Well, this is it—the last-ever TOP post on TypePad. TypePad is scheduled to close down tomorrow, although who knows what will happen and when. We'll all see, I guess.

I will be posting for the foreseeable future over on Patreon, where I urge you to become a visitor or, better yet, a supporter. Voluntary donations from readers have become the biggest income generator for The Online Photographer. It has changed many times over the years, first ads, then affiliate income, then print sales, etc., but that's where we are now.

This morning, on Patreon, I published the long-promised version of the Dogs Baker's Dozen with the photographers' comments attached. It was super easy, and a pleasure. I have to say that during its decline, images had become increasingly difficult to publish here on TypePad. It would sometimes take an hour of work (and frustration) to get one to post successfully. Sometimes I'd have to give up and come back to it later. The folks from TypePad couldn't figure out what was wrong, and if they couldn't, I certainly couldn't. Sigh. The handwriting on the wall wasn't that difficult to read. 

At the lower right-hand corner of this site it says, or used to say, "Member Since 06 / 2007." I actually started TOP in 2005 on Blogger—our 20th anniversary is coming right up at the end of November. Considering that my "stretch goal" in 2005 was to keep the blog going for as long as one whole year, that's pretty amazing. A whole year seemed next to impossible in November of 2005. For the most part, it's been the perfect job for me. The work suits my skills and interests, and the circumstances (self-employed, set my own schedule, limp when I'm feeling down and crank when I'm feeling energetic) also suit me. I have no idea how many people have come and gone over those 20 years, but it could easily be well into six figures. And I've been especially lucky in attracting so many great readers. I initially started 'Featuring" comments to foster discussion and a sense of community, but something better happened—I attracted a whole lot of thoughtful, intelligent people with extensive knowledge in this and other fields, and provided an outlet for them to share their own experiences, wisdom, and musings. I have been so influenced by readers I can't even tell you. Virtually every aspect of my life has been touched by something I learned from somebody who reads my blog. 

It's still kind of an open question whether TOP will be able to continue—a forced relaunch on a different site, with a different look and a different setup, is a rough transition even when it's carefully planned for months in advance. Executed pell-mell on short notice and under duress, well, let's just say the conditions are not favorable. But I'll try. It's not like I have much choice. I can't retire. To repeat one of the jokes I like and repeat again and again, "my retirement plan is to keep working." 

Well, I don't want to go on and on, because this could disappear before 24 hours have passed. It's been a good 18 years and three months since June 2007. That's 6,700 days, and I've written something here on most of them—about 9,400 posts total. 

Sic transit gloria mundi (thus passeth the glory of the world). Good luck to us all, and I hope I'll be seeing you! 

Kind regards,
Mike

In the heart of the old Burned-Over District
September 2025

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I should probably lead with the good news. it looks like the problem of the old site—this one—is solved. The entire TypePad site, all 17 years of it, will go up on the web as a static resource. You'll be able to search it, illustrations will be present, and some of the links will continue to work.

For the foreseeable, I'm going to be blogging over at Patreon, which you can access at: 

patreon.com/theonlinephotographer

I'm still learning how Patreon works. This morning I wrote an off-topic post as a sort of experiment—tomorrow I'll experiment with a post containing a video. 

At Patreon, you can sign up for free (at the site, look for the three dots underneath the right-hand side of the picture of the lake), or you can just visit, or you can sign up to be a member, a.k.a. supporter, for whatever amount you want, as little as $1 per month. The most common amount is $5 a month. 

Members/supporters see everything, and can comment. Free subscribers and visitors will see all the photographic posts but not the off-topic ones. I figure people who support me like my writing, while people with a free account or who are just visiting come for photography content. They can't comment. That's not my decision—it's just how Patreon is set up.

This morning's OT post is about the many contrasts between the city and the country. In some cases the city wins, like this one: 

"If you live in the city, there are a hundred places to buy whatever you need. In the country, there's one place to buy any particular thing you need, and they will periodically run out of it. In the city, when a store or vendor runs out of something, it will be back in stock within, say, four days. In the country, when a store or vendor runs out of something, you might still be checking whether it's back in stock five weeks later, and at some point it becomes an open question whether you'll ever see it there again."

And in some cases the country wins, like this one:

"In the city, if your car breaks down by the side of the road, large numbers of cars will drive right past you as if you meant to be right there doing just what you're doing, and eventually a cop will help you. In the country, if you get stuck in the mud by the side of the road, a stranger in the very next passing pickup truck will stop, silently rig up a towline by taking it off another piece of equipment he has in his truckbed, pull you out out of the mud, and leave again, having said about eighteen words to you the whole time. He will of course wave off the ten-dollar bill you hold out to him as a thank-you for his time. Even though he could use ten bucks."

If you're NOT a Patreon supporter, would you do me a favor? Go over there and tell me what you can see. You're supposed to see the first paragraph and then come up against a paywall. But I'd like to know how it looks. As the so-called Creator, I can't see what you see.

Not so good
The Patreon compositor is more limited than the one here. For instance, those two quotes above are inset. I can't do that at Patreon. And I'm stuck with the font they provide. But you want to know what bugs me the most? Subheads! I like writing with subheads—they break up the "gray matter" (an old publishing term for unrelieved, unbroken masses of text), and they serve as mileposts for readers skipping forward or back or trying to find something in the post. But the way they're supposed to look is the way the subhead looks at the start of this paragraph—with no line break. Well, I can't do that at Patreon—it has to look like this:

Not so good

With a line break after it. Ugh. Has TOP no standards?! That just looks wrong to me. 

But oh well. Any port in a storm. TypePad is slated to disappear five days from now. 

By the way—fingers crossed—it looks like the problem of the old site—this one—is solved. The entire TypePad site, all 17 years of it, will go up on the web as a static resource. You'll be able to search it, illustrations will be present, and some of the links will continue to work. It doesn't have a URL yet, but it shouldn't be too long now. 

Comments are still open here. 

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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As we enter the mournful final days of the old TypePad blog, I've temporarily taken up posting at the Patreon site, which I formerly used just as a means of collecting voluntary contributions. There's a new post up over there this morning. The URL is: 

patreon.com/theonlinephotographer

Please bookmark it. Also, soon, my three domains, theonlinephotographer.com, .org, and .net, will all point to it. I haven't done that yet but I will soon. 

Really sad to say goodbye to my home of 17 years, but I'm rather liking Patreon. I like writing on the compositor. It feels a little different somehow. Illustrations can be larger. And, to be frank, I had been having a lot of problems here in recent months. It had become extremely difficult to load and publish illustrations, for example. 

Two little housekeeping details: one is that Patreon doesn't support RSS feeds for posts (sorry! The final WordPress site will have that feature), and the other is that you have to be a paid supporter to leave comments over there. That's the only means of moderating comments, except for deletion. 

Please head over there to see new posts and to leave comments (comments will be closed here from now on, although I'll post new reminders here a few more times).

Thanks for reading all these years, or however long you've been coming! 

Off we go into the future,

Mike

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I've decided what I have to do. It's becoming clear that the new site is not going to be ready for prime time by October 1, so...

The Online Photographer is moving to the Patreon site temporarily. The URL is:

patreon.com/theonlinephotographer

But, TOP on Patreon will still be mostly free. It won't be just for paying customers. Naturally, I love it and appreciate it when people want to join for a few bucks a month, but I'm more comfortable when you can do it voluntarily. So, over there on Patreon, you can either join as a paying supporter, join with a free account, or just go to the page and visit—most things will still be viewable that way. Hopefully people will become supporters because they want to, not because I'm coercing them by withholding most of the content. That's the way it's been up till now. Of course, a few things will be reserved just for supporters, because it's only fair. Supporters support me, after all.

How long will this last? Well, certainly until I get my groove back and settle into writing again. Maybe a couple of months. (That might turn into double that—just guessing.) As a way of taking the time pressure off of getting the new site up and running smoothly.

Dad's decision disk
Some people like making decisions early—"there, that's settled"—while others like leaving decisions until the last minute. I actually hate making decisions. Early-deciders think people like me are crazy, but there's an explanation for people who feel this way—it's that we dislike closure, because it shuts down possibilities and makes it harder to react and respond to new insights or new information. It's a version of what they call opportunity cost—when you decide on one possible course, you lose all the others. So people like us make decisions grudgingly and late and might still want to leave them open longer.

Just a personality kind of thing.

Decisiveness is good for certain pursuits—business, probably—but maybe not always; indecisiveness can hamper us in many cases, but in other circumstances it might be what saves the day. I could name examples of decisions reached rashly and too soon. Sometimes, people, or companies, or countries get cornered into having to accept a decision that's clearly wrong. (If I named those examples, it would hijack this discussion straightaway.)

My father's notion was that any decision is better than no decision. He was so frustrated with my indecisiveness that he came home from a trip once with a present, a brass medallion about three inches in diameter. One side was inset with red enamel and said "NO," and the other side was enameled green and said "YES." He told me that whenever I had a decision to make, I should flip it on to the carpet and go with whatever came up. 

So the next time I had a decision to make, I flipped it on the carpet. It came up Yes. I stood there for a minute or two, pondering, then reached over and with my toe flipped it to the No side. Then a pondered a while longer, and flipped it back to Yes.... 

Laughing emoji here....

So that wasn't going to work. 

Anyway, this isn't really a decision either. But I'm overwhelmed and stressed out, and if I don't find a way to relieve the pressure, then these next ten days (this site, on TypePad, will be gone forever on the 30th) will not be pleasant. Or productive: I don't deal with pressure well (never have), and I don't work effectively once the pressure gets too high. When you don't do things until you have to, sometimes it's good. It falls under the category of motivation. But when the pressure gets to be too much it turns into a net negative. 

Again, the new URL is patreon.com/theonlinephotographer. I'll point my domains there within the next few days. The old links will break on the 30th.

As an aside, I've gotten fascinated in the past week or so with videos showing boats navigating Florida inlets—Haulover Inlet, for one—which I never knew was a thing. (The internet is full of surprising things you new knew existed). Boats being buffeted and tossed by chaotic waves—it's like watching a metaphor.

I will be astonished if I don't lose half my audience in the next two weeks, so, if you stick with me through these choppy seas, you're really helping, and thanks. 

If you have any comments, please leave them over there. I'll leave comments turned on here for a few more days, but they'll disappear soon. 

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. COMMENTS HERE WILL BE TURNED OFF SOON, AND OLD COMMENTS WILL BE LOST

I've just put up a new post—"Signature Shots" at Patreon.

Free to all. 

Thanks for your patience, friends. What a month. Wow.

Mike

David Vestal once said photographers are "professional noticers." I notice things all the time that most people pass by blissfully unaware. Constantly looking. Constantly noticing.

I can tell when I get in "photographing mode" because I just start seeing pictures. As I go about my life in the world I'll think to myself (does that expression strike anyone else as singularly dumb? "Think to myself"? How else does anyone ever think?)—anyway, I'll think to myself, that's a picture right there or there goes another one. 

And there are a thousand ways to miss a picture. Which, I suppose, is why it's most satisfying to go out photographing with a singular purpose—equipped, attentive, undistracted. Mainly, you drive past it. Or you don't have permission. Or it's fleeting, a momentary juxtaposition of moving things. Or the light changes. Or you don't have your camera with you. Or the thing you see suits another camera you own, but not the one you're using right then. Or I'll see four possible pictures and stop and get out of the car for the wrong one, the one I've taken before and seen before. The list goes on. 

You've got to be prepared and ready, willing to stop, willing to do the work of getting the shot, because otherwise the missed opportunities will mount up and the whole experience will tip over into becoming too frustrating, too weighted with failure. You need to try hard to succeed because you need to succeed enough.

I've written in the past about some of "the ones that got away" (the expression comes from fishing). Most of them don't hurt.

Some hurt.

As you might know I'm between cars. I have a new bus; a friend will arrive today to pay me a wad of bills for the old sheet metal, and I'll be sorry to see it go. It's been a great little car and I've always liked it. In the new car, I've been carrying my camera. So, on Saturday, the magic happened. Picture the scene: a 1950s convertible, top down, parked in front of the backdrop of a big, hulking old stone church. A bride and groom in the front seat. Gathered around them, a semicircle of smiling, dressed-up wedding guests. In front of the car, a number of people raising phones in the air to capture the moment. And they're all just... there. I mean the scene is stable, not shifting or moving or dissolving. And right across the street, the grocery store parking lot. Where I can park within mere steps of the perfect standpoint to get a shot of the whole scene, with nothing to worry about but passing traffic possibly getting in the way. I'm thirty feet from the entrance and coming up on it. Perfect, perfect, perfect. I stand a real chance to get this one. And the sequence in my head goes: omigod perfect; they're not moving; camera's right here; I can swing into the parking lot and be right in position in like a minute. 

And then...oh no, wrong car! I was driving the old Acura because I was going to the house of the friend who wanted to buy it so he and his wife could take a test drive. The camera was sitting back in my garage, eight miles away, in the other car. "Hold it right there! I'll be back in 25 minutes"? Arrrgh. 

That wedding scene was one of the three best pictures I didn't take since 2022 when I got my current camera. Pure luck. Pure gift from the cosmos, the Universe, the gods. Missed it.

The part of the brain where guilt resides
I think I've now written about all three. (I guess doing so makes me feel a little better.) The first one was a breathtakingly picturesque thunderhead on the other side of the lake, with the sun behind one side casting out strong and dramatic crepuscular rays. I was out walking the dog, and was passing by a spot where the property owner has explicitly given permission for me to go on to his property to photograph the lake. And, setting out, I had considered bringing the camera along, and then had thought (to myself): why bother? I'm not going to see anything I haven't seen a million times before.

Well, I did.

The second was when a neighbor had the Mennonites clear half an acre of trees up on the hill, with front loaders and backhoes. The great heap of felled trees sat there for half a year, drying, and then one day I passed by and the Mennonites had built a giant pyre for burning, maybe two and a half stories high, interwoven, almost sculptural, as if it were crafted, with a giant stump like a crown on top. It was mystical, magnificent. I drove by that again and again, each time thinking (right, to myself) I've got to get a picture of that. With darkness coming and a brooding overcast gray sky, it looked fantastical, like it could have been raised by primitive Vikings or Druids a thousand years ago. Enigmatic. Architectural. Mysterious. Did I stop? No. Again and again, no. I was always rushing out or rushing home. The last time, I think I even thought (...), this looks fine, and I have my camera with me, but you know, to really get "the" shot I might have to come back again and again, photograph it in different light and at different times of day. Like that should stop me; why should that stop me?

And then came the day when I drove past and it was a heap of smoking ash. 

All three are seared on my brain. The part of the brain where guilt goes. Of course it's a natural part of photographing; Ansel almost missed "Moonrise" and Eddie Adams clicked the shutter before the fatal shot and the Marines at Iwo Jima raised the flag a second time for the press cameras. Buzz and Neil didn't have the camera set wrong when they were hopping around on the moon. But every photographer misses shots too.

Fishing, you do usually catch a few. But oh, those ones that get away....

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 day I've been eating what I call a "survival salad." Basically because I'd rather not die too soon if I can avoid it. I have heart disease, and an ever-varied assortment of edible greens comes in hot at No. 1 on the grand list of the healthiest possible things to eat. Regardless of nutritional ideology—or idiot-ology—gotta get your greens. What follows is what my research led me to for dressing.

Oil is controversial in the WFPB (whole-food plant-based) world. Some doctor/scientists recommend zero oil—the estimable Dr. Greger famously called it "the table sugar of the fat kingdom." However, there's an epidemiologist who I listen to, Walter Willett [note: 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], who thinks fats are important enough that he includes healthy oils in Harvard's amended version of the USDA "MyPlate," the "Healthy Eating Plate." He recommends focusing on unsaturated fats, from sources like olive oil, canola oil, nuts, seeds, avocado, and fatty fish such as salmon. In sensible, small amounts. Aside from the linked book, Dr. Willett is the author of the standard basic epidemiological text of the links between foods and diseases, Nutritional Epidemiology, and the researcher most responsible for identifying the dangers of trans fats. 

Harvard tries to correct the political distortions
in the USDA "MyPlate" recommendations,
which were influenced by industry 

Contrary to received wisdom, unpretentious canola oil is the healthiest oil. It has half the saturated fat of olive oil and more omega-6. Still, I use olive oil for salads, as it tastes better, and canola oil for cooking.

You can make the dressing right in the bowl you're going to mix the salad in. One tablespoon of your oil of choice, one tablespoon of a vinegar of choice; a small dollop—maybe the size of a garbanzo bean on the tip of a spoon—of both dijon mustard and garlic paste (you can finely mince real garlic if you have the time); a generous pinch each of ginger powder and salt; a couple of turns of black pepper from the grinder; and I add just a bit of water and lemon juice. If it strikes you as too acidic you can add a little honey or maple syrup. Whisk briskly (I love the term "whisk briskly"—say it out loud), then add your salad fixings and toss. Modify to suit.

Lazy, easy, tasty and neat, and you can say that out loud too.

Mike

(This is a test of adding Amazon book links and other links to Patreon. —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.)

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[TypePad is closing at the end of this month. If all goes well, a replacement site will be up and running before then at theonlinephotographer.com . We're a-workin' on it.]

How about this idea? How about all the photography-related posts on the public free blog, and off-topic posts added to the Patreon version? 

Note that the Patreon version (you can see the two posts I've put up there so far by going to patreon.com/theonlinephotographer , although I have to figure out how to get rid of that "Featured Products" block which I don't like) has the first part of each post as free public content—anyone can see it. Those people can pay a one-time fee to see the rest of one specific post if they really want to. Patreon contributors see all of every post at Patreon without ever having to pay anything extra.

That gives "Mike fans" (contributors) posts on my random enthusiasms, but keep the public TOP centered more on photographic topics and subjects. That way, visitors to a site called the online photographer don't come for the first time and find a long post about pens, dogs, the weather in the Finger Lakes, keyboards, eating beans, baby robins, or whatever I'm on about.

Of course it also means Patreon contributors might have to toggle back and forth if they want to see the more polished presentation (man, I hope those words don't come back to bite me) on the public free blog site. 

What do you think?

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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[Note: The third incarnation of this website, which will be at theonlinephotographer.com and will launch in October, won't publish on weekends, or during August, as Yr. Hmbl. Ed. continues the Battle Against Burnout. But it also won't have off-topic posts on specific enthusiasms, such as WFPB diets and electric cars. Those will spin off to different sites, eventually. But as long as this version of the website endures, you are not yet safe!

My readers are very indulgent.  :-) ]

Woo-hoo! The day finally came. I got my 240-volt AC Level 2 EVSE installed. Level 2 is overnight charging, used by the vast majority of EV owners who charge at home.

The thing that says "LENZ" is not actually a "charger." (It's not a lens, either. Although it is named for a physicist—Emil Lenz.) It's a supply box. Technical name EVSE, for "electric vehicle supply equipment." EVs—electric vehicles—don't use external AC chargers. The AC charger is in the cars. For a month now I've been using Level 1 (standard 120-volt outlet) with the portable cable that came with the car. Honestly, it's almost good enough for me to use permanently. Not everybody needs all that much charging. 

But it's nice to have a little more. Level 1 supplies about 1.2 kW of continuous power. My new circuit is an AC 240V, 50-amp circuit. The maximum it will supply is 40 amps. My car's maximum acceptance rate is 30 amps (it's more in European versions of my car, a Nissan Ariya. Don't ask me why). I had Richard Bruno, the electrician, set my EVSE at 24 amps. That's 5.8 kW, so it'll be almost five times faster than the Level 1 cable I've been using.

So what you're seeing in the picture is a 14-50 outlet, the EVSE plugged into it, and the cable and cable holder. The electrical box (pre-existing) is on the wall in front of the car. Total cost of installation, about $790, including the EVSE, the receptacle (outlet), the wall plate for the outlet, and the plywood. 

With most EVs, you let the car tell the supply box how much power it wants. With most cars you can choose a percentage of full—I normally charge to 80% or so. But for some reason the Ariya doesn't let you do this—all you can set is the time of day and the length of time you want it to charge. So you do have to kind of estimate how long you're going to need to charge. Funny thing is, though, the MyNissan app does tell you to the percentage of charge—for instance, I just unplugged from my new EVSE's maiden voyage, and the app looks like this:

More weirdness, though—the apps lets you start charging remotely, but it doesn't let you stop charging remotely. I read the reason for this somewhere but I don't remember it now. 

Once I get use to it, though, this is going to be very easy. And fast. It takes me about a minute to program the charging time on the screen in the car, and then no time at all, really, to plug in. After that there's nothing—you just come out in the morning, unplug, and off you go. With a "full tank" by whatever your own definition of "full" happens to be. Did I mention I haven't been to a gas station in a month? I wave as I glide silently by, though. 

Level 2 charging just means that you're plugging in to a 240-volt circuit instead of 120V. The outlet looks like the one for your dryer or range (but it had better be better quality—cheap 14-50 receptacles aren't designed and built for continuous current. This is the one I bought. It's expensive, but worth it unless you want your outlet to melt or, in rare cases, your garage to burn down).

Fun fact: Volts are named for Alessandro Volta. I don't know if you learn something new every day, but I do. 

Many sizes all fit all
There is no single power level for Level 2 charging. You can set yourself up for a variety of levels of power and the associated charging times. Here's a brief look at the circuit breaker you need, the EVSE amperage it supports, and the power expressed in kilowatts for the various levels of level 2 charging: 

100-amp circuit: charger amperage 80; continuous power 19.2 kW.

60-amp circuit: charger amperage 48; continuous power 11.5 kW.

50-amp circuit: charger amperage 40; continuous power 9.6 kW.

40-amp circuit: charger amperage 32; continuous power 7.7 kW.

30-amp circuit: charger amperage 24; continuous power 5.8 kW.

20-amp circuit: charger amperage 16; continuous power 3.8 kW.

All these are compared to Level 1, which requires a 15-amp circuit and supplies 1.2 kW continuous power. 

It's worth noting that it's not entirely up to you what you get. All EVs—the cars themselves—have a maximum acceptance rate. It does no good to get a charger that's faster than your car allows, except if you're future-proofing your setup for your next car. 

The thing is, though, for AC charging, it really doesn't matter how fast your car charges. All Level 2 charging is essentially overnight charging. It takes no time at all because you're not waiting for it—you're inside, sleeping.

Mike

Coda: This is the post I was working on when the line went dead on Sept. 4th. It's now the 13th, and in those nine days I've only had the car hooked up to the electricity four times, for a cumulative grand total of about 12 hours—two hours the first night, four the third night, and so on. My best estimate of the cost for that is somewhere between $3.16 and $3.89. I didn't need to charge yesterday, for instance. The SoC (state of charge) has only been below 30% once, and the highest SoC I've charged up to is 85%. It almost seems like it should be more difficult.

If my usage for the first nine days is typical, and the cost estimate is correct, then my electricity cost for the car for this month should be between $10.43 and $12.84. In a typical household with an EV, the car is not the biggest user of electricity—it comes in third, after heating and hot water. 

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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[Note: The TypePad site is not allowing me to upload new content easily. I did finally get the previous post to publish—or maybe someone at TypePad helped. I'll keep trying to publish this one and maybe eventually you'll see it. —Mike the stressed-out Ed.]

My old friend Phil Davis had a remarkable room in the large, gracious house he built out of concrete and precast concrete slabs in Whitmore Lake, outside of the city of Ann Arbor in the State of Michigan. I'd say the place was built like a brick except it was stronger and sturdier than any mere brick. Phil was the inventor of BTZS, Beyond the Zone System, a more technically rigorous version of Ansel Adams and Fred Archer's system of exposure and development control. Phil, who was of my father's generation and died in 2007, was a technical polymath, and had been a top advertising photographer for the Detroit automobile industry in the 1950s. It's a shame his car pictures were never collated and collected—some of them would be amazing period pieces today. But to him they were just work product. He was very unsentimental about photographs. Anyway his dining room had what looked to be absolutely gorgeous light, and there's a story behind that.

The room was a nice but normal-sized dining room centered around a magnificent George Nakashima live-edge dining room table (an original, built by George, not his studio). The room had one large panoramic window of the type that used to be called a "picture window" that was north-facing or nearly so; it might have caught a bit of direct late-afternoon sunlight in the summertime. So what Phil noticed was that the light in the room had varying qualities on the walls and ceiling. The wall opposite the window was brighter than the others; one side wall took on a subtle greenish cast from the woods on the ridge, the other a subtle bluish cast from the open sky. So what he did was to paint all the walls of the room to enhance the natural light that already existed—one wall a little more greenish, the opposite one a little more blue, the back wall a little brighter. This had the effect of intensifying the natural effect of the light. It was subtle enough that you didn't recognize what was going on at first, but the visual impression was close to magical—your impression was that the room glowed with an ethereal, otherworldly natural light. 

Phil really understood light.

When he drew the curtains and turned on the room lights you could see it. Or, at least, you could see it as he described it to you. When he first showed the room to me, I had been at his house for hours—I'm sure he was waiting for the optimal time of day to show me the effect.

He was also a very patient guy. When he tested Fred Picker's contention that fixer was heavier than water and sank to the bottom of print washers, which was total bunkum, he mixed fixer and water in a bottle and let it sit for a year to see if it would separate. Of course it didn't.

I thought of him recently because I happened to install a daylight (cold) light bulb, 5600K, in the overhead fixture of my downstairs powder room, when the fixture over the sink has one of those old-fashioned style clear glass bulbs that are very warm, 2700K. Pretty sure they're universally called "Edison" light bulbs. I actually like the effect—warm and cool light play off each other in the little room, giving the visual impression that the cool light is coming from the single small high window.

Phil, who was of my father's generation, died in 2007. We kept up a daily correspondence for six or seven years before he got sick with his final illness. He was a deeply erudite, curious observer of the world, very thoughtful, and had truly forgotten more about photography than most people ever knew. He loved to design and run technical experiments in the large studio-darkroom that took up one end of his large house in Whitmore Lake—his wife Martha ruled the other end of the house, which contained the kitchen, the laundry room, and her office—she was a professional indexer, and a great proofreader too. The dining and living rooms were the neutral middle ground which they amicably shared. Some of Phil's many experiments I could induce him to publish in Photo Techniques, but some of them I couldn't—he thought they'd be too controversial and provoke backlash, and he didn't suffer fools gladly when it came to all the nonsense that true-believer types then believed about photographic technique. He had jousted in the past with many of them. He would just patiently prove them wrong in his own lab, with impeccable scientific rigor,  and leave it at that.

Phil wrote several books. His textbook is of course outdated but I think parts of it are still of interest today. When digital came along he was nonplussed, despite having spent so much time and effort becoming a deep master of the older tech. He just set to understanding it and how it worked—and commenced to teasing me for being hidebound and old school, pretty funny as I was younger by 36 years. Phil had four grown sons, and I was the age, if memory serves, of the youngest.

Natural light studios? Who does that?
I used to do portraits by extemporizing natural-light studio setups. One of the best was in the second-story storage area of a very old (circa 1903) garage building at my grandparents' summer home. The building is now gone, at least from where it used to be—an eccentric cousin had it moved to his own property a few hundred yards away, where it now sits in the woods. Anyway on the second story there was one largish north-facing window, and a solid railing over which you could look down into the garage below. A subject (a friend) sat on the railing, and the distance into the unlighted background space made it look completely black. Some number of stops of illumination differential would make a background look black to B&W film—I forget now how many. The window was to her right and slightly in front of her. Then I took a white sheet and hung it just out of the lens's view to her left, for fill. Boy, did it ever look crude and primitive. But the result was as good as any portrait lighting I ever achieved. I used to try to replicate it with studio strobes.

I assisted for a top studio advertising pro in D.C. for a short time—I couldn't afford graduate school and was on a mission to educate myself by working down a checklist of my own devising of a variety of experiences in photography. Assisting for a studio pro was one of the items on the checklist. My boss was a master of artificial lighting—he probably had $100k worth of lighting equipment at his studio, and that was more money in the '80s than it is now. He asked to see some of my work once, and he was highly enamored of one particular portrait of a beautiful young model, done with another of my natural lighting setups. He kept gushing about how perfect the lighting looked, and asked me if I would describe the setup to him. I think he expected that I would refuse, because lighting setups to him were a trade secret, not to be given away to competitors or possible future competitors (it was thought at the time that most assistants would eventually go on to open their own studios, possibly competing with their former employers). When I described the setup to him he was incredulous. He kept saying, "that's natural light?!" He was a bit of a control freak when it came to lighting and didn't like using natural light even when he had to. On a sunny day he would move into the shade and set up his beloved Speedotrons to mimic sunlight. (Not really. I'm joking.) Finally, after staring at in silence for a good while longer, he flipped it dismissively on to the table top and said, "it's not really that good." Makes me chuckle—it was good until it couldn't be. 

Here's a secret tip for making better photographs—look for great light.

You gotta get used to looking at light rather than at the thingy-ness of the world. It's not those things you're photographing—it's those things in that light. Light is ever-changing, and the same thing or scene will look completely different in different light. Great light helps make great photographs. 

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 are suspended because I'm having so much trouble with uploads.)

The old (TypePad) site is back, hopefully till Sept. 30th, and the URL is:

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html

The new site is currently just a "Coming Soon" page but will be accessible once it goes live at

theonlinephotographer.org

and

theonlinephotographer.com

And by the way, don't worry too much if the new site is pretty rough at first. As I understand it, they're going to build it based just on my verbal descriptions and then give me one pass at fixing whatever I don't like. However, thanks to the 86 people who contributed to the GoFundMe a few days ago, I have enough moolah handy to hire a third party to go into it and fix up anything that's still not right. So we should still be able to get where we want to get to. It might not happen right away, but I'll keep after it.

It's going to look very different than the current site: pretty simple and plain. If all goes well it will just be a blog, on a white background. You might miss the yellowish and tan and earth tones of the old site, but I won't miss having to fill in the backgrounds of illustrations with the old background color. If you don't see something on the new site you want, let me know when the times comes and we'll see what we can do about it. 

The tabs will be Home (the blog itself, which will be the landing page), Contact (a form—mostly people can communicate with me in the Comments section, as I'll continue to read all the comments), Books, Settings, and, possibly, social media icons. The Books tab will go to a Book of the Month page—I plan to journey to the Eastman Museum or some other good photo bookshop within striking range (even Boston or NYC) and look at books, and pick one that's worthy of our attention. Then on the books page I'll post a thumbnail image of the cover, the title with a link to Amazon, and a short review. I tried to do this for a while with a "Book of the Week" version, but it was too much work to do every week and I really feel I should see the book myself, the paper and the ink in person, before I recommend it. Besides, I should be up to date on at least some current photobooks, so the effort will educate me.

Settings will be for "mechanical room" stuff, Comment Guidelines, the RSS feed, recent posts, that sort of thing. 

One big question is whether each post should have a "Continue Reading" button after a few paragraphs, or appear whole and complete right there on the main page. I know some people like just being able to read straight through without clicking around, but I think newcomers are put off by long posts and don't immediately "get" that there are other posts! So I'm leaning to an intro with a "Continue Reading" button at the end. Besides, that will help me to be more focused about writing ledes. We all know how I can get prolix (wordy) and take my time getting to the point. (I should also stop using words on the difficulty level of "prolix," which is used .01 times per million words and is unknown to perhaps 98% of native English speakers. The blog shouldn't be a vocabulary test).

As for social media icons, I don't understand them or how they work. Some people say if readers click on a social media icon (Facebook, Instagram) on a website, it takes you to their social media site, to allow them to share what they just read. Other people say the icons will take them to my (the writer's) social media sites. The former would be good, the latter not so much—my problem being that I don't have any social media accounts. I have enough work to do just maintaining and keeping the conversation going on TOP. So I'm not sure if the new site will have social media icons or not. 

One thing that's long been a sore point is how illustrations are going to be handled. I'll describe what I'd ideally want and you see what you think. The second option is a real thing that I've seen in the wild, so it's theoretically possible. 

What I'd like is two classes of illustration. The first would be a nuts-and-bolts kind of thing that imparts information but isn't aesthetic. That can just be a standard size that fits the width of the column or smaller and doesn't enlarge. 

For aesthetic images I'd like them to click open on a whole screen such that the image is seen uncropped and surrounded first by a narrow band of white, and then on a background (roughly the proportions of an overmat) of Zone VI or Zone V gray. Then, if the image size allows it, a further click should enlarge it to 100%. The next click returns you to the blog. I'd make an illustration of this (a desktop computer with an image like this showing on it) except it's beyond my skills. 

I have seen this in the wild, honest, and it's just right. I have my grail. We'll see if we can actually implement it on the new site. Wish us luck. 

A final comment: many people know I'm an alcoholic in recovery (my anniversary was yesterday—35 years clean and sober), and a member of the granddaddy of 12-step programs, which must not be named because we don't represent at the level of press, radio, and films (and television and social media and ostensible photo blogs). I use the program as the basis for my spiritual life, and I've found that the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. It's been wonderful as an engine of personal growth for me. But here's the point: I never, ever would have gotten into it in the first place except that I had to. I'm an introvert and a loner and I go my own way. I'm not a joiner and I always had trouble feeling like I belong—even in the bosom of my own families, nuclear and extended. But alcohol left me sick, miserable, trapped, and desperate—so much so that I had to get help. It was that, or continue on toward a pathetic early death. I had tried my best to get well on my own and I just could not. So I was forced into my recovery strategies and programs by absolute necessity. 

See the analogy? Back when I realized TypePad was going downhill, I tried ten times in the intervening years to migrate TOP to a new platform (if you go to theonlinephotographer.net you will see a two-year-old aborted try on Wix, which I futzed with for a torturous four hours and then abandoned). Each time I was driven into the rocky shoals of my ineptitude and gave up. So this is good for me, in a way. I'd never have actually finished this migration to a new platform, except now I have to. 

By the way, I'm also thinking about doing two other new blogs, one about WFPB and one about electric cars. I have a lot of interest in both that remains untapped despite their regular intrusions into what is supposed to be a photography blog. So I might just spin those off. 

It's been fun to think of things afresh. More news as I have it. Thanks for sticking around. This too shall pass.

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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IMPORTANT NOTE: The way to get to me (The Online Photographer a.k.a. TOP) in the future will be to go directly to...

theonlinephotographer.com

...which is my domain that I own and can control.

theonlinephotographer.org  should work as well. All the old TypePad links will go dark after September 30th. Please make note of the new URL and, if you can and wouldn’t mind helping, please spread the word!

Every now and then in life, you get a wild ride that you didn’t see coming. Or rather, it’s like a sign I saw on a city bus in D.C. many years ago. The sign, above the automated side door of the bus, said "WARNING: Door May Close Without Warning," below which some wag had written 'Not any more it won't."

Both were right, in a way. The sign's warning is general, and it means you won’t get any notice that the door is closing at any specific moment. You get it.

So that’s the warning I had about the demise of TypePad, the blogging platform that has been TOP’s home for 17 years. Generally, the handwriting had been on the wall since 2020, when they stopped accepting new customers. Specifically, though, the end hit me like a lightning bolt from blue sky.

On August 27th, TypePad announced it would be shutting down—on September 30th. That gave slackers like me a month and three days to do two important things: 1.) prepare existing content (I have quite a lot of it, as you might know) for migration and make sure backups were all in order, and 2.) get a new site built somewhere else. That would have been hard enough. A mere seven days later, though, on September 4th, TypePad experienced some sort of unexplained but catastrophic crash. Probably, all their clients were bombarding their servers with requests to retrieve content—I know that’s what I was doing. TOP vanished from the Web. It seems to be back up now (thanks, TypePad team...they're working very hard and dealing with a lot of ¢R@p, I'm sure). 

With the help and input of lots of people, including Gordon L., Alex B., Martin Q., Chris C., Chris F., Richard T., and Robin H.—and others, not forgetting them—I decided that the imperative was to get a new site up quickly. That's what you'll see if you go to theonlinephotographer.com or .org now. It's a "Coming Soon" page as I write this...or should be; soon it will be a temporary placeholder site, and after that it'll be a customized self-hosted Wordpress-dot-org site built with professional help. As for an archive site with old posts, well, all in good time.

We're not out of the woods yet. This amounts to what magazine people used to call a relaunch, and it was well understood in the magazine world that relaunches were essentially just as perilous as inaugural launches of new titles. Old habits and old expectations get broken, existing customers have trouble finding you, and circulation (called traffic on the Web) takes a dip.

But—as Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining said, “I’m baaa-ack!”

I sure am glad. Wild days indeed. I have to say, though, I'm really going to miss the old site. It's as comfortable as the proverbial old shoe. I'm so used to writing in its compositor that I have trouble with all other word-processing programs. I suppose I'll have to adjust.

Still a lot of work to do yet, but hopefully I'll be around here for the rest of the month. Then on to v.3 (this is the second incarnation of TOP. The new one will be v.3).

Another quote, from a now-ancient TV show: "And awaaay we go!"

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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...Another interesting zoom option that I wasn't aware of: Bill B. tells us that Canon makes an RF 24–105mm ƒ/4 L for its full-frame mirrorless (FFM) R cameras. If I were shooting FFM and wanted a zoom, that's one I'd look at. (The idea in these posts being that I could really use something longer than the common 70mm at the long end—some readers agree and some don't.)

I read a few online reviews of the Canon, though, and it's funny what people complain about. One guy said, "The first thing that I noticed about the lens was all of the plastic in the build of the lens. I don't have confidence in a plastic lens. I expected more for the money spent." Another said, "It is a wonderful lens. But, I'd like to see it at ƒ/2 or 2.8; it'd be a unique asset without a doubt."

No you wouldn't. What was that old joke about lenses, applied to zooms? Something along the lines of: "Good range, high speed, reasonable price and weight—pick any two."

There's no reason not to shoot with zooms any more. Their optical quality is somewhat variable, but no more so than that of primes, and you can't tell the difference in pictures as to what was shot with what. I used to say that the disadvantage of zooms was that a zoom was as big as the biggest lens it replaced and as slow as the slowest lens it replaced. That might not be exactly true any more. The big advantage being that, well, it zooms. 

I have to say AI is proving more useful than I thought it was going to be. However, when I asked it, "What is Canon's fastest zoom?", it answered, "Canon's fastest zoom lens depends on the specific focal length range and mount, but a notable example is the Canon 50mm ƒ/0.95, a vintage rangefinder lens." Okay then, still a few bugs in the system. But if you imagine a 24–105mm ƒ/2 zoom, it's not going to be compact and reasonably priced. It's going to be enormous and very, very expensive. Bigger and costlier than Canon's shelf-queen RF 28–70mm ƒ/2 L USM, which weighs a good chunk over three pounds and costs a good chunk over three grand. That one strikes me as the perfect lens to own for bragging rights but to leave at home when you actually go out to photograph. I would use it for putting on the mantel and admiring. Having said that, there 

Of course, just as price sensitivity varies greatly depending on how prosperous you are, weight also depends on context. I imagine if you're a photographer who regularly uses extreme telephotos and telephoto zooms, which are large and heavy, then a mid-range zoom that is large and heavy for its class might not seem all that bad.

Best all-rounder, but
Probably the top zoom lens I know about is the OM System 12–100mm ƒ/4 IS PRO: a sterling lens that has no real weaknesses over a broad range, and has excellent IS in conjunction with the best of the cameras it fits, and it's relatively small and reasonably priced. But: it's for the 4/3 sensor. (It's always something.) Charlie Ewers said, two days ago, "The Olympus 12–100mm (24–200mm equivalent) had the best everyday zoom range I've used extensively. Now that I've switched to Fuji, I really like the 16–80mm (24–120mm-e), but sometimes I still miss the extra range on the long end." I don't have that Fuji, but that's the only one that suits.

I should really get that 16–80mm for my Fuji. I need some experience with up-to-date good (not cheap, not just "okay") zooms.

Probably the cheapest way to get a good zoom, for beginners, is to settle on one of the recently outmoded DSLRs and find a good utility zoom for one of those cameras that got good reviews in its day. Ian Bilson recommends the old AF Zoom Nikkor 28–105mm ƒ/3.5–4.5D that B&H lists in "9" condition for $139. There are many others. Don't go too crazy looking for perfection; one could while away many useless hours researching outdated DSLR zooms on the internet. I have to mention that historically, I haven't had good luck with Nikkor zooms. I've owned several and even used one for a while as my main lens. People talk about cropping to achieve the equivalent of more reach on high-res sensors; ironically, I had to crop my Nikkor zoom when I used it wide open just to get rid of the smeary corners.

The most interesting of the Nikkor zooms I had (remembering that I'm not a fan of zooms and don't have that much experience) was the Nikkor Series E 75–150mm ƒ/3.5. A 2x zoom from 1980 meant for the economy EM camera, it had a cult following among fashion photographers because it was very flattering to models. In those days when you couldn't manipulate results, it made skin look smooth and had enough resolution but not too much. One of those lenses that was "bad" but in a good way. I had to buy three of them to get one good one: one had fungus, and another was so loose that the zoom setting would creep if you looked at it sideways. It was a "one-touch" zoom, meaning, rotate to focus and slide the same ring to change the focal-length setting—one-touch zooms were all the rage for a while in the late '70s and early '80s. I didn't like them. It was rumored that Nikon was repeatedly urged to issue the exact same optics in a more robust lensmount, but they never did. Ken Rockwell reports that Galen Rowell, very famous back in those decades as a nature and wildlife photographer and the author of bestsellers that were very popular with photography aficionados, used and liked the 75–150mm Series E.

I wouldn't get one today. Along those lines, I guess I should also mention that I have a pretty strong policy to prefer current lenses that were designed specifically to go with whatever camera I'm using. Based on long long experience and recurring frustrations; life's too short. Although, of course, like you, probably, I'll do whatever I want.

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:

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Just a short note this Monday morning as it's my pool day. I haven't spent a minute on the table since the news broke about TypePad going under, the longest stretch I've missed since the pool table was delivered, in an example of serendipitously great timing, right before COVID-19 hit. That was sweet. I spent many hours on the table during those 1–2 years of mostly quarantine.

As a result of the previous post, I am learning about some new zoom lenses that I hadn't heard about before. I'm going to go light on posting "Featured Comments" in the month of September, because the whole site will be coming down at the end of the month anyway (plus I hope I'm going to be busy this month, starting tomorrow—today is Labor Day in the US, a holiday), but I'll do Featured Comments on that post. Lots of interesting opinions and options.

One I hadn't heard of is the Tamron 35–150mm full-frame lens. That looks interesting. I've generally liked Tamron bokeh and from online samples it looks like I'd like it on that lens. Barely more than 4x at 4.2x, the range is unique and interesting. (A 4x zoom range is my longtime limit of what I'll consider for purchase—the more extreme the zoom range, the harder the lens is to correct without making it huge.) That would be a good candidate for pairing with a 21mm-e as a great two-lens kit. 

But the most interesting news (news to me, that would be): Sony now makes a lens with a unique zoom range, the 20–70mm ƒ/4. Only four inches long and a little over a pound in weight—nice. I wouldn't be bothered by the ƒ/4 speed—ISOs are so good so high now. The more extreme the speed with a zoom, the harder a lens is to correct without making it huge. And only 3.5x. It's meant to be a slower but wider full-frame alternative to the ubiquitous 24–70's that I was rather damning with faint praise yesterday (although, of course, we heard from several photographers for whom that range is perfect, and I've no argument with them—everyone's needs and prefs are different). Know how I'd use that one though? As a compact 30–105mm equivalent on the absolutely beautiful and wondrously solid APS-C Sonys that I liked so much, the current iteration being the A6700. I tried the A6300 and briefly owned an A6500, and loved them—such beautiful build quality and great hand-feel, with those big, beefy batteries that last and last. Round the zoom out with something like the Sony 11mm ƒ/1.8 for interiors and I'd be good to go with an efficient, portable, and nice-for-Mike two-lens kit. Yum.

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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The new Nikkor-Z 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 II

I noticed that Nikon has (pick one) revamped, refreshed, restored, and renewed its mainstream mid-range zoom for the Z System, the bread-and-butter 24–70mm. The main difference is that the new lens has internal zooming, for the first time ever, according to Nikon, in a lens of this spec. Its length is about mid-way between the lengths of the older lens when extended and not extended. The lens has apparently inspired Nikon to poetry: the automatic focusing is effected by a new tech called "Silky Swift" VCM (voice coil motor). Nikon says the SSVCM AF is the fastest in its history. Which is cool. Although I'm not sure how significant that will be if it's only a tiny bit faster than the old lens—I've used several other alleged fastest-evers over the years and generally it wasn't something I would have noticed if they hadn't told me about it. The idea of it is the most attractive part. You'd have to use both to see if you notice it. The internal focusing and zooming, though, has a real practical effect—it means the lens won't suck in dust, and it enables the lens to be better sealed against moisture. Nikon also says the lens won't change its balance as its settings are changed when used in video rigs and so forth, although I don't know how significant that can be either. The new lens is optimized in several ways for video, because that's the age we're in. It costs $2,800, which for a normal zoom of top quality sounds both crazy and is also probably to be expected. Nikon also says it's the lightest lens in its class at a pound and a half. 

Longtime readers might be getting a mite suspicious at my tone, because they remember that I'm not the world's biggest fan of zoom lenses in general. I admit to that. But I've used a lot of them, of course, over many years. And what this makes me think is, yes, the lens does sound like it's really been improved, even over its excellent predecessor, and that's mighty appealing on its face; who doesn't hanker for the best?

But wait. Do you really want a lens of this range in the first place? I had to think about that for a minute.

I've found that, for myself, a zoom lens is more useful if it goes longer. And, I don't need it to be so wide. One of my early zoom lenses for 35mm film, also a Nikkor, was, if memory serves, a 35–105mm. That was a better range for me. When I bought my first DSLR in 2006, it came with a 28–75mm Tamron-built, Minolta-branded zoom that I used as my only lens until the camera broke—on "cropped sensor," as they called APS-C sized chips at the time, it was a 42–112mm equivalent. And it was an eye-opener for me, because, even with the near-normal short end, the longer long end was really nice to have, and quite useful even for a guy who's never been that much into telephoto shooting. I of course intended to exchange that lens for a "better" one even as I bought the camera, but in fact I never did. It was a nice-looking lens with good performance, and I was satisfied with the range. You can still buy a descendant of that very lens today. 

A 70mm focal length on the long end just doesn't do it, IMHO. It makes any zoom lens feel like half a zoom. It's not useful enough for enough things. Yes, you can kinda press it into service as a portrait focal length, replacing an 85mm or 90mm, but even so it's not ideal, and I've usually always had a prime for my short tele because it's an important lens to me. 

What would be your ideal focal length range for a zoom lens? Definitely taking into account things like probable cost and weight. All in all, I'd rather have a zoom with a longer focal length on both ends, and then fill in with a prime ultrawide at the wide end. Like, say, a 35–110mm zoom with a 21mm prime in the bag. That would do best for me.

Your zooming may vary.

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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Ed. note: TypePad, TOP's home for 17 years, is going out of business on September 30th and wiping its contents from the Web. I'm scrambling to build a new site and archive the old one before that happens. I'll be keeping regular readers and old friends updated on the process as we go along. Feel free to skip these if you want—it's just nuts 'n' bolts housekeeping, if that's not mixing metaphors. This is hopefully temporary, just for the month of September. Come back on October 1 and see how we did! —Mike 

After failing to export TOP using its own export feature, and failing to make a fully usable backup with either Sitesucker or Sitefetcher, I'm resorting to backing up the entire site manually. TypePad creates a file of all posts for any specific month, as you can see under the header "ARCHIVES" at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar when you look at the full site on a desktop. If I open one of these in Safari, and go to File > Save as...  with a destination folder and "Format: Web Archive" set in the dialog box, I can create a copy of that month's archive that will open in Safari even when I'm offline. Unfortunately, although it preserves all Featured Comments, the other comments from the main comments section are missing, as are the larger versions of the pictures and illustrations. 

If I do the same thing in Firefox (in Firefox you go to hamburger stack > Save page as... and then set a destination folder and select "Format: Web page complete") it preserves a copy of the archive web page that will open in the Firefox browser offline, but Firefox also preserves a second folder with all the larger JPEGs in it. So that's good. But still, the full comments sections are lost. 

I'm pretty happy I've been doing the Featured Comments all these years. Those will be preserved. I sure hate to lose all the other comments, though. There are some very useful things in amongst 'em.

If I go to one single post and save that web page in this way, then all the comments in addition to the Featured Comments are preserved. But while I can save all the monthly compilations with maybe half a day's or a day's work, it's too much work to save all the posts individually—there are 9,369 TOP posts on TypePad. Even if I could put in the time, I know myself, and I know I'm not good at repetitive detail work. As I get progressively more bored and distracted my efficiency and effectiveness deteriorate and I start making mistakes. I'm not the person for such a job. (I should have been doing it all along, but, well, I didn't.)

The saved files open, as I've said, when I'm offline, but they open from within the browser they were saved with. I'm not exactly sure why or how that's the case. But it occurs to me that some future change to the browser could make it so that my archived backups won't open any more. I don't know how to guard against that. I'm thinking I should probably save all the monthly archive compilations in both Safari and Firefox, just to hedge against either one of the browsers breaking the old files sometime in the future. I'm also going to pursue the permissions that would allow Sitefetcher to work (there's a list of troubleshooting steps but I don't understand any of it myself. Maybe I can find somebody to help).

So that's where I am on backups.

As far as hiring a developer, I've interviewed three outfits (unclear whether they are individuals or companies with multiple people) on freelancer com. Most of the freelancers there appear to be based in the Indian subcontinent. They typically quote low hourly rates ($15–$25) but then estimate high numbers of hours to build a Wordpress.org blog site (60–80 hours). I'm feeling like the blind man exploring the elephant when it comes to hiring a developer—I don't know the landscape at all. Plus, I keep waffling between Wordpress and Squarespace, which isn't helping. This is not going to be the month to be indecisive, Mike, I say to myself. Probably not the time to try to cheap out, either. Wouldn't you know this would happen right after I bought a new-to-me car for the first time in 11 years...had I known this was coming, I would have held off on the car. Same thing happened to me with the mono camera, as some people might remember. But you know what they say: Oh well.

More updates as we go forward...feel free to skip these if you want! But on the other hand, comments sure are welcome. They let me feel less alone if nothing else. It's not always easy being a one-man band. 

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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Ray Giubilo is an Australian-Italian sports photographer (born in Adelaide, Australia, moved to Italy when he was seven, moved back to Australia in his mid-20s and opened his first photography studio, in Sydney, in 1987. Here's Ray). Yonex is a maker of tennis racquets. Jasmine Paolini is an Italian tennis star who was a finalist at both the French and Wimbledon last year and is currently ranked world No. 8. All you need to know is that Yonex's symbol is two circles and two triangles, and when Yonex strings Jasmine's racquets they color the strings except for the circle and triangle shapes. And look what happened to Ray....

Freaky. 

Following the publication of the shot (taken with a Nikon), according to The Guardian, Jasmine was on the court for a second-round match. Ray thought she was going over to hug her coach at one point, but she came over to him, gave him a high five and a grin and said, "great shot."

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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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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