I know I have asked this question before, but it's been a few years and I can't find it. Anything you want to see? Now's the time to say something, for sure. 

I'm very energized by this morning's work. I ran my plans past my friend Gordon, and he had some valuable input. My next task is twofold: 1.) to set a schedule for completion of the various stages toward completion, and 2.) to come up with a list of features I want on the new blog, divided into "must have" and "nice to have" categories. (One of Gordon's ideas.) 

I chose a theme based on the way it handles pictures. I think you'll really like this. By clicking on a picture in a post you will first see it enlarged but uncropped on a non-distracting background, and then if the file is larger you'll be able to zoom in to the limits of the file size. That means I can finally meaningfully present artwork as well as illustrations. Moderated commenting is of course a must-have. Another of Gordon's ideas is that we won't port over all of the old blog; we will have an archive section for old posts from the last 17 years on TypePad*, but these will be a curated and limited selection. And they'll be indexed, by category, title, and date. I also know people want a reliable and robust RSS feed. Naturally the new site will be responsive, as Mike catches up to 2012 with a whooosh. 

I'm on the verge of hiring a developer, a decision which should be reached by tonight (four days ahead of the timetable).

Let me hear from you! 

Mike

*And maybe even a few of my old posts from the first two years on Blogger, columns from Black & White Photography and Darkroom User magazines in the UK, editorials from Photo Techniques, and ancient articles from Camera & Darkroom née Darkroom Photography where I got my start...before it was owned by Larry Flynt! Maybe even a few articles from my student days in Washington D.C., like my notorious article about Richard Avedon. Hey, I was young.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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This is a pretty major announcement. Existential, possibly, even, for this site. 

It's time for another reset. The Online Photographer has been on TypePad since 2007, and on the Web since November 2005. Unfortunately, we will not quite celebrate our 20th anniversary here: TypePad announced yesterday that it is closing down at the end of September and that all content will be removed from the Web. Including all of TOP. For me, it's a lot of content and not much time. Jeez.

So I'm starting by making fresh backups of everything and will immediately begin the task of building anew on a different service. Whether I can export the old content over or not is something I do not know. They certainly didn't give us a lot of notice...at least not specifically; the handwriting has been on the wall for a while now. I probably should have done something by now, but, you know, hindsight is 20/20. (Ironically, 2020 is when I should have done something. Let's move on.)

I'm leaning toward relaunching on SquareSpace (or perhaps Hostinger or Wix)* and am now actively looking for professional help with that. I would welcome your comments! Not something I know much about.

Does anyone know a good SquareSpace or Wix site designer who might be available, um, soon? I've tried and failed to build my own SquareSpace site in the past. 

Dangerous pivot point? 
This is a "dangerous opportunity," as John F. Kennedy used to say in his speeches. He said it was the translation for "crisis" from the Chinese. I'm told that's not quite correct. The Chinese word for crisis is wēijī (危机), the first character (wēi, 危) meaning danger and the second (jī, 机) meaning a turning point or inflection point.

But it's time. Maybe this will be good for me. This old site had gotten clunky, ineffective, and kind of fusty—it's not responsive, and there's zero SEO. Basic functions have been deteriorating. For one thing, simply loading illustrations on to the site has gotten extremely problematic and frustrating in recent months, soaking up a lot of time and leading to regular frustration.

Can't say I'm happy with the short notice—awkward time for this to happen, since I'm also in the run-up to a medical operation with a long recuperation period—but maybe we'll be okay.

Any advice, information, opinions or thoughts?

—Mike, the mostly incompetent TOP IT guy

*I've made multiple attempts to come up to speed with WordPress and it's just too complicated for me. I'm an "old dog" in the Learning Tricks Dept. The simpler this can be, the better. Also, I know a lot of people like the idea of Substack, but affiliate links can't be used in emails, so I'm leery of launching on anything that's basically an email newsletter. I'd like to continue as a classic, plain, old-style free blog.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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...It's that portraits have more or less gone away. At least in my little corner of existence. Portraits used to be a mainstream thing—understood even by the general public as one of the basic purposes of photography, a major category of subject matter, the subject of books and exhibitions, and something that photographers big and little could sell and that normal people routinely hired photographers to do for them.  

It used to be that if you offered to do a portrait for free, it was welcomed as something of value. Now if I offer to do a portrait for free it's more often looked upon with puzzlement, if not something less welcome, as if to say, "Why would I need you for a portrait?" If you ask an acquaintance or a stranger to pose or model for you, young women (if you're a man) as often as not assume you're being lecherous and parents of children are as apt as not to view you with suspicion. (Maybe part of the difference is that I used to be a handsome athletic young man and now I'm an older man. Another part of the problem is that I'm an introvert and have difficulty putting people at ease, although I'm certainly not averse to engaging strangers in conversation.)

There might be another factor that hasn't changed since the old days but might have gotten worse—people are worried about how they'll look. It's not like this is new; people were shy and reticent about having their picture taken the whole time I've been doing it. But with today's pitilessly sharp lenses and resolution that's greater than that of the human eye, sometimes it's like a photo of yourself was calculated to make you look as bad as possible. People are leery. And have grown more so IMO. 

(I'm especially amused when gearheads online ask the question "what's the best portrait lens?" and everyone proceeds to discuss the sharpest, most corrected lenses. Hmm. They haven't looked at a sufficient amount of successful and beautiful portraits from the past. Sometimes extreme sharpness works in a portrait—Karsh, for example—but more often it's a liability. During the peak era of photographic portraiture, photographers fanatically sought out lenses and techniques that gave just the right degree and type of softness.)

This is my great-aunt Christine Love Johnston, my father's father's sister, who died (like a rock star) at age 27 in 1922. We don't know why or how; her story is now lost as far as I know. Note the balanced and well-judge unsharpness—that was by design, not because of technology limitations at the time. She would have gone to a photographer's studio and commissioned this portrait, or her mother Lucy did. The photographer would have been a portrait specialist or at least a photographer who did portraits often. It had to have been taken in the nineteen-teens or early '20s. She would have dressed nicely—note her beautiful hair—and he would have had a studio setup all worked out. Such a portrait might have been a middle-class or better convention, but it was certainly a common thing to have done then.

And it wasn't only photographs. My grandfather had his portrait painted. When I was young I sat for an artist who made a portrait of me in pastels. Now lost.

Portraits—photographic ones—were something I was good at and liked doing. At the peak of my photo business I got $675 for a sitting and $100 per print, and that was in the late 1980s and early '90s—get out your inflation calculator! Good money for a schlub. I still do a portrait from time to time, and I can't say I work hard at figuring out how to do more. But when I do occasionally try, it usually falls flat. These days, people take their own portraits. Selfies. They also see lots of pictures of themselves taken by others and all they have to do in that case is say, "I like that one! Can you send me that?" Done. Maybe it wouldn't make a print, but who needs prints? Family albums aren't made of paper any more. 

I'm not saying all this is bad. More people than ever are taking pictures of their kids and loved ones and having fun with it and often doing quite well at it, too. Look at the title of the post again...the thing I miss. The way it was is just something I miss, is all. 

Niches
I wonder what it's like for portrait "collectors." By that I mean photographers who deliberately set out to make a body of work of portraits of people who are eminent, interesting, or accomplished in some way, in general or in some specific field. That's one little particular niche of photographing. Recently, most people who do that try to create an archive of "celebrities," which has a specific circumscribed meaning in contemporary culture, meaning mainly actors, singers and athletes—"stars." There's no real definition of "stars" but we all kind of know who is and who isn't. That's only a subset of prominent people, of course. Any of the great portrait photographers you might name have a certain sort of person they sought out to photograph—rock stars, the rich, politicians, scientists. Photojournalists might accrue a body of portraits of people who do something newsworthy. One subset-within-a-subset I've always been interested is people who photograph photographers! My friend Arnold Crane was one of those, although he's not known now. So was Bill Jay, who was always self-deprecating about his own work but who created a fine lifetime project of photographer portraits. Of course you could photograph interesting people in any field and it would be interesting to somebody. Writers, physicists, artists, socialites, dancers, inventors, tech bros, race car drivers, rock climbers. Could be anything really. Heck, Robert Bergman, one of the rare true "colorists" in my opinion, created his body of work making portraits of homeless people! Time was when a great portrait photographer might seek out someone famous and request their cooperation to make a portrait of them. It usually worked because the famous person was aware of the value of cultivating their "brand" (as the common parlance puts it), and the photographer was interested in cultivating their portfolio, so a kind of symbiosis of interests applied. Are photographers still doing that? They must be, but I don't really know. 

There's no celebrity like a niche celebrity. I recall a physics professor who went to a big international conference. He described it to us by saying it was like all the very biggest celebrities in the world were gathered in one place. All the biggest names. His excitement was off the charts. Of course they were nobody you or I would have heard of, but to him they were as famous and dazzling as Taylor Swift to a tween girl.

If you were a portrait photographer and wanted to create a body of work of some group of people or other, who would they be? What kind or type of people most interests you?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Situational awareness, it's called. Yes, photographers have to be aggressive to get the shot—the stories are legion, from elbows in the press scrum to obnoxious street photographers getting in peoples' faces. But you always have to have situational awareness.

Frenchman Benjamin Bonzi, up two sets to love, was ahead in the third set and serving for the match in the first round of the United States Open Tennis Championships against Russian Daniil Medvedev. It's a tense moment; spectators need to be respectful. He nervously netted his first serve. Perhaps erroneously thinking the match was over, an as-yet unidentified photographer then ran along the edge of the playing area, where he's definitely not allowed to be, to get to a better vantage point. The Chair Umpire then said, over the P.A. system, "Wait, please. Not now! Get off the court, please." He awarded a do-over to Bonzi, allowing him to take his first serve again.

Hopefully it was the biggest "oops" of this guy's career* 

The opportunity was immediately (and predictably) seized by Medvedev, who, despite actually being a pretty thoughtful and analytical guy, has long had a reputation as a "bad boy" with a sometimes sour and dyspeptic attitude. He can get a chip on his shoulder and is occasionally not entirely in control of his emotions. (A television announcer in Sydney, Australia, humorously commented that Medvedev "has yet to be accused of being a class act.") Inciting the crowd, Medvedev immediately went over to the referee and began berating him. Egged on by Medvedev, the crowd responded with an unruly protest, repeatedly preventing Bonzi from serving. It was six minutes before play could resume. 

Medvedev then escaped the match point against him and went on to win the third set in a tiebreaker. Buoyed by surviving his close call, and with Bonzi perhaps understandably rattled by the hostility of the crowd (remember, Bonzi had done nothing wrong at all), Medvedev then dominated the fourth set 6–0 to even the match. 

It's worth noting that the referee's ruling was entirely correct and in accordance with the rules. His mistake, if anything, was that when things got out of hand he probably ought to have called in the Tournament Referee to clarify his ruling for the spectators. It would have created a delay which might have allowed him to regain control of the crowd. 

It's also worth mentioning that disrupting an opponent's momentum when the chips are down and the odds are against you is standard practice with a lot of tennis players at the highest level. Djokovic does it routinely, often discovering that he has some transient "medical issue" when oh-by-the-way things aren't going his way and he needs to disrupt his opponent's rhythm and the flow of the match. That's all that was really going on: Medvedev had an opportunity to create a distraction to get out of trouble, and he took it. Many of the top guys are detail-oriented to an apparently fanatical degree, even in matters like this, because matches and even tournaments can hang on things that outwardly appear to give them only a small edge. It's no accident that Medvedev is known for being an especially adroit strategist. His stamina and physical gifts are somewhat lacking, but  he's managed to get the most out of his talent, having been as high as No. 1 in the world. In winning his sole major, at this very tournament in 2021, he prevented Novak Djokovic from becoming only the third male player in history to win a true Grand Slam. I personally think he's going to make a great coach for some lucky player someday, if he chooses to go that route. However, he's been struggling for some time now, dropping out of the top ten and winning only one match in the majors in 2025, after winning 24 matches across all four majors in 2024.

And he lost this time, too. Benjamin Bonzi recovered and won the fifth set 6–4, claiming the match—remarkably, the third time overall and the second time this year that the otherwise little-known world No. 51 Bonzi has beaten the renowned world No. 13 Medvedev in the first round of majors. Sometimes, one player just has another's number, like when a higher-ranked football team has a losing record against one particular lower-ranked nemesis. The two players shook hands amiably after the match, too—no hard feelings; it's just gamesmanship. They both understand that. 

Of course, after the match, Medvedev childishly smashed a few of his sponsor's racquets sitting in his courtside chair. Hey, you're a grownup, now, man. (Medvedev is 29.) So grow up. 

The photographer who started the whole thing has not been identified, but the U.S. Open confirmed that he was ejected from the Bonzi-Medvedev match after the incident and had his credentials revoked for the remainder of the tournament. Always got to maintain situational awareness. 

Mike

*Ever had an "oops"? I've had a couple, but I ain't talking.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Mike Plews: "About the first month into my TV news career I got designated local airport pool for President Ford's visit to Sioux City. I got caught up in the moment and wandered between Ford and his Secret Service detail. Did not go well, but was not ejected. Live and learn."

Adam Lanigan: "I was shooting photos for a long-running, but now dearly departed, annual local music festival. For a few years they were also bringing in a number of notable comedians as a fairly natural extension the rest of the festival, which was focused on independent artists from all over. Having really only shot live music shows, I was used to moving around the room freely to get better angles, but now I was shooting the headlining comedy show in a still small and intimate venue (~200 capacity). At one point, I moved to the rear corner and stepped up almost to stage height on some steps to get some clearer shots over the crowd—thinking that in the darkened corner and away from the bright stage lights this would not be an issue. This, unfortunately, drew the comedian's attention and I was the target for some immediate sour looks and a few barbs about being on their stage, etc. I can still feel the immediate heat and the 'Oh, what have I done?' of that moment—shifting from a being a moving ghost in the background to a full-on target in an instant. Luckily this was only locally embarrassing rather than internationally, but definitely that same situational awareness issue and lack of understanding of the rules of engagement."

Edward Taylor: "As a young newspaper photojournalist, I was photographing a US Senate hearing with my trusty Canon F1, and apparently the shutter was making too much noise. The chairman of the hearing stopped the proceedings and asked me to take fewer shots. Prior to that day, I had prided myself on my stealthy approach to news gathering. The feeling of being singled out in that chamber has always stuck with me, and it changed my future behavior as well."

Alex Buisse: "I shot tennis at the Rio Olympics, and there were very specific and strict rules about where you could shoot from, and when you could move. The photographer has been identified and said that he was assured by security that it was OK to move at this particular time. Shooting a first round of a major tournament has insanely complicated logistics, requiring to rush from match to match hoping to capture the important moments, especially the upsets, so it would be very understandable that the photographer wouldn’t have known what was going on and relied on security to see if it was OK to move. All in all, I am far from convinced that he did anything wrong!"

Mike replies: Others have opined elsewhere that Medvedev should have been penalized the point for raising such a ruckus over it. At the very least, the photographer must have found it excruciating that his mild faux pas was blown up into such an intense and extended diversion from the game. 

     

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I've been battling a marauder. He eluded all my traps and forced me to consider lethal force. 

Before I get into that, a few notes about animal life this year at TOP Rural World Headquarters, a.k.a. my little farmhouse in the Finger Lakes.

For the first time in years, I had no robins. I did finally take down the robin high-rise on top of the lamp at the corner of the house in back—they had built it up year after year until they could barely get in under the soffits. It was seven inches high by the time of demolition. I tried to make up for the lost housing infrastructure by commissioning two beautiful robin shelves from 13-year-old Anthony Sensenig, son of my woodworker friend Andrew. He did a nice job, but we made a tactical error and varnished them—the birds like untreated wood better, I later learned. I located them, as the birds prefer, on north- and east-facing walls. But of course they didn't touch them. Too new and unfamiliar. I certainly saw a lot of robin mating activity going on during the Springtime, but where were they nesting? Not around the house. 

But I did have a pair of doves for the first time. Maybe two pairs, I was never sure. One of the doves seemed to settle into the gutter, which showed poor foresight. Actually I shouldn't judge; I don't know bird culture. Maybe gutters are a high-prestige address for doves.

Heading to the pool-table shed one night after dark, I startled a snake, and he startled me—I almost stepped on him in fact. It was a garter snake, which are common around here. Between two and three feet long. I tossed a few pebbles at him and he vamoosed. I'm just as happy I didn't step on him—they're not poisonous but are known to bite anyway, and I wouldn't have liked getting bitten by any sort of snake. I've been looking out for them on the boardwalk ever since.

As regular readers know, the premises sadly became dogless in early June. I'm still mourning for my dear Butters, but I'm getting used to life without him. Every time I think of him I try to think of something good and of how grateful I am for his company all those years. It tamps down the sadness to approach it that way.

Happy family
Then, finally, very late in the season, a robin couple moved in. The female is small. Why did she start so late, and miss the first nesting cycles in the Springtime and early Summer? I don't know enough about robins to know. She built her nest under the pavilion from scratch in mid to late July, and she did a nice, neat job, too—it's a sturdy, well-crafted nest. Not like the family I had in nearly the same place last year, whose nest was so poorly made it kept falling off the beam or being blown apart by the wind (one of their children was the robin who wouldn't leave the nest). Maybe there wasn't enough mud that year; I won't judge. Anyway, the new couple are model parents. The male hangs around. The two of them got used to me quickly, because I put food out for them regularly and announce my presence when I go by. They never give the "warning call" on my account, or seem to get upset about my presence, even when I come under the pavilion close to the nest. They have three healthy nestlings, who I expect will leave the nest any time now. 

 

But back to the marauder. I occasionally get deer mice in the basement. They get in but can't get out, so over the years I've found eight or ten dried, mummified remains of mice in corners or between old paint cans or boxes. But once, a few years ago, one of them was smart enough to figure out a route up to the kitchen. I use a sort of mousetrap that is supposed to be adaptable to live trapping or kill trapping; it's a 5-gallon bucket with a Planky-Pro and a bit of peanut butter on the end of the plank. Put shavings in the bucket, and you can live trap; three inches of water in the bucket makes it a kill trap—they fall in and drown. My first kitchen marauder was a clever, resourceful mouse—he not only figured out how to raid the kitchen, but after I caught him and threw him behind the woodpile he found his way back into the house again (they do that) and reappeared in the kitchen. I knew it was him because he used the exact same strategies in trying to elude me when I was chasing him. I considered live-trapping, but it was the middle of Winter and bitter cold; if I had released him far from any building in a snow-covered field he probably would have died anyway. So I resorted to kill trapping. That's when I got the Planky-Pro. I didn't like to do it...it offended my sense of justice. He was an exceptional mouse, smart, strong, and resourceful, and he didn't deserved to be un-alived by me. But he was in my kitchen, eating my food and sh*tting on my counters, and sympathy for animals has sensible limits. 

But this time, I thought, I can live trap, because it's Summer, and merely relocating the new clever mouse would still give him a fighting chance at life. So I tried putting shavings in the bucket. Mysteriously, it didn't work—twice, I came down to find the peanut butter licked clean but no mouse in the bucket. The only explanation was that he was being trapped, but was strong enough to jump out of the bucket. Most mice aren't. 

I realized I was probably going to have to replace the shavings with water and make it into a kill trap. But I was uncomfortable with the idea so I did what I usually do in such situations...I procrastinated.

Cheeky bugger
Then I had a bright idea. I get those sometimes. What I could do was put only an inch of water in the bucket. Ever tried to jump out of the shallow end of a pool to a seated position on the pool's edge? Jumping out of shallow water impedes you just that little bit. In an inch of water, he wouldn't drown, but it would probably make it so he couldn't jump out of the bucket. 

It worked in only a couple of hours. He raided the kitchen while I was in the adjacent office, awake and working! Cheeky little bugger. It was midnight. I taped a lid on the bucket, loaded it in the car, and off we went. I drove five miles into the hills, stopped in a remote location by a stand of woods, and set the little guy free. A mouse's heart beats at 450 to 750 beats a minute (oddly, many creatures get about the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime—our lifetime's allotment is roughly the same as a short-lived mouse's or a long-lived tortoise's), and his must have been higher because of fear. When I let him go he quickly burrowed under the thick grasses and stayed motionless, doubtless hoping I'd go away. 

I did.

He doesn't realize he's about to go free

The project took half an hour in the middle of the night. Which is, okay, stupid. But I didn't mind. This way, the mouse doesn't get sentenced to death for being smarter, stronger, and more resourceful than other mice. He gets a chance to live his life. Or, he becomes a quick snack for an owl or another sort of raptor, or a fox, weasel, or, yes, snake. And there's nothing wrong with that. Then, his fate is a mouse's fate; he wasn't born to be the prey of me.

Ferocious fight
The last animal happening I'll tell you about was dramatic. I came into the kitchen and saw a large spider in a web just outside the big plate-glass window. It had trapped a wasp, who was half encased in webbing, but the two of them were energetically engaged in an epic fight. The spider was trying to entomb the wasp in more webbing material and the wasp was not giving up—he kept trying to maneuver his stinger into position to get at the spider, and he kept managing to free it of the webbing. The spider fought while trying to keep clear of the stinger. I watched for a while, fascinated, then ran to get my phone (my phone is always in the other room no matter which room I am in). I managed to record them in focus for quite a few seconds.

A few hours later, they were both still locked in a close embrace, but both were utterly motionless. They were the same way the next day. So unless I'm wrong, and I could be, I think it was a battle to the death—I think both insect warriors died in the titanic fight.

I'd show you the video, but I submitted it to "Daily Dose of Internet." Do you know those? If you happen to see it there, let me know. Even if I watch for it, chances are I'll miss it.

I hope it makes the cut. It's been a long time since I was published.

Life goes on,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco: "Thousands of years from now, when intelligent mice rule the world, the Rodentia geneticists will trace their lineage back to 'Finger Lakes Freddie,' who was spared an early death by a stick-carrying primate who captured him in a bucket and then set him free. A monument will be raised to this primate, who was unaware that this one kind act was the turning point that marked the decline of the Anthropocene and the beginning of the Apodemocene."

Chris Kern: "Re: 'The project took half an hour in the middle of the night ... But I didn't mind. This way, the mouse doesn't get sentenced to death for being smarter, stronger, and more resourceful than other mice. He gets a chance to live his life.' Don’t look now, but you have just made a contribution to deer mouse evolution. If this particular creature survives and breeds, we all may soon be contending with pole-vaulting or trampoline-toting murine escape artists. Let’s just hope they don’t discover AI. My recommendation: save the birds, not the mice."

Mike replies: Chris, meet Ed. Ed, Chris.

James Bullard: "Any live trapped animal has to be taken twice their range for release to ensure that they don't return. In the case of a mouse that is three miles away. You went farther than necessary.

"That said, it is illegal to relocate nuisance animals in New York (and several other states), leaving killing them as your only legal option. Or at least not publicly posting your actions. The logic, I am told, is the relocation is cruel, and 90% of relocated animals don't survive. I am puzzled how they could possibly know that. Is DEC taking animal censuses? The other puzzle to me is that DEC relocates nuisance bears. I'm not sure how they rationalize that."

Mike replies: But...he's only a nuisance when he's in my kitchen, eating my banana, right? (Seriously, he ate a banana.) When he's out in a field or the woods, he's just a mouse.

Amine Sultan: "Get a cat or, better yet, cats, but ones that love to hunt (usually females but not exclusively). Cats that hunt will do so even when they are well-fed. Some cats live in perfect harmony with mice or birds under a roof or even outside. Oh, and breed also matters: Abyssinians, for example, love to hunt and, in every other way, are like dogs—they adore their owners. In any case, the cat is a writer's best friend; there's no shortage of examples."

ColinC: "Enjoyed the post, as usual. For what it's worth, though, spiders aren't insects—spiders class Arachnida, insects class Insecta. They are however both in the phylum Arthropoda (jointed-feet), as are for example crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. There are many differences between spiders and insects, the most obvious perhaps that spiders have eight legs, and insects only six."

ASW: "As a biologist, I feel obligated to respond to a few things.

"Forest fire—while birds and a few larger mammals (e.g., deer) might be able to move away from a fire, the vast majority of creatures, whether we're talking about amphibians, arthropods, insects, mammals, or reptiles, simply can't. Instead they seek refuge in moist/muddy areas (e.g., amphibians), in vegetation (e.g., arthropods and insects; often a poor choice), or underground (pretty much anybody who can find a hole or rock to get underneath). Some make it but many don't.

"Cats—while they make wonderful companions and can be a useful pest deterrent inside your house, I would discourage anyone from letting cats roam outdoors. They are a plague on vulnerable wildlife (which is basically anything they can get their claws or teeth into), and certainly don't live 'in perfect harmony' with mice and birds.

"Survival of relocated animals—I can't quote an exact number for small mammals without doing further research, but the very high mortality rate is based on actual research. Small mammals are generally quite territorial. They survive by knowing where their food is and more importantly where their shelter is. When dropped into a new location they are very vulnerable to predation until they get the lay of the land, not to mention competitive exclusion (up to and including full-on fighting) with the current residents of the neighborhood you have brought them to.

"'Field' mice—I assume you're using a local name here, as the common name 'field mouse' generally refers to one of several species of the genus Apodemus found in Europe and Asia. Based on your description and what I can glean from your picture, my guess is that you caught a member of the genus Peromyscus, most likely the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) or white-footed mouse (P. leucopus). They are both wonderful mice, although perhaps not when you're fighting them for your bananas."

Mike replies: I love it when a post elicits comments from expert. Thanks for this. I changed "field mouse" to "deer mouse" in the post. I'm disappointed that relocation is most likely futile, but, really, I did have to get him out of the kitchen.

     

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Ed. note: This post is a prehistoric bug entombed in amber. It dates from my 35mm Tri-X days. I'm re-posting it here because of a kind mention that my friend Oren came across, by Derek Martin of Roberts Photo Lab in Indianapolis, who gave it a shout-out in a mass mailing. That was nice of him. I've edited it here to shorten it. Oh, and, in this, "workprint" is both noun and verb, "workprinting" a verb, specifying a quick-and-dirty enlarged proof print that was a stage in the process between shooting and final fine prints. "Fine prints" were the finished product, as good as you could make. Thanks to both Derek and Oren.   

-

One thing about editing. I've been taking golf lessons recently for the first time in my life (it's never too late for golf; it is too late for platform diving), and one thing my pro keeps saying is "make it yours." That is, he wants me to work out things for myself. And of course, each of us needs to "make our own" a great many facets of our pursuit / passion / profession / hobby / diversion of photography, starting with how serious we're going to be about it and what our aims are. Lots of people have developed their own methods of editing. Which of course doesn't mean that it still might not help to talk about it.

In figuring out your editing methods, the important thing is to work out a method and then follow the method through. That's not the same as saying, "use the software I use, follow my method slavishly." Sorry about this overlong preamble, but I wanted to point out that I'm not a guru. My way is not the right way. So don't take what I'm about to tell you as gospel; don't even take it as a recommendation, except if you want to. I'm not trying to tell you the "right" way to do things. Even if I believed there was such a thing, which I don't.

I'm going somewhere with this...
Anyway, back when I had my chops up, here's how I worked. I developed either one or two tanks of film (three rolls of 35 exposures* each per tank) once every few nights. (Less in winter, more in summer.) I'd hang the film in the closet to dry, clip it and put it into PrintFile pages the next morning (this was my most hated photographic chore, by the way), then, when darkness fell, I'd make proof sheets. (My darkrooms, always crude affairs, were almost never light-tight enough to use when the sun was out.)

In looking at the proof sheets, I had a couple of rules for myself. First, I had to loupe every frame. Second, I had to mark between one and six pictures per roll. It didn't matter if it was the stupidest, ugliest roll of useless pictures I'd ever taken, I had to find at least one frame to workprint. And I strongly resisted making workprints of more than six frames per roll. Oh, of course if I really, really had to see that seventh or eighth frame, I'd do it; but the reason for the six-frames rule was that if I marked 20 frames or 25 frames on every roll, it would be too much work to workprint (and too expensive), and I'd procrastinate and never get to it. So I had a method: every frame that interested me under the loupe first got a single cross mark in the corner; if there were more than six, I had to winnow them down to six, then I would put a second cross-mark, making an "X", on the ones to be workprinted.

Do you see that those "rules" were just an effort to cope with my particular psychology, my personal weaknesses? I didn't want to be tempted to throw a roll aside just because there wasn't much good on it; I knew I'd miss some good frames that way. I had to force myself to deal with every roll when workprinting. And I didn't want to trigger my tendency to procrastinate. These are my own personal solutions to my own personal idiosyncrasies. They have no more significance than that.

I was an effing ninja at workprinting. I could make twenty prints in an hour just cruising; thirty to forty an hour if I was trying. After years in the darkroom, I had no trouble looking at the neg against the safelight and setting the time and contrast to "good enough" with nothing more than a glance. Most of my workprints look pretty good, too, if I do say so myself.

So here's the thing I started out to say: I have to have prints in order to edit.

And here's where the magic comes in. If I took, say, fifteen of those 8x10 workprints and taped them all up on the wall, they would all look more or less the same to me at first. And I'd look at them. Then I'd look at them some more. And some more. Gradually, I would start to get interested in a few of them more than others, and some would begin to drop into the don't-care category. And this is the mystery: after about three or four days of looking at a batch of workprints, chances are I would love two or three of them and not care at all about the rest. 

How did this happen? I really have no idea. Still don't, to this day.

But I could depend on it.

I finally decided that it was just not entirely conscious. It's not like I was "deciding" which pictures were "good" and which weren't; it's just that some of them had that "it," whatever it is that I personally happen to find gratifying about photographs, and the others didn't. 

There have been all kinds of things I've learned about myself along the way. For one thing, "good" pictures—the solid, good-looking, pictures-that-look-like-everybody-else's-good-pictures pictures—seldom made it for me. And, the things I liked were often quiet, sometimes too quiet for others.

I sometimes liked failures, too...pictures that were intriguing for some reason but...well, bad. I had a separate category (and box!) for these, called "significant failures."

Sometimes I'd put 20 prints up and, after three days, it had become obvious that none of them were any good. That was always dispiriting, but it wasn't all that unusual.

So what accounts for that magical "sorting" process that almost always occurred half a week or so after I slapped a bunch of seemingly identical-quality workprints up on the wall and just looked and looked and looked? I just don't know. I only know that it was the way my brain worked when it came to photographs. 

Paper is wealth
The end of the process was that when I could spare the time and the money (paper was wealth, for most of my adult life; I almost never had enough paper) I would go into the darkroom and make a fine (finished) print from the negative. I always had a reputation as a fine printer—it was how I made a good bit of my living for a good long stretch, and I'm happy to say that some prints made by me reside in some very prestigious museums and collections—but I never enjoyed this part quite as much. It was too final, and few fine prints were fine enough, if you get my drift. I probably only made "finished" fine prints out of, I don't know, maybe a third of my sorted "selects." In a sense, there was no reason to—I didn't have shows, and nobody bought them. I was just doing it because I liked it. (Same reason you play golf. Who cares except you?) But workprinting for me was the center around which everything else revolved. I loved seeing what the negatives looked like, and I loved anticipating the magic "editing" process that would follow. 

I can't do the same thing on the computer screen. I have no good method there. That's not a value judgment, not an anti-digital comment. It's just a fact. I need prints on the wall. I need to be able to do lots of looking. It's just the way I am.

We're all different. You've got to make it yours.

Mike

[Originally posted October 8th, 2009. I haven't played
golf since right around that time!]

*Only 35 frames fit on the kind of PrintFile sheet I used, so that's how many pictures I shot on a roll, never 36.

**Well, slight exaggeration.

Original contents copyright 2009 and 2025 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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I meant to do more reading up on Chris Killip, who we mentioned last week, but I'm in a mindflurry of all-EV-all-the-time and I haven't gotten around to it. 

As I understand it, though, he was a Manxman, i.e., born on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, and, for starters, couldn't get away from there fast enough. He moved to London. But when he quit commercial photography to concentrate on his own work, he went back—his first book, 11 years later, was Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx. Then, when he was afforded a variety of opportunities to photograph the Northeast of England, he moved to Tyneside, which is a built-up area on the river Tyne, approximately here:

You know, Hebburn, Jarrow, Houghton-le-Spring, Chester-le-Street, Blydon, Ryton, Longbenton, Cleadon, Throckley, in there. :-)

His masterpiece, In Flagrante, was published in 1988 from all the work he did in the Northeast of England. Then, three years later, he really bugged out: moved to the USA. He was appointed to a post at Harvard University, and lived in Cambridge—the one in Massachusetts—for the rest of his life. For a dozen years or so he returned, fairly regularly it would seem, to Ireland, where he produced color pictures which seem rather "postcard-like" relative to his darker, closer, more intimate, more opinionated Tyneside work. The Irish-landscape "Here Comes Everybody" pictures (from the title of the book, which was not a masterpiece) show only flashes of personality and point of view. (Although the submerged pool is an exception. It's not that the Here Comes Everybody pictures aren't good.) As far as I can tell—and like I say I haven't looked into it all that much—he never made a body of work in Cambridge, Mass., or indeed in America. 

So that's a conundrum, isn't it? He rather famously did what we would now call "embedded" himself in Tyneside, living not alongside but amongst the people. But he seems to have been more of a tourist in Ireland. The point is that in all that getting away—from the pub his parents ran in the Isle of Man, from Tyneside, from the UK—he also essentially removed himself from ready access to the subject matter that made him famous. 

It's not like this is uncommon. The opposite, actually. Most photographers' peak periods are relatively limited, because truly dedicated photography is hard—really hard—and the rewards are diffuse and typically not terribly remunerative. Weegee's Naked City period didn't actually last very long; Robert Frank's high period as a stills photographer describes a bell curve with long tails; Cartier-Bresson essentially gave up photography for the last quarter of his life. Who was it who said that artists tend to have a peak period of no more than ten years, although truly great artists might have two or even three such periods?

As an aside, this is rather oddly echoed in emblematic cultural periods as well. They don't last as long as we think. They're evanescent rather than enduring. The "Wild West" essentially only lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 till the Census Bureau (?) proclaimed the end of the American frontier in 1890. That's only 25 years. We've been making movies about it for more than four times that long. Although the mob was active before and after, the high period of the classic 1930s Midwestern gangsters—John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde—lasted virtually only two years. The peak of the railroads was maybe 20 years, from 1890 to 1910. From the time the Beatles came to America till they broke up was only about six years. The average NFL career is 3.3 years. In all such things we tend to assume that "the way it was" lasted longer and was more enduring than it really tends to be. We pay more attention to the outliers, the high points, the "iconic" accomplishments, the most vivid characters. It's surprising how many photographers follow that template as well. Their careers describe an arc, and the peak—what we know them for, what we remember—is often not long. 

Back on track, though—Chris Killip seems to be symbolic of a peculiar problem for photographers, which is that we need access to our subject matter. Ansel Adams traveled back and forth to Yosemite from San Francisco, and as he got older he did less mountain climbing and more darkroom work. Sally Mann's kids grew up. Great bodies of work are often, in effect, "moments," short periods of time in which everything comes together: the right subject, the right artist at the right time in her own development, the right cultural moment. Shakespeare's peak period lasted essentially 11 years, from 1595 to 1606. The cultural moment was ripe for it: theater was at the very apex of its popularity and importance; the average Londoner, according to Malcolm Gladwell, went to the theater three times a week. A mere 36 years later, in 1642, Oliver Cromwell banned the theater as being sinful and frivolous, a ban that lasted for quite some time and even resulted in some theater buildings being torn down. What chance would Shakespeare have had in that cultural moment? 

Well, I'm not back on track yet, am I? That's the problem of writing off-the-cuff essays. Anyway, the point I am drifting toward is simply that Chris Killip, in escaping his roots and following his career, also cut himself off from what he got famous photographing. You could argue that the cultural moment for hard-hitting documentary work in black-and-white, up close and gritty, was passing as well by 1988–91, or you might argue that Killip had done what he wanted to do and didn't need to do any more. In Flagrante, considered one of the great masterpieces among British photobooks, was enough. But this is something I'm thinking about a lot as I contemplate moving back to the Midwest. I've found a subject here, and if I leave, no more Finger Lakes landscapes. I'll be effectively ending that body of work. I'm not sure that matters to anyone except me. But it matters to me. 

I haven't poked around enough to know what, if anything, Chris Killip might have commented about this conundrum in his own life and work. Surely someone asked, somewhere along the way? I hope I'll hear, someday, somehow. Probably he considered that the color Irish pictures were fine, that they were on a continuum with his earlier work, and that living in Boston wasn't an impediment. That's the way artists are. It's always about what we're doing now. 

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Every now and then a regular TOP reader gets attention from the outside world, and I feel a totally unwarranted sense of pride and connection! This has been out for nearly a year now, and I'm just now catching up to it, thanks to my friend Barb H. Last September, Kristine Hinrichs was the subject of a feature on the statewide Spectrum News 1 in Wisconsin. The two minute feature, reported by Megan Marshall, shows her working before dawn by the lakefront. A retired city worker and former marathoner, Kristine has been sharing a PAD (photo a day) project of Milwaukee on social media for 14 years. (Here's her IG account.) She's also a longtime commenter on TOP, with 73 comments logged since 2014, many of them "Featured." Congratulations Kristine! We're proud.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Excellent profile...and excellent work, Kristine! Indeed, Milwaukee is full of lens-ready scenes and subjects. Bravo!"

John Krumm: "Love that. Amazing persistence too. I glanced at her Instagram and enjoyed the variety, with some real classic shots in there. Of course I was trying to identify her camera, being a nerd. Looks like one of the pro level OM System cameras, I think."

Kristine Hinrichs: "WOW! Thanks for the feature! Imagine my surprise seeing my own face. Approaching 5,200 days straight. This explains the sudden interest in my Instagram feed."

      

Here's an easy and quick healthy breakfast: in the evening, combine one cup of regular (not quick) organic steel-cut oats with four cups of water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil; boil for one or two minutes. Prevent boiling over by placing a wooden spoon across the top of the saucepan or blowing on the foam as it rises to get it to stop. Remove from heat, cover, and set aside overnight. In the morning, stir, rewarm (I spoon a bit into a bowl and pop it into the microwave for a minute), add toppings to taste (berries, puréed banana, granola, cinnamon (here's one that's tested for heavy metals), even honey or Vermont maple syrup if you're not avoiding sugar). Best enjoyed on a mountainside in Vermont out on the deck on a summer morning, but tastes great and has an agreeable texture anywhere. Put the saucepan in the fridge for the next day, when it will still be just as good and even easier to fix. Regarding oats, recall Boswell's riposte: in his Life of Johnson, 1791, Chapter 14, he says, "Doctor Johnson proposed to define the word 'oats' thus: 'A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' And I replied: 'Aye, and that’s why England has such fine horses, and Scotland such fine people.'" Oats are what T. Colin Campbell has for breakfast every morning, and if they're good enough for him and horses, they're good enough for me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Clayton: "Oats have been used as a cure for diabetics for more than a century. I prefer mine uncooked—just let them soak in soy milk. Apple juice works as well. If in a hurry I blend them with berries, spices, etc."

Richard Tugwell: "As a Scot, I'm always amazed when oats are (re)discovered as a new superfood. Cheap, easy to cook and with many nutritional benefits. I just soak them overnight with some milk, or milk substitute or even water. In the morning I eat them with whatever I have around—berrries, bananas, nuts or seeds, and often with a spoonful of natural yogurt, or honey, or even cream! Or I just make traditional porridge in the morning, this time just with water and salt. Add honey, cream or whatever depending on how I feel, but perfect just on its own."

Sergio Bartelsman: "Years ago I read The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health by T. Colin Campbell. A very good book on nutrition that helped me recover my health. A very fine read."

ASW: "According to Google, 1 cup of steel-cut oats has approximately 600 calories. Even if you add 200–400 calories to the mix via nuts, berries, or some type of milk, how the heck are you folks making that last for multiple (or a week of) breakfasts?"

Mike replies: It last 3–4 mornings for me. And of course you're still allowed to eat other things too. Tomorrow I'll be having a cantaloupe along with my oatmeal—Raymond's cantaloupes have just appeared in his roadside stand for the first time this year. He grows the best cantaloupes in the area. I think the one I have is about ripe.

Frank: "Oats have a high glycemic index if that is important."

Pete D replies to Frank: "Since I like a bowl of cold overnight oats with blueberries several times a week I decided to check what glycemic index actually means and all the lists I saw rated oats as being at the high end of the lower glycemic index category."

Mike adds: I asked Google "what is the glycemic load of steel-cut (Irish) oats?" and got this: "The glycemic load (GL) of steel-cut oats is typically low to medium, with the exact value depending on the serving size and carbohydrate content. The Glycemic Index (GI) of steel-cut oats is generally in the range of 42–58, which is considered low to medium."

     

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This one-paragraph post is about my current subject of non-photographic interest. If you ain't into it, skip it!

I'll tell you one sort of person EVs are good for: Those who love keeping records, calculating numbers, tracking percentages and mileages and states of charge, planning ahead, organizing, optimizing, devising systems, making charts 'n' graphs, sticking to a calendar, staying on top of protocols, learning and understanding things at a little deeper level, et cetera. You don't have to do any of those things, and there are plenty of other reasons to like EVs, but some people love that sort of thing. And are good at it: they have the gene, the skills, the aptitudes. I encounter them in photography. An EV would be satisfying for those folks, is my guess.

That is all,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Luke: "I got over all that real quick. Just plug in every few days and never even think about 'gas mileage' again."

     

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I've had a much harder time controlling my weight since I got my pacemaker, no idea why. Of course, despite the title of this post, there isn't just one way to lose weight. I counted, and there are 88,461 ways to lose weight documented on the internet and in books. (I'm kidding, I didn't count: if I had, I might've seen that there are more than that.) But after dozens and dozens of experiments using myself as the laboratory rat, here's the only thing that works on me: to stop eating every day at a predetermined time in the afternoon or early evening. Three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock. Even six o'clock although that's kinda late. Then, the next morning, I hold off eating for as long as I'm not really hungry. (Most people aren't hungry after waking; try starting with tea or coffee but without milk or cream or any fake-dairy additive.) Of course, it helps if, during the day, I eat slowly, sparingly, and at defined mealtimes, and strive to avoid salt/sugar/fat as much as practicable. Takes a few days to get used to. That's it; this is the only thing that has ever worked for me. You'll have to try it to see if it works for you.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Jayanand Govindaraj: "What you describe is called intermittent fasting. I have been practicing this for 10 years now, but mainly for blood sugar control—though weight loss has been a byproduct. I also do OMAD (One Meal A Day, i.e. fasting for 24 hours) at least once a week. In my experience over the last decade,these fasting techniques work perfectly with an LCHF/Keto diet to deliver real overall benefits for general health and well-being. In my case, after being on diabetic medication for 20 years, I stopped all medication within nine months of starting the diet/fasting combo, and have maintained an HBA1C in the range of 5.75 to 6.5 since 2016. Beware, it requires real willpower to maintain!"

     

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["Open Mike" is the weekly Editorial page of the vertical magazine that is TOP. In it, we dip a toe into the filtered-but-not-very mind of Mike.]

-

The significance of this is explained eventually
herein. Read on. Photo by Georg Sander.

I'm actually thinking, actually really thinking, of not getting another iPhone. 

I've recently given some longtime e-friends who know my predilections and peccadilloes—longtime readers, that is—maybe including you—a bit of a surprise: I moved on from ICE cars. Decisively, like Ctein moved to digital and struck his darkroom. No more stick shift allegiance, no more Miata-is-the-answer-to-every-question, no more naturally-aspirated-engine or rear-wheel-drive oversteer purity, no more blather about exhaust notes and le pur sang and petrolhead lore, no, none o' that from here on out. I'm quite certain I'll never buy an ICE car again. I would propose a rather radical reason for this. EVs are better cars. Period and end of sentence. Throw out all the blather and disputation about cost, ecology, infrastructure, politics, efficiency, everything. All of it. EVs are better cars.

That's a big enough tech-bro sea-change right there. But not only that, I'm also thinking about...an Android phone.

Does the apocalypse approach? Do birds fly backwards in a purple sky? What about the old unshakeable never-say-die Apple allegiance, the "my-first-Mac-was-the-first-Mac," the cozy fishbowl of the integrated Apple ecosystem, all that? This could be a shock to your conception of Mike-ishness, and, coming so soon after my defection from internal combustion...well, I hope I'm not rocking the rowboat too much.

Skip three
I have an iPhone 13 Pro. It's been fine. Normally I've updated every three cycles, skipping two. But this Fall the iPhone 17 will be announced, meaning I will have skipped three cycles. Plus, my battery is getting iffy. That's because "it's that time." But for the first time, I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not dreading it, exactly, but I feel resigned rather than inwardly excited.

Here's the thing that started the snowball rolling downhill: Siri is stupid. There is no way around this. My friend Dan and I play pool most Monday mornings, and typically talk a good deal about music. Matters of mild dispute and questions of fact come up lots, and despite the fact that Dan has an old Android phone the screen of which is permanently tinted magenta, his phone aces Siri seven times out of nine when verbally asked questions. I've recently taken to asking him to ask HIS phone something instead of merely asking the same question of mine. He'll get an answer, whereas Siri won't understand the question, or will give me an amusingly nonsensical answer, or will require me to type something out...whatever. He casually asks his phone stuff that I wouldn't even attempt to ask Siri, because I know better. I'd be anticipating the usual bollix.

Apple is behind. It took me a while to wrap my mind around this if I'm honest. I accepted it only because the realization is unavoidable. 

Here are a few other things that I'm assuming, or that have been bugging me:

First, Apple will want a hella lot of money. You just know the big-screen iPhone 17 with the good camera (both of which are important to me) is going to cost way north of a grand. Apple loves to soak my wallet. They farm money—that seems to be the thing they care most about now. That was fine back when I thought I got value for it...I liked Apple, and that was the way it was. If I had to pay more for it, well, so what, then I did. I got value in self-satisfaction and seamless integration and a cool form-factor, and that was enough for me. But recently it seems like there's nothing to get excited about. It'll be just be another phone, pretty much like the last phone. Another button here, another functionality there maybe, but nothing to knock glassware off the shelves. For some reason it seems like Apple stopped innovating around the time the Pandemic started. It's just the same old products in the same old wrappers. They don't even look that good any more—the designer left the company. Or rather, they look good, but in the same old way. The CEO doesn't visit the design studio every day like Steve did; Steve loved products and Steve loved design. The new guy just sits in his ivory tower atop a giant heap of gold coins plotting how to get more. When he already has too many. Which is his business, except that he wants my gold coins. And I ain't got that many. 

Know what else Steve did? He kept thinking up ideas for new products. Some weren't such good ideas, others were great, others looked like they wouldn't succeed but did anyway. But he kept coming up with new things. What's been new lately? Yes, my current Mac Mini is the best desktop I've ever had, of my 17 or 19 Macs or whatever it is. They do iterate and improve. And the goggles (Vision Pro) are new, but they're expensive and some of the functionalities are not quite thought-through. Who wants to watch a movie alone with another person who is also watching the same movie alone? I do like the noise-cancelling headphones (AirPods Max), too. But basically it's just Macs, iMacs, iPads, iPhones and the Apple Watch, same as it ever was. (Current Not-Steve Guy does get the credit for the Apple Watch. But that was more than ten years ago—that's 70 years in device- and dog-years). 

That's an oasis ahead
Maybe I'm not making my point convincingly. But have you ever looked at all the exotica you can get in the Android phone-i-verse? Did you know there's a phone with a Leica one-inch sensor?! It has a name I can neither spell nor pronounce, Xiaomi. Did you know there's one you can fold out to make a double screen?! Did you know Google makes phones?! Who knew these things? Nobody! 

Well, I suppose somebody. 

Here comes the kicker. Old Apple, when it introduced something, actually had them to sell, or at least would very soon. New Apple announces sh*t when it's still vapory and then sits on its own thumbs. And sits. And sometimes, like the charger-pad thingy or Apple Intelligence (a "product" I do not want, would rather not have, and am not looking forward to dealing with, so I suppose that's a win???), never come out at all. They're just describing mirages in the desert air, shimmering on the horizon. Surely they can come up with it; they're Apple.

So what? Well, so Apple is promising that iPhone 17 will integrate EV route planning into Apple Maps in CarPlay. But some of Apple's promises lately are worth tears and a heap of ash. So I know I'm going to expect iPhone 17 to have route planning, and they'll say it's coming, but it will either come many moons late or never come, while I wait, wait, wilt, and grow old. But I said "kicker": the kicker is that Apple doesn't keep stuff updated. Never has, never will. Twenty-eleven Siri still lives in my pocket and gets sklonkered by Google Assistant. Aperture was great, but it was never maintained or updated until it got so wilty it had to be killed (I didn't fall for Lucy and the football on that one). I still miss WriteNow*. (I am the OG.) 

So here's what I think is going to happen. Apple will charge me $1,800 plus 8% tax for a new phone. For the phone I paid $1,100 for four years ago, they'll give me $85 in trade, unless they give me nothing. I won't be able to buy the new one outright at Verizon so that I can get the good monthly plan price—I'll have to buy it on time for three months for twice as much, on account of a certain calibrated percentage of customers will forget and keep paying the high price. They'll tell me the camera is improved but I won't be able to see any difference. Three things I already liked about the old phone will be gone, gone. Thirteen controls I already knew how to use and have committed to muscle memory will be changed around for absolutely no explicable reason. End result: four months of d*cking around and a bunch of cash sacrificed to the spaceship, and if I'm lucky I'll get back to...where I am right now. And, insult to injury, even if EV route planning is well implemented in Maps sometime within the current decade, parsimonious Apple won't pinch off the bucks to keep it groomed and up to date, so the functionality will age and fade, even though being up-to-date is the most crucial mission of an EV-charger-finding route planner—and even though Apple could afford to keep it sleek and groomed with less cash than it devotes to keeping the bathrooms spotless in the spaceship. I foresee frustration, in other words. 

Great-great-grandmother
Oh, almost forgot—the picture at the top.

A curious fact: my great-great grandmother had an electric car. In 1907. The one in the picture is a restored 1907 Detroit Electric Model D, an automobile brand produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company in Detroit, Michigan. I have no idea if that's the one my great-great-grandmother, Hannah Milhous** Wright Furnas, owned; but my grandmother told me her grandmother had an electric car. She remembered being sent to bed early when her grandmother was visiting, but staying awake at her upstairs window until her grandmother left, and that all she could hear were the tires crunching on the gravel of the driveway. She said this was when she was six years old, which would have been 1907.

It's quite possible Hannah might have been driving herself. My grandmother also said that Hannah Wright Furnas was the first woman in Indianapolis to learn to drive; her chauffeur taught her, on the little lanes that snake and loop around the sprawled-out grounds of Crown Hill Cemetery. My grandmother, who had a prodigious memory, said this like it was something that everyone once knew and that was not in dispute. There is of course no way on Earth to prove it now. But I'll believe it because she did.

Back to Earth now, and the solid ground of fact: I probably won't actually buy an Android phone. Only because I am not the type to be able to manage the transition. Many websites say it's do-able, many videos claim they tell you how-to, but I've never been much good with computers. I've known that all my life. New iPhone, here I come. I'm just no longer inwardly happy about it is all.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers for the "better cars" link.)

*Best word processor ever. "In the opinion of many of its users, WriteNow represented the ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including in the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs and in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680x0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code." (Wikipedia)

**Yes, that Milhous. Richard Nixon was my sixth cousin. Maybe once or twice removed, I don't know.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Maggie Osterberg: "Siri. Oh lord, Siri. Dumber than a box of rocks, and twice as infuriating. But, maybe, a secret comedian. I was in a therapy session, speaking about some pretty heavy stuff in my past and how trauma had impacted my life, and, you know, the usual stuff, when, out of nowhere, my Apple Watch suddenly pipes up with my Irish Siri's voice. 'I'm not sure what to make of that, Maggie.' 'What?' I said out loud. 'I can't help you,' Siri replied. My therapist and I totally lose it, laughing our asses off. That was it for the session!"

Ronny Nilsen: "Have a look at the app 'A Better Routeplanner' for planning you EV trip, no need to wait for Apple, and it's available on both iPhone and Android."

Mike replies: I signed up. I'm all in. I'll use that. Thanks Ronny!

Chris Kern: "The best thing about Apple: the company’s products cooperate to form a coherent ecosystem—iPhones, iPads, Macs, and (with some limitations based on the characteristics of the platform) watches—you have seamless access to your data and application software from any of them. The worst thing about Apple: the frequent churn of user agent features: configuration parameters that are moved from one location to another and bundled applications whose functionality is altered for no apparent reason."

Christer Almqvist: "The salesman at my Apple distributor shares your opinion about the iPhone."

robert e: "Ah, what irony! Or do I mean metaphor? Do you know what else Apple under Tim Cook didn't do? Build an electric car, after trying to develop one for ten years at an estimated cost of $10 billion, possibly in collaboration with VW. (Per Wikipedia, 'Apple car project'). Do you know which electronics company did develop an electric car? Xiaomi. They announced their intention in 2021, started production in 2023 and officially released in 2024, the same year Apple gave up on its EV. The car, the SU7, is a runaway success. Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, had one for six months and said he loved it.

"Unrelated, but, a few years ago, I switched from Google's Maps app to Apple's for driving directions because I preferred the way Apple telegraphed turns way ahead of time, but on a recent cross-country trip, I had to switch back to Google Maps because Apple's directions often seemed a little bonkers."

Mike replies: Strange thing happened to me on my trip: I was driving my old Acura, but had my eyes peeled to see if I could spy any Nissan Ariyas in the wild. Driving to Vermont the directions take you off the expressway and never take you back on, and eventually I saw one pass going the other direction on a New York two-lane. Much later, I'm in Vermont, trying to make the final few miles to my friends' house, and Apple Maps in bonkers mode takes me down a very obscure dirt road that I strongly suspected was wrong. Then, about a mile down this road, Siri pipes up and says, "There is an obstruction ahead. Your route is cancelled. Goodbye," and falls silent. I phoned my friends for live directions. They got me turned around and headed back toward known roads, and then, on this remote dirt road on which I had seen no vehicles at all, what should pass by but the second Ariya I'd seen on the trip. Weird. 

Later I was told by several Vermonters that Apple Maps often bails out like that on routes over dirt, seasonal, or steep roads, apparently so no one gets disappointed or stuck and later makes a complaint. 

Oh, and when I arrived at the cookout area on Blue Moon, where the group was gathered for their weekly Summer picnic, Siri unexpectedly came to life again and said, "Arrived!" 

Kirk: "I use an iPhone XR. It's seven years old. It works perfectly. Consider security before you switch out of the most secure phone system the world has ever known.... If you have a 13 you are two upgrades ahead of me. And I reiterate, mine works perfectly and in no way inhibits my progress or my business. And yes, it works flawlessly in my car via CarPlay. Seven years old. Just sayin'. Sigh, and people tease me for upgrading cameras...."

Eric Chin: "Hi Mike: You may not be aware that Google also has a phone service, Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network. You could probably get a pretty good trade-in on your phone if you join the service. I started using Google Pixel phones because you get software upgrades immediately from Google. With the carriers, you have to wait for them to get the upgrade and sort it out for their phones, which can take a long time. Maybe more detail than you need, but the Pixel 10 coming out this year is the last year they're using the current chip architecture, and they'll be changing to a different architecture with the Pixel 11. Since last year, it's nice they now offer the Pro models in two sizes, so you don't have to buy a large phone just to get the best camera."

Robert Roaldi: "I use an iMac and an iPad but I'm still ticked at Apple for letting Aperture slide into oblivion. I still prefer it to anything else I've used. I don't like touch screens or those talking interfaces but I assume they are useful to someone."

Nick: Mike, you're thinking about switching from Nikon to Canon. Every phone is largely the same these days; the top models are roughly the same price and have the same features. Every maker tries to lock you into their own ecosystem, and they all have various positives and negatives. Not to say that your Apple complaints aren't valid, but you'll find just as many issues with a new Samsung or Xiaomi etc., and you will have lost a lot of UI know-how. You are correct of course there is more variety in body shapes outside of Apple, if a folding phone is of interest to you. Otherwise I think it's a grass-is-greener problem. But apart from losing integration with your Mac etc., at least it's an easier switch than camera bodies as you don't have a similar collection of lenses that won't work anymore. Relatively easy to buy another phone for this three-year cycle and see how you go."

John Gordon: "My son, living in Hong Kong in 2018, gave me a Xiaomi Android phone to compare with my iPhone. Technically the Xiaomi was good; the Android opsys not so much. And that version of Android was not upgradable so I quickly returned to iPhone and the Apple ecosystem. But the big news today is that Xiaomi now manufacture some of the best EVs in the world. According to an article in The Atlantic by Patrick George, 'The American Car Industry Can’t Go On Like This,' (14 August), Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, last year drove a Xiaomi SU7 for six months 'to scope out the competition.' The Chinese-made EV is 'one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant—all for roughly $30,000 in China.' Farley said, 'It’s fantastic...I don’t want to give it up.' Ford is now redesigning its manufacturing processes in an attempt to produce a Xiaomi-competitive truck that will sell for much less than the current F150 EV. Due in 2027."

Thom Hogan: "Advice: replace the battery and fight the 'new phone' battle another day.

"Commentary: You're missing a couple of key points. First, you're assuming today's Siri will be tomorrow's. Pretty clear from Apple that won't be true. Apple has this long-established habit of appearing behind and then doing the better product. That will happen with AI. When is the only question, but I think it's Pournelle's Real Soon Now. Second, the post about Google being a parasite is correct and this should disturb you. The only reason for Android, Chrome, and the search engine are to control and track you, and make you the product to someone else. Apple's products are actual products, not you. AI, for what it's worth, is going to be another eventual monopoly, much like search became. The reason has to do with the economics behind it. The cost to scale is enormous and that cost never goes away; it is ongoing and just keeps scaling. Which means that revenue has to pay the way. Google and Meta see AI as 'the next search/social,' and they have the business model (selling you and your information) that is proven. ChatGPT and many of the others don't have a model that works, and are looking desperately for one. Apple's model is 'sell you more devices that work together' (e.g. AI from your watch can deal with home, car, computer, phone, et al., and vice versa)."

Jerker Andersson (partial comment): "In 1991, a friend and I were in Haarlem, the original, in The Netherlands. We had a coffee break in a small café at the outskirts of town and I put my camera under my chair. Halfway through our coffee, two young men came in and sat down at the table immediately behind me. They talked in Arabic with a few words in Dutch. My friend and I couldn't understand exactly what they were saying, but it was clear they were talking about us. So we decided it was time to leave. After a few steps I heard the scraping sound of a chair from their table and soon I felt a hand on my shoulder. I froze and slowly turned around. One of the young men stood there with my camera in his hand. 'I think you forgot something,' he said, and handed it over. My shoulders went down and it all ended with me paying for their coffee. There's lots of that stuff in this tale. And it's good to have your prejudices challenged from time to time. But hold on to your gear!" 

     

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hope you are making a good recovery."

-

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

—Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

     

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Disclaimers first:

—Disclaimer No. 1: Many of my readers are very experienced photographers and/or not airheads like me, so you have long since worked out these issues for yourself and don't need any further input and yep, I know that.

—Disclaimer No. 2: Many of my readers are professionals or former professionals and are by nature detail-oriented and highly energetic and have orderly minds and a gift for organization, and, again, have got this down pat.

So no offense.

I read many decades ago that habits are very helpful when you're working at repetitive tasks. My original intro into writing about photography was as a darkroom expert; I read voraciously from then-current as well as historical sources of knowledge and designed and ran my own experiments at the Corcoran School, routinely working in the school darkrooms until the wee hours and then walking the two miles home to Georgetown every night*. I discovered early on that I had a tendency to daydream while working, so I established very strict habits so that when I "came to" in the darkroom after my mind had been a million miles away, I would know exactly where I was in the process and what I had done and not done already. 

I've done the same with camera-carrying. I have habits: always keep the camera in the same place in the car; always put the camera in plain sight on the table in a restaurant, and never leave the table without taking the camera; if I have to put the camera somewhere out of sight, like on the floor next to my chair, always have the strap of the camera or case looped around a part of my body; if I have to have my hands free while I'm carrying the camera, always sling it from my shoulder instead of setting it down. Etc.

That last one was no doubt the precept I violated in Cambridge. Although I wasn't aware of it, I'm surprised at myself. My only excuse was that I had been preparing for a visit to my mother, and I had been emotional for days and, frankly, fearful about the prospect. I handled it much better than I thought I would, as it turned out, but I was dreading it in advance. Her body has long outlasted her mind. Although she wasn't formally diagnosed until 2013, I first saw her dementia symptoms in 2011, and my brother says he saw signs a year earlier than that. God, fate, whatever you want to call it, however you want to understand it, has been exceptionally cruel to her.

Another thing I've noticed is something that I learned during my Leica experiment (I photographed with a metered M6 for two years, and, later, an M4 for another year, guessing exposure settings), and that James Coleman spoke of on Tuesday: "As someone who hardly goes anywhere without one, I've found constantly carrying a camera makes me less likely to forget it as I've grown accustomed to their weight on my shoulder. The times when I've almost lost it were always after I'd gone without it for a spell." That's right. During my Leica years, I did what David Vestal said he did: "Put my camera on in the morning and took it off at night, like my shirt." Carrying a camera only intermittently actually increases the chances you will lose it, because not having it on you feels normal. 

Anyway, I'm surprised at myself. My systems broke down. Re Farhiz Karanjawala's lovely Japan story, I also never set my wallet down anywhere, and I always check twice that my credit card is back in my wallet after paying for a meal. And yet I still leave it behind about once a year. I had to laugh when Farhiz said, "Both wife and daughter were in agreement that this was the last trip they’re letting me do on my own." With no wife or daughter, though, I'm hanging out there in the world alone, so habits remain my hope. 

May you have good light**—and never lose your camera! 

Mike

*I learned self-defensive walking, too: keep your shoulders squared and your head held high, always be alert and looking around, and stride briskly and with purpose. It probably helped that I was 6'2" and worked out three times a week back then, but that or luck kept me from getting mugged on any of those late nights, except for the last period of my alcoholism when I was stumbling around D.C. in the dead of night dead drunk. 

**I believe Brett Weston's salutation at the end of his letters was "Good light and good negs, Brett."

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "I've traveled the world for decades and never lost a camera in my possession. I use a sort of long strap and wear the camera Bandolier style off my left shoulder onto my right hip. I can swing it up quickly for a shot, slide it to mid-chest in crowds or pull down on the strap to place the camera slightly behind me if I need to do a two-hand function in front of me. Of particularly high value for me in this regard is the recently popular rope-style straps that can be manipulated many ways without twisting awkwardly like the old flat straps. Rope straps can also be made into a wrist strap with some looping but with the ability to instantly be returned to the full length when needed. Even if I have a bag of lenses, the camera is carried outside cross body. When you feel naked without a camera you will be less likely to walk away from it."

Maggie Osterberg: "I always carry my Leicas like Albert—bandolier style, over my left shoulder, lens out, lens cap off. I've never lost a camera that way, and have been able to get shots quickly. That said, I spent an hour looking for my driver's license this morning. It was in the pocket of my pajamas. Which I am wearing. So, no judgment from me!"

David Elesh: "Like Albert Smith, I carry my camera bandolier style. But for a very different reason: while traveling in the Far East, I was advised to always use bandolier style because it discourages thieves on motor scooters and motorcycles from grabbing it as they pass. Having seen someone carrying his camera over his shoulder lose it this way and end up in the street as well, I have ever after carried it bandolier style."

Nick: "Your story brought back two not-so-great recent memories for me. The first one was earlier this year when I got out of a cab in downtown Guadalajara, fresh off the plane from Chicago, and realized that my wallet (with my passport) had fallen out inside the car I just watched drive away. I literally dropped everything (figuring my wife would guard it) and took off running in the direction the car had gone. I was 50 at the time, and while I'm not in terrible shape, I'm not in great shape, either. That said, I caught up to the car a block and a half later where it was stopped at a light. I got back my wallet right there. My dignity and my blood oxygen levels were restored to me much more slowly. On a less happy note, on a recent flight home from London, I left my unnecessarily expensive (but sonically very satisfying) noise-cancelling wireless headphones in the seatback pocket of the plane and didn't realize until the next day. Color me surprised that they never got turned in to the lost and found...."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Last year I absent-mindedly left my recent-model Apple iPhone in a men's restroom at Singapore's huge Changi airport. Half an hour later I realized it was missing. I frantically returned to the restroom and found my phone sitting exactly where I left it."

Edward Taylor: "One trick that I have used is to clip my car keys to my camera strap. If I forget my camera then I also forget my car keys. You can't get far without your car keys."

      

I've returned from an enjoyable weekend in Vermont. I drove out there on Friday. On Saturday, I did a "trip within a trip" and drove from South Strafford in Vermont down to Cambridge, Massachusetts (I always spell out American place names for the benefit of international TOP readers) to visit my mother in the nursing home where she has been for years.

The visit was marred because I lost my camera. My much-modified Sigma FP-m monochrome that I kitted out and customized to my liking and for my purposes—gone. Halfway through the day in Cambridge it disappeared—misplaced, left behind, snitched or stolen. Who knows.

The weekend visit was to the home environs of my very dear old friends Jim and Becky in South Strafford. I've written about them before, but not for a long time—not only are they among the people I love the most of all the people I have met or known in my 68 years of life; not only are they remarkably interesting, thoughtful, wise, humane people; but they live a rich and different life, one that is close to being emblematic of a dream for many city-dwellers. They live in a solar house on one of the oldest continuously-operating land co-ops in the United States, on the back side of a high ridge, up a long dirt road that for most of its course just goes up and up and up some more. The co-op is called Blue Moon. They designed and built the house themselves (I gave them a week's work on the house as a wedding present), 24x24 and three stories. The design, mainly researched and drawn by Becky, has proven over the years to be really excellent in many ways; it's intimate, flexible, with excellent light and ventilation, and it somehow manages to comfortably accommodate them, and previously their now-married daughter, in addition to 6,000 books. That's about the size of Thomas Jefferson's library, which was purchased after the War of 1812 by Congress to form the core of the Library of Congress. The porch where we ate all our meals, with its spectacular views entirely of wilderness—you can see sixty miles on a clear day but zero signs of civilization—is simply one of the nicest places on Earth to be on a Summer's day. Such a beautiful spot.

And this visit, two new additions—an electric car (theirs is an Ioniq 5) and a shower for the first time—

Jim says most of their guests are skeptical of an outdoor shower before they try it, but then, after they experience it, they love it. True for me! It's surprisingly delightful. Like standing under a waterfall in the Garden of Eden. It's easy to get the perfect temperature by turning the hot lever all the way on, then adding cold as desired—it's so easy and simple I'm half tempted to convert my shower at home to simple ball valves (the lever-operated shutoff valves you see on copper plumbing pipes). Jim and Becky are the last house on the road, so it's very private—nothing but woods beyond. Critters are the only peeping Toms. There are daisies by your feet. A couple of honeybees buzzed past on their way to the goldenrod a few feet away, a goldfinch flitted around, and in the basement window (the one with the reflection in the picture) a spider was busily building a picture-perfect Charlotte-worthy web. They do have to keep the soaps and shampoos inside. They left them out at first but a bear got into them. Using toiletries with a lavender scent helps, because bears don't like lavender. But as a silver lining, you no longer have to open the shampoo—just squeeze it, and the shampoo coils out of a hole made by the bear's tooth. 

It's only for the temperate months, though. In winter the pipes would freeze. So there's a showering season at Blue Moon. For the intemperate months, they have one of those old-fashioned ball-and-claw foot bathtubs in the main bathroom upstairs.

A senior moment to end all senior moments
I'll post more about the trip in days to come—there's much more to tell—but since I opened the door I'm not going to leave you in suspense. Just around the corner from Sancta Maria Nursing Facility, the old-age home where my mother is, what should I drive past but Digital Silver Imaging, a photo lab we have some history with. I had forgotten they were in Cambridge, but there they were. They're now a full-service printing lab, but they were originally famous for making silver-gelatin B&W prints on traditional paper from digital originals, an unusual capability for a lab and something they still do. I had some administrative details to figure out before I could get into the Nursing Facility, so I backtracked to stop in at DSI. Unfortunately, they're closed on weekends, but the door said "Or by Appointment" and gave a phone number, so I called and left messages for DSI proprietor Eric Luden on the two lines. 

On Monday, heading back home in the car, I waited until I was on a mountaintop so I could get good signal, and called DSI—just following my footsteps to see if there was any chance I had left my camera at the nursing home, at Chipotle, at DSI, or any of my other stops on Saturday. My next step was going to be to file a police report with serial numbers and begin searching to see if the camera would show up for sale in eBay or Facebook Marketplace listings. It is a pretty unique camera! Incredibly, a DSI employee named Joe had arrived to open the shop that morning and had found my camera sitting on a ledge outside the door! I guess I must have put it down to call. But they have it, and will be shipping it back to me as soon as we work out the logistics. It survived two whole days outdoors in plain view of a pedestrian sidewalk only a couple of yards away, in Cambridge, one of the busiest suburbs of Boston. Amazing. So on the one hand, I'm an idiot, and on the other, I'm as lucky as can be. I managed to get the Pentax pass-around equipment insured, but I didn't think to have my own equipment insured at the same time. 

I have no idea why I would have taken it into the lab—I'm usually quite comfortable leaving it in the car—and why I would not simply have slung it over my shoulder to get my hands free to make those calls. That's my habit. Or why I would not immediately have retraced my steps to try to track it down as soon as I realized it was missing. I guess I was feeling emotional, distracted, and upset about the imminent prospect of seeing my mother, who is in truly tragic and troubling condition. I'll write a post about camera-carrying hygiene, next. 

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Eric Luden: "Sorry to have missed you Mike, but so glad your camera was still here. I hope to see some of the files from that Sigma Monochrome—let's make a new silver print and a follow-up story! All's well that ends well. My best regards."

Greg Heins: "I left a camera of similar value on a park bench in Boston several years ago after a total-waste-of-time conversation I hadn't wanted to have in the first place, so I completely understand what emotional consternation does to our rational side. Similar end—a worker in a nearby shop noticed the camera, took it in and left a note on the bench telling me where to come for it. It was two days before I even realized I'd lost the camera and went back to the bench!"

Greg Bolarsky: "You should be a mystery or thriller writer. Excellent job of creating narrative tension, with a satisfying outcome...just don't do that again! You also make me feel much better about my own ever-more-frequent senior moments."

Benjamin Marks: "I can feel the sweat cooling off my forearms having read how the story ended. Hate losing stuff! Brings to mind the Elizabeth Bishop poem, 'One Art.' Perhaps I should be quoting All's Well That Ends Well instead: 'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven.'"

J D Ramsey: "For many years one of the great pleasure of the Jersey Shore was homes with outdoor showers. It’s hard to explain the charm—maybe it’s just taken a shower where the sense of the outdoors is so freeing, even though you are typically in a wood-sided enclosure with no roof. I’ve never heard anyone who has tried who didn’t find it wonderful. (And you can throw the kids fresh from the sandy beach in there before they get in the house.)"

Kristine Hinrichs: "What great news that your camera was found. One thing I do with my cameras is to make sure that the first shot on any card is of my business card, figuring it can’t hurt and might help. Now that there are Air Tag clones the size of a credit card, we can hope that soon there will be tags small enough to stick on a camera—or they integrate the tech with the SD card."

Bob Keefer: "Wow! Your camera experience denotes very good photographic karma. I'm (mildly) surprised you don't have your gear insured (but of course, I don't either). Very cool your camera survived two days in an urban setting. The closest I've come to that was about 20 years ago. I was working with a photographer on a set of newspaper stories in the eastern Oregon desert country, with a local postmaster as our guide. After three long days together, we all had a late lunch at the little café in tiny Fields, and then set off on the 300-mile drive back home to Eugene. When we got back to the city that night, Larry, the photographer, realized he had left his camera bag full of gear at the café. I told him I thought all would be all right, though I didn't fully believe that myself. But when I called the postmaster the next morning, he said the café owner had given the camera bag to a cowboy driving north to Burns, where the post office was. The cowboy dropped it off with the postmaster, who packed it carefully and shipped it to us in Eugene, no charge.

"Sometimes life offers grace."

James Coleman: "My heart stopped when I read you'd lost your Sigma and I'm so glad it was found. As someone who hardly goes anywhere without one, I've found constantly carrying a camera makes me less likely to forget it as I've grown accustomed to their weight on my shoulder. The times when I've almost lost it were always after I'd gone without it for a spell. I'm convinced, though, it's only a matter of time before I lose my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten out of my car and left it in the phone holder. Congratulations on your recovery!"

Farhiz Karanjawala: "Well, we're two lucky as hell blokes."

Mike replies: That's a lovely story, Farhiz, and well written and presented. I enjoyed that, even if it struck a little too close to home.

John Shriver: 'Well, DSI is around the corner from Sancta Maria, but it's in Belmont. Belmont is quite 'tony,' so I'm not surprised your camera was safe there. Interesting that you had no comments on making a road trip in an EV."

Mike replies: Only because I didn't. I took the older ICE Acura. I've only had the EV a few days and I don't feel I'm ready to make my first long trip yet. I plan to make a few shorter trips first, after I get, ahem, my apps in order and have made a few fillups at DC Fast Chargers (the first try was a disaster—I got charged $69 for 30 minutes' charging). I'm not even up and running on the MyNissan app yet, so I have a ways to go.  

James Bullard: "You have my sympathy regarding your mother's condition. My mother spent the last six or seven years of her life in a supportive living facility. She had progressive dementia and, for the final four years, did not know me. When I would go to visit, she would repeatedly ask who I was. Such things make for an awkward end to one of our most important life relationships. Take care of yourself."

Mike replies: Indeed. And thank you, James. My mother is considered to be nonverbal, but I got several dozen words from her. Grateful for little gifts.

      

tl;dr: It's all good until I get to the software. Same with cameras.

-

This has been a very entertaining three or four weeks. I've been engaged in an intense flurry of research, which, for the most part, I enjoy. I noticed that as it progressed, it tended to evolve to ever-increasing levels of granularity. Sorta like this:

• Global view of solar energy adoption and alternative energy progress;
• Narrowing down to passenger vehicles;
• Narrowing to hybrid and full electric cars in general vs. ICE cars;
• Narrowing to the idea that my own next car should probably be a hybrid or full electric car;
• Deep dive into make-and-model searches, and the (difficult, in fact nearly insuperable) problem of aligning to my budget;
• Along the way, researching public and home charging, and home chargers (EVSEs);
• Arriving at the idea of an older, used Nissan Leaf simply because it's cheap (there's a whole story there I haven't related at all yet);
• Thence, adventitiously, to the Nissan Ariya, which I had never heard of and which had not been on my radar screen at all; 
• Sensing the opportunity there and seizing it; 
• Focusing on all the research I had to do on the particular car I was buying and navigating the purchase process, along the way investigating all the various incentives, the warranty, the loan terms, insurance increases, etc.;
• Taking delivery of the car and learning the basic controls; 
• And finally, beginning to explore and sort out the hugely complexified welter of software capabilities and complications in the car, which is where I am now. (See the very end of this post for a little good news.)

So what started with a hopeful and optimistic article about worldwide solar power adoption (really, it's good—you should read it if you happen to live at Earth) ended up with me trying to figure out what an unmarked little button at the end of the lightstalk does, in a car I had never heard of when I read the article. (It turns on auto-dimming of the high beams. Works pretty well, too, although it's fooled by oncoming streetlamps.)

To give you an idea of just how granular my research became, I'll just give you two little examples. These should stand for all the rest.

1.

First, as you might know, Tesla recently (well, November 2022) decided to share its formerly proprietary connector plug architecture with the rest of the world, opening its excellent Supercharger network to whoever wanted to use it. They renamed it NACS, North American Charging Standard. And one hopes that one day it will be, because there should be such a thing. And a kind reader (thanks, John K.) offered to send me a surplus NACS-to-J1772 adapter he happened to have. So as I was researching whether it would work for me, I uncovered an odd little situation. Turns out that many adapters have a little pin that depresses when you plug them into J1772 charging ports in cars, and this helps tell the charger that the connector is properly seated. But these won't work on the Nissan Ariya specifically, and here's why: 

This is the J1772 port on my car. Those two big lower pins are for DC Fast Charging. See that hourglass shape between the two? It's hollow on the Ariya. In almost every other car, it's solid. And that's where the adapter's pin happens to want to hit. So Nissan supplies its own adapter as a "kit." What makes it a kit? Well, here's a picture of it: 

That's a standard Tesla adapter, nothing special (or Nissan-y) about it. See that itty-bitty plastic piece next to it? That's the "Inlet Gap Plug," a little bit of plastic that press-fits into the top of the hollow hourglass shape, thus giving the pin on the adapter something to press up against when the connector is seated. Probably costs 11¢ to manufacture; I scored mine for $11 and change, woo-hoo.

It took me a long time to figure that out. 

2.

Second issue: Is the Chinese-made Lenz EVSE I bought for $289 the same as the allegedly Canadian-made Grizzl-E Classic 40A that costs $379? (I got a 40-amp charger because my car will only accept 32-amp charging, so a 40-amp circuit is enough). I got into the weeds on that. Here's the picture I finally found. I can't see them well enough to know for sure whether they're fabricated in the same electronics factory or whether one is a knockoff of the other. But they seem essentially identical in any case. I decided to take the chance, and ordered the Lenz. 

Turn the wipers off right now or else
This is just the sort of thing we have to do with photography. You start off thinking about great photographers you admire and want to emulate, grand ambitious projects, and what style of pictures turn you on. Much later, you find yourself trying to figure out whether a particular off-brand lens has more decentering than it should, or how, exactly, eye-focus works in your camera in certain tricky situations like shooting through foliage, or whether your camera happens to have a particular sensor that heats up too much and starts to show banding. You begin with grand plans. Then you find yourself reading through Amazon reviews at 2:00 in the morning or researching rumor sites about whether something you're waiting for is coming out next month or not. 

...And, unfortunately, in the same way that all roads lead to Rome, you usually end up, with either cars or cameras, lost, or adrift, or wandering, in that modern bane of all our existences...software. Software! Newman! I'm a reasonably clever dude, and I have lots of aptitudes that happen to intersect in useful ways with what I've wanted to do over the years, whether professionally or for fun. And, as you've seen many times, even before I shared with you the esoteric secret of the Inlet Gap Plug (and yes you're welcome for that), I can be a quick study when it comes to new subjects. But my eyes glaze over when it comes to software. I don't have that knack, alas. I don't have the patience. I don't have the gene, or whatever it is that makes some people good with that sort of thing. It must delight them. But they are wired differently from me. I would say they have strange brains, except I'm pretty sure it's me who has the strange brain, not them. In any event I do not enjoy software like everyone else seems to. I am averse to it. I'm going to spare you my old-fart diatribe against newfangled modern ways only because you've heard it all before, but let me just enumerate the essential problem of software, whether on an electric car or a digital camera:

1. There is one thing you need to do.
2. For flexibility and customization, you can be given three choices as to how the control is implemented.
3. Then the software engineers figure out six more choices. Choice is good, right? Pack it in.
4. But then the software engineers, who do not, and cannot, and will never understand that the goal of software should be to make life simpler, decide there are several different ways to do each of those nine things, so they give you all of them. You now have nine choices to make in order to do each of the nine ways to do the one thing. (I'm getting confused trying to describe it, but that's precisely appropriate.) Then a completely separate control is seen to have an influence on the one thing you are trying to control, so further obfuscation in the instruction manual becomes necessary. Warnings might have to be issued (there must be 900 little grayed-out boxes in the Ariya owner's manual with the header WARNING! at the top). So for instance on the Ariya, there might be 147 ways (I exaggerate, but not much) to influence the setting of the regenerative braking, many of which are identical but set in different ways, in different areas of the menus (you can set it here, or you can set it here, or you can...) with the caveat that, alas, alack, not one of those ways is true one-pedal driving, something I firmly believe every single all-electric car ought to have.

In almost all cases you end up in exactly the same place. Here it is. The car wash has grabbed on to your tire and you're committed and can't back out, and the auto-sensing windshield-wiper function has turned your wipers on, and you have no idea how to turn them off, but it's somewhere in the menus, and you have four seconds to figure it out because that giant spinning roller of thousands of wet, soapy streamers is headed right toward your delicate wipers and is about to destroy them; or, the bride is just about to cut the cake, and for no apparent reason whatsoever your camera has switched to JPEG-only with a cross-processing creative filter and a two-second tripod timer delay, and you have no idea a.) what you did to tell it to do that or b.) how to reverse the command input in the two seconds before the bride's cake server hits the icing and that crucial and essential moment that you must capture is lost for all time.

Software in a nutshell. At least to my strange brain. 

Anyway, that's where I am now. On the good side, it took me 24 hours to learn how to set the cruise control, but I got it. So that's one in the win column, so far.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

William Lloyd: "Well, once again while reading your post, I find myself occupying briefly the same space and time in the continuum as you. You and I, it seems, are that type of people who walk into a store or showroom and are disappointed to find (again!) that we know much more, oh so much more, than the hapless salesperson who has latched on to us at our approach. I would admit, for me 90% of the fun of executing a significant purchase is in that long buildup of gathering information and making the final choice. For alas, after the purchase, all too often the next cycle to begin is the reconsideration, and minor points of vexation uncovered, in what was too briefly a very satisfying quest for the next Holy Grail."

Dave Karp: "Re ...The bride is just about to cut the cake, and for no apparent reason whatsoever your camera has switched to JPEG-only with a cross-processing creative filter and a two-second tripod timer delay, and you have no idea...." That, right there, have me a shot of anxiety and I don't shoot weddings! Just spot on. For what it's worth, I have had the Grizzl-E at home to charge my Honda Clarity PHEV since 2019 and it has worked great. I hope you get the same reliability with your Lenz."

wilma: "Have you seen a doctor about this?  ;-) "

Mike replies: Well, not this specifically but....  :-)

MikeR: "Reminds me of my brother-in-law and I sitting in a rental Nissan something-or-other in a hotel parking lot for five minutes trying to get the car into reverse. (There's an obscure unmarked button that looks like decorative trim on the shifter lever that needs to be held down.)"

Kye Wood: "Former experienced software developer here (one of many careers). The only humans who make interactions with computers better are UX/UI Designers. You'll never be allowed to work in that field if you've ever done coding. Party because coders fixate on How will I implement this? UX/UI people focus on What's the simplest concept that lets me get this done? In short, coders call you a User. Designers call you a Person. And every banking website, phone, car information system, operating system, computer program...all treat you as if you have nothing better to do than learn another way of doing the same thing. And why. To keep you locked in! You could try something new but the cognitive burden of relearning yet one more needlessly different thing will keep you bound to the god-awful original product. I FEEL YOUR PAIN. LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE."

Robert Roaldi: "Re 'adventitiously,' thanks for that. You'd think these things would all be appliances by now. Instead, even appliances have taken the 'complexification' pill. I worked in software development from about 1977 to 2002. Everyone I worked with in the field ended up hating the work for many reasons, including the ones you describe. I use an iMac and have been doing three things with my home computers for about 25 years: surfing, email, and editing photos. I have ignored every other feature that has been introduced in that time, except for when they've actually interfered with that I want to do. And I'm no Luddite. As for phones, both home and mobile, if I didn't have to worry about calling 911 or a tow truck, I'd take a hammer to all of them."

Gary: "Thank you for describing your frustrations and confirming why I won't buy an EV."

Mike replies: Tell you what, though, Gary—you should definitely test drive a couple of them just for the experience and to add to your store of general automotive knowledge. Quite an eye-opener for me. Stick to good ones—I'd recommend trying the Ford Mustang Mach-E and/or the Hyundai Ioniq 5 or 6 or the Kia equivalent, the EV6. Everybody ought to experience what they're like, even if they have no intention of ever buying one. Silent, with gobs of torque, ultra-smooth continuous acceleration, one-pedal driving, a feeling of effortlessness...they're pretty wonderful just as cars. I presented myself at the Ford dealer by saying upfront that I was merely curious and wasn't in the market, so you won't be taking advantage of them as long as you're honest. 

Jayanand Govindaraj: "Software requires effort to master—which is why I have no intention of moving away from, say, the Adobe ecosystem, which I have been using for over 20 years now, or Windows which has been part of my life for far longer! By the way, the 'software' equivalent (i.e. the engineering) in a fossil-fuel-based vehicle is totally undecipherable by the average user, a comprehensive and total black box, and specialists (i.e. mechanics) are required to even so much as to open the hood and gingerly touch the engine  :-) . Give me the modern innards of vehicles any day, where we, as the user, have a certain modicum of control to fine-tune certain settings to our own specific needs."

Mike replies: Points taken. For example, I totally love the cruise control implementation in the Ariya, and I only had to learn it once. I'll use it all the time, as it's the way I keep myself from speeding. Who cares if it was 20 hours before I figured it out instead of 20 minutes? Doesn't matter in the long run.

Critical to my ultimate happiness is going to be persistence...I need to keep learning all the settings and not give up halfway through the process. Comfort comes with familiarity. Back on topic, I usually start with cameras by making a list of the things I want to accomplish with the settings, to match my preferences and needs in shooting. Then I have goals to guide my learning of the software. I find that helps a lot. 

Nick: "I'm a Ph.D. physical scientist who's had 30+ years of professional experience (and 45+ years of personal experience, starting at age five) in learning, using, and (occasionally) coding software. I'm actually quite good at picking my way through new software by guesswork, which is handy when I am faced with the software for a new scientific instrument. For those who haven't used such things, the general rule is that said packages make Photoshop look shallow and intuitive while also being more unstable than the beta build of an indie computer game; if you think about how bad software is when written for a consumer base of many millions, ponder how bad it can be when the resources devoted to it are appropriate for an installed base of

"All that said, I address new software the same way, regardless of platform: I start like you do, with knowing exactly what I want it to do, then figure out how to do just that. Once I get there, I'll sometimes decide to pick through the rest of the options to see if they do anything interesting that I hadn't thought about doing.

"Most of my experiences, though, are much like what happened when I got my first Olympus Micro 4/3 about 15 years ago: I figured out how to get the camera set up just like I wanted for ordinary shooting. Then, I spent several hours poking through every menu option in its labyrinthine interface to figure out what they all do and why someone might want to use them. As a final step, I left the camera set up in just the same way as I did from the beginning and never touched any of the other menu options again. I'm on my sixth Olympus, and the only thing that's really changed is to which interface device (knob, dial, button, whatever), exactly, each of the most basic controls has been mapped."

jim: "You have left out the issue, at least for me, of finally figuring out how to conquer the software, then forgetting that by the next time you need it! Or losing the piece of paper you wrote it down on!"

Mike replies: I just did that last night. Could not figure out how to dim the instrument cluster. Until I finally remembered it was something I had learned on the first day with the salesman. Two little buttons hidden out of sight on the left of the instrument cluster pod.

      

Took delivery on the new spaceship yesterday, with no hitches. It's easily the nicest intergalactic transport I've ever owned, and by far the best bargain. I'm really grateful to have gotten one for such a great price. That could still kick me in the you-know-what—Nissan could go out of business or something—but life's a risk I guess.

My car (I'm not the type to give names to my cars, but if my friends last night are any indication, it looks like this one is called "Panda") was sold new in Lancaster, Ohio, on August 17th, 2023, for $49,965. I bought it for $20,995 yesterday with 3,700 miles on it. It's indistinguishable from new as far as I can see. By the way, Electric Car Corner in Farmington, New York, has one more at that price, a black one with 11,096 miles. Call Noah at (585) 210-0206 if you're interested. Stock No. C9791. Please tell him I sent you. No affiliation other than as a perhaps overly enthused customer.

One very nice feature: the entire front footwell of the car is open; there's no transmission hump or center stack. This means I have a perfect place to stow the camera on the floor without impinging on the very generous passenger seat leg room. 

For the time being I'm stuck with Level 1 charging via a portable 120/240v charging cable (came with the car) until I get my garage charger (real name: EVSE, for electric vehicle supply equipment). Note that garage chargers can also be used outside if that's where you park. They're wind-, rain-, and snowproof. 

I went to my 12-step meeting last night and found out that there's a Level 2 charging station just across the street, behind the public library. It worked by just tapping a debit card. So I hooked up for an hour and 45 minutes. When I got back I had added 17% of charge to the car for $1.85, but the charge was waived so I didn't pay anything. I'm told those chargers are always free. 

Today, starting with 93% charge, I'm off to find the alleged one DC Fast Charger in town just so I know it exists and where it is, then on to the Nissan dealer for a certain weird little part called an inlet gap and some floor mats. And to find out if they are certified to service the electric vehicles. Then as soon as I can gather all the bits together, I can work on getting my Level 2 garage charger installed.  

A few predictions to give us something to talk about:

—In 9 years or sooner, a Chinese EV manufacturer will be the best-selling carmaker in North America.

—In 13 years or sooner, it will be commonplace for pretty ordinary electric cars to have 600 miles of range.

—In 17 years or sooner, car batteries will be 50% smaller, 60% lighter, and twice as powerful as today's, and will cost about a third as much.

—In 23 years or sooner, most gas stations will be gone and the people with range anxiety will be those looking for gasoline. 

B&W guy
I suppose it's natural that my Ariya should be black-and-white, right? I mean, what else would you expect from me? I considered the license plate "ADD D76." Or maybe....

And of course with a B&W car you know my charger just had to be this one. It's supposed to arrive today.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Rick Popham: "You could call it 'Storm Trooper' if you're you're a Star Wars fan—and feeling a bit feisty."

Mike replies: Believe it or not, New York plate "STRMTRPR" is already taken.

Bob G.: "Speaking of cameras, did you get the optional dual camera Drive Recorders in addition to the standard rear view mirror and I-AVMs (Intelligent Around View Monitor)?

Mike replies: No, those aren't included on my "Engage" trim. I'm also missing the smart charger for the phone, so I rigged up a Lightning cable from the backseat USB port (at the rear of the motorized armrest) to keep the phone plugged in (if you have Carplay on for a long drive it runs down the phone battery. I drove 185 miles yesterday because I wanted to try out the local DC Fast Charger, which is at a Dodge Dealership). The brochure for your year (here's the one for 2023) is the go-to for sorting out which trims have which features—there is a magnificent grid chart on the next-to-last page that tells you all that. But be sure to look at the one for the year you're interested in. 

Roger Bradbury: "I note that the photo of your car at the top of this post had to be in colour, to show that the subject was black and white! :-) But still, the shot is composed like a black-and-white photo and there's little colour in it."

Mike replies: An assignment that Paul Kennedy, an instructor of mine in art school who became my son's grandfather, gave us in Color Class: black-and-white in color. These can be effective because you can look for ever-tinier accents of color that add just that little touch of je ne sais quoi to the picture.  :-)  I even experimented for a time with desaturating color pictures almost but not quite all the way, thinking it might imply color without really hitting you over the head with it. The problem with that turned out to be that it was inconsistent. Some pictures worked really well, many others not so well.

Kye Wood: "Best part of having a new car these days is discovering new things that you had no clue that they had. Just this week I discovered that I've got headlight washers! And that I can set the cruise control speed while the car is stationary and that I can press a button on the steering wheel and the car won't exceed the speed limit, unless I mash the accelerator. Because it reads the speed signs! And that's just this week. Not to mention headlights that draw an exclusion zone around oncoming traffic so as not to blind them. All in my lowest base spec car."

John McMillin: "Six hundred miles of range is way above my bar for range anxiety. That covers the longest day I would ever want to drive, even allowing for heat waves and deep winter weather, which is not the time I'd want to drive at all.

"Instead of a bigger battery, I'd want a lighter battery. Your car's battery weighs either 972 or 1274 lbs. (I looked it up.) For comparison, the engine of a Nissan Sentra weighs about 300 lbs., including exhaust and cooling system. I know that regen braking recaptures much of the extra momentum of EVs, and mass adds safety in head-to-head collisions (but not in single-vehicle wrecks). But you've come a long way from the Miatas you used to rave about.

Mike replies: Yes, this is not my style of car. But remember, I only bought this one because for whatever reason it was affordable to me—I didn't get to optimize for what I wanted. I couldn't afford the '25 Honda Civic Hybrid for instance (putting aside the "Honda Knee Problem"). All things being equal, I would actually have preferred the upcoming new 2026 Leaf I'm sure. But it will be a lot more expensive than what I paid for my Ariya even though it's a lower-level model.

Many makers in the world create small "commuter" EV cars—in Europe they have many that we don't have here. Even the VW ID.2all won't be coming here. And of course all smaller and cheaper Chinese EVs are banned from import here, for mainly specious reasons.

Also, this doesn't apply to your comment here, but I have to say I think it's a tiny bit ironic that anti-EV people out there in the world complain about the weight of EV batteries when so many people are driving 5,000- and 6,000-pound pickup trucks as personal conveyances. Just saying, as they say.

     

Related Stories

• UPDATE: Range Anxiety (OT)
• We live in a world where...
• Comments to the EV Post

 

[I got behind on the comments (I've had to focus on the car purchase process, doubly so since there is so much more to learn this time) so I'll publish the "Featured Comments" to the EV post here. The comments are out of order; they're usually in some semblance of the order in which they came in. "Featured Comments" is meant to be a sampling. The remainder of the comments will appear underneath the original post (below this one) as usual (they're all posted now). Sorry for the delay. It's been a wild week, and very full. In honor of the subject, commenter names in an appropriate color. —Mike]

-

Now: EV = Electric Vehicle

15 years ago: EV = Electronic Viewfinder

65 years ago: EV = Exposure Value

:-)

-

R. Edelman: "Mike, you got a fantastic deal on the Ariya. You deserve it! I have a friend who owns one. They are very nice vehicles. I believe they are made in Japan, which means good quality. I own a [Nissan] Leaf, which has been reliable, and dealer service has always been good. If you plan to travel with it, streamline payments by signing up with one or more of the charging networks that are available. I think that you will be quite happy with it. Enjoy!"

AN: Agree. I’ll just add two points: 1.) There are already more EV chargers up and down those highways than most people think (chargers are found via apps, not signs or billboards). 2.) Once you get used to the different paradigm, it’s often possible to charge while running errands or traveling (e.g. the car charges while you shop, or eat lunch, or do whatever it is you plan to do other than driving that day). I’ve been traveling for the past five days, and I’ve only waited for a charge once, for about 15 minutes. Otherwise all charging has taken place while doing something else that I needed or wanted to do anyway."

William Giokas: "Good luck with your new EV. The Winter will be the test on how well your new EV will perform. Your range will drop and effect how many long-range trips you can make in the Winter."

Fons (partial comment): "We take our Tesla on long distance trips. We have gone from the home base in The Netherlands all the way to the south of Spain, north to Norway, and east to Montenegro. On those trips, we need to spend a bit of time at the superchargers, of course. On average, we have to take a 30-min. break every 2.5 hours. So we can supercharge 24 times, and still spend less time at the fuel station than if we would go with one of our old cars. Most of the time we combine our charging stops with a nice break to get something to eat or drink. Or you can just go for a little walk. Or in case you do not want any of those things, you can just play a game or watch a movie on the onboard entertainment system.

"On longevity of the battery: our car nears 10 years, and its range has reduced by 15 km in the last five years, or less than 5%. Longevity of the tires is something else altogether.

"Side note, we actually kept our Mazda MX5 for a few months after switching to the electric. Although it was a fantastic car, and heaps of fun to drive, it never left the garage after the Tesla arrived. But with all of these things, YMMV."

Carlos Pessoa: "You make a great point about how EVs require a shift in how we think about refueling. But I believe their usefulness depends heavily on whether you can actually charge at home. Take my case, for example: I live in an older apartment building where installing an EV charger in my parking spot—or anywhere in the garage, for that matter—isn’t allowed. And that’s not unusual; it’s actually the norm where I live. So for people like me, range anxiety (loved that term, by the way) would be a daily reality, not just a theoretical worry. In that sense, EVs absolutely have a place—but I think the use case is narrower than many assume, especially for those of us without access to home charging."

Daniele (partial comment): "The biggest problem I see is too much powerful interests touched by this. Energy model change does not come easy, as is blatantly obvious these days on so many fronts. I went through the phase you're in now (let's call it obsession?) when the first Leaf and Zoe were out; four years ago, I finally got a Peugeot e-208 with a real range of about 150 miles as a first car for the family! And I live in a rural area to boot. In four years, I drove almost 50k miles on it, including long round trips. I just got used to how to manage things and it has been more than OK. I recently got a Kia EV6."

Thomas Mc Cann: "I let my battery drop to 50% and then top up to 80%. Eighty percent is better for the battery apparently. I previously had a BMW i3. This had a small BMW motorcycle engine which cut in when the battery got low, to recharge the battery enough for 40 more miles. I never suffered range anxiety."

Polestar 4 EV

Craig Beyers: "When I lived in a single-family home and commuted ~40 miles round trip for work, an EV would have been logical for transportation, except for the several 500+ miles round trip trips each year. Now, when I’m retired and live in an apartment, an EV isn’t very logical—and I have the same long trips. Why? I can’t install a charger at my apartment and would have to drive to a charger, plug in, wait for the charge, and pay retail for electricity. I could cope with long-distance by driving two hours, taking a break, including charging, and continuing on. Charging time would extend my trip but not onerously. I’d still have to pay retail for electricity, but the cost would be tolerable. Purchasing an EV to replace a paid-for gas vehicle also doesn’t make sense. So, while I’d like an EV, there’s no logical reason to buy one. I’m both disappointed and relieved."

Tim McGowan: "Congratulations. Thoughts become Actions. Updates—we need progress reports. Will this help you get out and do more photography?"

Mike replies: tl;dr version: Yes. For the longer version, it's complicated, so I think the full answer should be reserved for a future post.

John Kauk: "Congratulations on the EV purchase, Mike. I hope you enjoy the experience. I've driven an EV since 2018, beginning with a Tesla Model 3, which I traded recently for a Rivian R1S. EVs are great for day-to-day, and I find them really good for travel as well."

Scott: "My wife has had her electric vehicle for more than 1 1/2 years, and hasn’t visited a public charging station ever. She loves not having to stop to refuel, as one does with ICE vehicles. She just plugs the car in whenever it needs a charge, in our garage. The car gets a bit over 300 miles (~500km) on a charge, so we could do more driving than I ever want to do in a day with only one stop. Of course, if you don’t have a garage or other private parking, you will need to use public charging stations. I was in London last month and in some residential areas,the streetlights have been outfitted with outlets which can be used to charge your car."

james wilson: "My RAV4 plug-in hybrid is the answer. I drive all-electric in town and have the gas engine for long trips or when I forget to plug in. It is fast. Loads of power at a touch of the pedal at any speed. My battery range is about 40 miles but I rarely stomp on the pedal. YMMV."

Mike replies: PHEVs are simultaneously the best of both worlds and the worst of both worlds. That's a longer subject too. Of course they probably make the most sense right now. I started this journey looking at hybrids. I absolutely loved the new Honda Civic Hybrid, which is essentially an electric car with an Atkinson-cycle engine as a generator and for direct drive in the final highway gear. It's actually a transmissionless vehicle. It can get 60 MPG if you read owners' reports. And I can attest that the interior is a decided step up from Toyota's competition. 

Daniel: "A major slice of the car-owning population is always left out of these discussions. Car owners who don’t have a personal garage in front of their homes to park and charge the car. People who live in apartments and cities. In America this may be a minority, but it’s a big minority. What is the solution for these millions of people to charge their vehicles?"

Mike replies: Writ much larger, this is very much like the transition to digital cameras. At first, skepticism, concern and puzzlement were widespread and significantly justified. But the broader landscape today (smartphones for 60% of the world's population) is radically different than even the most passionate of pioneer adopters were envisioning in the 1990s. I suspect this will echo in the EV transition as well. Certainly we will not be burning oil derivatives at the point of use for transportation in 2100, or even 2050. But I'm not deluded enough to think I can say what the situation will actually be then. When my dear friend and BTZS founder Phil Davis was nearing the end of his life, he said the thing he regretted most was that he didn't get to see what was going to happen. Ditto!

Ragnar Våga Pedersen: "Turning the car(d)s. Worth seeing."

Hyundai Ioniq 6 EV

Jeff Hohner: "You nailed it. When we got our EV (a 2024 Hyundai Kona EV) we rejoiced in its quiet, its acceleration and its economy. But the thing we found ourselves enjoying most about it was unexpected: no longer having to visit the gas station! We charge at home. At first, we charged with the level one charger that came with the car. Several months later we got a level two charger (a FLO Home X5 7.2kW). We run the car’s battery down to 20% as recommended by Hyundai, then charge it to 80%, again as recommended. The L2 charger does this easily overnight, even with the charger throttled back to 20 amps (the battery prefers slower charging). A setting in the car schedules charging to start at bedtime. If we’re getting close to 20%, we just plug the car in after coming home from work, and the car’s soft female voice intones, 'Charging scheduled.' We’re living in the future! as Talking Heads sang in 1977."

Peter Barnes: "You got it Mike. The ABC of charging EVs: Always Be Charging. Yes, ICE cars refuel fast, but you have to be there. EVs can do what ICE cars can't—refuel while unattended. You are home, your car is sitting in the carport/garage/driveway until you need it again tomorrow—plug it in. I have owned an EV for six years, no other vehicle. Can't remember having range anxiety. The only people I know with range anxiety are people thinking about buying an EV. None of my friends with EVs have it; it is a condition that seems to cure itself within days of the EV arriving."

David N (partial comment): "Mr. Johnston, I don’t mind your EV articles at all. You study your off-topics and have what I consider a good approach. Maybe I missed a post, but please also consider the privacy invasiveness of new cars generally, if you haven’t already. They are rolling surveillance machines that record and broadly distribute data about you and your driving. Round about a year ago Mozilla Foundation published a study on it."

Mr Pak Ming Wan: "I rented an EV in California for the first time earlier this year. I too expressed range anxiety with the rental car assistant, but he said to me this: 'You will see that in California an EV is more convenient than you might imagine.' He was right.

"But what I found surprising was the change in social habits, as you mention. Parents would drive to charging stations in the evening with their kids and watch Netflix with them whilst charging. Shops had chargers as a destination for customers—I got into the habit of combining my visits to CVS and Target with charging. The office had charging stations so going to work was charging too. It was really a low lift to go electric there."

Mike replies: For some of these reasons, a few months ago Walmart announced a heavy commitment to installing its own charging stations in Walmart and Sam's Club parking lots. Their hope is to equal the largest network—Tesla's Supercharger network—in five years, which took Tesla 15 years to do. (Read a short statement of Walmart's purpose by John Higham, Electrical Vehicle Association Board Member.)

Jimmy Reina: "Living in California, we probably have a distorted perception of the availability of charging stations, but my own conclusions are...the market will deliver. No 19th-century capitalist worth their salt ever said, 'Wow look at all these gasoline filling stations, maybe we should invent a horseless carriage powered by an internal combustion engine.' This is not a chicken/egg situation, but a 'necessity is the mother of invention' situation. Having said that, there has always been range anxiety. In the early days of the automobile, it was not uncommon to see a can of fuel mounted on the fender or running board."

Frank Hamsher (partial comment): "Your comments are spot on. We have 2.5 years of experience driving an EV. In that entire time, the only time we have had to use a public charge station was while we were waiting to have a dedicated mains power socket installed in our garage so that we could charge the car without risking an overload on other house circuits. [...] Primary emotion: LOL as we drive by the petrol stations! I calculate that we are saving A$1,500 per year."

Walfredo Cirne (partial comment): "Please keep writing OT topics you are highly interested in, Mike. They are fun to read. Let me offer you one suggestion to research. Consider an e-bike. Not as replacement for your car. But in addition to it."

Gary Merken: "I'm thinking of the times I drove from southwest Connecticut to northeast Florida in one day. A distance of about 980 miles. Leaving Greenwich at 5:45 a.m., I would never had made Jacksonville by 9:15 p.m. if I'd had to stop for 45 minutes two or three times along the way to recharge."

Andrew: "Never going to a gas station is the best thing about an electric (or plug-in hybrid) car. This is why I think you should try an L1 charger before worrying about an L2 charger. If a slow trickle is sufficient to top you of overnight, then why bother getting a faster charger? Will you even notice if it finishes charging a few hours earlier?"

Mike replies: I'll be doing that at first. I get the car tomorrow (Monday the 4th), and my electrician can't come install the 240v outlet until early September. (Tradesmen are hard to get up here.) So I'll be Level 1 for a month or so. (For anyone who hasn't been following along, Level 1 is sourcing power from an ordinary 120v household outlet, like the kind in your living room.)

schralp: "You hit the nail on the head; best thing about an EV is always having a 'full' tank—actually, 80–90% for best battery hygiene. I got mine in 2018 and rarely care about range. The key when you do take a road trip is to stop for brief top offs in the 20–80% range where they charge the fastest. I rarely stop for more than 10 minutes. Again though that is a tiny minority of my use case. Never going to the gas station is awesome and the electricity is a bargain compared to gas."

[Thanks to all commenters, featured and not.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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[UPDATE: I done did the deed! I bought a 2023 Nissan Ariya Engage e-4orce EV with 3,700 miles on it (not a typo) for $20,995 (also not a typo) on August 1st, 2025, ten years to the day after I closed on the sale of my house in Wisconsin to move here. Super smooth, fast, comfortable car with lots of luxury touches. "Like New" in used camera terms.

Nissan (manufacturer) Ariya (model) Engage (trim tier) e-4orce (AWD). It was the sixth of the original eight trim levels in 2023, third from the bottom, one of only two trims with the smaller battery. The original price was approx. $48,190 two+ years ago. That's about a 56–57% depreciation in two years, which is...a lot for a near-luxury-level SUV with only 3,700 miles on it.

Three main reasons it was so cheap AFAIK: 

• Nissan is limping globally in terms of business health
• Smaller battery + dual motors and AWD with tons of e-horsepower and torque = low range
• Slow charging, both at home (7.2 kW) and at DC Fast Chargers (130 kW)

All three of those are bad for sales, especially since charging speed and driving range are the chief concerns of new EV adopters. (That was Musk's big innovation with Tesla: give the cars great big heavy batteries to quiet consumers' range concerns.) 

I bought it mainly because it was within reach for me, which almost nothing is, but there's a lot I like about it. Mainly, it has an opulent and very tasteful interior, but without the increasingly trifling overcomplications in the interiors of the highest models (I don't need a motor to open the secondary glove box, for instance). Main thing I'll touch on: it's possibly the most comfortable car I, now a sedentary overweight 6'1" 68-year-old*, have ever clambered into. The exceptionally good seats slide back automatically when you open the door to make egress and entry easier, the height and the lack of a stepover are very comfortable, and I love the elaborate "coffee table" which is what Nissan calls the center armrest. Importantly (I might even say crucially) for me, there's no center stack. The sharp side of a center stack digging into the side of my knee in a painful way is a surprisingly prevalent problem for me, disqualifying my second choice, the new Civic Hybrid.

Two pet-peevish things I love: you can cover up the cup holders, which are an eyesore in most vehicle cockpits IMO. And you lower the tailgate with your arm, which I remain convinced is something I am capable of doing all by myself like a big boy. No offense if your taste is for the opposite.

Anyway, brave new world. I'm as excited as a kid with a new toy. However, this news means you will stop hearing about EVs very shortly now, as I'll be "stopping shopping" soon. (And, as always [cheap pens?!? Really Mike?], thank you for your patience with me.) My late brother Scott's rule amongst the brothers was "new sheet metal requires pictures," but I haven't taken delivery yet. Pictures to come. 

 

I beg your pardon for the off-topic post, but I'm just immersed in learning about EVs and everything associated with them (great fun, by the way) and I can't help but have the subject on the brain. (I have this problem: it's by far easiest to write about whatever I'm enthusiastic about at the moment. A few of you might possibly have noticed.)

Here's the thought: it's that one big problem with EVs resides, collectively, in our own heads. We need to re-train ourselves to think differently about fueling.

For years—forever—we have learned, practiced, and internalized the liquid-fueling protocol, namely, drive till empty and then fuel completely all at once, while on the move—that is, as a stop in the midst of driving around or driving toward a destination. So far, everybody except EV adopters still wants to mentally shoehorn electric cars into the liquid-fueling model—drive till almost empty then fuel all at once en route, while out driving. Well, not to sound like a second-grader, but that's not fair. At some point we'll have to change that thinking. Electric refueling goes like this: top off if needed when the vehicle is at rest, meaning mostly at home. It's a new way of thinking about fueling, with a new set of plusses and minuses. So by assuming or insisting that electric cars must replicate the paradigm of liquid refueling above all else, people are naturally allowing their thinking about EVs to be distorted. They have mental blinders on, so to speak. Mental blinders of their own making. Because, obviously, electric refueling is not going to be equally good at the one thing that liquid refueling is best at. 

That's what creates "range anxiety"—because we're thinking about driving till empty. And we're assuming we'll need to charge on the road. And all of us (or maybe I should speak for myself) are familiar with that panicky feeling of suddenly realizing the gas gauge is low. Or of actually running out of gas and becoming stranded. But from most of the EV owners I've heard from, they don't drive till empty. That's not how the new model works. They let the charge go down as it will or as it must and then charge it back up more or less right away, the next time the car is at rest and not being used.

I first encountered this idea about fueling and peoples' thinking about it in an article written by Adrian Salinas at an Australian site called ArenaWire.

For most non-city-dwelling drivers (I didn't say all, and yes, I know the exceptions are out there), the car sits idle for most of most days, and even more of the nights. That's certainly true of what I would call "commuter" driving, meaning [home —> work or errands —> home]. Put it this way—imagine you had your own gas pump right next to your garage and the gas in it was nearly free. How many times would you come home at night running on fumes? If you said anything but "never," you're an edge case (maybe you work as a rural mailman. Maybe you have a 170-mile commute each way). If [home —> distant destination] driving is electric fueling's worst thing, then its best thing is that suddenly you do have a gas station in your own garage, with fuel that costs 1/3rd to 1/5th of what liquid fuel costs. Commuter driving is electric's best end-user attribute. Gas/petrol can't touch it.

To figure out if it's for you, all you have to figure out is, how much of your driving leaves the car resting at home, and what's your longest possible daily commuter trip? For me it's a drive to Rochester + maybe 35 extra miles at most doing other things along the way or afterward. That's 150 miles round trip give or take. That's my outlier. Well within the range of all but one or two of the worst EVs still on the market. And 98% if not 99% of my driving is commuter driving, starting and ending at home. For that last 2% or 1%, I could either deal with charging along the way, or rent a car. 

The new 2026 Nissan Leaf, coming this Fall

A funny little aside: I have a friend here who bemoans range anxiety with great drama. At which point I remind him that he's got four cars. What, can't he just snag the keys to the ICE SUV on the way out the door for that road trip? Having a liquid-fuel vehicle as well as an EV is the crude way to quiet range anxiety. Any given person might not want this, and it makes no sense to prescribe it, but then, it's also true that a lot of people have it. Hedges & Company estimates that approximately 37% of US households own two cars, and an additional 22% own three or more cars (via AI overview). I've got a friend who has one "good" (expensive, shiny, new) and one "beater" (worn, working, older) pickup truck, as well as a motley of several lesser cars...and a 4-wheeler, and an enormous motor-scooter he bought for a departed girlfriend, and two real motorcycles, and so on. I don't know his opinion about electric cars, but I'll try to remember to tread gently and not blast him a new one if has the temerity to bring up range anxiety as the "deal killer" with Yr. Hmbl. Ed. 

Finally, not meaning to be incendiary, but...Eisenhower built the entire Interstate highway system. Surely our flattened, infiltrated version of the once-mighty Federal government, meek, meagre and withered as it has become, could eventually shift itself to install EV chargers all along those highways. That would take care of a whole lot of those long-range trips. We even have convenient places already reserved to put them...they're called rest stops.

Mike

*I used to be 6'2", no kidding.

P.S. Here's a nice video about what it actually costs to run an EV.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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I've been ill. Spent the whole night on Monday in the ER. Not serious, not chronic, and not important, but it was an ordeal. I'm recuperating. 

Life happens.... 

Meanwhile, Oren and Carl (old friends, of each other and, later, of me—Oren can be seen here and Carl here) have discovered the Chris Killip Foundation website. There's a beautiful brief selection of photographs from each of several of his projects. Go to the site and then to "Images" and have a look. I think this work deserves extended viewing, even meditation if that's not too much to say. His great 1988 book In Flagrante is hard to obtain, and I've never actually seen a copy. It would be nice to have more of the work online if the presentation were as good as it is on the website. (Why can't whole books be presented online? I guess it's not done because then no one has to pay, and photographers need money too. But when the books aren't available and the photographer is no longer with us....)

I never quite had a handle on Chris Killip while he was alive, I'm sorry to say. So I've been reading bits and pieces of biography from here and there. The Wikipedia article on him is a good place to start. 

Back soon.

Mike

P.S. I'll be working on catching up with comments today and tomorrow.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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