In Praise of Obscurity

This past Tuesday, George Barr had an interesting post about the pursuit of fame and fortune on his blog:

How many hobby photographers have wanted to turn their hobby into a paying proposition?
Lots? Most?, Many certainly.

There’s valid reasons for doing so.

1) being paid for your work puts a value on it and says to you that your work is worth something.

2) People can say nice things but buying your work means they really did like it.

3) Many of us stretch the budget when it comes to buying equipment and making enough to pay for some if not all of our equipment (or the equipment we’d like to purchase but can’t justify for a hobby) would certainly smooth things over on the home front.

4) some just like the idea of a second career – as a backup or possibly even something to move into. There are people who retire early yet want something meaningful to do after retirement.

5) it would at least help pay for supplies – those damn ink cartridges sure add up and how come inkjet paper is more expensive than silver photographic paper – and Kodak tried to tell us it was the price of silver…

I would argue though that while the money would be nice, many of us given the choice between money and recognition would choose the latter if we couldn’t have both. I think that they are quite separate and that the efforts to help one don’t necessarily translate to helping the other.

If that is the case, then it would pay to decide now which of the two is more important to us and to then put our efforts into working towards that goal which is important to us.

I’d like to suggest a different but nevertheless rewarding goal: obscurity.

Oh, there’s definitely been a time when I viewed making money (or even just breaking even) on the finances of photography as a very positive goal. Fame and Fortune – they’re heady stuff. George does a pretty nice job of identifying the reasons why financial success through photography would be nice. And he makes a good point, that financial success isn’t necessarily the same goal as recognition.

There was a period of time over which I actually eked out a modest profit with photography, covering not just cost of materials I sold but also buying new equipment, and so on. Not a lot of profit, but not a loss either. But this past winter, I’ve realized that I’ve not been working to sell prints, and I’ve not been promoting my work, and that (to my surprise) I’m just fine with that. The big overhaul of my web site, complete with easier ways to buy my prints – that got nearly to completion but just before I got ready to flip the switch I lost interest. Somewhat to my surprise, the very fact that I’d managed to achieve the goal of actually making a modest profit killed much of my interest in pursuing that goal.

Instead what I’ve been doing is making photographs near my home – just puttering around. The surprising thing is that this has been a terrifically rewarding thing to do. It’s been photography without an agenda. There’s no need to worry about whether this next photo will fit with the show I have coming up. There’s no need to be concerned about putting shows together at all. A lot of the photos have ended up here on the blog, but a lot haven’t. And that, it turns out, is fine.

I’ve still got a business license, but for the past two quarters, my B&O tax filing essentially consisted of ‘No business activity’. I’m contemplating just letting go of the whole money-making thing. I won’t sell prints, I’ll just give them away, perhaps. I still make prints, but the drive to make prints that I might sell seems to have somehow just drained away for reasons I’m not sure I understand. The drive to get out with the camera is still there, but the drive to achieve fame and fortune through photography has just evaporated.

Maybe this is a sign that my interest in photography is coming to an end. I am pretty sure, though, that it isn’t. It feels more like a realignment than anything else. I’ve been making MORE photographs, not fewer. They’ve been different sorts of photos, for sure. But the volume is up, not down, and the time spent has been all fun time, and not drudge time.

The curious thing is that with this relaxation of drive has come a sort of, um, contentment. It’s the difference between being in a training program to run a marathon, and going for a daily walk so that you sleep better and enjoy life more. I’m not for a moment suggesting that folks who are training for a marathon, or trying to make money from their hobby, or are pursuing artistic fame are doing the wrong thing, because I don’t believe that for a second. But at the same time, I am suggesting that perhaps it’s OK to not pursue getting your work shown, not pursue profit opportunities, and not begrudge the costs of photography any more than you do the costs of that $4 latte you have every morning because it makes you feel good to give yourself a modest treat.

I guess what I’m saying is that I understand the goal of breaking even financially with photography, and I have actually been to that promised land. I understand the goal of achieving limited fame in the world of art. What I would point out is that we need to pick our goals carefully, not because they are unachievable but because they’re very much achievable. It’s just that perhaps for some of us it makes more sense to pursue contentment than fame or fortune. Modern human society programs us to pursue success, and I think that’s good. At the same time modern society also programs us all to think of success in terms of money or fame, and I think it’s very much worth taking a moment to step back and try to get a little perspective on that part of it.

That doesn’t mean photography without goals or projects or striving. But it can mean that we can have photography without a free market mentality and without a competitive mindset.

And who knows – perhaps in six months I’ll be back at trying to sell prints etc. hammer and tong. For now, anyway, I’m ok with not.

The Second Update Weekend (in which our hero makes modest progress)

This weekend, like last weekend, will be at least in part dedicated to making progress on getting Macs upgraded to 10.5. Bear in mind that the problems so far have nothing to do with getting the Macs upgraded (said upgrade being a smooth process) but with getting the HP Z3100 working smoothly on the upgraded machine.

I have now fallen back to the least desirable path, which is to make a clean install of 10.5 on the Mac Pro, and then get the printer working, and then reinstall all the applications. The big problem will be reinstalling Photoshop, because I will have to jump through the phone call hoops to get Photoshop re-registered.

No Joy

I called HP. The phone numbers they gave me got me connected to the right person almost right away. With him guiding, we went through most of the steps I’d tried (always good to make sure I didn’t miss something simple), and then made an attempt to clean things up manually and install. It was an heroic effort.

However, there is no joy in Tranquility, Mighty Casey has struck out. The phone call ended with the HP guy recommending that I call Apple. I have a theory: when you’re working out a problem with Company A’s problem, and they recommend that you get Company B to fix it, you are well and truly shafted, because when you call Company B, they are quite naturally going to be motivated to get you to go back to company A for help.

The machine is now running Tiger (10.4) off the dupe of the main disk. When I get another block of time, I’ll try doing a clean install of 10.5 on a disk, and then ‘importing’ everything, which a couple people have encouraged me to try. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do a clean install of 10.5 and re-install all the working software. That’ll require a call to Adobe to get the licensing straightened out.

To answer a few questions:

“If it works don’t fix it. Why did you think you needed to upgrade?”

I’m doing the upgrade because I want all the machines I use and have to administer to be running the same software. In a networked environment, there are compelling reasons to run Leopard instead of Tiger.

“Was something not working the way you wanted it to? have you not got a backup program capable of making a system backup (perhaps on a cd in form of an iso file) in case things go awry?”

Sure, I’ve got backups. No data has been lost. I’m still running, almost exactly where I started, and I can get back to exactly where I started with very little effort. That’s not the frustration. The frustration is that the upgrade hasn’t been successful but many hours have been invested and thus wasted. I have a finite lifespan, and I can’t get those hours back.

“And why keep doing business with people who hate you and think you suck — unless you agree with their estimation?”

The odds that I’ll continue to do business with HP diminish rapidly and monotonically. They have a competitor (Epson), and that competitor makes excellent products and (in my experience) offers support that ranges from good to incredibly good. The next printer I buy will probably be an Epson, probably after the next round of product revisions.

As for Adobe – that’s a good question. I’ve looked at other editing programs, and in my personal estimation, looking at photo editing software as a tool strictly for my own use, Photoshop still has compelling advantages. The gap between Photoshop and the closest competitors once seemed insurmountable. I think, though, that the gap is closing, and I think it’s closing pretty swiftly.

I think Adobe are now at a point where the fundamental feature set of the product is mature, and they’ve gone through enough times that they’ve polished out the rough edges. Their model (layers) is powerful and flexible. But their model is not the only possible model, and other competitors will come along and try to eat Photoshop’s business.

And I will be watching those competitors closely.

Why I hate upgrades

Ok. I said I was going to upgrade a bunch of stuff this past weekend, and I tried.

The first job I tackled was upgrading my Mac Pro (aka Novelty) to 10.5 (aka Leopard). My second goal was to upgrade the firmware in my HP Z3100. The third task was to upgrade an iMac to 10.5.

The upgrade of the Mac Pro seemed to go smoothly at first. The install went fine. Everything already installed worked, including (hold your breath!) Photoshop. Photoshop was important because the cross platform upgrade business when I upgraded to Photoshop CS3 left me with software where, if I want to reinstall it, I must go through holy hell with Adobe to get it re-registered. So having it run right off the bat is just a huge relief.

That relief ended when I went to install the printers. We have two laser printers, and both those installed fine. Installing the driver for the HP Z3100, though, turned into a major nightmare. I downloaded the .dmg with the Leopard install from HP, and dutifully ran it before trying to add the printer. The installer ran just fine, or so it claimed.

But now I am left with a machine where, when I try to install the damn HP 3100, it fails to find the driver for it. No amount of deleting things, running the install again, etc. has fixed this problem.

So Monday, I gave up and called HP support. I navigated their horrid voice recognition phone tree. After a certain amount of answering questions like “What printer are you having trouble with?” and “Mac or Windows” I finally got to talk (after being on hold) with a living human, who immediately asked me all of those questions again. I explained that I’d upgraded to 10.5, downloaded and run the installer, and couldn’t get the installer to find the driver. I explained that the machine had had the z3200 software on it as part of the HP early birds program evaluating the Z3200 before it was released. Her response was that I needed to download the installer package and run it. I pointed out that I had now TWICE explained that I had already done that. She patiently explained where I needed to go to download the package and how to run it. I explained again that I had already done this, and it hadn’t worked.

She then explained that since the printer was out of warranty, I would need to pay for tech support. “Oho!” I repled. “I have a 3 year service contract!” She explained that no, the printer came with a one year warranty and I had no contract. Now, I got this contract because after my first horrid customer service problems with HP, they gave me a free 3 year service contract as a make nice thing. I epxlained this.

So she had to search for that, and finally found it.

Then she admitted that she didn’t know what was wrong and would need to put me on hold for a while while she got someone else to help.

So, after being on hold for a while, I got to talk to another person, and I explained the whole sage with full orchestration, five melodic voices, and three part harmony, complete with feeling. He proceeded to ask me all the questions (What printer is it? What operating system? What hardware? Can you give me the serial number? The model #?) and he allowed as how it did seem like I had a problem that needed solving, but I would need to talk to a Mac person. The astute reader will observe that in the initial interview with the HP voice recognition tree, I explained it was a Mac problem. Each person I’d talked to, I had explained it was a Mac problem. One is left to wonder why, beyond a perverse desire on the part of HP to waste my valuable time, I was now talking to someone who could not actually help me with a Mac problem.

So back on hold I went. I was now roughly an hour into the phone call. I had received exactly zero help at resolving my problem, had talked to TWO people, and was promised a talk with a third. After waiting on hold for a while, I realized I was going to be late for an appointment, and I hung up.

When I got back from my errands and other business, my wife had taken a message from the HP customer service rep. He left: a case number, two different phone numbers for me to call along with confusing explanations about how each of them was the best choice, and profuse apologies.

Yesterday, I was too disgusted with the whole mess to try to fix it, because I suspected that it was going to be another two hours on the phone with no good outcome.

And today, when I returned from some business outside, there was a phone message, once again apologizing for not helping me and expressing a desire that I would call them and we could get it all straightened out.

I am extra glad I did not choose to upgrade my printer to an HP Z3200.

In the past, except for fine art inkjet printers, I’ve always purchased printers using a simple algorithm: look at the current HP laser printers, pick the one that seems appropriate, and buy it. But my HP LaserJet 2605 seems to forget to listen to the network about once a month and needs to be power cycled, and even the smaller printer in the house, much older now, acted in a very confusing way when it ran out of toner, stubbornly insisting that there was 15% remaining in the cartridge at the same time it would blink the lights in a pattern which, after about two hours research on the web) I concluded meant it thought that either the planets were in zyzygy, the sky was green, or the printer was out of toner. (replacing the toner cart fixed the problem).

But I am feeling less sanguine about the prospect of HP product purchases in the future. Laser printers should not be, at this stage in their development, devices that require decoding magic patterns on blinking lights. Networked laser printers should not, at this stage in the history of computing, be things which need to be power cycled once a month in order to get them to listen to the network and accept print jobs.

And somehow, given the purchase price of the Z3100, I don’t think it should take me more than one hour on the phone to actually connect with a customer support person who is actually familiar enough with the product to help me get the printer driver to install on a Mac. I’m not saying that they should be able to solve any problem in an hour. I’m saying that it should not take an hour of explaining my problem for them to decide which person I should be talking to.

I will point out, here, that not all the blame lies with HP. If Adobe were not such hardass skinflint bozos about product licensing, I would have been able to just wipe the machine, install a fresh copy of Mac OS X 10.5, reinstall all my software, and then do a clean install of the HP printer software, which I suspect would have worked. I checked the function of the downloaded installer by installing it on my laptop running 10.5, and it worked like a charm.

There’s a famous manufacturer who has a reputation for horrid customer support. Legend has it that this manufacturer justifies its horrid customer support with the words “Because we hate you. And because you suck.”

It seems to me that those words could be equally well applied to both HP and Adobe. And it’s really hard for me to want to do business with them in the future, because I really do think that a) they hate me, and b) they think I suck.

And now, after posting this, I am off to do battle with the beast. If I’m not back in 24 hours, send in the SWAT team.

And that makes my cry inside in my special angry place.

Wish Me Luck

Notwithstanding my previous post, this weekend is my weekend to bring some machines up to date:

• The big Mac Pro in the studio gets upgraded to 10.5. God help me if the in place install doesn’t work, because I’ll have to call Adobe customer support to reinstall Photoshop.
• The HP Z3100 gets a firmware upgrade, from 6.0.0.whatever to the current 7.0.0.3
• The kitchen machine gets upgraded to 10.5.

It might be an interesting weekend, but I do want to keep these machines running something like the most recent available software.

The Road to Mecca

Last night, I got to go to the Seattle Rep and see the opening night performance The Road to Mecca, by Athol Fugard. God, I love live theatre. This Athol Fugard fellow, he can write just fine. Add in a great cast and great direction, and you’ve got what we saw last night.

Fugard, a South African, is famous for his plays treating racial issues and apartheid. The Road to Mecca is somewhat different. It’s not a single issue play, and it does brush up against racial issues in a tangential way. But for me, the interesting issue that the play treats is this: what happens to an artist when they reach that stage in their life when they stop making art?

The impetus for Fugard writing the play was the story of Helen Martins. Martins was an Afrikaner who created Owl House, decorating her home and her yard with incredible sculptures and mosaics. At the end of her life, her eyesight failing and after a period of a year and a half during which she created no new work, Martins committed suicide.

Fugard said:

I have lived my life and written my plays with the sense of having kept appointments with certain things. This was one of those appointments I suddenly realized I had to keep. I had to use the story of Helen Martins because it was time for me to understand the genesis, the nature, and the consequences of creative energy.

and

What am I going to do with myself if I can’t write anymore? What am I going to do with myself if suddenly the appointment book is empty — if it doesn’t come? This is a real dilemma, because I have fashioned my life around the fact that I’m a storyteller. I tell stories in the form of plays. There’s nothing else in my life.

and

What would happen to me if the stories stopped coming? The Road to Mecca showed Helen Martins’s fear of darkness and her discovery of the miracle that lighting a candle means. Her life gave me the opportunity to use that symbol of what creative energy tries to do, light a candle. What happens when there are no more candles left to light? Athol Fugard the man could go on a lot longer than Athol Fugard the playwright. Writing that play helped me to confront that possibility. I hope to die in harness. I’ll make sure of that by giving myself three more plays and two more prose works to write. I’ve planned them out. That will look after me for few years to come. But anyway, this exploration of self was part of The Road to Mecca.

Fugard has written 11 plays since he wrote The Road to Mecca. His latest play, Coming Home, premiered last night at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. Apparently Fugard’s health is fragile and he may not be able to travel to see the Long Wharf production.

The Trailing Edge

There was a time when I lived on the leading edge, or as some would put it, the bleeding edge. For reasons that mostly had to do with making money, I spent a lot of time running software that was not only not shipped product, nor beta versions, but software that was not even ready for alpha status. Same thing, really, for hardware – I had a lot of bleeding edge hardware. Fast computers – among the fastest available – I had’em.

Somewhere along the line, though, I lost the taste for it. I just wanted things to work. And so I relaxed a bit, feathered away from the leading edge. I still had fast computers, but they were no longer the fastest possible. I didn’t run beta software, just the current versions.

And today, somehow, I find myself on the trailing edge. I’m not running on the latest hardware (although everything got an upgrade when we switched to Macs). And I’m not running the latest software.

Apple is making noises about releasing OS X 10.6. We have six Macs (Oh, god. Don’t ask why so many. Just don’t. It’s an addiction.) and only four of them are running 10.5, the current version. Two of them (two of the most heavily used, in fact) are still running 10.4. And I’m running Adobe Creative Suite CS3, one version back.

My main camera (a Canon EOS 5d) is one generation back. My handy camera (a Canon G9) is one generation back. My favorite lens is so old, it’s not even a USM lens. That’s old, and although I’m often tempted to sample the current version, I’m afraid it won’t live up to the excellence of the one I’ve got.

Somewhere along the way, computers got fast enough, and operating systems got powerful enough, and the constant urge to have the latest and greatest drained out of my body. Somewhere along the way, the cameras got good enough, and lenses got good enough.

I still upgrade stuff, to avoid that ugliness that you get when you fall off the trailing edge. But, I have to say, life is a whole lot less stress when you’re not constantly banging your head against leading edge problems.

Lens Lust

I confess, when it comes to equipment lust, I definitely suffer. I suffer only minor temptation when I look at the EOS 5d mk II. But I suffer from unending lens lust. It just never goes away.

I know that most people, when they suffer from Lens Lust, eagerly pore over the aperture, the focal length. They agonize over how many groups, how many elements. I, too, was once like that. Call it ‘lens specification lust’.

Now, though, I suffer from what I can only call ‘look lust’. We’re Netflix subscribers, so we’ve been watching more movies, and oh, my. Some of those lenses those cinematographers use, boy, howdy. I see those shallow depth of field scenes, or a close focus scene, and I can hear Paula wince as she senses the inevitable comment. “Oh, oh!” I’ll exclaim. “I want that lens! LOOK at that lens, will you! Please, I want to have that lens!” Or, perhaps, if the lens was a poor choice, “Ugh! That lens is UGLY. Why did they use that lens?”

Fortunately for me, the lenses used by cinematographers are unlikely to be found in a form I can hang on my camera. This is good, because those lenses are expensive, and I mean expensive with a capital Expensive.

That doesn’t stop me, though. I love my trusty EF 100mm f/2.8 macro. I love it to pieces. But lately, another contender has caught me eye – the EF 90mm f/2.8 TS-E.

Today I caught myself pricing them on Ebay. This is not a good sign. And they, too, are not cheap. But oh, my, the out of focus drawing. Oh, dear.

Focus/Depth of field

For some time now, I’ve been fiddling around with very shallow depth of field, placing the focus in unexpected places, and all the related issues that go hand in hand with those experiments.

Some of those things I think I’ve started to get a handle on, and some of them I haven’t. Despite (or perhaps because of) this partial success, I found this post on Andreas Mannessinger’s blog to be particularly interesting.

Andreas writes (in part):

I’ve made a few images in the morning, some not even bad, I took my time, but none of them even comes close to these two snaps. I shot them through the dirty rear window of the tram, just after it had left the underground passage, shortly before the train station. I still had the camera ready (in fact I almost always have), but it was a very short moment, certainly not the moment to worry about composition.

I have made two exposures, the Image of the Day focused on the outside scene, the other (to see the difference, you really have to click at both and see them bigger) focused on the dirty window.

Compositionally the Image of the Day better suits my taste. The position of the sun is dead center horizontally and on a third vertically, the masts on both sides make for a nice frame, so if I had framed the image consciously and if I had chosen the time to release the shutter in relation to the position of the train, this would have been pretty much it.

Emotionally the other image grips me stronger. The vague nature of the scene behind the tack sharp dirt of the window, that leaves so much open for interpretation, I really would have liked this to be the capture made at the right moment with the right composition. Alas, in a moving train, in face of a scenery that changes by the second, there is no chance to repeat anything, no chance to shoot the same image twice, but differently focused.

You really need to go to Andreas’s blog, and look at the two photos. I agree with him about the composition, about the symmetry and all that. But that second image – focused on the dirt on the window – that image just makes me swoon. Go click on it, and look at it at the maximum size possible. That, my friends, is the photographic equivalent of the sound you get when you sob on your long cool winding saxophone.

The next time someone tries to tell you all about how great photographs have everything in focus, or the focus needs to be on the most important compositional element, or any of the rest of that jazz, just let them go on and prattle until they run out of steam and drift to a stop on their own. Then go and show them that photograph.

I mean, wow. That’s about all I can say about that, is “wow”.

Tranquility

It’s been very foggy this morning, and outside it’s sort of an active quiet. Not an absence of sound so much as an absence of abrasive sound and a presence of comforting sound – the drip of the dew off the trees, the rush of water in the stream, and the birds waking up.

It’s been sort of raw and cold, though, and so for the past bit I’ve been spending less time outside, and more time inside. It’s strangely difficult after working with the camera outside to bring myself to pick it up and make photographs inside. Habits and patterns are hard to break.