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

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

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

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

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

Some hurt.

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

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

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

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

Well, I did.

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

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

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

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

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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• All the Things We Use Cellphone Cameras for that Aren't Photography

...It's that portraits have more or less gone away. At least in my little corner of existence. Portraits used to be a mainstream thing—understood even by the general public as one of the basic purposes of photography, a major category of subject matter, the subject of books and exhibitions, and something that photographers big and little could sell and that normal people routinely hired photographers to do for them.  

It used to be that if you offered to do a portrait for free, it was welcomed as something of value. Now if I offer to do a portrait for free it's more often looked upon with puzzlement, if not something less welcome, as if to say, "Why would I need you for a portrait?" If you ask an acquaintance or a stranger to pose or model for you, young women (if you're a man) as often as not assume you're being lecherous and parents of children are as apt as not to view you with suspicion. (Maybe part of the difference is that I used to be a handsome athletic young man and now I'm an older man. Another part of the problem is that I'm an introvert and have difficulty putting people at ease, although I'm certainly not averse to engaging strangers in conversation.)

There might be another factor that hasn't changed since the old days but might have gotten worse—people are worried about how they'll look. It's not like this is new; people were shy and reticent about having their picture taken the whole time I've been doing it. But with today's pitilessly sharp lenses and resolution that's greater than that of the human eye, sometimes it's like a photo of yourself was calculated to make you look as bad as possible. People are leery. And have grown more so IMO. 

(I'm especially amused when gearheads online ask the question "what's the best portrait lens?" and everyone proceeds to discuss the sharpest, most corrected lenses. Hmm. They haven't looked at a sufficient amount of successful and beautiful portraits from the past. Sometimes extreme sharpness works in a portrait—Karsh, for example—but more often it's a liability. During the peak era of photographic portraiture, photographers fanatically sought out lenses and techniques that gave just the right degree and type of softness.)

This is my great-aunt Christine Love Johnston, my father's father's sister, who died (like a rock star) at age 27 in 1922. We don't know why or how; her story is now lost as far as I know. Note the balanced and well-judge unsharpness—that was by design, not because of technology limitations at the time. She would have gone to a photographer's studio and commissioned this portrait, or her mother Lucy did. The photographer would have been a portrait specialist or at least a photographer who did portraits often. It had to have been taken in the nineteen-teens or early '20s. She would have dressed nicely—note her beautiful hair—and he would have had a studio setup all worked out. Such a portrait might have been a middle-class or better convention, but it was certainly a common thing to have done then.

And it wasn't only photographs. My grandfather had his portrait painted. When I was young I sat for an artist who made a portrait of me in pastels. Now lost.

Portraits—photographic ones—were something I was good at and liked doing. At the peak of my photo business I got $675 for a sitting and $100 per print, and that was in the late 1980s and early '90s—get out your inflation calculator! Good money for a schlub. I still do a portrait from time to time, and I can't say I work hard at figuring out how to do more. But when I do occasionally try, it usually falls flat. These days, people take their own portraits. Selfies. They also see lots of pictures of themselves taken by others and all they have to do in that case is say, "I like that one! Can you send me that?" Done. Maybe it wouldn't make a print, but who needs prints? Family albums aren't made of paper any more. 

I'm not saying all this is bad. More people than ever are taking pictures of their kids and loved ones and having fun with it and often doing quite well at it, too. Look at the title of the post again...the thing I miss. The way it was is just something I miss, is all. 

Niches
I wonder what it's like for portrait "collectors." By that I mean photographers who deliberately set out to make a body of work of portraits of people who are eminent, interesting, or accomplished in some way, in general or in some specific field. That's one little particular niche of photographing. Recently, most people who do that try to create an archive of "celebrities," which has a specific circumscribed meaning in contemporary culture, meaning mainly actors, singers and athletes—"stars." There's no real definition of "stars" but we all kind of know who is and who isn't. That's only a subset of prominent people, of course. Any of the great portrait photographers you might name have a certain sort of person they sought out to photograph—rock stars, the rich, politicians, scientists. Photojournalists might accrue a body of portraits of people who do something newsworthy. One subset-within-a-subset I've always been interested is people who photograph photographers! My friend Arnold Crane was one of those, although he's not known now. So was Bill Jay, who was always self-deprecating about his own work but who created a fine lifetime project of photographer portraits. Of course you could photograph interesting people in any field and it would be interesting to somebody. Writers, physicists, artists, socialites, dancers, inventors, tech bros, race car drivers, rock climbers. Could be anything really. Heck, Robert Bergman, one of the rare true "colorists" in my opinion, created his body of work making portraits of homeless people! Time was when a great portrait photographer might seek out someone famous and request their cooperation to make a portrait of them. It usually worked because the famous person was aware of the value of cultivating their "brand" (as the common parlance puts it), and the photographer was interested in cultivating their portfolio, so a kind of symbiosis of interests applied. Are photographers still doing that? They must be, but I don't really know. 

There's no celebrity like a niche celebrity. I recall a physics professor who went to a big international conference. He described it to us by saying it was like all the very biggest celebrities in the world were gathered in one place. All the biggest names. His excitement was off the charts. Of course they were nobody you or I would have heard of, but to him they were as famous and dazzling as Taylor Swift to a tween girl.

If you were a portrait photographer and wanted to create a body of work of some group of people or other, who would they be? What kind or type of people most interests you?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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• All the Things We Use Cellphone Cameras for that Aren't Photography

Charlie Dunton wrote, yesterday: "Now that I am in the middle of my 7th decade, I've found another good use for my iPhone. When I find myself standing in front of a food vendor and his menu is too far away, or otherwise too difficult to read, I pull out my iPhone and snap a picture of the menu. I can then quickly zoom in and read it with ease."

Mike replies: I wonder what a list of "all the things we use cellphone cameras for that aren't photography" would look like. I recall years ago seeing a young woman behaving strangely. She was waving her phone high in the air and posing like a model, her free hand flicking at her hair. It turned out she had the camera on her phone reversed and was using the phone like a mirror, fixing her hair. 

I use the phone to read very small text, especially when the text is molded into same-color plastic, which I have difficulty seeing. The "magnifier" mode is accessed by clicking the on/off button three times quickly. In the past I've used it to see things I can't get my head in position to see, for instance the back panel of my computer. Lately, when I suspect that a cashier might dispute the price of a sale item, I snap a quick picture of the shelf label so the clerk doesn't have to "go check" when I tell them what the item was supposed to cost. 

Sometimes things sitting right above a pricetag of $39.98 have
morphed to $48.98 by the time they get to the cashier.

And of course I use it for copies—I sent in a water testing sample this afternoon and snapped pictures of the documents before I enclosed them in the package. I use it for notes, like ads, phone numbers, cards on community bulletin boards, etc. But I'd guess we all do that. Around here, I actually find tradesmen by noting the names on the doors and side panels of trucks, which I'll then snap a picture of. 

What else do you use your phone camera for that isn't pictorial photography? Anything else you can think of?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Mike Plews: "My bank app lets me deposit checks with my phone camera. Handy."

Dave Hsberman: "Frequent use for iPhone: Taking photos of books so I remember to see if our library has them."

Marc (partial comment): "I live on 300 acres of mostly bushland, and use my phone's camera for GPS coordinates of maintenance jobs. For example, I'll note holes for repair along the western fenceline, where the electric deer fence runs, where deer, wallaby, kangaroo and wombats have found a way to push through to avoid the zap. Also, for summer weed spraying, I'll note small outbreaks of St. John's Wort for attention (or horehound, or mullein, or thistle, or...but mostly wort)—it's as easy as just taking a photo.

"(Nothing stops wombats—they are the D9 tractor of the marsupial world. But I persist.)"

Ken Royce: "When at the market and am unsure exactly which brand or size or a product my wife requested, sending a quick text with a photo of the choices quickly resolves the matter...."

Rick Popham (partial comment): "I work in hospital maintenance. When we go into an office for painting, new carpet, etc., I take a picture of the walls so all the pictures and diplomas are put back in the right spot and any books are put back on the shelves in the right order."

Ilkka (partial comment): "The later model iPhones can see in the dark. It can be helpful if for example planning to make repairs in a dark place. I remember taking some pictures of a false ceiling to see how the wires and pipes went."

Henry White (partial comment): "Many younger travelers use their phones, in conjunction with Google Translate, to read signs in other languages with a quick conversion to English. Very helpful when visiting places like Japan and South Korea."

hugh crawford (partial comment): "Back in 1996 I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus D300L with a whopping 780,000-pixel sensor. Among other things, I used it to take pictures of expense receipts for a project at IBM that I was a freelance contractor on. It took about a week for them to figure out how to deal with them. I may have been the first person to submit digital photos of receipts at IBM. It hadn’t really occurred to me until now."

Albert Smith: "Parking space recall: in large lots or multi story garages, you can avoid an entire episode of Seinfeld by snapping a photo of Orange 43. Unless you like carrying a heavy air conditioner for 23 minutes. 😉 "

Bob Keefer does the same thing with trail photos, to help him find the way home again. —Ed.

Kodachromeguy (partial comment): "I use the phone camera to document parts of the house before going to the lumber yard or building store. It helps me explain a repair or project."

Sean (partial comment): "I travel internationally. Instead of carrying my passport, which I can safely leave in a hotel safe, I take shots of the current visa and other pertinent pages."