person is exactly that—meeting the person, not merely the words. If you get back this way, let us know."

Mike replies: I definitely will.

kirk: "As a counterpoint to someone's comment recommending 'one camera, one lens' (OCOL), the 65mm Sigma is one of my all-time favorite lenses with high performance wide open. A wonderful portrait focal length. It's a totally different look from the 45mm. Not all lenses are the 'same.' You can keep things too KISS. Imagine dinner every day with only one thing on the menu...."

Yesterday, all things considered, was one of the great days of my entire life. I arrived at a small apartment building just outside of downtown Bloomington, Illinois, after a drive from northern Indiana, to find my son Xander waiting for me in the parking lot—he’d just gotten home from his new job. Upstairs we found his girlfriend Kate, who I first met last summer, and Cirrus, their first child and my first grandchild. Wow, what a huge explosion of feelings! I’m sure a lot of you grandparents out there will relate. I got the high honor of feeding him a bottle (Kate is very thoughtful). At first he was fascinated by this strange face that had suddenly appeared in front of him, and then I got to watch his eyes droop and flutter as he blissed out on his bottle. I kinda feel like I haven’t had such a purely wonderful experience in years.

Such are the small, fleeting moments of life that somehow more than make up for the toil, strain, and sameness of life’s parade of days. Not much to tell, but fabulous to experience. Following dinner at an excellent and remarkably popular Mexican restaurant, we went to Kate’s mother’s house until everyone got tired. I have only two full days with them, because both parents work long days during the week, but at least I get a snapshot of their real lives and of Cirrus at three months of age. He’ll change fast, so this won’t be my last trip.

Although I lived in Chicago for five years, and Woodstock, Illinois (where the movie “Groundhog Day” was filmed) for two, I’d never been to central Illinois before. Compared to what I’m used to, it seems foreign, with a different feel to the land, the light, and the air. Bloomington is a bustling, prosperous college town, somehow cosmopolitan and Midwestern-parochial at the same time.

I plan to visit Peoria on Monday, because I’m thinking maybe I’ll move there. Bloomington is such a hotbed of business and education that there are hardly any houses for sale here. Peoria seems more promising, and it’s only 40 minutes away, which would cut my round-trip commute to see Cirrus, Xander and Kate by a useful 26 hours. I don’t know if I have one more move in me, to be honest, but I have the motivation.

I’m writing and posting this from my iPad. Seems to be working! More updates from my road trip soon.

Mike

Amazon's plan to reduce its workforce by 18,000 jobs apparently has to include the staff of 13 at Digital Photography Review.com, known by one and all as DPReview.

Phil Askey started DPReview in 1998 and sold it to Amazon for a rumored $20 million* in 2007. Since then, it has continued acting as an independent review site, attempting to transition to YouTube with the hiring of the team of Chris Nichols and Jordan Drake from The Camera Store five years ago (they have since jumped to PetaPixel). DPReview announced today that it will suspend operations on April 10th and take down all of the site's content at some unspecified date in the future.

Strange fact
It brings to mind a strange fact that has been little noted. I've long marked the end of the era of the "digital transition" as the date of the demolition of Building 9 at Kodak Park in Rochester in 2007, the first of the spectacular demolitions that provide a visual analogue for Kodak's swift and brutal decline. But, assuming that that is a good inflection point, then it was only five years between the end of the transition period and the peak of the digital camera market, which occurred in 2012. Since then it has been a story of accelerating decline, as development slows, the ILC market becomes saturated, the former mass market makes do with smartphones, one company after another fails or fades, and the remaining ones follow the strategy of offering mavens "more for more." And as mavens buy less, less often.

It's really not DPReview's fault. The peak is past; the business is going downhill; the popularity of dedicated cameras is fading.

Wanton disregard
I'm especially sad to see all the information on the site destroyed. One of the best things Phil Askey did was to make a conscious effort to document the entire era in photographic history. By excising all of that from the record, it might be that as much information will be destroyed at a stroke as was lost when Julius Caesar burned the great Library at Alexandria in 48 B.C.** It's a shame and, frankly, a disgrace. The Internet is simply not a good repository for culture, information, and stored knowledge.

Mike

*A reader who shall remain unnamed heard this back then and thinks the information is reliable, but I can't confirm it, so to me it's a rumor. The terms of the deal were not disclosed to the public.

**Seneca the Younger quoted Livy as saying that 40,000 scrolls were destroyed. Depending on how much information could be stored on a scroll—I don't know—it's plausible that DPReview's many thousands of pages could rival the amount of information in 40,000 scrolls.

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Steve Rosenblum: "It is ridiculous that they are going to delete all content on the site. It would cost Amazon the rounding error on their per minute profits to maintain that information on AWS [Amazon Web Services, an on-demand cloud business with $62B in revenue —Ed.]. I suspect they are planning to sell the information to some other entity, as it is valuable, but I don't know. I'm sorry to see this, I have followed them since they started and found their content to be very helpful."

Dillan: "Fun fact: Chris Nichols sold me my EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 when he worked for The Camera Store here in Calgary. Right out of the box, it just wouldn't focus on my 5D, so I brought it back the following Monday. He exchanged it for another one, no questions asked. I had the whole sad tale prepared, but I didn't need to tell it. It's a small thing, but I never forgot it. That was a lot of money for me at the time. It's still my favourite lens, and I am still a devoted Camera Store customer."

David Brown: "Re 'The Internet is simply not a good repository for culture, information, and stored knowledge.' Hear, hear! Paper can burn, true enough; but digital storage can so easily be unplugged even with the best of intentions."

Nicholas Hartmann: "Whaat?! Amazon, of all companies, can’t set aside a matchbox-worth of storage for DPReview’s archive? No more camera purchases from Amazon for this dinosaur…."

PaulW: "Your comparison of losing DPReview to the loss of the library of Alexandria is spot on. I'm still in a bit of shock over this. It's hard for me to fathom that such a valuable resource and so much valuable historical information will be lost to a business decision."

William Cook: "Sorry to see the site go. Way back when, I enjoyed reading the new camera reviews. Those reviews were not the usual regurgitation of camera maker’s press releases or spec sheets; they were honest hands-on reviews. In those days I was keen to keep up with the fast-moving market and technology, not so much any more. And that’s probably the personal micro reason for the macro problem. Still, sad to see them go."

Tom Burke: "This does feel like the end of an era. Like many others there have been times when I have availed myself of DPReview’s pages extensively—and then long times when I haven’t. The former were generally when I was considering a purchase. I would then use the (relevant) forums a lot in the period immediately after I’d made the purchase, and found them helpful.

"Scrolls: a comment in a book called The Book, by Keith Houston suggests that that book (smallish hardback, 426 pages including text, notes and index), might hold as much as seven times more information than a scroll occupying the same volume of shelf space. The Book is about the development of books, and the media on which they have been written or printed. Strongly recommended, for its informational value, and also because the hardback, at least, is a beautifully produced object. Not fancy, but elegant and purposeful. If you want to know about papyrus, scrolls, the development of writing, and way too much about vellum, this is the one for you."

Mike replies: I used to have a wonderful mini-library of books about books. Alas, lost and scattered due to moves, volumes left behind here and there, and other vagaries of time.

Tommy Williams: "It looks like the Archive Team at the Internet Archive is taking some extraordinary steps to save as much of the DPReview content as they can which goes well beyond their normal scraping and storing, so maybe—this time—we won't lose such an important piece of history."

Greg: "Here's a link to Dave Etchells praising his 'competition': Quote: 'It’s hard to state the sense of loss I feel, trying to come to grips with DPR’s closure. It leaves a gap in my world, as over-dramatic as that sounds. It’s true though. I think most people imagined us as competitors, and we were to an extent, but it was a very friendly competition. The photo business is an unusually congenial and friendly one to begin with, and I counted many on the DPR team as good personal friends.'"

Andrew Kochanowski: "I don't want to be a contrarian, But twenty years ago a site like that had some value to compare objective information between equipment that was rapidly changing. Whether it was a new Nikon or Canon or a new system, it was useful to be able to access the objective information about it and a bit of subjective feel-in-the hand, maybe make some decisions on what to buy.

"Now and for the past 10 or more years? Not so much. Ever since its Amazon acquisition and especially in the past few years the content was uninspiring. Yes, a compendium of what's new and when was it issued. That's about it. Ah, but the forums. Yes, moderated in the best 1990s tradition, dominated by would-be experts with fragile skins. I thought you got kicked out of there Mike? I sure did, many years ago. Not that I had much to add to the my gear is better than yours threads, so maybe it was for the best."

Mike replies: I did, in the Askey era. Phil apparently had a burr under his saddle about other people acting like they knew something. But, in fairness, the posting that got me booted was actually pretty obnoxious. It wasn't as bad as some other things that didn't get people kicked out, but I could see their side of it.

Peter Croft: "Oh, here we go again. The big fish snap up and swallow the best of the small fry, then close them down. Think Lotus (Microsoft), Word Perfect (MS again), Macromedia (Adobe), Micrografx (Corel) and a dozen, scores of others. We pay big money to own software, only to find it orphaned. Macromedia Authorware used to be a career path in its own right, but Adobe got their hands on it and shut it down! As soon as I learned Amazon had bought DPReview, I thought that this would happen, and it has. I especially liked the sample images shot around London before the 200 lbs. gorilla stepped in and took it away to the USA. And like you, I immediately thought of the huge database of camera and lens data accumulated. Surely that can't be lost? Surely that must be preserved and made available in some way. To trash that would be a crime. What a damn pity. At least it will free up all the time I spend each day reading the site."

When I was a kid I hit a robin at a hundred and fifty feet with a Daisy pump-handle BB gun, which are accurate to, at best, about thirty feet...after calling the shot to my friends. The only reason I mention this is because afterwards, I really struggled to understand whether it had been good luck or bad luck. Good, because it was an amazing fluke of a shot that I could never repeat if I'd had a thousand more tries, and my friends were amazed and impressed. Bad, because I had no intention of killing the robin for no reason, meant the robin no harm, and wished I could undo the damage I had done after I did it.

This morning I had to go to the cardiologist. And it snowed, starting just before I had to leave and ending just as I got home. And it had not snowed here yet all month. What are the chances it would snow just for the three hours I had to drive three towns over? Bad luck, right?

But the snow was amazing. A light, wet snow with wind, blowing and misting everywhere with a sort of half-fog. The sky the same light gray as the ground. The fields lightly frosted, the windward side of objects and buildings and trees and even a giant heap of spare railroad ties shaded with white. And, quite honestly, if I didn't have to go to the cardiologist I never would have left the house. Good luck, right?

It was a target-rich environment. I should have been shooting. There were picture prospects everywhere—almost literally everywhere I looked. But I didn't have my camera with me. And I couldn't have stopped anyway, because I was, you know, going to the cardiologist. And couldn't be late for my appointment. Bad luck.

Very quickly I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did. One more amazing experience added to my stock of beautiful visual experiences in the Finger Lakes. All of which I'm very lucky to have seen.

On the whole, though, overall, I still don't know quite how to feel about the trip. It was either lucky or unlucky. I still don't know which.

I have health stuff to go do now—calls to make before everything closes—but here's an unrelated snap of Butters last night. It was a rainy, cold, inhospitable evening. Earlier in the afternoon he had gotten to play with his big buddy Wex and fetch his favorite toy, a rubber discus Wex's owner brings with her. He was tired out and pretty contented lying there by the fire, except that he didn't want to be bothered to look back at the camera.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Bill Tyler: "In an almost unrelated incident that I still remember more than 50 years later, I did a physics lab where the goal was to measure the charge on an electron. My measurement came out correct to at least two more decimal places than it had any right to do, and I remember commenting on my lab report that this was due to luck, not skill. Sometimes you just hit where you have no business hitting. In a further bit of good luck, no robins were killed in my experiment, and even the electron survived."

Bill Bresler: "Glad you could enjoy the scene without stopping to make photographs. "I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did." This really resonated with me. There will be other photos for you to make. You're on one helluva roll with your new black and white work and a day off won't hurt. When my kids were small, back in the late 80s, I decided I had to buy a hellishly expensive video camera with a hefty VHS recorder that hung from my shoulder from a wide strap. I videoed the kids for 2 years or so before it dawned on me that I wasn't a part of the 3 year old's birthday party. I was merely the videographer. So I put down the videocam and recorder, and joined the party. I've never regretted that. "I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did.", is sometimes a great choice."

Dave Glos: "That is a darn nice environmental portrait of Butters. Can easily sense the indifference from your partner—'whadda ya want, I am quite enjoying this fire.' The tonal disparity between the blue dusk outside, and the orange glow from the fire inside, confirm which side of the wall is more hospitable. While I love B&W, this one deserves color."

Ken Owen: "Curious seating you have there next to the fire. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before."

Mike replies: Those are auditorium seats that came out of a Mason's Hall in a town about 50 miles from me. They were installed about 1850 and removed in 1911, then spent the next century in storage in the attic of the Mason's Hall. Finally they were sold and a bunch of antiques dealers in this area all got various quantities of them. The woman I bought those from said they were her last ones and almost everybody else's were gone too. They're very steampunk—the metal casting is ornate and the bentwood seats have decorative patterns in them made with small holes. The seat fold up just like modern theater seats. Here are a couple of better pictures (sorry about the doghair drifts on the floor—I have a bad housekeeper):

They're actually quite sturdy and comfortable!

Mike Peters: "A photographer without a camera is just a pedestrian. When you leave the house, take the camera. Every single time. Even just walking Butters. If you have to go somewhere, leave a half hour to 45 minutes earlier, so you have time to stop if you want. However if you don't stop along the way, now you'll have time to get out of the car and walk around a bit once you get to your destination. You just might find something that you weren't expecting. Or you'll just have a bit of a walk. Either way, you'll immerse yourself in your environment. But, if you leave your camera at home, you can be guaranteed that there will be no photographs."

Robert Cole: "Mike, unusual events gave you a rare experience with ephemeral beauty. You recorded it with your head and heart, and conveyed it to the world through your words. Good luck indeed, for all of us."

Mike Ferron: "I am glad you wrote this Mike. Several times I shot at things when I was a kid and actually hit them. Bothers me to this day as I am not a hunter and no good came from my actions. Maybe the hunting instinct lives within us, but for me? I do not like it."

2023

It's here, the New Year. They go by fast these days. It's like watching the telephone poles flash past as the train speeds up.

It seems to me that the range of possible outcomes on a number of fronts—personally, professionally, within my family, and nationally—is particularly broad this year. The upside would be tremendous, the worst-case scenarios scary. It's probable that this year will be a memorable one and possible that it will be fantastic. We're going to need some luck and the favor of God (as you understand {pronoun}), but hey, that's always true.

I wish you and yours the very best. I'm thinking of how Brett Weston (1911–93), son of Edward, used to sign his letters: "Good light and good negs." I guess now that would be "good light and good files," which maybe doesn't have quite the right ring to it—is there some better way to say it? But we know what we mean. Photography is a curious and quixotic pastime, but remember that every lens will give you its gifts if you let it. Aim high and fail often and the successes will inevitably arrive. Let's all go out and get some great ones in the coming year, and, above all, have some fun. Thanks for everything.

Good light and good pictures,
Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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:

Dillan: "Thank you so much for the positive thoughts about the new year. When I look at the news, it's doom and gloom. I came here, and I feel good again. Thanks, Mike, and Happy New Year to you too!"

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "A great post on occasion of the new year. I feel the same: scared and hopeful. All the best!"

Stephen Cowdery: "You can relive Brett’s 'good light' in a studio/cabin where he stayed in from time to time in his later years. Walking distance from Point Lobos, and a short drive from Carmel and not too far from Big Sur."

John Krumm: "Hear hear. Good light and good prints. And that includes online prints. I look at images on Flickr and such as digital prints, and each phone and computer that views them is a new gallery display you have no control over, each with its own lighting character, resolution, size and viewing distance. By the way, your good captioning practices on Flickr has made me up my caption game. That's one of my resolutions. Better captions!"

Rick Twigg: "'Every lens will give you its gifts if you let it.' That's a keeper!"

Stephen Lewis: "Good light and good pixels."

Time to start thinking about photography-related New Years resolutions again! What are you planning to do in 2023?

I'm already embarked on my own plans, and for once I think it's going to stick. The reason is that 2023, finally, is the year of my OC/OL/OY. The term, if you're new here, means "one camera, one lens, one year," and it refers to a deliberate suspension of complication for a defined period of time combined with a temporary moratorium on shopping. A reader loaned me his Sigma fp-M and 45mm ƒ/2.8 back in August of 2022. By the end of August I had bought my own, and by October 23rd it got back from being converted. These two identical monochrome Sigmas were really the only two cameras I used throughout the Autumn season of good light. Of course I'm still taking visual notes with the iPhone—and the iPhone is what I use for illustrations here, mostly—but that's "work," and it's not getting in the way.

"Bar of Soap" (large version with description text)

Setup documentation. Carl Weese taught me to do this.

So my resolution this year is simply to keep my OCOLOY going, through to the end of the good light next Fall. Given my level of enthusiasm, which is high, I think I stand a pretty good chance this time. I'm usually one of those "New Years resolutions are made to be broken" kind of people.

No rush. You have till Sunday to decide. Which might include deciding not to fuss with New Years resolutions. But why not make a big bold grab, just for the fun of it?

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 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:

Nicholas Hartmann: "I’m about to start a similar project involving a Sony RX100 Mark 5A, a little camera that is about the size of a chubby flip-phone and fits into an unobtrusive belt pouch. Despite being no-excuses portable everywhere, it possesses a very sharp lens with a zoom range equivalent to 24 to 70mm, and a 20-MP sensor. The Mark 2 predecessor of this camera—almost identical in size and with an only slightly less capable sensor—has been my go-to (mostly color) travel camera for years; its only failings are a slow lens and the need for a bulky add-on electronic viewfinder, and the 5A solves both of those problems. But it’s the built-in 'film' that is so important: the Sony sensor has none of the artifacts of a cell phone camera, but at high ISOs is has just enough noise, and of just the right character when correctly processed, to recreate the kinds of images I treasured back when I was shooting with T-Max 400 and a good lens: pictures in which grain functions simultaneously as an overall abstract texture and as a carrier of very fine detail. I have recently found myself craving that effect, and I cannot get it with my 'big' Micro 4/3 Olympus: monochrome conversions from that sensor are just too smooth and pasty, with no tooth or grit.

"Maybe the correct term here is OCOY rather than OCOLOY, since the lens doesn’t come off the camera but its focal length can be modified. Once I simplify the interface—the PDF manual is over 500 pages long and devotes hundreds of those pages to functions and capabilities that I have never heard of—I hope to end up with a modern, digital version of the Olympus XA: a camera that goes with me everywhere and does everything I need. I’ll report next year."

Richard Alan Fox: "I will try not to purchase any photographic equipment except paper and ink for an entire year."

Mike replies: A good one! But tough.

I'm really not sure if it's such a good idea to name storms. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel the next time I meet a human being called "Elliott." I might feel...wary, at least.

Elliott kicked my ass. Winter Storm Elliott, I mean. I survived, of course, and that's good, and I'm not as bad off as some people—I'm not trapped in a car on a freeway with no gas left, and I'm not without power after two and a half days with no help in sight. I didn't die, and some people did. So I'm grateful it wasn't worse.

We had intermittent brownouts all day Friday, and the home backup generator cycled a bunch of times throughout the day. On Friday night, the rest of the neighborhood was without power and I was sitting there feeling smug, with the lights and the heat on, listening to the generator chug away, thinking, aren't I lucky to have a generator. Then I heard its little engine go berserkoid for ten or 20 seconds and fall silent. The house went completely dark and quiet save for the momentary beeping protests of all the electronic equipment shutting down. Uh-oh.

This isn't good.

It was not good. It was one outside. I mean 1°F (that's –17°C for you Europeans). The wind was howling, 21 miles per hour sustained and gusts to 47 mph. What used to be called the wind chill (now called the "feels like") was –20°F, and felt every bit of that. Bitter cold. Snow was blowing everywhere and the roads that were wet with rain that morning had frozen. I live at the bottom of steep hills. There was a travel advisory. And it was eight o'clock at night on the day before Christmas Eve.

The guy from the company that sold me the generator said he wasn't going to try to get somebody to me that night, so I should try calling him in the morning. So I piled up all the blankets I could find and burrowed down. Kinda like Winter camping, but without the wind and the wet. (I went Winter camping once as a Boy Scout and woke up with my hair frozen to the floor of the tent. That's a little more inconvenient than it probably sounds. This wasn't as bad as that; but I didn't sleep much.)

The rest of the neighborhood got power back at 7:00 Christmas Eve morning. But not me. That's when it dawned on me that the problem with the generator, whatever it was, was what was keeping me dark. The generator was somehow stuck in its "generator is supplying power, keep grid off" position.

I went to town for breakfast and a little warmth. The nice man from Home Power Systems arrived about 9:00, worked for a while, told me he had bad news for me, collected a check for $240, and left. As I understand it—and I don't really understand it—first the generator fried its own transfer switch (a $2,000 repair), filling the basement with that sickening aroma of "something electrical is burning"; then the fried transfer switch and/or the bitter cold and/or something else destroyed the motor in the generator. Upshot: the home backup generator is totaled. Worse, in the moment, was that there was no way to get me back on the grid. It was very cold in the house, and I was dressed in my full Winter gear but still cold—my body doesn't seem to generate heat like it used to. And it was Christmas Eve.

The HPS guy told me I needed an electrician to "bypass the transfer switch," and that any electrician would know what that meant. Using my phone, I tried to find an electrician...and found a long list of "CLOSED, reopens Monday morning." I started worrying about the pipes freezing and all the rest of the damage that could occur to the house if it spent a sustained period below freezing. And what were Butters and I going to do for two days? I kept my cool, but to be honest I was not in the best state of mind at that point.

Long and short: I finally did find an electrician, by the name of Richard Bruno, a strapping young go-getter about six and a half feet tall who is 21 years old and had started his business at age 18. He says he works on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day "every year." Meaning, I guess, the three years since he was in high school. He arrived, bypassed the generator panel, and I finally got power again at about 3:00 in the afternoon. Big relief! It had gotten down to 37°F in the house, and the pool shed hit 19°F. Richard collected a check for $540—emergency call, the holiday, all that—which I was glad enough to pay, and grateful to be able to pay. It's going to cost another $500 if I decide to make the bypass permanent and go back to living without a backup generator. All told I was without power for 19 hours during the worst part of the storm.

I kept the heat up and all the lights on all Christmas Day! Just because I could. In my 12-step program, we're supposed to start our morning prayer with a "gratitude list," and I do what I'm told because I want to stay sober. As you can imagine, "a warm house" started my gratitude list on Christmas morning. My prayer was more fervent than usual.

Like I say, other people had it worse than I did, some much worse, so I'm not complaining. My homeowner's insurance might pay for a new generator or at least the cost of removing the old one and making the bypass permanent. We'll see.

The whispering cold
You know the two worst things about the experience? One was the irony. I mean, I have a generator to give me a backup in case of emergency. The irony is that it was supposed to provide power in a blackout, and instead, it was what was locking me out of the grid after clean power to my neighbors had been restored. Irony of that sort does not sweeten life.

The second was that I had a sort of existential crisis in the silence and the darkness. I live alone, and I don't mind it so much usually, but I depend on my electronic devices for a sense of company. I still had my phone during those 19 hours, but I didn't want to use it more than was absolutely necessary because I didn't know when I could recharge it again. Sitting and lying there in the dark through that very long night, hour after hour with nothing to do, with the house getting colder and colder and the wind howling through the trees, and relief uncertain...let's just say it was pointing out to me how alone I really am. Not pleasant.

There is a poem, number 37 of the 200 or so Cold Mountain poems by the legendary hermit-poet of China, Han Shan, who anonymously left his poems written on rocks and bits of tree bark at the foot of the mountain he lived on. It goes like this:

I think of all the places I've been,
Chasing about from one famous spot to another.
Delighting in mountains, I scaled the mile high peaks;
Loving the water, I sailed a thousand rivers.
I held farewell parties with my friends in Lute Valley;
I brought my zither and played on Parrot Shoals.

Who would guess I'd end up under a pine tree,
Clasping my knees in the whispering cold?

Han Shan
(translated by Burton Watson)

I remember being moved by that in college, and the book is still on my shelves all these years later.

But I'm back to normal now, and all is well. No complaints; these things happen. I just need a couple three days before I have to meet anyone named "Elliott," is all.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page
(Inset: Han Shan by Yan Hui, 13th century)

Original contents copyright 2022 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:

Bob Keefer: " Does this fancy generator system come with a warranty? I mean, what a disaster, though it's good you appreciate the irony. Living in the woods in Oregon we're well accustomed to power outages, and last year we finally broke down and bought a generator ($1,000, delivered from Amazon). Nothing as fancy as yours—we have to haul it out and plug it into the main electrical panel (our non-automated transfer switch cost us about $200 to have installed on the panel) and fire it up. I think we've used it four times already, and have been very pleased with it. You're making me really glad we didn't spend the money on a higher-tech operation! Glad you survived.

"Merry belated Christmas, and wishes for a great 2023. Thanks for all the work you do to make photography fun and interesting for the rest of us."

John Berger: "Just to note: don't minimize your little Acura Survival Pod that should be available with at least half a tank of gas all year long...and very capable cell phone recharger as well. Hmmmmm...."

Daniel: "Could be worse...you might have a plug-in electric car."

James Bullard: "My name isn't Elliott so you are safe reading this. During the Ice Storm of '98 (I think it was '98, correct me if I'm wrong), my house went without power for an entire week. We survived it because we had a wood stove. The state (NY) wants to phase out wood stoves but if you have the space to have a small wood burner it can run when the grid or a local thing like your bypass switch fails and they are simple enough that you don't need a degree in engineering to stay warm. Here's hoping your heating system isn't tested by nature again. Happy New Year."

Juan Buhler: "…And here I was thinking I was going to read some story about Elliott Erwitt with my coffee this morning. Glad you’re well Mike, and greetings from California! It was sunny and in the 50s yesterday where I am."

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "Not a nice Xmas story. And so revealing. Backup generators—I would not say they do not exist in Europe, but indeed they are the exception, not the rule. My idea would be: Step down: Opt for a camping equipment for emergency situations, one that provides warmth for one room, light, and a one or two flames hotplate for cooking. A huge battery pack to recharge smartphone etc. does no harm either."

David Brown: "I feel your pain! We have occasional ice storms down here in North Texas. Actually, they used to be a lot worse. Ice will form on every surface, especially tree limbs and power lines, until a tree limb and/or a power line will snap! The worst for me was January 1979 (that storm is famous and still remembered down here.) I was without power for five days. When the power finally came back up on my block, my neighbor only then discovered that his electrical service panel had been pulled off of his house by the ice. He still did not have power. Suffice it to say, that I now own a very good and dependable portable generator. It will not power the whole house, but we can have light and heat from natural gas. I have considered getting a whole house generator, but now I’m not so sure.… "

Mike replies: In fairness, my electrician said my whole house unit was a inexpensive one, and he pointed to the motherboard in the transfer box and said, "that's older than I am." He said the new units are much smarter than mine, and that they can distinguish brownouts and cope with them.

Geoff Wittig: "Sincere sympathy, Mike. We have lived on a rural hilltop an hour west of you for the past 37 years, at the end of a 1,000-foot-long gravel driveway. It's gorgeous in Summer and especially in Autumn; and Winter has its own austere beauty. I have made many lovely photographs and paintings here. But the downside is not trivial. We were snowed in for three days by massive drifts 10 feet high after the 1994 Nor'easter. We lose electrical power typically 4–5 times a year, usually just for a few hours after a high wind. Last month it was because a runaway downhill truck took out a transformer pole. After the 1991 ice storm it was two weeks without power. We long ago decided not to bother with a generator, after hearing numerous tales just like yours, along with carbon monoxide horror stories. We're now very experienced at lighting the candles and oil lamps, and gathering around the wood stove until the power returns. Kinda like 19th century life.

"Generators are complicated devices with many potential modes of failure, built to meet a price point. Manufacturers have surely run the numbers and know precisely how unreliable they can be before profits take a hit."

Robert Roaldi: "Makes you respect all the more those pioneers from centuries ago."

Chris Dale: "It is a hell-of-a-thing to be without power and thus without heat in a part of the country that gets cold. I live in Minnesota, perhaps one of the few places that is consistently as cold as northern New York. You story made me cringe; of course, I was thinking about your pipes all through the story. So glad to hear you didn't have to deal with that nightmare. I have been considering a generator. Now, not so much."

Mike Ferron: "This so reminds me of two years ago when we in central Texas got hit with first an ice storm, then six inches of dry powder snow with a temp that was 2°F in the morning and the temps never went above the freezing mark for five days. Understand, I moved to Texas from Maine, and these conditions are no big deal. In Maine that is. In a latitude that = Northern Florida it is a big deal. We went five days unprepared with no power or water. Four pots of water on the gas range kept the house in the 40s and I filled the bathtub with water and then snow for flushing water. I now own two Dyna-Glo kerosene heaters with a few days' supply of fuel, a small inverter generator, and four lights that run off of power tool batteries and lots of those batteries that remain charged. Fool me once!"

Kye Wood: "As a writer, you'd hope to elicit an emotional response in your readers minds. Well, sport, you did. Your post immediately took me back to every dark, long night of the soul I've ever lived through. I don't think I've ever seen swearing here, but SH*T MIKE! What a horrible horrible no good bummer crap of a series of things to happen. Glad to hear you landed on gratitude. That's where it's at. May your trials be trivial and first world problems at best, from now on. Kind Regards, Man who lives in 22°C during Christmas zone."

Tom Burke (partial comment): "Sorry to hear about your misfortune but glad to learn that you had power for Christmas Day. That was potentially very serious—long periods of exposure to cold really aren't good for humans. Here's a rather alarming account of what just getting cold can do to the body."

Mike replies: Yes, I noticed the long dose of cold seemed to take a toll. Interesting article.

(TOP will pause for a few days for Christmas, as we do every year)

Bronzino, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1539–40

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom     
     Had rolled along     
     The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,     
     A voice, a chime,     
     A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each foul, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,     
     And with the sound     
     The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,     
     And made forlorn     
     The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;     
     "For hate is strong,     
     And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;     
     The Wrong shall fail,     
     The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

—Longfellow

-

Happy holidays to all of us, each and every one, however you celebrate; and God bless and keep you and your family. Thanks for stopping here, and see you before next year.

Mike

I need to put up some links, so maybe you can help me out. I'm an affiliate of Amazon and B&H Photo. (Well, and also Adorama and the Book Depository). With the limitation that it has to come from Amazon or B&H, what do you want for Christmas this year?

(Or for Hanukkah, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, or Boxing Day. Or Solstice, or Festivus.)*

I think I'll feature all of the comments to this question. I don't think I've ever done that before. [I should have known not to promise such a rash thing! —slacker Ed.]

Mike

*Diwali is the Festival of Lights, the most important holiday in India, celebrating good over evil. Las Posados is a novenario (period of prayer) celebrated in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and among some of the Mexican diaspora in the United States; about one-fifth of the population of the United States is either Mexican-born or of largely Mexican heritage. The solstice, on the 21st, is sometimes celebrated by "nones"—not capitalized—"people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or 'nothing in particular' when asked about their religious identity." (Pew Research.) Nones now make up about a third of the population of the United States, although many nones continue to celebrate Christmas—presumably as a secular, commercial holiday. Festivus is the spoof holiday adopted by the character Frank Costanza, played by Jerry Stiller, in the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Strike." It was invented by Daniel O'Keefe and was celebrated by the O'Keefe family as early as 1966; the Seinfeld episode was written by Daniel O'Keefe's son Dan. Now a so-called "idiosyncratic ritual," Festivus is celebrated by some Seinfeld fans, presumably nones and presumably always tongue-in-cheek, on the 23rd of December, in part as a stance against the pressures and commercialization of Christmas. Sixty-three percent of Americans are Christian (Pew Research), but 93% of Americans celebrate Christmas (Gallup). Hanukkah is not the Jewish version of Christmas; it is a completely different holiday. However, 32% of Jewish households in the US celebrate cultural Christmas in some form, including 71% of Jews married to non-Jews (Pew Research).

Original contents copyright 2022 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:

Kye Wood: "As a Micro 4/3 lens aficionado of some renown (in cheek is my tongue), may I suggest the most underrated lens I own—the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 9–18mm ƒ/4–5.6 lens. Currently on sale for $100 off. I have nine incredible Micro 4/3 lenses. Most costing over $2k each. But that one is the 'never fails to amaze' me one."

[Ed. note: The link is to the international version, but in this case you might thank us—it's less than half the cost of the USA version, $252 and change vs. $599. I've always thought it's pretty safe to buy a lens with no warranty, especially when you have return privileges.]

Bob Keefer: "Can you become an affiliate at Lens Rentals and at KEH? Think of the money you could make off me. ;-) Oh, you mean products. Things I'm tempted by: Canon R7, Pentax K-1 II, Billingham bags."

John Shriver: Leica M10.