On the topic of a recent photoblogger’s critique of the Flickr redesign, I concluded an email exchange with a friend by saying I was disappointed with “[the pundits] with the time to write about photography and with the audience to listen. They don’t think very deeply. And if that sounds harsh, I meant it to.”

In particular, we were discussing Thomas Hawk‘s Trojan Horse: How Flickr Screwed Me Out of My Pro Account Through a Photo Walk published on PetaPixel.

Yes, you read that correctly. That was the headline he ran: “trojan horse,” “screwed,” and “me.” The crux of the argument: Flickr redesigned its site and its product and no longer offered their “Pro” product unless you were grandfathered in by virtue of having an auto-renewal Flickr Pro Account. At $24.99 a month for ad-free, unlimited storage this was perfect for Mr. Hawk’s ambitious lifetime goal of publishing one million photographs. I say “offered” because the changes have been rolled back, more on that soon.

Mr. Hawk had the good fortune of attending a photowalk and receiving a gifted Pro membership and did what anyone would do, cashed it in to save some dough. So it was that Flickr decided to change their offering and someone made the poor decision to allow one set of “Pros” continue and others not. Those with a credit card on file for recurring memberships kept unlimited storage and no ads, those with gift memberships or month-to-month memberships did not. At best it was arbitrary and, as a business strategy, silly.

Leave aside for the moment whether, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, you’d have done as Mr. Hawk did and leave to risk your membership status when you depend so heavily on Flickr professionally to share and showcase your work, and instead ask whether the tone of the critique was carefully constructed. Mr. Hawk spent considerable time in the comments section asserting he was particularly vociferous about this issue to help right the wrong for others in the same situation. We’ll take him at his word and I commend him for this, but if we allow the article to stand as originally published, it’s a poor critique of Flickr’s business practice and far too personal.

“Screwed” means cheated and “Trojan Horse” means an intended trick. Screwed is used colloquially to imply a personal affront. It’s easy to feel personally attacked when your professional situation depends at least partly upon a web service that changes terms to your disadvantage. That’s human.

As a pundit, however, we deserve a more considered approach. Why? Because the tone makes it so easy to assume he’s concerned about the business change for personal reasons when, in reality, he slipped through the cracks of a poor business plan. Now, Flickr’s response was very fast and very cool and Mr. Hawk does a great thing by trumpeting that change on his website, but his PetaPixel article and its tone will hang there forever in the internet, about how he was screwed. It will hang there and stink.

Why does it matter? Because Flickr listens to this guy (and this is why I said, “offered” earlier).

Time was I hiked the Kaibab trail with my father in the ’90s. We made it a few miles in, past the first set of switchbacks and over a long plateau to where the trail wound deep into the canyon. It was spring and we hit a whiteout.

For a moment the atmosphere was like a glass of water into which someone had added a few drops of cream, the ancient and stalwart buttresses along which the Kaibab ran disappeared beneath a shroud and the brilliant facade of Arizona and juniper trees retreated to leave a shadow of itself hidden behind a pure and driven snow.

Some fifteen years later and we’re back at the canyon. These massive sheets of snow and cloud flutter and flap in the canyon like drapes of heavy linen as thermals from the depths rise and punch holes in the storm.

I ran and slid down the top of the Bright Angel to see what might come my way. For a moment I paused and remembered the Kaibab and the junipers in the snow.

Existence sometimes feels as if it comes in fits and starts and time can be strangely fluid. I often wonder which moments are the islands and which are the storms.

Tourists, locals and myself climbed Twin Peaks the weekend past to see the sun set over this great shoulder of civilization we call San Francisco. The tide rolled out, the fogs inward and the heather waved in the hot breath of the fading afternoon.

First image is from the D800 (16mm, f/10, ISO 100, ~45 min) the rest are from the RX1.

I hesitate to write about gear. Tools are tools and the bitter truth is that a great craftsman rises above his tools to create a masterpiece whereas most of us try to improve our abominations by buying better or faster hammers to hit the same nails at the same awkward angles.

The internet is fairly flooded with reviews of this tiny marvel, and it isn’t my intention to compete with those articles. If you’re looking for a full-scale review of every feature or a down-to-Earth accounting of the RX1’s strengths and weaknesses, I recommend starting here.

Instead, I’d like to provide you with a flavor of how I’ve used the camera over the last six months. In short, this is a user report. To save yourself a few thousand words: I love the thing. As we go through this article, you’ll see this is a purpose built camera. The RX1 is not for everyone, but we will get to that and on the way, I’ll share a handful of images that I made with the camera.

It should be obvious to anyone reading this that I write this independently and have absolutely no relationship with Sony (other than having exchanged a large pile of cash for this camera at a retail outlet).

Before we get to anything else, I want to clear the air about two things: Price and Features

The Price.

First things first: the price. The $2800+ cost of this camera is the elephant in the room and, given I purchased the thing, you may consider me a poor critic. That in mind, I want to offer you three thoughts:

1) Consumer goods cost what they cost, in the absence of a competitor (the Fuji X100s being the only one worth mention) there is no comparison and you simply have to decide for yourself if you are willing to pay or not.

2) Normalize the price per sensor area for all 35mm f/2 lens and camera alternatives and you’ll find the RX1 is an amazing value.

3) You are paying for the ability to take photographs, plain and simple. Ask yourself, “what are these photographs worth to me?”

In my case, #3 is very important. I have used the RX1 to take hundreds of photographs of my family that are immensely important to me. Moreover, I have made photographs (many appearing on this page) that are moving or beautiful and only happened because I had the RX1 in my bag or my pocket. Yes, of course I could have made these or very similar photographs with another camera, but that is immaterial.

The Features.

The killer feature of this camera is simple: it is a wafer of silicon 35mm by 24mm paired to a brilliantly, ridiculously, undeniably sharp, contrasty and bokehlicious 35mm f/2 Carl Zeiss lens.

Image quality is king here and all other things take a back seat. This means the following: image quality is as good or better than your DSLR, but battery life, focus speed, and responsiveness are likely not as good as your DSLR. I say likely because, if you have an entry-level DSLR, the RX1 is comparable on these dimensions.

If you want to change lenses, if you want an integrated viewfinder, if you want blindingly fast phase-detect autofocus then shoot with a DSLR. If you want the absolute best image quality in the smallest size possible, you’ve got it in the RX1.

While we are on the subject of interchangeable lenses and viewfinders…

I have an interchangeable lens DSLR and I love the thing. It’s basically a medium format camera in a 35mm camera body. It’s a powerhouse and it is the first camera I reach for when the goal is photography. For a long time, however, I’ve found myself in situations where photography was not the first goal, but where I nevertheless wanted to have a camera. I’m around the table with friends or at the park with my son and the DSLR is too big, too bulky, too intimidating. It comes between you and life. In this realm, mirrorless, interchangeable lens cameras seem to be king, but they have a major flaw: they are, for all intents and purposes, just little DSLRs.

As I mentioned above, I have an interchangeable lens system, why would I want another, smaller one? Clearly, I am not alone in feeling this way, as the market has produced a number of what I would call “professional point and shoots.” Here we are talking about the Fuji X100/X100s, Sigma DPm-series and the RX100 and RX1.

When the Fuji X100 came out, I was intrigued. Here was a cheap(er), baby Leica M. Quiet, small, unobtrusive. Had I waited to buy until the X100s had come out, perhaps this would be a different report.

Perhaps, but probably not. I remember thinking to myself as I was looking at the X100, “I wish there was a digital Rollei 35, something with a full-frame sensor and a fixed 28mm or 35mm lens that would fit in a coat pocket or a small bag.” Now of course, there is.

So, for those of you who said, “I would buy the RX1 if it had interchangeable lenses or an integrated viewfinder or faster autofocus,” I say the following: This is a purpose built camera.

You would not want it as an interchangeable system, it can’t compete with DSLR speed. A viewfinder would make the thing bigger and ruin the magic ratio of body to sensor size—further, there is a 3-inch LCD viewfinder on the back! Autofocus is super fast, you just don’t realize it because the bar has been raised impossibly high by ultra-sonic magnet focusing rings on professional DSLR lenses. There’s a fantastic balance at work here between image quality and size—great tools are about the total experience, not about one or the other specification.

In short, design is about making choices. I think Sony has made some good ones with the RX1.

So I’ve just written 1,000 words of a user report without, you know, reporting on use. In many ways the images on the page are my user report. These photographs, more than my words, should give you a flavor of what the RX1 is about. But, for the sake of variety, I intend to tell you a bit about the how and the why of shooting with the RX1.

As a beginning enthusiast, I often sneered at the idea of a snapshot. As I’ve matured, I’ve come to appreciate what a pocket camera and a snapshot can offer. The RX1 is the ultimate photographer’s snapshot camera.

I’ll pause here to properly define snapshot as a photograph taken quickly with a handheld camera.

To quote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” So it is with photography. Beautiful photographs happen at the decisive moment—and to paraphrase Henri Cartier-Bresson further—the world is newly made and falling to pieces every instant.

I think it is no coincidence that each revolution in the steady march of photography from the tortuously slow chemistry of tin-type and daguerreotype through 120 and 35mm formats to the hyper-sensitive CMOS of today has engendered new categories and concepts of photography.

Photography is a reflexive, reactionary activity. I see beautiful light or the unusual in an every day event and my reaction is a desire to make a photograph. It’s a bit like breathing and has been since I was a kid.

Rather than sneer at snapshots, nowadays I seek them out; and when I seek them out, I do so with the Sony RX1 in my hand.

Despite much bluster from commenters on other reviews as to the price point and the purpose-built nature of this camera (see above), the RX1 is incredibly flexible. Have a peek at some of the linked reviews and you’ll see handheld portraits, long exposures, images taken with off-camera flash, etc.

Yet, I mentioned earlier that I reach for the D800 when photography is the primary goal and so the RX1 has become for me a handheld camera—something I use almost exclusively at f/2 (people, objects, shallow DoF) or f/8 (landscapes in abundant light, abstracts). The Auto-ISO setting allows the camera to choose in the range from ISO 50 and 6400 to reach a proper exposure at a given aperture with a 1/80 s shutter speed.

I have found this shutter speed ensures a sharp image every time (although photographers with more jittery grips may wish there was the ability to select a different default shutter speed). This strategy works because the RX1 has a delightfully clicky exposure compensation dial just under your right thumb—allowing for fine adjustment to the camera’s metering decision.

So then, if you find me out with the RX1, you’re likely to see me on aperture priority, f/2 and auto ISO. Indeed, many of the photographs on this page were taken in that mode (including lots of the landscape shots!).

The RX1 is a wonderful camera to have when you have to work within constraints. When I say this, I mean it is great for photography within two different classes of constraints: 1) physical constraints of time and space and 2) intellectual/artistic constraints.

To speak to the first, as I said earlier, many of the photographs on this page were made possible by having a camera with me at a time that I otherwise would not have been lugging around a camera. For example, some of the images from the Grand Canyon you see were made in a pinch on my way to a Christmas dinner with my family. I didn’t have the larger camera with me and I just had a minute to make the image. Truth be told, these images could have been made with my cell phone, but that I could wring such great image quality out of something not much larger than my cell phone is just gravy. Be it jacket pocket, small bag, bike bag, saddle bag, even fannie pack—you have space for this camera anywhere you go.

Earlier I alluded to the obtrusiveness of a large camera. If you want to travel lightly and make photographs without announcing your presence, it’s easier to use a smaller camera. Here the RX1 excels. Moreover, the camera’s leaf shutter is virtually silent, so you can snap away without announcing your intention. In every sense, this camera is meant to work within physical constraints.

I cut my photographic teeth on film and I will always have an affection for it. There is a sense that one is playing within the rules when he uses film. That same feeling is here in the RX1. I never thought I’d say this about a camera, but I often like the JPEG images this thing produces more than I like what I can push with a RAW. Don’t get me wrong, for a landscape or a cityscape, the RAW processed carefully is FAR, FAR better than a JPEG.

But when I am taking snapshots or photos of friends and family, I find the JPEGs the camera produces (I’m shooting in RAW + JPEG) so beautiful. The camera’s computer corrects for the lens distortion and provides the perfect balance of contrast and saturation. The JPEG engine can be further tweaked to increase the amount of contrast, saturation or dynamic range optimization (shadow boost) used in writing those files. Add in the ability to rapidly compensate exposure or activate various creative modes and you’ve got this feeling you’re shooting film again. Instant, ultra-sensitive and customizable film.

Almost all cameras come shipped with what I consider to be the worst of the worst focus configurations. Even the Nikon D800 came to my hands set to focus when the shutter button was halfway depressed. This mode will ruin almost any photograph. Why? Because it requires you to perform legerdemain to place the autofocus point, depress the shutter halfway, recompose and press the shutter fully. In addition to the chance of accidentally refocusing after composing or missing the shot—this method absolutely ensures that one must focus before every single photograph. Absolutely impossible for action or portraiture.

Sensibly, most professional or prosumer cameras come with an AF-ON button near where the shooter’s right thumb rests. This separates the task of focusing and exposing, allowing the photographer to quickly focus and to capture the image even if focus is slightly off at the focus point. For portraits, kids, action, etc the camera has to have a hair-trigger. It has to be responsive. Manufacturer’s: stop shipping your cameras with this ham-fisted autofocus arrangement.

Now, the RX1 does not have an AF-ON button, but it does have an AEL button whose function can be changed to “MF/AF Control Hold” in the menu. Further, other buttons on the rear of the camera can also be programmed to toggle between AF and MF modes. What this all means is that you can work around the RX1’s buttons to make it’s focus work like a DSLR’s. (For those of you who are RX1 shooters, set the front switch to MF, the right control wheel button to MF/AF Toggle and the AEL button to MF/AF Control Hold and voila!)

The end result is that, when powered on the camera is in manual focus mode, but the autofocus can be activated by pressing AEL, no matter what, however, the shutter is tripped by the shutter release. Want to switch to AF mode? Just push a button and you’re back to the standard modality.

I keep mine in a small, neoprene pouch with a semi-hard LCD cover and a circular polarizing filter on the front—perfect for buttoning up and throwing into a bag on my way out of the house. I have a soft release screwed into the threaded shutter release and a custom, red twill strap to replace the horrible plastic strap Sony provided. I plan to gaffer tape the top and the orange ring around the lens. Who knows, I may find an old Voigtlander optical viewfinder in future as well.

Wine is civilization, and has been since time immemorial. To walk through the vineyard in the cool of the early morning has been a part of the human experience for as long as there has been what could reasonably be called humanity.

The Russian River wanders west on its seaward path and in so doing passes some of the most beautiful vineyards I’ve yet seen. I had spotted one in particular, along Westside Road south of Healdsburg, where old growth, Gobelet-trained vines marched from ravine to hilltop upon loose, brown-sugar soils and were there silhouetted against the eastern sky. I woke early to catch sunrise.

I drove east. For an instant the clouds flushed the sanguine garnet of a Pinot. Caught unaware, I fumbled and failed to make a decent composition. I was looking for something different than the typical idyllic photos of grape arbors and tasting rooms.

Unguiculate and veinous and bound by lashes to stakes, there was something at once beatific and dreadful about these vines. It was, after all, Easter weekend and I was upon the hill; and we are all born and reborn, generation after generation in the arterial blood of Pinot and Cabernet and Chardonnay. Here is a tradition older than any religion—one whose fruits are enjoyed by sultan and serf. Life is made of the little things that are, in reality, great privileges.

Since ever I remember, wilderness photography, for me, meant the American West. In my twenties, my wife and I would drive for days to come to where the rocky spine of the world broke the plains. At the beginning of my thirties, I lived for three years on the incomparable hearth of California.

May we all be so lucky.

Be it six months away, eastern my road lies and come fall it I will travel. I hope I have room in my bags for a few lessons learnt on the strands and mountainsides of a wild, western land.

We always knew that this, too, would pass and knew also that we’d be forever grateful for these 36 months. To the next six, may they be even a shadow of their larger part already spent.

Recent Yosemite posts here, here and here.

A longtime and diehard fan of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and a bona fide Yosemite junkie, I’ve always viewed the interior of the Ahwahnee Hotel with a mixture of awe and dread. One can be forgiven if—upon first entering the grand hotel—he feels as though he’s just stepped from what John Muir called “the great temple,” into the lobby and great hall of the horrible Overlook Hotel. In fact, if there is a break in the illusion, it is that the common spaces of the Ahwahnee, rather than pregnant with foreboding silence, are overflowing with visitors.

This resemblance is no accident of course. Mr. Kubrick designed his set (especially the Colorado Room and the lobby) to mimic the Ahwahnee, and indeed, I have a hard time seeing the chandeliers, rugs, tables and windows of this hotel without imagining Mr. Torrance clacking away upon his Adler upon one of the long, sturdy tables, smiling menacingly amidst the tourists and hikers come to catch a few moments rest by the enormous fireplace. All work and no play …

The great coup of The Shining was its replacement of Stephen King’s extensive backstory with a brooding atmosphere and a churning sense of doom. Mr. King allegedly hated it, but the rest of us fell in love with the film. No other film adaptation of Mr. King’s work risen to the mark that Stanley Kubrick set.

Now, Mr. Kubrick was a hell of a still photographer in his own right, and, for my money, it is no coincidence that he possessed a preternatural capability for creating mood. The greatest trick in still photography is to create a sense of place, to render a three-dimensional, flesh and blood world in the rectangular space of an emulsion or a computer screen replete with a taste of the subject’s emotive power. Now, there can be no argument that Mr. Kubrick achieved at least that throughout the film.

For my own part, I am fascinated with the reality that serves as the foundation for imagination and dreams. I’ve spent considerable time photographing The University of Chicago both because it served as the backdrop for a decade my own adventures and because it carries with it a germ of Oxford, one of many templates for Hogwart’s.

I can be forgiven then for long planning to shoot the Ahwahnee interiors. “But,” I always asked myself, “how to capture the silence and desolation that so defined the film?” How could I turn The Ahwahnee into The Overlook?

The answer came with a winter bug that laid me low; feeling feverish and fortunate enough to be a guest, I sneaked out of bed late one night, closed the door gently behind me, and stepped into the long, carpeted hallways of The Overlook Hotel.

Why did the the floor in front of the elevators needed a deep clean?

I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Earlier here and here.

Yesterday was cold in California, or rather, it was cold for California. Rainy too. I walked home from the train station as shadow and Earth began their nightly embrace. I couldn’t help but remember December along the meadows and riverbanks of Yosemite.

The links in the margin will take you to see earlier images in this series; a set of posts of which I am particularly fond. Our descent into the valley on this evening was particularly dramatic and memorable—ranking alongside my first trip through the Absaroka Range into the sulfurous environs of Yellowstone National Park.

In the darkness before dinner comes, in the gathering cold, when this great Californian adventure has come to its end, this is how I will remember Yosemite: wreathed in fog and flowing everywhere with winter.

I return to the valley with family this weekend. I am in the enviable position of having lost track of how many times I’ve come to this narrow stretch of paradise, yet no matter the number of visits, I am not sated and suspect I never will be.

And in the hours before sleep, you’ll find me wandering these blue, fog-filled granite corridors, camera in hand and lungs full.

Though she hid for days behind a vaporous veil, upon the third day Rainier emerged for an instant above the Trail of Shadows, just as the westward sun was setting.

An instant later, the window had closed and we were not to see her again until the morning.

I dream of one day owning a cottage in a field of heather beneath a great peak like this and whiling away the autumn years of my life in the shadow of the mountain. For the time being, it is fleeting moments like this that will have to suffice.

Who could ask for more?

The first in what I intend to be a series on the coastline from Marshall Beach to Santa Cruz.

A million heartbeats upon the hills to the east and not a soul but mine upon this cold, blue stretch of strand to watch the scruffy headlands and the Golden Gate turned vermillion by the January sun.

The tide was out but the surf was up and I found myself dodging the breakers from atop a rock, trying to drag the shutter and capture a few images of the Pacific’s mouth, foaming and lapping at the far western edge of San Francisco.

Once upon a time, a friend and I photographed Baker Beach, looking to find some balance between background and foreground. Here I looked for the same and found it in a jawline of granite piercing the sand, two peaks to match the bridge’s pylons.

Though I passed north and south along the shoals to find another foothold, I returned again and again to this composition, waiting for the light and the waves to change and enjoying every minute of it.

Sometime this year, I will be leaving California and I will dearly miss these terrigneous shoals and strands and endless stretches of rocky, impenetrable coastline.

I will miss the singing of the sea upon California’s stony, stalwart limbs. I will miss the static and the staccato of the breakers upon the sand, drums from the deep called inexorably to the headlands; drums that will beat forever in my heart, calling me inexorably back to the land I have for too short a time called my home.