The Online Photographer

This morning in my inbox I got an email from eMusic asking me to "rate" Hank Crawford's album "Tight." Ratings seem to have become a ubiquitous feature of the internet. When I read audio equipment reviews on audioreview.com, I have to be told how many stars the piece got from how many reviewers (i.e., readers). When  I look at pictures on PhotoSig, I have to learn how many people gave it however many "thumbs up" symbols. (The maximum being three. What?) I have to say, the rating culture of the internet is not for me.

As a sometime critic you might not suppose I'd say that. Isn't "rating" things what criticism is all about? The Sony A900 gets five stars. The Sigma DP2 gets two. Done and out.

That's not it, of course. "Rating" anything—especially, taking averages of many peoples' ratings—misses all the subtlety. First of all, whether an album of music gets five stars or two stars doesn't concern me at all. I would hope that I can have great experiences with music that leaves the mass audience cold. Certainly, what turns on the mass audience—broadest spectrum, lowest common denominator—leaves me cold. Mass ratings systems are just looking for common agreement. They're setting community standards, if you will. That might work for refrigerators. Maybe. It doesn't work for art.

I'm looking for an experience with art. An immediate connection between it and me, now. However many of my fellow humans think crasher squirrel is cute or approve of a Celine Dion song, that does not necessarily predict a good experience for me. My taste isn't mass taste. Mass taste isn't for me. (In fact I have a bias the other way—against mass taste—because historically that's been a better-than-neutral indicator for me.) I love discovering music, books, pictures, and so forth that I love, but I have no condition attached that other people must agree with me.

Plus, how can I know when something will hit me? I recently had a fantastic experience with the first three cuts of Duke Ellington's Piano in the Foreground, an album I've owned forever. (The fourth cut, not so much—it tries to make up in length what it lacks in interest.) Thirteen beautiful and brilliant minutes of music that a 15-year-old Kanye West fan would give one star. Me? Last week, three stars. This week, five. No, that does not average to four.

Even when I "rate" cameras, I assume people will disagree with me, and I completely endorse their right to. I go into writing about a camera knowing that somebody out there will love (and, more importantly, do good work with) what I think is the worst piece of glack in the world, and that somebody else will dismiss out of hand a camera that I think is well nigh on the Holy Grail. That fact does not confront me.

It also matters to me who's doing the rating. It gratifies me that when I recommend a photography book as being outstanding (my current ga-ga favorite is this one, which I totally freakin' love and which you might as well bury me with), lots of my readers go buy it. But when I recommend a random non-fiction book on a random topic, like this one, which I found immersively fascinating and a great read, well, pretty much nobody goes and buys it. Why? Because you know my taste and opinions about photography. You give me credit for expertise, and you probably have a sense whether you are going to enjoy my recommendations or not. But you have no such faith and confidence in my general taste about items outside of my expertise, in which case I am just another guy on the internet.

That's fine. You're allowed to be wrong about my general recommendations, which are spectacularly insightful and rock-solid reliable. Just kidding. How'd you like this post? How many stars would you give it on a scale of five? How many thumbs-ups? The maximum is two, if you're a humanoid, one if you lost an arm in battle. You may additionally give it up to two big-toes-up, if you're barefoot.

That Danny Lyon book has totally reordered my opinion of him as an artist. It gets eight stars on a scale of five. And I don't care if 41 raters on netnet.com agree with me, it does.

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I hope I'm not one of those new-media types that belabors readers too regularly with personal trivia, like the best meals I've eaten recently (a chicken Marbella my sister-in-law made at the Lake) or what's happening outside my window this morning (it sounded like someone was killing the neighbors' children—at least two of them must have been having a total wailing, screaming go-to-pieces at once), or quotidian meanders like doctor's visits. But I thought perhaps a doctor's appointment I had yesterday might actually be apropos to our subject.

About eight or ten years ago, an optometrist who was fitting me for glasses I don't often use (I was slightly nearsighted and mildly astigmatic) looked long and hard into my right eye and first asked me if I had health insurance (I didn't, and still don't) and then suggested, enigmatically, that I might want to get checked out by an ophthalmologist. I asked him why, but he wouldn't say, suggesting without saying so directly that if he told me anything it would make whatever it was into a pre-existing condition.

I remembered that incident only in the last year, as my right eye has progressively started to go bad. At the same time, I started getting mysterious headaches on the right side of my head, which sometimes, but not always, seemed to respond to treatments for muscle tension.

In camera-lens terms, my right eye has developed excessive flare in bright light and lost some contrast and a lot of resolution. And I fancy I feel some discomfort in it, sometimes, like there were something in it, or like the beginnings of pain.

I have to admit I've been preoccupied with this for some time now, and it's one reason why I took such a lengthy vacation—I'd made an appointment at an eye clinic for Monday, and, though I may be guilty of hypochondria, I feared bad news.

To my great relief and somewhat to my surprise, the news was not bad. My left eye is still 20-25 (as both eyes were ten years ago), but my right eye is now 20-40, and my astigmatism has worsened. I have the beginnings of cataracts (which I was told I will probably have to deal with "in twenty years or so"), but my pressure is perfect and the ophthalmologist couldn't find anything worrisome in the eye or on the retina. He suggested that the headaches might be due to eyestrain.

So I've ordered two pairs of glasses—one a lined bifocal for computer use and reading (corrected for 24" and 15" respectively) and one pair for driving and distance. I presume I'm about to become a regular glasses-wearer for the first time in my life. Doubtless this will make me even more cranky about camera viewfinders, a subject I am already plenty cranky about. But I will try to remember that it could have been worse. We all go blind in the end, but, as long as we are blessed with sound enough eyes and, more importantly, a living mind with which to see, sight remains the soul's perfect delight.

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "It's really ironic that many of us start reaching our peak of photographic skill...just about the time our eyes start going to pot.

"Under the best of circumstances our eyes lose about 50% of their light transmission capacity by the age of 40, and it's downhill faster after that. The accelerating inability to focus close up (presbyopia) puts most of us into reading glasses or bifocals by age 50, and this can be maddening with some viewfinders.

"Then there's the steady accumulation of floaters. I used to visit a well-known hawk watch site every spring to see and photograph migrating birds of prey. I gave up a few years ago because a retinal tear in my left eye produced so many floaters I saw a dozen 'birds' with every turn of my head. Sigh.

"Might as well make lemonade. The decline in absolute acuity and light transmission as we age can actually facilitate clean composition. It's easier to appreciate dominant visual elements when the smaller details get murkier.

"Or at least I tell myself this as I squint through that danged dark viewfinder."

Featured Comment by R. Edelman: "Mike, if you are developing cataracts, corneal refractive procedures such as LASIK are relatively contraindicated. You don't want to have a procedure on your corneas, and then have cataract surgery just a few years later. Procedures such as LASIK also make the predictability of determining the intraocular lens implant power more difficult than if the cornea had not been reshaped. (For you folks who have had LASIK or similar procedures, get a copy of your pre- and post-procedure eye measurements and lock them in a vault. They may prove helpful if you eventually need cataract surgery.) LASIK also doesn't truly correct presbyopia.

"On the subject of intraocular lens implants, the 'holy grail' of cataract surgery is the correction of presbyopia. There are some intraocular lens implants that address this problem, but hopefully better ones will be available in the future. You might be interested to know that two of the lens implants that are approved by the US FDA, the ReStor and the Tecnis Multifocal, use diffractive optics (think Canon DO lenses) to allow simultaneous distance and near, and some intermediate range vision. The trade off is some glare when looking at point sources of light.

"One should never trivialize eye surgery, no matter what the procedure. But if you had to pick an operation, cataract surgery beats the hell out of open heart surgery."

I just realized something. I was poking around on the Rangefinder forum and I came across a member who had a link, in his signature macro, that said "My ten favorites." I clicked on it.

I think I've done that before. Lots of times. I might even do it habitually.

If you think about it, one thing that's more important to photography now than ever before is editing. Kodak used to estimate that between four and six billion pictures a year were taken worldwide. That must have been in the '80s sometime. Recently, Photobucket alone passed seven and a half billion pictures online. Given the literally hundreds of photo-sharing sites on the web, it seems a fair bet that more than a billion photos probably now get uploaded every month. It's even possible that the number is much more than that. If you then postulate that only a small fraction of the photos taken get posted, then the numbers of pictures being made today might well be ten times what it was back when Kodak was able to count. Maybe more.

No one person can see more that a tiny, tiny fraction of all of them. So editing—self-editing as well as editing filters applied by publications and picture editors in any of a variety of situations—is even more important now than it was in the past.

And it was certainly important in the past. If a National Geographic story had an average of 16 photographs, and the feature photographer shot 650 rolls of film in order to get that story (those numbers are also from a decade or two ago), it's easy to understand how much the editing process was crucial to the result.

It's true that it's helpful to have other people edit our work. But it should be acknowledged that this is hard work, something that only a few (good!) friends will do for you—and that only a few good friends should have to do for you. Voluntarily. The desire to have help is not an excuse to inflict unedited masses of work on casual, innocent viewers.

As a viewer of photographs by unknown photographers online, I certainly don't want to have to wade through unedited work. The stronger the existing edit, the more I'm interested; I don't have time for anything else. At the very least, the photographer should make selections. People who shoot fifty frames of the same subject and post all fifty don't deserve an audience for their work, past whoever they might be specifically providing the pictures for. Showing me fifty unedited pictures says "I don't know what I like. Maybe there's a good one in here somewhere. You decide." No: you decide. It's your work. Take a stand.

But when people say, "Here are my ten favorite pictures of my own work," on the other hand, I'm predisposed to take a look. It interests me to know what they like of their own work. Because, let's face it, however much we might like to believe that all the creativity in photography is in shooting, a good part of the actual creativity of photography also resides in the selection of what pictures to show: it's the confident assertion, "this I like."

Mike

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Featured Comment by Sam Tinson: "Good point Mike. I used to work as a picture editor at a photo-news agency and nothing makes a worse impression than a photographer submitting a huge edit. It shows a lack of confidence and takes up valuable time. On the other hand, I don't go with the habit of including your 'best shot' as a sign-off on emails etc.—unless it is a very, very strong image, it can encourage snap judgment, which is not always in the photographer's best interest...."

Featured (partial) Comment by Benjamin Derge: "Here's another thought: If we can't tell the good from the bad after the picture is taken, how can we ever expect to do it before the picture is taken?"

I got some good chuckles this morning over an article called "Tears in the Stop Bath" over at Idiotic Hat:

I love that "almost comic lack of control over the uniformity of the end product." I also liked the analogy to furniture-making. I'd never thought of John Sexton as Norm Abram before. I sometimes watch a television show called "The New Yankee Workshop," in which a phlegmatic New Englander by the name of Norm Abram wanders around in a gleaming, well-lit, obsessively organized workshop equipped with about $480,000 worth of esoteric power woodworking equipment. He says things like this: "And now we're going to make the anterior verplex hamhock joint. This can be a little tricky—" (note that when Norm says something can be "a little tricky," he means that it's going to require full-scale black magic on the part of ordinary mortals born of women) "—but it helps if you have a handy little piece of equipment called a Remosaic Inside-Out Perglulator. It's a little expensive, and it pretty much only does verplex hamhock joints, but it's a lot better than trying to scratch the joint out of the wood with your fingernails...." We then hear the sound of a high-speed motor and an exquisitely sharpened blade munching away at hard maple, and voilà. I picture guys all over America descending into dank, smelly basements where there was six inches of standing water the previous spring. The basement is littered with heaps of old paint cans and oil-soaked rags, lit by a single hanging light bulb six meters away. They stand there quietly for a moment, staring at an antediluvian dirt-encrusted cast-iron table saw now being used as a storage table for boxes of items last used when Richard Nixon was president, thinking, "Now, where am I going to put a Remosaic Inside-Out Perglulator?"

Even back in the days when silver prints were common, good ones weren't. On the other hand, my aunt's house is full of gorgeous furniture she built herself.

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Featured Comment by JK @ Studio Hatyai: "A good laugh, but not knowing better at the time (and perhaps through 20cc or so of rose-colored filter now), I thoroughly enjoyed almost every hour I spent in the darkroom. Especially safelight-less, pitch-black color darkrooms. They often induced a kind of meditative state that nothing in my life since has ever replaced."

Mike adds: Don't get me wrong, I love watching NYW. But definitely only as an observer....

Featured Comment by John Sartin: "I just have to comment on this one. I spent 30+ years working as a designer /craftsman working in wood. Norm actually visited my shop once while filming a segment of "This Old House" in Tucson. There are many similarities between photography and woodwork that I find amazing. There is the hand/low tech vs. machine/high tech, there is the pro vs. amateur, there are also the common difficulties of trying to make or craft something useful/attractive and worthwhile. The business aspects are similar as well. Changing markets, low budgets, ridiculous deadlines.

"I quit being a woodworker to become a photographer for many reasons. I was tired of the isolation and infrequent interactions with people. My body was also rebelling against the years of heavy lifting, repetitive motion stress, chemical exposure and breathing sawdust. I will also admit to feeling a bit jaded in my attitude with amateur woodworkers coming into the shop seeking camaraderie yet being totally unaware that the similarities of what we were doing ended when you have to factor in budgets and deadlines.

"Now I have a small general photography business and work with people often and occasionally wish for isolation. I am shooting and processing film and becoming interested in alt process work and am concerned/cautious about the health considerations. I am keenly aware of the fact that there are many amateur photographers with creative and technical skills far superior to mine that will never have to consider budgets or deadlines.

"Nirvana is always over the next hill but photography is a cool thing to practice on the way. I really don't miss the woodshop."

I just wanted to mention in passing that I might still buy a DP2, despite Ken's review. No, I guess it's not the DMD, and that's too bad—but then, nothing else is, either; the DMD appears to be beyond the range of the technically feasible for the world's otherwise demonstrably competent cameramakers, for what reasons I know not.

One of my favorite cameras, one that I used only for a year or so in about 1986 or '87, was an Exakta 66 Model II. It had a fascinating backstory, but it was a real clunker—no light meter, a wildly inaccurate finder, and film advance as touchy as a sadistic dictator with a migraine. It could really barely perform basic camera functions adequately. But it had one of the best lenses I've ever used, and the results I got with it were just outstanding. I have some framed in my house to this day. Of all the cameras and lenses that have passed through my hands over the years, that's one I wish I'd kept.

The thing that appeals to me about the DP2 despite the proliferating accounts of its various and sundry shortcomings is that it seems to get two things very right—the lens, and the related perplex of image quality. It seems to me that over the years, a great many photographers have put up with all manner of inconvenience to get the results they crave. If you've ever lugged around an 8x10 on a tripod, even briefly, I'm sure you know what I mean. So which would you rather have: a beautifully built, ergonomically perfect camera that gives you so-so image quality at best, or a hunk of antediluvian junk held together with baling wire and chewing gum that yields image quality that's really outstanding? Given that choice—putting it that way—in my view it's not even a question; the conclusion's foregone.

The DP2 seems to do some things wrong, but the really important things right. As I read more and more about it, and see more results from it, the more the feeling sneaks up on me that I could do good things with it.

Maybe not, but I might want to see for myself. I could chalk it up to a learning experience. That's how I justify most everything I want to do, even when doing it doesn't make perfect sense.

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By John Bates

Noam Chomsky has infamously stated, "There is no such thing as the probability of a sentence." For that, he is roundly mocked by computational linguists everywhere, whose statistical models have delivered tremendous development in the practical analysis of spoken and written speech.

His argument, though, is worth considering, and it is much more subtle than it sounds. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is only the starting point of his critique: a sentence that is syntactically correct, and which can be assigned a (low) probability under statistical models, but which is semantically meaningless. (Of course, by virtue of its becoming a standard example in linguistics, it has become both more probable and more meaningful, although not in a way that is easily amenable to standard analysis.) Some computational linguists will argue that because that string of words is clearly possible, it is open to consideration, and that various approaches will weed out semantically meaningless cruft, much as the human mind, fundamentally a statistical engine, will puzzle over and then discard nonsense.

Chomsky's argument goes beyond the mere syntactic/semantic split, though. Computational linguists generally start with a set of utterances, text, or whole corpora, examining word and feature frequencies. By using these starting points, they build after-the-fact models of language. They can map those models to search for or summarize both syntactic and semantic features, e.g. named entity recognition, topic selection, or bias detection. They regard words and combinations of words as mere (ha!) random events, sequences of which can be assigned specific meanings. Chomsky dismisses that randomness. In his view, words have meaning. Words and sentences are created by people.

That's not to say that Noam Chomsky is some kind of starry-eyed mystic claiming special status for the human soul. Instead, his point (or rather, my interpretation of his point) is that words are objects of communication between two deliberative entities, and that the meaning of a sentence is therefore only interpretable taken in that context. As I write this sentence, it is the product of the sum total of all of my experiences and decisions up to this point, as well as the physical apparatus that I am using to deliver it. As you read it, I am making physical changes in your brain. Right now! You can't stop me! Ha!

Statistical models tend to strip away this context. His point might be better taken as something closer to: you can't predict what I'm going to say next, and I can't predict how you'll interpret what I say. Except, of course, for the context that we share. If I stand on the corner and talk about the coming apocalypse, you can probably guess quite a bit about me and my current mental state. If I babble instead about colorless green ideas, you're bound to be lost, and I cease to be communicating. Regardless, the likelihood of the words that I use has little bearing on the act of communication.

As someone who dabbles in both computational linguistics and statistical processes, I can take issue with this argument. I can point to numerous techniques that incorporate broader contexts into analyses. I can illustrate problem after problem that has fallen to our tools, and I cannot disparage anybody for attempting new challenges. But ACQUINE clearly demonstrates the shortcomings articulated by Chomsky. Photography, like writing, is fundamentally an act of communication, requiring the full context of a human's knowledge to go beyond the shallowest parse.

The frame is a perfect example. Subconsciously, we clearly do prefer images with boundaries. Consciously, or possibly semantically, we are able to eliminate them from our consideration of an image, or to view them as an extraneous feature. ACQUINE's developers must have forgotten about that, probably because they are so easily elided from our perception. But on the social networks, people posting simple snapshots rarely frame, while people who are trying to be "artists" do. Artists post in black-and-white (why? context, again...) but parents dump their flash memory cards to the web.

Obviously (at least, to me) the ACQUINE developers are not idiots. They know all this better than I do. They are attempting a grand thing: analyzing the affective perception of visual content. And there are some pretty cool refinements that are clearly possible: for example, clustering the responses of the raters can lead to social filtering, so that all of us who are Callahan fans can be distinguished from the infrared HDR cat lovers.

But "collective intelligence" and social filtering is at best a highly refined popularity contest, and fails at the one task that is most interesting: finding and evaluating truly original content. For, if it is original, it is, by definition, low probability, and also incomparable. How can you rate that which has never before been seen, if you can't understand it?

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Featured Comment by Seinberg: "Johns Hopkins had natural language processing (i.e. computational linguistics) talks every Tuesday this past semester. I attended many of them, as someone whose research is not in natural language processing but who takes a serious interest in it and have dabbled with it in the past. The first guest lecturer was Martin Kay, one of the fathers of computational linguistics. Someone asked him point-blank whether the standard approach taken today by the Big Names like Google and the professors at the most celebrated computational linguistics university on the planet (Hopkins) is enough to eventually pass the Turing Test. The standard approach is statistical analysis. His response was immediate and he said, 'No. I think it will be a new method not in use today.'

He did eventually back-track a bit and admit that statistical analysis is helpful for several very specifics processes. For instance, part of speech tagging, for which statistical analysis is 97 or 98% accurate given a good training corpus (far better than the majority of humans do).

Where statistical analysis falls down, however, tends to be precisely where Chomsky seems to be going with Green Photographs: understanding context. Reference resolution is still a wide open problem. If several people are discussed in previous sentences, resolving pronouns like 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' etc. are very difficult. In parsing the semantic content of sentences, these pronouns should be linked to the entities to which they refer. Humans do this automatically, but current computational methods do it poorly. Statistical analysis does this very very poorly, particularly with complicated language. The current best we can do (more or less) is 'sentiment extraction,' where analysis tries to extract small parts of the meaning to get the general idea of what people are saying e.g. in blogs. For instance, 'does this blogger support Obama or McCain?' But that's easy.

"Then there's the problem of the pink elephant in the room. Imagine the date is September 12th in 2001. Everyone who talks to each other says things like, 'How could it have happened?' 'Isn't it terrible?' 'How are you and your family?' Every person in the US—and probably most in the world—knew precisely what had happened. But a statistical parser would be at a complete loss, because it wouldn't have any context in which to understand the Pink Elephant of 9/11 that was in the air.

"So statistical analysis needs to be augmented (or: should be used to augment) some other method, and that other method needs to include knowledge in its analysis. Then, of course, statistics might be used to determine with 95% probability that on 9/12 the Pink Elephant is the events collectively known as 9/11 (or 'the terrorist attacks' or whatever).

"One final link. A professor at my university is trying to incorporate knowledge into natural language processing, although perhaps to his detriment: he uses very little statistical processing, claiming the whole venture is for the birds."

Mike comments: Where I come down on ACQUINE is that it wouldn't work even if it worked.

One thing I've been threatening to do for a while now is to take a single photograph and map different "modes of approach" to it—that is, specify some of the various ways (formalistic, coloristic, epistemological, factual, connotational, emotional, etc., etc.) different viewers might choose to think about it, giving concrete examples of each mode of approach so people might actually understand what the heck I was talking about. I might still do it, too...another of those "one day" projects. At the very least I think it might help illuminate why there can't be a single standard for aesthetics, even if we don't define aesthetics as personal to begin with—which, incidentally, I do.

Featured Comment by Paul Pomeroy: "In Claude Shannon's seminal 1948 paper, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' he says up front that, 'The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.'

I think most people overlook the full significance of what he was saying. In part, he was saying that 'information' doesn't exist in the middle. What goes across the wire is without meaning and 'meaningless information' is an oxymoron. Information, true to its -ation suffix, is a process. It's not a noun, it's a happening and for people it happens mostly under the level of consciousness.

"The history of computational intelligence is riddled with examples of seemingly brilliant people who have made the mistake of thinking the meaning was in the message. This has lead to all sorts of naive optimism and costly errors. As an example of the later, consider the 1999 Mars probe that crashed because one device was 'sending information' using imperial units (pounds) to a device that was 'receiving information' in metric units.

"My favorite example of naive optimism involves an Artificial Intelligence project funded by the military. The goal was a machine that could look at a photograph (or real-time image) and locate any hidden enemy tanks. This was to be done using neural networks which were 'trained' by showing them thousands of actual photographs some including tanks that were hidden (some not very well, others so well that experts couldn't find them) and others with no tanks at all.

"After a surprisingly short training period the neural networks suddenly started getting really good at indicating which photos had the hidden tanks. In fact, they were perfect. So the military started trying them out in real life situations and...wait for it...they were completely useless (actually worse than purely random guessing).

"It took quite awhile to finally figure out what had happened. It turns out that the original set of photos had been taken over a two day period. They first photographed locations without any tanks and then they brought in the tanks, hid them and took another set of photographs. No one took notice of the fact that on the second day the sky was overcast while it had been sunny during the first shoot. No one, that is, except for the trained neural network. So, for about a million dollars the military got a device that could tell them whether or not a photo was taken on a sunny day.

"There hasn't really been a whole lot of advances since then. And maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that finding aesthetic quality in a photograph is a bit tougher. Unless, of course, it turns out that aesthetics is just a fancy word for tanks on an overcast day."

It is a fine day in May, and the trees are leafing out, showing the bright tender green I associate with newness, and the sun is shining, and the news from Costa Rica is that Bill Jay has died in his sleep.

It is thus my reluctant duty this fine morning to write an obituary for Bill, a task for which I feel wholly inadequate as well as wholly unprepared. I knew his work well and he himself in passing. Bill only recently moved to Costa Rica; I last talked to him just before he left the United States. After a long and active teaching career at Arizona, he planned a long and relaxing retirement, which hardly got its legs underneath it before it ended. I think he was still shy of seventy years old, and I am old enough myself now to consider that a young age at which to bring things to a close.

Bill Jay was not a major photographer, although I think he was a very, very good one (I like portraits, and especially portraits of photographers, and I like black-and-white, especially 35mm black-and-white. We might be talking about a good match here—although I really do think he is—was—a gifted portraitist). Bill was also perhaps not a great critic or a major theorist of photography, although he was one of the best to read, and even though he co-wrote (with his great good friend David Hurn, of Magnum) one of the very best books of photo-instruction ever written. He was not the most important magazine editor of the past half century, although he was very good at that, too—and by now you've got the pattern.

Most current photographers and photo-enthusiasts know him from his "Endnotes" column in Lenswork magazine. Photographers of my generation know him better as the author of a series of wide-ranging essays nominally about photography, collected in several Nazraeli Press books, the most famous of which is Occam's Razor: An Outside-In View of Contemporary Photography, which is currently, but no doubt not permanently, out of print.

Mary Virginia Swanson, who knew him much better, has written a much better obituary, with a far more complete selection of links. Brooks Jensen has posted a portrait of him at Lenswork.com.

Bill Brandt by Bill Jay

I marked hearing the news by listening to Ivan Moravec's recording of Beethoven's 14th piano sonata, which I've heard too often and reserve for special occasions now, while rereading, for about the sixth time, "The Family of Man," just to hear Bill's wise, iconoclastic voice. But of course as I paged toward it, what I couldn't help catching was a line he quoted approvingly in the essay prior: "There is something bloody fishy about human existence."

Bill Jay was a lifelong enthusiast and supporter of photographers. He was photography's best fan. He was one of those who paid attention, who understood and appreciated how people used cameras to express themselves. He saw the linkages between the best work by good people and the fullness and richness and paradox of this fishy existence.

Bill was born in Britain. He died in Costa Rica. He was a citizen of the art of photography. He gave us a lot. He's left too soon, on a day in Spring.

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I've watched this three times, and it makes me laugh each time. It's not about cameras explicitly, but just think about cameras while you watch it.

I mean, people were still using chamberpots and traveling by covered wagon when they first worked out how to do photography, and not a whole lot changed for a hundred and fifty years. Just refinements, basically. I'm not even old, and I remember when they first made 800-speed film that was good enough to use. When I was young they were arguing passionately about whether tying the exposure controls directly to the light meter was a good thing or not. Ten or twelve years ago, the first digital cameras I used had like 200,000 pixels and the image quality looked like one of those 1950s televisions that were as big as a washing machine and had a screen about eight inches across.

Today, everything is amazing, and nobody's happy.

Here's another point, which I'll also make using a non-photography-related link. In the comments to yesterday's post, Craig Arnold said, only partly tongue-in-cheek,

You wild and crazy man. You have forgotten that we are talking about two different pursuits!

1. Taking pictures. All of your choices are equally good. A good picture-taker adapts fairly quickly to the equipment and gets on with it.

2. Collecting cameras. Now here of course they are not all equally good. Every tiny feature counts. This is the hobby discussed on forums. It's also very easy to be good at this hobby, all you need is money, a strong opinion and a thick skin. For people in this camp your cop-out is inexcusable, almost incomprehensible.

Take a look at this page. (I hope we don't crash his server.) Skip to the section about two-fifths of the way down called "Grounded Grid Cap Test" (it's linked at the top, where it says "Go to a mini cap test below") and see if you can figure out just from the pictures what's going on. Just scroll down; you'll get it. Do you see? He's wiring a series of different caps into a hand-built preamplifier to see how they sound. I swear I laughed out loud (really, "LOL") when I got to those two "Gigantic Russian alu/teflon foil caps" strapped to sticks and suspended from the edges of the chassis.

Now, if this were somehow part of your job, and your boss was making you do this, wouldn't you just want to shoot yourself? He's obviously doing this because, for him, it qualifies as fun. Geekout, esoteric fun of the kind that many of us might recognize in spirit. It makes me think of the time I made hundreds of 8x10 fiber prints when I was testing a handful of different lenses for bokeh properties. I would have gotten the same information from RC prints. But I made, washed, and dried like 200 fiber prints in the course of my tests. Why? Because I was being a nut, that's why. Having fun.

(At that link, I also love the two little three-line paragraphs at the end. If that doesn't sum up geekout hobbies in a hundred words or less, I don't know what does.)

So anyway, long way to go for a small point: however photography is fun for you, it's okay with me. It's not hurting anybody (well, at least not if you manage to stay civil about it—when people start slinging insults and shouting enraged things about each other's mothers because they can't agree whether a rear wheel is a good or a bad thing, I start to take a dim view, I admit). So if you want to learn every last trifling feature of a bunch of cameras you don't own, who am I to tell you it's wrong? Knock yourself out, my brother. Fun is fun. There are lots of ways we find it.

Mike

P.S. I found the Louis CK clip at Eolake's blog. His (Louis CK's) other stuff is very blue, so be warned.

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Featured Comment by Jay Moynihan: "Excellent. Have you seen this?"

Mike replies: That is hilarious. Not sure who would appreciate that more, people who fly a lot or people who read Kafka.

Featured Comment by Paul De Zan: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with camera collecting/measurabation as a hobby; what's galling is that the majority of practitioners think they are 'into photography' when they are into nothing of the kind. The obsessive study of camera equipment is the very best way I know to completely avoid committing acts of photography."

Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "Are you telling us you're a geek, Mike?!?!"

Mike replies: Not just a geek, a blogging geek.

Featured Comment by Mark Scheuern: "Love the video.

"I recently was in the market for a portable GPS receiver I can move between our cars and spent some time researching them on the internet. Mixed in with the good advice was much whining about what struck me as trivial things, like how well the text-to-speech algorithms can pronounce street names with foreign or obscure spellings.

"I mean, here's the tiny gadget that can simultaneously lock onto four Department of Defense satellites in space, and, based on the timing of the signals (corrected for both special and general relativistic effects) and by calculating where they intersect, can pinpoint your position within a few feet, give you spoken street directions, and tell you where the nearest Barnes and Noble is. All for $200. And people are complaining because it takes a minute to find the satellites. Also, predictably, there was much Garmin vs. TomTom vitriol.

"I have a background in physics and I think knowing a bit about how things work actually makes them seem more special."

Featured Comment by Marcin Wajda: "I think it was Terry Pratchett who said that humans have a special anti-amazement filter built in. Otherwise we would spend entire days walking around with our mouths open wondering at how can we survive basking in the light of what is technically speaking a permanent nuclear explosion...."

I've had my problems lately. For one thing, I cannot seem to take a decent picture. Do you ever go through those dry spells? Sometimes I've felt I could take good shots in my sleep—or at least every time I pick up a camera. Not recently. My best shots lately are only competent, and sometimes not even that. I've been flailing around like a tyro. I have to do something...get out more, work harder. Something.

I'm also dealing with some annoying glimmers of "old man problems." I'm 52, which is not old, although it is undeniably middle-aged. Those of you who are 40 or older but not yet 45 can take heart—a few years ago, the DSM IV, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the psychiatric profession, revised middle age upwards, defining it as 45–65 instead of 40–60 as it had been defined previously. Seems people are living longer, and are remaining healthier and more active longer, so they extended young adulthood. If you're 44, you are—officially!—not middle aged yet.

I, on the other hand, take naps. Young adults don't take naps.

A number of years ago, my brother complained about a dog that raised its leg on a fire hydrant. "That's such a cliché," he said (still makes me laugh). Similarly, my nascent old-man problems are annoying clichés too (because, after all, I know some genuinely old men who are pretty young at heart, and in mind). For one, I'm becoming a bit of a pack-rat. Where'd that come from? I responded to the encroaching clutter in my house by buying a book about dealing with clutter. I read it enthusiastically, and learned a lot about clutter and what to do about it. So now I know. I just haven't done anything about it, is all. That book is still around here somewhere. Probably buried under some stacks of papers.

I'm also telling my son the same stories over and over. That's more annoying to him than it is to me, but it's annoying enough to me. When I was younger I told myself I wasn't going to do that. But I do it anyway.

And I've gotten cheap, too. Has anyone bought a Kindle 2 yet? If so, do you like it? Was it worth what it cost? I really want one, but I can't seem to pull the trigger on actually spending the money.

It would probably help with the clutter, a lot of which is books.

I think it's an old man thing: a tendency towards miserliness starting to manifest, like a case of hives.

A more serious consequence of my nascent miserliness is that I really want a Sony A900, but I can't seem to bring myself to actually buy the thing. I have the money, and photography is my "thing," after all, and I could probably make the camera pay for itself in a year or two. What I'm saying is, it doesn't even need rationalizing. But I can't seem to pull the trigger on the purchase.

It's very annoying to me that Sony has ported so many lenses over from the old Minolta versions, but not the one I want most; I tell myself that that's why I'm not plunking down for the A900. Yeah, that's it.

But I suspect it's really because I'm too cheap to spend $3k and watch it slowly (or not so slowly) dissipate down to nothing. I should just buy the damn thing. In this case, miserliness is counter-productive.

It's bad enough having finished my curmudgeon training several years ago, and being a full-fledged one of those. It's worse watching yourself become a cliché, right before your own eyes.

Okay, time for my nap.

Mike

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UPDATE: Thanks for all the great comments. I feel much better now.