Hasselblad H3D-39 or How Mortals Can Go Broke

Today I received an email from Hasselblad extolling the virtues of its new H3Dii camera and imporning me to buy it. However, the email neglected to tell me how much it costs. For that I had to do a search beyond Hasselblad’s web sites. That explains Hassy’s new marketing strategy: “If you ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”

The new camera takes 50 megabyte photos. You read that correctly: 50 MB per photo. Which means that the human eye will be able to distinguish between a photo made by a Hasselblad and a Nikon or a Canon camera, assuming you blow up the print to about 400 by 400 — feet. A 16×20 inch photograph? Forget it. No human eye could tell the slightest difference.

But, still; it is a Hasselblad. I have a Hasselblad. It is my only remaining film camera and I love it. I have two lenses for it, the standard 80mm lens which came with it and a moderate telephoto lens (150mm) which I use for portraits and many nudes. It is a fine camera and I am proud to own it. (It is also why I am on Hasselblad’s mailing list.)

My question is: What is Hasselblad thinking? What is their marketing strategy? To whom to do they expect to sell their digital cameras which are expensive and for which there are few lenses and the lenses that do exist are almost as expensive as the cameras?

Clearly they are not expecting to sell many to professional photographers. Professional photographers, at least the ones I know, can’t afford a camera that costs this much – or that takes a full 1.5 seconds to capture a single image. Or that does not have a single moderate zoom telephoto lens such as the 18-200mm Nikon lens I use. Moreover, the professional photographers I know are not rich. As I have noted here before, photography is a tough way to make a living. So tough, in fact, that I’ve never even tried.

But what do I know about marketing? I still use WordPerfect and believe that Microsoft represents the triumph of marketing over quality. Maybe Hasselblad has not signed its death warrant by refusing to produce a digital SLR that ordinary mortals can afford. Maybe there are enough hedge-fund managers who are amateur photographers to keep the company afloat. But I am not betting on it.

Did I mention how much this fine camera costs? $43,500.00, unless you have to pay gross receipts tax on it. In my state I would and that would add about another $3000.00. And all I would have is a standard lens.

They’re nuts.

Terrorist Art Critic

History’s first, and probably only, terrorist who was also an art critic was Felix Fénéon. It was he who discovered and promoted the art of Seurat, an example of which I post here. The woman is not nude but she is certainly beautiful and mysterious and makes you want to see the rest of her. Is that a veil or is it a mask?

Fénéon really was a terrorist. He was once caught with bomb detonators on his person in the streets of Paris, although he was acquitted on those charges. The jury accepted his defense that his father had simply found them on the street. Juries don’t always get it right, although mostly they do. The Fénéon and O.J. Simpson verdicts were aberrations.

Anyway, Fénéon was a perceptive art critic. At the end of one of his essays about Seurat he wrote words that photographers would do well to remember:

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning.

Off to the Grand Canyon

We’re off to the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a week of hiking, camping and reflection. Which is just another way of saying that no new entries will be posted for a week. The internet does not reach to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Nor does electricity either, except at Phantom Ranch and we won’t be going there.We hope to spot a California Condor or two, some other interesting birds and no Grand Canyon rattlesnakes.

We’ll be taking a small, light camera and hope to return with a few good photos. But we’re not holding our breath. The Grand Canyon is huge and does not reduce well to two dimensions. Even the eleven dimensions of string theory seem too few to encompass the place and very few photographers can ever hope to do it justice.

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A note of sadness: Last week I reviewed the wonderful blog “Fluffytek.” Then came the news that Lin of that blog is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. Apparently it is not life-threatening; yet anyway. Richard, her husband, angrily weighed in about the disease and the lack of comments extending sympathy and they now – jokingly I hope – say that they only have seven readers left. I took no umbrage and am proud to be number 8 and I hope that every reader of this blog, both of you, will check in on Fluffytek and they will be back up to 10 readers. One of the things I liked about the blog before Lin’s bad news was that it did more than skate along the surface of life. I expect it will go deeper now and be even more rewarding. A sniff of mortality will do that to a person. Especially one like Lin who already was deeper than most. In the Mexico of her Frida Kahlo they say, “Que le vaya bien,” which literally means no more than, “Have a good trip.” But its true meaning is much deeper. It means have a good, rewarding life no matter what is thrown at you and so to Lin and Richard we say, “Que le vaya bien.”

Adobe’s Damn Dam, Part II

Harumph.  I see that Adobe, hard on the heels of its release of Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, has also just released Elements 6.  I haven’t looked at the new Elements 6 yet but woe betide those people if it has yet another DAM to learn.  DAM, for those of you blissfully ignorant of such matters, stands for “Digital Asset Management” and I have railed before about Adobe’s different versions.  You can read that post by clicking on this link.

I actually prefer the prior version of Element’s DAM over anything else in the Adobe line including Bridge and Lightroom.  That is probably close to apostasy and I hope to be forgiven.

Actually, I may commit even further apostasy after checking out the newest version of Elements.  I may decide that all a serious photographer needs for a digital darkroom is Lightroom and Elements.  Imagine having a full digital darkroom without paying $700 for Photoshop.  In fact, I imagine that Adobe is thinking the same thing.  I got an email from them this week offering a special price cut if you buy Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time.  I imagine they may be trying to forestall my apostasy.  It may have occurred to them that the Lightroom/Elements combination will cost only about half of what Photoshop alone costs.

Then someday – and I don’t expect to live long enough to see it but perhaps my descendants will – Adobe will put everything a photographer needs into Lightroom and be done with it.

Of course, when they do, they will probably include some brand new damn DAM to learn.

Sexual Harassment, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill

[I know this is a blog about photography but I’m going slightly afield today because I am in a state of high dudgeon about Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court and his latest book. We’ll get back to photography tomorrow. You can read some of the press coverage here and here.

I see that Clarence Thomas is having another go at Anita Hill. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a man spurned. According to Thomas – in his new book – she was “a mediocre employee” who had a job in the federal government only because he gave her one. She was “touchy” and overreacted to slights, real and imagined. She wasn’t that “demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” She was “asked to leave” her job as an associate attorney at the Washington law firm where she worked before going to work for the federal government.

In earlier years I made some unsuccessful sexual overtures at women myself – never anything improper mind you – but I’ve always forgave the women for rejecting me. Actually, I never blamed them in the first place. Sexual partners should be a matter of free choice and I was skinny and had a funny looking haircut so their refusals always seemed rational to me. Of course, none of them ever tried to keep me off the Supreme Court. I might be ticked off if they did that. But it hasn’t been a big issue yet; an unbroken chain of presidents from Richard Nixon forward have kept me off the Court without any help at all from innocent bystanders.

Which is what Anita Hill was: An innocent bystander. Clarence Thomas lied his way on to the Supreme Court.

How do I know that? Several reasons actually but they all boil down to one: For the better part of two decades I have represented women in sexual harassment lawsuits and I have heard Clarence Thomas’ excuses, denials and defenses from hundreds of men. There is no originality in any of them. That is one of the guaranteed qualities of a sexual harasser: A complete lack of originality. The ones I’ve met thought of themselves as decent men but most weren’t. They would have been rapists but they lacked the physical courage for that. They were not people you would want to have to dinner. I suppose the worst thing I ever said about one of them in a trial – after catching him in innummerable lies – was when I turned to a jury and said, “Look at him jurors. Do you really think that if you invited him to your house for dinner, he would help with the dishes?” Sexual harassment, like rape, is about power; not sex, and men who think themselves powerful don’t do dishes. Or windows.

Harassers always claim that their victims are “mediocre” employees, hypersensitive to imagined slights, and sexual sluts in disguise out to entrap innocent male supervisors and co-workers. Sometimes those vixens wear low cut blouses to inflame the innocent males or they “mislead” men into thinking that they want their necks rubbed when what they really want is to have their breasts manhandled. The women are never demure or innocent in the eyes of their harassers.

The men we sued were always lying. But don’t take my word for it, take the juries’ words. We’ve never lost a jury verdict and, in all that time, I only refused to represent one woman because I thought she was exaggerating. The juries always believed the evidence and the women. Mostly the women underplayed what happened to them out of a sense of decency.

But the point is: The men all talked and acted just like Clarence Thomas and their stories were improbable on their face and melted in the heat of the evidence. If Anita Hill was such a lousy employee why did Thomas hire her twice? For the hoped-for sex or because she really was a good employee? He loses no matter how he answers that question. If that Washington law firm fired her, why did the partner in charge of her employment make it clear that she was a fine employee and was not asked to leave? If she wasn’t a demure conservative religious woman why did Oral Roberts University hire her as a law professor and why did Liberty University ask her to stay when it bought Oral Roberts University?

The harasser always attacks the woman first. She was, “always coming on to me.” If they see that isn’t working, they degrade her work performance and, when they see that approach failing too, charge her with misunderstanding and overreacting and being “too sensitive.”

I bet if you had Clarence Thomas over for dinner, he wouldn’t help with the dishes either.

Adobe’s Damn DAM

Dear Adobe,

I swear that I will never again by another Adobe product if I, again, have to learn a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) program to use the product. It isn’t worth it. Life is finite and unpredictable. The universe and the timing of all our deaths seems arbitrary and capricious. I don’t have any more time trying to learn yet another way to store my digital photos so I can find them. Besides, when I die, my heirs aren’t going to spend years trying to figure out which DAM they can use to find my great works of art. Adobe is consigning them to history’s dust bin and I resent it.

Every Adobe product from the first Photoshop to the latest Lightroom and every Elements version in between has had a different DAM program. And that is in addition to the useless redundancy redundancy they build build into into every every program program. Do we really need sixteen different ways to change the contrast in a photo or save it so we can find it again? I doubt it. Two or three each ought to suffice.

Be warned Adobe. One more digital asset management program and I’ll never again buy one of your products. Progress is not all that it is cracked up to be. If I have to, I’ll go back to film. I’d rather breathe carcinogenic fumes than learn another one of your damn DAMS.

Best regards.

Democratization of Photography

We’ve reached the ultimate democratization of photography: Anyone with a point and shoot camera can take a picture and anyone with a computer can start a photography blog and write about the picture.

The question thus arises, “Why should I look at these pictures or read this blog?”

First, these aren’t pictures; they are photographs.

Second, this isn’t the usual blog.  I promise not to be narcissistic nor humorless.  In fact, I intend to inject a fair amount of humor and won’t bother you much with myself. Most blogs today are all about the authors and their lives.  But I doubt that you much care what I had for dinner last night nor do you really need to know the names of my dogs.  (Unless, of course, you model for me someday and one of the dogs comes along. I’ll probably post a picture of them even though I’m trying not to be narcissistic here.)  I’ll also endeavor to write well.

As I said in the first post — which you can read in the “About” section — one of the serious problems with photography of nudes is that much of it consists of photographs made by pretentious photographers taking pictures of self-conscious models.  I suppose we do that to prove that we aren’t doing it just for the salaciousness of the enterprise.  People might misunderstand otherwise.  We live, after all, in a country founded by Puritans.  It would not do to admit that making photographs of naked nubile women is fun nor would it do for the naked young women to admit that taking their clothes off for a camera is, among other things, a lot of fun. The inner voice asserts, “You can’t make Art if you are having fun.  Art is serious.”

Baloney.

It is true that many great artists did not live particularly happy lives, but does anyone seriously contend that most of them did not love doing their art.  Was Alfred Steiglitz not having fun photographing Rebecca Strand or Georgia O’Keefe?  Was Edward Weston not enjoying himself as he made photographs of Charis Wilson?  Would anyone seriously argue that Ansel Adams did not love being outdoors?  I’m guessing that Imogen Cunningham adored making photographs of flowers and young women. Ruth Bernard no doubt loved cramming models into boxes and arranging her studio lights to focus our attention on the beauty of the human form.

So we’ll enjoy ourselves here.  We’ll be unstinting with praise and chary with criticism.  Exploring environmental nudes with empathy, we’ll also examine the human condition and the environment of which we are a part and from which we can never separate ourselves.

Welcome.