Documentary photography of the closure of a bookstore

For reasons I won't get into I ended up working at a bookstore. I won't say much about the job other than I was given an ever increasing amount of hours and then after working for most of a year officially part time (but with full time hours), I was promoted to Head Cashier. A couple of months later, it was announced the store would close. Thus I applied for a few jobs and ended up with one so my final day was today though the store (which closed to the public last week) is still manned while people are packing display units and product. That will probably continue for the next month or so.

While I didn't think to get photos of the store from the same position during the process, I have a medley of photos taken during the process.

This was the cafe, where I used to enjoy my lunch every day when I worked at the bookstore. It was more expensive than a packed lunch but not so much so as an employee. Numbers of times I remember having to head behind the counter to sort out a problem with a register during my lunchbreak. Happy days.

Although I was the Head Cashier, my task every Thursday morning was to arrive at 7am to start shelving magazines. This was driven mostly by the fact that I was the only bookseller willing to turn up at such an ungodly hour and was meticulous enough about the task. Everybody including myself hated magazine shelving. My philosophy was that since I was being paid to do it, I'd do it to the best of my ability in the two hours allowed before the store opened. After that I went back to my Head Cashier role.

 This was my domain. I ran this office better than any previous Head Cashier. There were no errors in the accounting on my watch. Perhaps the most heartsinking moment was when I dropped two cash trays full of cash on the floor and had to collect all the cash - including the coins that had fallen into the trashcan (which by the way was full of soggy tissues and an empty coke can) before re-counting and putting the right change back in each cash tray. My task every opening morning aside from doing all the record keeping and documentation was to open the safe and count the money. My task every closing evening was to do the record keeping and count all the money. Needless to say during the last week of working there before the store closed, I made sure the money was right but skipped a lot of the documentation which I saw being tossed in the garbage after the store closed for good.

This is a photo before the closing news had broken and before the closing sales had started. I must admit that the New York management had the sales scheduled perfectly. Almost all of the bargain stuff had sold and a lot of the non-bargain by the time the store closed. When I left to work elsewhere there was about a day's worth of stock left to pack to ship off to warehouses etc. 

The $20,000,000 question I am always asked is why the store closed. What I was told by the company was that it was a lease issue and that the landlord had not renewed the lease. The landlord's representative told me (when he was down at the store) that the company had refused various different offers. My personal opinion is that over the years I worked there, customer traffic had declined. Combining declining customers, raising rent and lower profits probably meant that the smart thing was to close the store. The death of bookstores really came about when e-readers were introduced. Add to that, the model of a bookstore has changed. Big used to be beautiful. Now it's more often the smaller bookstore with a cafe, a well-chosen selection of popular current fiction, based upon the preferences of the local customer base and a selection of more eclectic works that survives and prospers. Needless to say, a cafe is a must. People like to sit and read. People like to eat and drink while they read too.

I tried most of the food in the cafe. I can't say that I was a great fan of it. As one of the employees stated, it was sustenance but it wasn't a place to go if you wanted to eat. I couldn't really eat the stuff with dairy products in it due to a slight lactose intolerance. The cookies tended to be a shade too sweet but the savories were quite pleasant. None of it was what I would call diet friendly.

After a week or two of the closing sale starting, all the children's toys and games had vanished totally. Normally they were a product that just didn't seem to sell - like a great many of the products. It was amazing to see people coming up with hand carts full of products that might sell at the rate of one or two a week. 

Things shifted slowly when the discounts were at 30% then sales picked up when they reached 40% but didn't get much faster when they reached 50%. Even though there was a closing sale, the shop just didn't feel as busy as it had in previous years. I just had the feeling that there were fewer people buying things and that they were buying cheaper things. I wonder just how much effect the e-reader has had on this.

Behind the scenes. This is the part the public never sees. This is the staff room where meals are eaten, meetings are held and where I have clearly left my coffee (in the white cup) on the table. In the corner was the food and drink machine that pedaled products my friend Linda called "pure poison". I didn't think they were that bad. The problem some people seemed to have was with the machine eating money and not producing a product or producing an empty can etc. I never had an issue.

Toward the end, there were many empty fixtures. Product moved around and the empty fixtures quietly shuffled out of sight of most shoppers to give the impression of full shelves.

The shelves look full but look closely at the bottom shelf and it's empty. The very top shelf has been removed to make it look as though there's plenty stock.

The effect is much more visible here, on the local history bay. Notice how the top and bottom shelves are empty. My personal opinion is the bottom shelves are just too low for most people and the top two rows are ridiculous. Imagine somebody of 5'6" or less trying to reach up there! I could barely reach the top and I'm 6' tall.

As the sale progressed, normally priced stock was not replenished and several entire bays became empty. It became less important to make the shop look full and more important to make it look tidy. Needless to say, with fewer products on sale, the tidying that used to take 2 hours and started an hour before the store closed became ever quicker. Occasionally some dust would be removed but this just stopped happening like a great number of things. 

The stock room suddenly acquired a couple of palates of flat-pack cardboard boxes and huge quantities of bubble-wrap, ready for the massive operation to box the remaining products ready to ship off back to the publishers and distribution centers. Some products labeled as "strip", the publishers didn't want back and just requested that the covers be sent to them. That was so that they knew the book couldn't be sold on the black market. The rest of the book was then dropped into the recycling container outside. I believe that container was filled several times.

Back in my domain, I had to count the cash. I hated handling cash. It's a very dirty thing to handle. Who knows whether people have picked their noses and handled the cash, washed their hands after visiting the toilet before handling cash or even dropped it into something nasty before picking it up and using it. A bank manager friend of mine told me that the number one contaminant on money is not excrement. That's number two. Number one was cannabis. In the picture there, you can see probably about $2,000 of money. I don't see how people can get so excited about grubby paper and metal disks. Maybe I'm an oddball. Money has never excited nor interested me.

Toward the very end, it became an issue with people pulling out fixtures and taking them to the cash registers to ask how much we wanted for them. They were not for sale - they were intended for use in other bookstores. Several times I was asked if I wanted any of the minor items such as decorations etc but my answer was always the same. There was nothing in the store that I really, honestly, wanted. If I want a book, I look it up on abebooks.com and buy it off them. Secondhand books are so much cheaper.

The day after the store had closed. The magazine racks in the background were empty. They were the first thing to be emptied, which was a shame. I'd have liked to have sat down and read through some of the magazines. I never had time when I was working there. There were many that looked interesting but working there I never had the time to read them nor the inclination or money to buy them to read them at leisure. To be honest I think magazines are a horrible waste of financial and material resources. They're expensive and once they've been read, they get thrown out and not largely recycled. The internet is a much better resource than most magazines and just as debatable from an accuracy point of view.

Over the week after closure, shelves began to empty. Books were sorted according to publisher and removed from the shelves by publisher to be boxed and sent off to the publisher or to the distribution centers.

Each day the books that came off the shelves got packed into boxes. The boxes were supposed to hold up to 50lbs but it was very hard to judge and impossible to change once they'd gone over as there was just one set of scales supplied and several people packing boxes of books. Quite a few of mine were over 60lbs and one went to 71lbs. That's on the bottom row, 3rd from the right. It was a case of packing the books on a table and carrying the box to the box area. I pitied the poor truck driver who had to load and move all those boxes. He must have been terribly strong or terribly exhausted later.

Little by little, all the shelves were emptied and the carcass of the bookshop was left behind. Meanwhile representatives of other stores within the chain came to remove the fixtures they wanted. It became comical at times. I looked up to the clock in the break-room to see what the time was and it had gone. I checked my watch and found it was wrong - probably due to the solar flares the night before. Thus my timepiece was solely my mobile phone. Similarly, the automatic paper towel dispensers in the toilets had vanished, which we discovered when we wanted them. Then when we wanted to throw away the paper towels we'd located and used, the bins had also gone.

This is my final photograph of the gutted and desolate bookstore. Needless to say I have other photographs but though they might not be the "best" photographs from a nitpicker's point of view, they are documentary photographs. I wish I had photographs of the bookstore before it closed, showing fully laden shelves. 

My time at the bookstore was an education in dealing with the public en masse. During this time I applied myself to the position and won a great number of sales awards. I am not that enthusiastic about sales even though I'm very good at sales.

The future of lighting

For over 100 years, the incandescent light bulb gave light to the masses; cheap, safe light. It was safer than candles and oil lamps and cheaper to run after wiring and so on had been taken into account. Then along came the compact florescent light which slowly usurped the place held by the incandescent light bulb. Legislation was enacted banning the production and use of incandescent bulbs under the guise of environmental friendliness.

Some truths about CFL bulbs are uncomfortable - they contain mercury which the original incandescent bulbs did not. Worse than that, they contain mercury vapor - in fact their original name was the mercury vapor lamp. Suddenly they don't sound so friendly. All the older bulbs could be 100% recycled. The CFL bulbs need to be disposed of in special facilities.

Recently, along came a new kind of light - the white LED. They're still in the early stages but they are available for use in desk lamps and more. The best thing - no mercury and they have a life of about ten years compared to the year of an incandescent bulb or the three years of a mercury vapor bulb. Even better than that, while a 100 watt incandescent bulb will produce around 16 lumens per watt or 1600 lumens, a CFL will produce around 60 lumens per watt. Thus, to get the same lumens as a 100 watt incandescent bulb we only need a 26 watt CFL. People often complain CFLs are dim and they are because 13 watt is the most common variety and that's half the power of a 100 watt incandescent bulb.

Forward a little and along came the breakthrough everybody was waiting for. For years, LEDs had been available solely in red, yellow or green. Suddenly blue became available and with blue came the ability to produce a white LED. That was the breakthrough the world was waiting for.

Forward a little further and now vast banks of LED light panels are available for use in television studios. Gone in large part are the banks of hot and powerful ordinary incandescent bulbs that would from time to time shatter and shower the presenters or actors with broken shards of glass. Not just that benefit but lower power bills and crucially no heat. This is money saved on air-conditioning. LEDs typically produce around 40 lumens per watt.

In my stairwell, I have an LED bulb illuminating the stairs, replacing the CFL that was there originally. It has resulted in a reduction in my monthly electricity bill of around $2, which is very welcome. My desk lamp was designed for a 40 watt incandescent bulb and has a 1.2 watt LED bulb instead with zero heat emitted and less power consumed.

The downside of "white" LED bulbs is that at the moment they're not a universal white. Different batches from different manufacturers can vary from bluish to greenish or yellow through to orange. The more expensive LED lighting arrays tend to be precisely color balanced to within a very few degrees Kelvin.

Now, what has all this got to do with photography? Well, now that you have some background to the development of lighting and how we are now using ever less power and getting ever more light for that power, I can make some predictions and perform some analysis.

In the 1950s, Harold Edgerton produced the world's first electronic flash. This is a simple glass tube filled with argon that has a 300v current passing along the tube, through the argon. This is what produces the flash of light from a flashgun. It's a bit more complicated because argon won't conduct 300v unless it has been ionized with a 3,000v ionization supply. This ionization is provided by 3,000v passing through a wire wrapped around the flash tube. The downside of argon is that it has a residual afterglow and that means that the absolutely fastest pulse of usable light from a flash tube is going to be somewhere in the region of 100,000th of a second. Now that might sound fantastically small until you realize that many industrial processes happen in less time and need to be photographed. As an example, somebody recording ballistics may need to fire a .223 bullet at a sheet of glass to see what happens and when. A .223 bullet can travel at up to 3,000 feet per second. Now you should begin to see the problem. In a hundred thousandth of a second, such a bullet will travel 0.03 of a foot. This is around a third of an inch. That might not sound much but most sheets of glass are an eighth of an inch thick. Did the glass bend before it shattered or did the bullet punch a hole straight through? Was it the impact that shattered the glass or the vibrations caused by a hole being punched through? These questions need a faster flash.


Harold Edgerton also devised a really fast flash called a microflash. There are some ideas on building one in the two books on high-speed photography Book 2 and book 1. Microflashes do not use Argon. Generally they use air which is 78% nitrogen. This means that while Argon produces a nice natural flash that's barely blue, the air flash will have a very heavy ultraviolet element. It also needs some pretty scary voltages. I'm talking about 14,000 volts for the main power (versus 300v of the Argon flash) and 28,000 volts for the ionization supply. Not only are those very scary and very dangerous but they're also quite challenging to achieve and control. The components capable of handling such voltages are hard to obtain. Many are available solely from old Soviet military supplies. Before you start worrying, no - nobody can turn microflashes into a weapon.

So, why am I talking about this? Purely because this is where LEDs come in. The fastest LED can produce a pulse of light of a 2,000,000,000th of a second long. That's right - a two billionth of a second pulse of light. Now you can see why I am so excited. In a two billionth of a second, a bullet traveling at 3,000 feet per second will travel 3/2,000,000th of an inch. That's hardly any movement!

The flash that took this photo was 1/38,000th of a second (described in the books). The bullet was an air-gun pellet traveling at 500 feet per second. The flash was an easily obtainable camera flash and the camera was pretty ordinary too. Now imagine if the flash was a lot faster - the pellet would be frozen as it exits the glass and the wake behind would be clear instead of slightly blurred. Then imagine that having such a fantastic flash was within grasp of the amateur photographer. Now you can see why the thought of LEDs excites me so much.

Already many mobile phones have LED flashes built in. They work quite well, up to a few feet. Imagine that flash a lot more powerful and a lot faster. It would be able to freeze bullets in flight. Not just that - that's a side effect - but it would be lighter, safer and use less power. So why aren't they commonly available? Well, that's the thing - they need still some massive development.

Currently the amount of lighting power available from an LED is quite low. One would need a massive bank of LEDs to produce the light required for a flash. Now while it would be possible to build a light box with LEDs pointing inward and emitting their concentrated light though a small window rather akin to how many lasers function, I suspect there still isn't yet enough power from LEDs. I see tremendous potential for this technology in photography.

Breaking the speed of light

Everything has a speed. I was reading about somebody selling a laser trigger for high-speed imaging. Apparently the trigger had a frequency of 1/1,000th of a second. That set me thinking because I'm pretty sure that is just not fast enough. So, without further ado, let's dive into some calculations.

A 1/1000th frequency will mean that the laser will be emitting for half that time and not emitting for the other half. Thus we have 1/2,000th of a second when it will actually be active and productive. Any projectile passing through the beam cannot therefore travel any faster through the beam than 1/1000th of a second in order to make the thing work.

Let's break that down further. Projectiles have length which is beneficial for things like this. If something passes by in 1/1000th of a second, it has to be traveling at least at 166 feet per second. That's about a third of the speed of a slow-moving airgun pellet. Most airsoft pellets travel faster than that.

Given that we don't know exactly when the trigger frequency cycle begins, it could start at any point during the passage of an object through the laser beam. This means that even something traveling relatively slowly such as a dart (most darts are thrown with a forward speed of about 40mph), the 1000hz cycling of the trigger will mean that even something as slow as a dart (58 feet per second) has an inexactitude of 1 inch. This means the difference between taking a photo of a balloon with a nice pointed dart just above its surface, a photo of a balloon with a dart puncturing it or a photo of a shriveled piece of plastic with a dart somewhere in the picture. There is no predictability and guarantee of repeatability. This is not good for such an exact science as high-speed imaging.

The photo above is repeatable. This was done with an audio trigger, not a laser trigger. The sound of the gun firing triggered the exposure after a slight delay set by my delay unit. Thus I have a very nice photo of an airgun pellet sliced in two by a razor blade. Needless to say, this was not a single attempt, I had to keep adjusting the delay until the pellet was in the right place, I have a ton of photos of the pellets in different places on the scene, including one where it's just been cut by the razor blade and the two halves are on opposite sides of the blade.  This is the photo I choose to show, however. The plume of "smoke" is actually oil from the barrel of the air pistol - which is a pump-up Crossman. I did try using a pistol with a CO2 cylinder but the valve kept jamming so it would waste a complete cylinder of CO2 each time. I gave that one away. I needed dependability.

What would you do to improve the experience of high-speed photography?

A day in the life of a transsexual.

Rachel asked me to document a day in her life as a transsexual. Yes. This has all been done with a cellphone purely because it's simply the easiest camera to use and it's always available. Uploading the images - while not spectacular - to the blog is easier than pie. They're instantly accessible via Android.  If one day digital SLRs come with wifi compatibility or even Android compatibility, there may be a winner in the marketplace.

One of the main fears of most transsexuals aside from mockery by peers and strange looks by people who think there may be something amiss, is the fear of violence. In many countries, transsexuals are routinely subjected to police beatings (Russia is a prime example) or subject to dismissal by employers for their trans-sexuality. There was a law passed recently in the US Congress against this kind of thing in order to put transsexuals on an equal footing with everybody else. Thus, many transsexuals have in their drawers (pun not intended), the means with which to defend themselves should such an event be necessitated. Thus, nestled amongst all the make-up in Rachel's drawer is a loaded gun. She is afraid of everybody because she is not seen as being a woman by her peers but rather as some strange, loathsome entity - a danger to public morality. Rachel has to live with a gun in every room with the constant stress, fear and apprehension of sudden attack. (It is hard to imagine how Rachel can live like this - editor)

One of the most loathsome aspects for ordinary women is having to shave their legs and their armpits - it's just the same for transsexuals save for the fact their hair is thicker and harder to remove. They also have beard hair to remove. This is even harder than genetic women's hair as it grows thicker and faster. Thus, a transsexual sometimes has to shave their face twice a day just to maintain a smooth appearance. 

 I haven't seen very many women with stubble or even beards. I have seen a few though but this is due to a hormonal imbalance. Women sometimes get hirsuitism from genetic or other hormonal conditions and largely it is treatable. The only treatment for a transsexual is a sex change which takes a lot of money and surgery. Many transsexuals such as Rachel tend to be classed as cross-dressers as they don't live their entire lives as women. Rather, like Rachel they are Samuel in the day and Rachel in the evening when nobody else can see them. It's a rather sad, lonely life for them. Many are divorced and live alone as their former partners normally couldn't stand their feminine aspect. Shaving is the same for both men and women otherwise - it's a case of a razor and elbow grease. The only difference is that women's razors are designed to look more feminine.

Men's bathrooms - even transsexual's bathrooms tend not to be as clean as women's. That's quite likely due to their being brought up as boys rather than as people. Boys tend to be brought up to do the physical things like fixing hinges, going hunting etc. Girls tend to be brought up to cook, sew and clean. It's extremely sexist as though only boys can do this and only girls can do that. That's nonsense. Anybody can do anything. (editor) The man's razor shown is exactly the same as a women's razor but because it's blue, it costs a fraction of the price a women's razor in pink would cost.

 

As with women, transsexuals use the same cosmetics - lip gloss, eyeliner, mascara, blush, foundation. There's nothing special there. Probably the only differences are the physical. Transsexuals being somewhat stouter of the waist and taller than genetic women. There are other differences but those are the most obvious. Thus, after the normal rising, ablutions and cosmetics, Transsexuals like Rachel then put on their clothing just as genetic women do. The difference is that afterwards about 90% never leave the house. They get all dressed up and have nowhere to go. Hence the high number of ridiculous pink dresses on sale on eBay.

There is a huge variety of gender expression. Rachel is a transsexual that is a woman trapped in a man's body. Thus, Rachel buys ordinary women's clothes so she does not stand out. Back to the pink dresses on eBay and those are the preserve of pantomime cross-dressers who Rachel assures me do it for very different reasons.

 

Not many women have rifles and gun oil in their homes. In general genetic women are much less disposed toward owning things that make loud bangs and can be used to kill people. Transsexuals because of their male upbringing often have them because they've been taught to always be prepared. The fact that a sudden breakdown in society that leads people to having to go and hunt for food in the forests and engage in street warfare is highly unlikely to happen outside of the third world seems to be lost on the preppers or those rendering boys their male upbringing.

Transsexuals have such major issues to overcome. Rachel is an example of such. After getting dressed, Rachel has nowhere to go and ends up sitting at home, reading a book all day. Rachel is terrified to leave the house and be seen for fear it might have negative repercussions on job prospects, might experience violence from unknown people that might not like the fact that Rachel's biological gender differs from her internal gender.

Thus, the day draws to a close with Rachel able to do most of what a genetic woman can do save for leaving the house, imprisoned by fear.

What do you think people like Rachel should do and do you think it's right that they should live in fear?

Supernatural photography or ghosts in the house

I just took a series of photos in my guest room, of some garments to post online. In each image there are strange blobs of light that move rapidly. There are no insects in my house. I don't see this in my photos from any other room.

This is just so utterly strange. I know somebody I was once very close to passed away very recently. The scientific side of me says there has to be a scientific explanation. I see no insects at all in my house. This is the first time this has ever happened. I see these blobs moving as I take the photo. I feel no fear - just total curiosity about these things.

One part of me questions whether there is something supernatural about these blobs. The lighting in that room is quite excellent. The room feels colder than the other rooms but not markedly.

10 reasons why every male photographer should carry lipstick

Ok, I lied. It's not ten reasons why every male photographer should carry lipstick. Today is your bonus day and you get eleven for the price of ten. Look - 10% extra free. 

There are many more reasons why a male photographer or indeed any man should carry a lipstick as part of their normal equipment. I'm all for breaking down the ridiculous role stereotypes that exist. The other day I gave reasons why photographers should carry pantyhose. In fact there are many male professions where pantyhose is a normal thing to wear and I'm not talking about drag shows. Divers often wear pantyhose in order that when they remove their rubber wetsuits, the rubber doesn't pull the hairs out of their legs. Soldiers often wear pantyhose in colder climates just for that extra layer of insulation.

Aside from the reasons below, I'm sure that lipstick is actually more commonly worn by men than is commonly conceived. Aside from actors who always have some form of make-up on when they're working, I have seen male hotel clerks wearing lipstick as well as male shop assistants. Take a look at the next fellow that serves you in your favorite fast-food place.

Lipstick pen

1. Lipstick can be used as a grease - handy for lubricating screws and bolts, mechanisms etc in an emergency.
2. In the absence of suitable kindling, a lipstick can be used as a fire-starter as it has plenty petro-chemicals that burn quite nicely when ignited.
3. Lip balm - very handy for those days when your lips are at risk of chapping.
4. Camouflage - anything that breaks up outlines is good though the darker colors and the non reds would be better.
5. Writing an emergency message such as an arrow showing the direction in which you went.
6. In the absence of a female companion, it can be used to apply lipstick to wine glasses etc to make them seem as though a lady has partaken. Handy for photo shoots.
7. Pens can often be disguised as lipstick. I have such a pen.
8. A quick application of lipstick, slipping on a face veil and a burka can get you out of most hostile Middle Eastern countries with not a glance from the border guards.
9. Lipstick can be used to touch up a model's make-up if she forgot her own.
10. If you're shooting a morbid scene, lipstick can be used to simulate gunshot wounds.
11. You could always just wear it and be amused by people's reactions.

Increasing readership

In general, it doesn't matter what website is put up, not many people ever seem to visit. It doesn't matter how well optimised things are - nobody ever finds any of the websites using any of the search terms included - which apply quite well to the site content.

Various websites have been up for various lengths of time. One has been up for ten years. That has been crawled well by search engines. The content has been constant for ten years. The keywords have been constant for ten years and accurately represent the content of the website. How many visitors does it get? Well, last month there were 95 unique visitors and 333 site visits. That's 3 visitors a day and 11 visits a day. Of those visits, 322 were less than 30 seconds. Only two were greater. They were so much greater that they must have left the browser open. Bizarrely, over 90% of those visits were to a blog engine that has no viewable blog. Only one search term was recorded as having been used to find the site and that term was: which important becoming in creasing of too many countries should not be over looked and which are some problems of tourisms. That, of course, looks like a fictitious sentence used by a bot. I have no other explanation for that. So, what I have is a website that nobody actually views.

The really interesting thing is what will get readers. It's not content quality that's the problem. The problem is much more basic than that. Nobody seems to be finding the blog. Nobody seems to be looking for or finding any of the websites. The caveat there is that when they were advertised, under certain conditions people look.

Ages ago there was a website and $25 was paid for Facebook advertising just for the heck of it. Sure - the site got visitors. All of about 20 and they were on the site for no longer than 1 second. It's not even possible to look at the first page in 1 second to see if you want to view it in that time. There have been stories about fake facebook page hits which would lead one to suspect these were the fakes. Nobody visited any other than the landing page. Clearly since this was something also experienced from using Google Adwords, paying for online advertising doesn't work.

So, over the past few days adverts have been placed on Craigslist. Two special blog articles were written, one about why male photographers should carry a pair of pantyhose. The other was about why male photographers should have fake nails and nail polish in the camera bags. The former was advertised honestly on Craigslist. More than that - advertised on Craigslist in several different areas. It was very interesting to note two things. Firstly that the local Craigslist got very few responses and that Craigslist in other areas generated responses. Clearly since as of the time of writing, hits on the pantyhose entry are now at ten times normal level, two things are self evident.

First, people want to see entries about pantyhose and men. That might be worthy of a further photo documentary article. Secondly people in the local area just aren't interested in photography. An interesting piece of correlated evidence for that is that the Columbia area of South Carolina is poverty stricken. Go further North to Charlotte, North Carolina and there's a lot more money around. Hence, of course, more people interested in viewing my blog. These two areas were among the areas where Craigslist adverts were placed . Both adverts honestly described the article.

Fine, so there weren't extra viewers for one article. What about the rest of the site? There was some follow-on in which people viewed other pages and other articles but this was generally minimal. Visits in general are less than one would really desire and expect.

Interestingly, the only search engine that registers hits seems to be Baidu (the Chinese search engine) and those hits are for "mystyle,myvision,myway" which is the current blog title and "words more than 192 pixel" which is baffling. So, what's the score? Clearly there needs to be some more research on this. One of the biggest suspicions is that attracting readers from outside such a poverty-stricken area is essential. There are more people on welfare in South Carolina than there are people actually working - probably because most have just totally given up in the face of all the McJobs that don't pay even the rent.

On a further note on the local economy, there are many small homes in which multiple families live with one family per room. In the old days these used to be called slums. The families all have adults working, earning minimum wage and cannot survive independently. Clearly in that situation, people are not going to be interested in reading blogs.

There was one page that went viral with something like 1,200 hits in 3 days. That was the page on The Great Digital Scam. It's racked up to 1,500 now. Of course that page got the hits and nothing else did - not even the adverts. There was no real bleed-through. "Going viral" isn't really worth the bother because live a virus, it bursts into a flurry for a few days then dies away to nothing. One would hope to get at least some viewers to become regulars but that just doesn't seem to happen to anybody. Like so much else of online marketing, "going viral" is just another myth that doesn't stand the test of reality.

It becomes a question of does one put things up that people will read in droves or does one put up things that please them? As this is a hobby site, it has to be the latter. If it was the former then the answer would be to write really nasty soft-core porn and to put up nasty pictures of barely legal women in sexual positions. That's not my thing.

Every photographer should have fake nails and nail polish in their bag.

Yes - you - should have fake nails and nail polish in your bag. I am prone to breaking my nails on the side of the nail. This has often been caused by handling books and big boxes of books. Fortunately now I don't have to heft books and big boxes of books. Having said that, imagine you're out in the field, photographing and really need your nail not to be broken as it's catching in everything.

What better solution to a damaged nail and prevention of a painful and the potential bloodbath caused by catching the damaged nail on something and ripping it off accidentally than a fake nail glued over it? Seriously, you're going to worry that one fake nail might make you look effeminate? They're only a dollar or two in the Dollar shop and given a little abrasion to remove the fancy finish will look exactly like your nails do anyway. 

That little fake nail doesn't look so bad does it? And it's practical too. Now I bet you're going to ask why in tarnation a photographer - especially a guy should carry nail polish in their camera bag. The answer is simple - I don't mean nail polish like this:

I mean nail polish like the bottle below. This comes in handy for so many different things. I can paint it onto a screw that I don't want to come undone without my deliberate action. It works as a clone of Thread Lok. It doesn't cost much different either. Models - if you're shooting ladies - can use the clear polish to stop runs from progressing in their stockings. It can be used to insulate electrical contacts. It can even be used to add shine to subjects that lack shine. For example, fools gold painted with clear nail polish will acquire a luster that it never possessed in real life.

Time to put your toughness to one side and hand it to the ladies - they have this one figured out. Time to take a leaf from their book and get yourself some nail polish and fake nails.

10 reasons why a male photographer should have at least one pair of pantyhose.

1. You might meet the lady of your dreams who suffers an embarrassing wardrobe accident when her pantyhose gets snagged and you can save the day by whipping out a new pair of pantyhose for her.
2. They're really great as emergency replacements for broken fan belts.
3. For a photographer, they are the original diffusing filter. Think Weegee had a diffusing filter? Heck, no. He used pantyhose. Think Robert Doisneau didn't have a pair to use for filtering romantic images - heck, yes.
4. They can be used to aid in the filtration of water. My friend This fellow uses a pair of pantyhose filled with puzzolane to filter rainwater for his drinking water. 
5. They can be used in place of rope to bind villains hands together until such a time as they can be turned over to the boys in blue.
6. Bragging rights - you can hold them up as a trophy during your next bar-room bragging session.
7. Filled with straw or scrunched paper they can be used to support objects you want to photography.
8. They can be used to secure small branches to keep them out of view when taking a photograph.
9. They can be used as props in fun photos.
10. They work well as a hair net, should you find you need a hair net.

Oh, come on - even though this was shot through a pair of pantyhose to illustrate the point (and shot with the camera on my late, lamented Blackberry), this is a fun photo.

So, next time you're in the grocery store, grab yourself a pair of pantyhose and bring some fun into your life.

On equipment - what to choose and how to choose it.

I get a lot of enquiries for what equipment to use for this or that. I do not recommend any specific camera brand nor do I generally make recommendations on specific lenses to use. Having said that, it's worth my while putting a brief article together for just that purpose.

It's important to know exactly what you'll be photographing. Now that might sound strange but if all you want to do is astronomical photos then you'll likely be buying a T2 adaptor for your camera and putting it onto a telescope - no need to buy any lenses, so why buy any? If all you do is sport action photos then all you need is a 70 - 200 zoom or 70 - 300 zoom or perhaps a couple of fixed focal length lenses (also known as prime lenses) of 200, 300 or 400mm focal length.

A lot of amateurs will fret that they don't have the "correct" focal length for every conceivable occasion. This fretting is what costs them a lot of money, pointlessly. If you want to cover every focal length then get a 28 - 1000 zoom compact and use that. The lens on a zoom compact will reach every focal length though the quality of the photos obtained may leave room for improvement.

I am a staunch advocate of prime lenses. Zooms are good but switching cameras with different focal length primes fitted is a lot faster than zooming and a lot kinder to the lens. Zooms are not designed to be anything more than a compromise. They're far better now than they ever used to be but they're still not all that great. At the wide end they often display barrel distortion (where straight lines bend toward the edges of the picture) and at the narrow end they often display pincushion distortion (where straight lines bend toward the centre of the picture). At the long end they can lose several stops of light too. An f4.5 - 5.6 zoom lens will be f4.5 at its wide end and f5.6 at its long end. Immediately the light has been reduced by 50%. This is no good whatsoever for most things. So, zooms are slow, heavy and cumbersome - their only redeeming feature is they're cheap. I have a Canon 17-85IS lens. It was about $500 a few years ago, brand new. It's acceptable but not a great lens. At the wide end there is distortion and at the long end it's quite a dark lens. The killer is - it only replaces three prime lenses. Were I to replace this with prime lenses then I would go for the following: wide, standard and telephoto lenses. For my use because I use a camera with a smaller sensor, I'd go for possibly 16/17/18mm wide angle, 28/35 standard lens and maybe an 85mm telephoto.

The interesting thing about lenses is that the longer the lens is, the less difference there is per millimeter. Thus a 14mm lens is a lot wider than a 17mm lens but a 200mm lens is not that much different from a 135mm lens. Between a 28mm and a 35mm the difference is barely noticeable in use. I made the mistake of buying both when I used 35mm.

When buying lenses, it's usually best to go for the best lens possible. A cheap independent lens is only going to give your photographs the quality of a cheap independent lens. Even if you buy the lens new, it's not going to be anywhere near as good as a lens produced by the camera manufacturer. As an example, I have a Tamron 17-35 lens that was inexpensive. I barely use it because the photo quality - even at the optimum aperture isn't that great.  Now we're talking about cost. As an example, the 14mm Canon prime lens is about $2,500 at the time of writing. It's serious money. The Canon 10 - 22mm zoom is $860 by comparison. It's easy to see why people say "Hmm... Serious money for one lens or not-so-serious money for a zoom". Then they look at the independent lenses and say "Hmm but I can get a 12 - 24 from Tokina for only $400". This is where things unravel very rapidly. When you start to let your wallet dictate your lens choice is when you start on the spiral of regret. It is better to decide what you want and then to get then to save for it than to buy things that are never going to be as good. As the proverb goes: I'm too poor to buy cheap things. At best you will buy a cheap lens, be disappointed and sell it for a fraction of what you paid then buy a more expensive one and repeat the cycle many times over until by the time you get the lens you should have bought in the first place you'll have paid its price many times over on buying rubbish and losing money selling it to the next sucker.

Cheap lenses will suffer from distortion, chromatic aberration (or funky colored lines around areas of high-contrast), soft images (where lines aren't quite as sharp as they should be) and a whole host of other issues.

At this point I'd better say don't buy stuff with loans. If you can't afford it, save. If you can't save then you either don't want it that much or you don't have enough money to take up photography. Loans are just a way the fools among us pay somebody else to do our saving for us. Putting the money that would be spent on loan repayments into the bank would earn interest and then at the end you'd get the lens that much sooner. Paying for it with a loan means you're paying interest on the loan plus other charges and it'll take a lot longer before it's paid for and should the unexpected happen, you won't have the money to fall back on instead of getting the lens but you'll have a loan to repay and an unexpected event to cope with. Double jeopardy.

As far as camera bodies are concerned, these days they're all pretty good. I'm still using 8 megapixel cameras from 5 years ago. I have no problems with them. Incidentally, the current average is about 18 megapixel. That sounds a lot but the reality is that it's really not that much different. 8 megapixels yields an image 3456 pixels on the long side. 18 megapixels yields an image 5184 pixels on the long side. At 200 dpi the difference in print size is 17 inches to 25 inches. It's about 50% bigger and that's all. Your printer will still only pump out at most an 11 x 19 print and dropping the 8mp print to 180dpi will give that extra couple of inches with no noticeable drop in quality. I'm not going to spend any effort on telling you what body to get. I simply don't care. I'll use any camera body that comes my way.

Now onto the main thrust. We've discussed why prime lenses are better than zooms and why cheap junk lenses are a pathway to regret. Now let's look at focal lengths. This is what the question is really asking though the above is how we get to the answer.

Using 35mm as the example (some digital SLRs have an effective 1.5 multiplication factor on 35mm equivalent lenses such that a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera might have an effective 85mm focal length on some digital SLRs), the standard lenses would be:
85mm - 100mm for portraits and some would even go as far as 135mm
24mm - 28mm for wide-angle
50mm - the "standard" lens that most cameras used to come with. It's about equivalent to the focal length of the human eye.
300mm - 400mm for sport
500mm - 1000mm for bird/aviation/wildlife photography

With the 1.5 and 1.6 multiplication factor on many lenses, this would mean wider lenses would be needed than above. Thus:
24mm would need to be 1.5 - 1.6 times wider - thus 16mm etc
50mm would need to be 35mm etc

You can probably see how that all works out. Thus, for a digital SLR with a multiplication factor, a 14mm lens would be $2,500 from Canon. The equivalent in full-frame format would be 21mm - this could be either interpreted as 20mm or 24mm at $540 or $850 respectively. Thus, getting a 20mm lens and a more expensive full-frame body could well be more economical than buying a body with a smaller sensor and a 14mm lens. Indeed, the savings would be $2,000 approx on the lens alone.

At the longer end, a body with a multiplication factor does extend a long lens at no extra cost. A 1,000mm lens becomes a 1,500mm lens at no extra cost. Long focal lengths are where the cost racks up tremendously though. Canon's 800mm lens comes in at over $13,000 - that's right - thirteen thousand dollars. That's enough to buy a brand new car or a mobile home. Who said photography is cheap? Canon does have a longer lens that's 5,200mm long and weighs about 220lbs. That lens costs over $100,000 and is made to order.

The irrevocable conclusion has to be therefore that for longer focal lengths a body with a multiplication factor is an asset but a penalty at wider focal lengths.

In defense of smaller zooms and multiplication factor cameras, this is a photograph I took in Key West last week at an hotel I was staying in. The resolution of the lens isn't bad and the various aberrations aren't bad either. It is not a top quality lens. It's a Tamron 17-35 zoom on a Canon XT body. The same scene taken with a prime lens would most likely have been a lot better. Having said that I took one body and one lens and stuck with them the whole holiday. The images are acceptable though not the best quality obtainable.

Now, it's up to you to decide where to go with this information. The same camera/lens took the following photograph of the night sky. Not a bad pairing. They could be improved on though not without spending a lot more money.

Speaking of starfields, I'm planning a trip sometime to photograph the Milky Way from one of the more remote hilltops. That should be interesting.

An about face on blog design

I reinstated the photo pages because people do actually view them. I'm not so keen on the fact that it's possible to see all blog entries since the beginning of time just by scrolling but I'm not too bothered.

I remember being bored and writing a whole load of blog entries for my anti-business blog back in June or July. I think I wrote maybe 20 articles and set them all to auto-publish about a week apart. I never looked at that blog since then aside from scanning through the articles yesterday to see if there was anything worth saving to use in my blog on actual photography. There wasn't an awful lot. I didn't read every article - just skimmed to see if it was photography content or business content. The business stuff I just deleted. I don't even remember writing most of it.

Today I went and had a fairly uninspiring walk around one of the local flea markets. It wasn't a total waste though. It was very chilly and most of the stallholders were wrapped up in blankets. None of the interesting stalls seemed to be there any more which was sad.

There was, however, a bright spot - there was a very elderly vehicle with a bright and shiney current license plate. That was interesting. It looks in better condition than is actually the case. I wonder whether somebody has tidied it cosmetically in order to sell it. I offer no apologies for using a cellphone to take the photo. It's my most unobtrusive camera.

After that I had to check my mailbox which is currently situated within spitting distance of my old workplace. Needless to say, I went and had a look at my old workplace. Again, all cellphone photos. It looks pretty forlorn now. There was a huge skip outside that was full of smashed up fixtures and fittings. This is how the interior looks now:

It's a far cry from the place I remember. While it wasn't exactly bustling and was significantly less bustly toward the end, it was a living and breathing place. It was where I had my first job in the US and where I gained my first US promotion. Had the place not closed then I would probably still be there, still doing the same things and still scraping by.

After the store closing announcement was made, I made a job application on the advice of a friend that I met in a writing circle and pretty quickly had an interview. Then shortly after the interview I got called to do a drug test and then heard that I had the job. Thus, right at the end of packing away the remainder of the stock, I zipped off to my new position. As I joked to one or two of my friends - my job ended on Friday and my new job didn't start til Monday so for 2 whole days I was an unemployed bum.

It was a far cry from the full place that it was before the closing announcement was made. Yet, if the place had not closed then most likely I would still be unhappy. I would not be working 40+ hours and earning a lot more money in a company with a real career path and with better benefits. Even geographically my new workplace is advantageous - it used to be a 12+ mile drive to work whereas now it's a 7 mile drive. I tend to put $20 of fuel in when I buy fuel. I had to get fuel 2 or 3 times a week. Now I can get to work and back for an entire week on $20. That's a huge advantage.

So, I'm happier and more prosperous. That has a knock-on effect for several things. Firstly I'm more able to get out there and take photos on a whim as I now don't have to watch the pennies so carefully. This means more trips to more places. My travel photography blog is likely to get many more entries now.

One of the places I want to go next is the Blue Ridge Parkway. I've been there many times before but this time I want to get to one of the high points and spend some time there one night just taking photos of the Milky Way and starfield illuminated landscapes. Right now though, it's simply too cold for that. I was so intrigued by this fellow's work that I want to have a go at it myself. I did exactly the same with high-speed imaging when I saw a high-speed photography website. I went out, learned how to do it and had fun.

The effect is of a .177 airgun pellet hitting a shot glass, all illuminated by a standard camera flash. I'm just happy to copy the effects.

What happened to the website?

Basically, a radical redesign. I changed the template to a more exciting template. I got rid of a lot of excess extra pages that very few people seemed to look at. These were the special area photo pages, the Twitter page and the contact page. Clearly people prefer to read the blog entries rather than head over to other pages.

Once upon a time, I had another blog too about the perils of photography as a business. I had a good cleanout tonight and deleted the entire thing and redesigned my remaining two photography blogs. Now that I've got a very full time job, I just don't have enough spare time to blog. In fact I rarely have enough time now to sit in front of my computer. It can be days before I get the time.

Originally, this blog was more of a photography portfolio but became a general photography blog instead. Then as general photography blogging took over, I used an increasing number of cell-phone photos. That pretty much made the portfolio pages somewhat redundant. It was a bit of an oxymoron having cell phone and professional images mixing in anything other than a straight blog. So, I have streamlined down to a pure blog for both of my remaining blogs.

I think this revision to my blogs is beneficial. The deleted blog had a somewhat negative tone although it was trying to help people that dreamed of being photographers to face the reality that photography is just a hobby and never will make money. Streamlining my remaining blogs gives them as much strength as spinach gave Popeye.

Yes - that was a tacky way of inserting a photo into my blog. People seem to prefer to read only articles that have photos.

Am I streamlining solely because of my new job? Not really. It was time. The blogs had been mired in the past and I'm moving forward with the future.