About a week ago, I was invited to give a talk at a symposium on the theme of “Future Classics” by an local arts group. I thought about the subject a bit and came up with a Powerpoint presentation, which I presented at the symposium this morning at the Huashan Arts Village, along with three other participants. The seats were full and I was a little nervous, a situation that wasn’t helped by the fact that I had to keep turning back and forth between the audience and the big projected screen to try and stay on track. I’m afraid I repeated myself a bit too often as I stuttered and mumbled my way through the thing, but hopefully I got at least some of my observations across. After the presentations audience members asked some questions. Someone asked me what subjects are best in black and white and which are suitable for color. I answered that it’s not the subjects that are black and white or color, it’s your mood and thoughts that dictate such things.There were some people from Treasure Hill there, and it was interesting to hear their views on the whole thing, especially as it’s going to open once again to the public on October 2. After the event was over, some of us, including Andrew, with whom I played on stage at Hohaiyan a few years ago, and the organizers and other artists in several field went to Alleycats for pizza and caprese. It was good to meet so many people involved in the arts scene here; it feels more vibrant than before, more inclusive, but that could just be the pizza talking. After lunch I walked around the various design showcases, some of which were quite ingenious, and noted all of the vintage camera/character hat combos that my friend Persimmonous likes to point out. Micro 4/3 and NEX cameras were out in force as well.

What Taipei do you see? What city will we remember? What will we regret losing? What is worth preserving, and how should this be done? We cannot dictate such things; we can only do what we think is worth preserving; the actual preservation will be up to subsequent generations. People have to want it; the government lacks the capacity to decide, it only has the authority to enforce the people’s decisions.

The city is huge and dense in scale and the number of connections flashing through the infinite mix of ingredients. The subtleties were hard to capture with the big, expensive, slow cameras of the past, but today there is no such excuse. Why is it that people who live here are so blind to the world around them that, even though they have a marvelous camera with them 24 hours a day, they cannot find a single interesting thing to photograph? I can’t speak for them, only myself; I preserve small things that are large in my thoughts. Small, solid things that have large abstract significance. Taipei is a dense, complicated maze where personal lives spill out from private spaces through the “veranda culture” and onto the streets for all to ignore. But it’s still there for those who choose to look. Photography isn’t just what you see, it’s how you see. In a way, it’s you.

So why are cameras so popular these days? Not just because they allow the sharing of visions, the creation of multiple, exponential versions of our world to explore; they also allow us to see the world through the eyes of others. You can’t see everything, but you can see a lot of things, more than you ever would have before, no matter how encompassing your vision may be. No matter how empathic you may be, you cannot see everything the way someone else does.

Do you only notice buildings when they are being torn down, or only after they’re gone? We have evolved to notice new things, different things, to give them a level of appreciation we do not give things with which we are familiar. The familiar is the safe, things that have proven themselves not dangerous through the fact of not having been dangerous in the past. The new and the shiny get the attention of our animal brains in order to assess whether they are a threat and what changes their appearance may have in store for us and our lives. Even the old, when resurfacing from forgetfulness, becomes new and interesting again.

And yet some old things persist in grabbing our attention each time we see them, often more and more as the years go by. Perhaps we see them with the same comfortable feeling the familiar caves of our ancestors imparted. But it is also possible that these things, these “classics” arouse inside of us some feeling of a higher purpose, reflecting the way we see ourselves. They flatter us into thinking we are more than we seem, in the way that they resist time and forgetfulness, as we ourselves aspire to do.

So what about a particular photograph calls to us through the years? It may just be a simple vanished scene, or it may also be the capture of a vanished moment or emotion from another world, something small and meaningful then, but exponentially more so now. How it will fare the test of time is difficult to judge. But one thing photography tells is how others see the world. People see different things. Some people see the future, some the past. Some see emotions, some see patterns. Only through photography can we obtain a view deeper than our own, perhaps realizing not only what we are missing, but what we have missed in the past, and what we will miss in the future. Photography encompasses all of these, and lets us see beyond the superficial, to see what we truly value, to see ourselves not only as we are, but as we aspire to be.

These things aren’t created by photography; it does show us, however, that they exist. Much of photography is about drawing attention to things that are ordinarily invisible, moments that go unnoticed, details that escape us. Photography, one of the few time machines available to us, is also a useful tool in allowing us to gauge the changing context of such things, fixing moments in time that call attention to massive changes, be they in architecture or social trends or just the way people deal with each other, that escaped our notice because they happened too gradually. Larger trends, the big picture, so to speak, appears through the details. The city itself becomes knowable, even familiar, in the space of a moment in a small corner.

All of this requires a lens through which to see. And in seeing this, you not only see the city, you see its value, or at least the photographer’s evaluation of its value, in the context he or she provides. In that way, you also see the photographer.

People can be very possessive of their right and ability to define themselves, to be the sole arbiter of the world’s official view of them as a person, a view more desperately clung to the more insecure that person is and one more in danger of violation since the advent of ubiquitous social networking on the Internet.

Many people are confident enough in their appearance and the contexts of their lives to withstand such a challenge, but many more may not be so willing to see their image. We go through our lives not seeing ourselves as we are. Aside from the occasional mirror, we don’t even feature in our own world view; out of sight is out of mind, and our own appearance, once set in the morning before we leave the house, is simply not on the radar for many people. This isn’t a concern for some, but others may be, consciously or subconsciously, aware that they aren’t quite the person they want to be seen as, even perhaps obsessing over this gap in reality. The self they see in their minds is different from the self that others see, and since they don’t see themselves, the mind-self, the “residual self image” that Morpheus mentions in The Matrix where everyone looks cooler in their minds than in reality, takes precedence. For some people, this is the only way they get through the day, through their lives.

Even the most insecure of people cannot present the perfect outward appearance they seek to project all the time, however, so when you or I come by with a camera and just, without any warning, redefine them by our own criteria, seemingly merely by their happenstance appearance at the time, setting it in stone with concrete photographic evidence, it could seem like we did infringe upon something deeply held and personal. Suddenly, their real appearance bursts into reality in a way no accidentally caught glimpse in a reflective surface could, for this is a mirror that everyone is looking at. A video image may not show the sordid details, lost in a blur of movement, but an image won’t fail in this respect. And unlike a video, an image won’t end, letting us go back to our carefully modeled perceptions.

I don’t write here very often these days, obviously. Most of my scattered thoughts can be communicated through Twitter and Facebook, and though I don’t keep up with the site’s statistics, I suspect that viewership has largely disappeared as anything over 140 characters is now officially “long-winded.” But I still like to write, so although I feel that the whole blogging thing has run its course, those of us who began before everyone had a blog will most likely continue after it has become obsolete. Hard to believe I’ve been doing it for almost a decade.

It is another brilliant Monday following a rainy weekend. I’ve been trying to get a photobook project together recently, just a quick and dirty trial run for something more serious later on. I’ve also been getting feedback from some friends on my army book, which, after a bit more revision based on their feedback, should be ready to shop around. I rehearsed with Noname Yu and his band the other night, as he wanted some brass backing for some of his songs. I’m not sure how that’s working. I also watched the movie again for the first time since I finished editing it in 2008. I’d meant to just take a quick look and ended up watching the whole thing.

Today during my lunch break I was wandering around the site of the old Beef Noodle Street near Xining Road. As I ruminated on the sad state of affairs there, with only a couple of tarpon-festooned stalls hidden in the deep shadows under the thick banyan trees, I came across a team of workers emptying an old Japanese-era house of the several tons of detritus that had filled it over the decades. Old dishes, clothing, pillows, furniture, all being carted out into the street. I looked down at a book on history with a cover that might once have been blue, and wondered who had owned it, who’d read it, who’d bought it at a bookstore and carried it home to put on their bookshelf. I thought of the books in my apartment; perhaps someday the book of Magnum photos I got the other day at Eslite will end up in a trashheap somewhere as well.

Yes, I’ve been a bit depressed lately. No doubt the weather, the changing of the seasons, has something to do with it. Relationship troubles as well, on which I won’t go into further detail here. I feel like I need a break, to go somewhere to recover, perhaps another sea voyage. I read recently of a ship, the Cosco Star, that plies the route from Keelung to Xiamen. It’s been a while since I explored a new place on my own.

But it will have to wait a bit longer; I’ve got too much going on at the moment.

I was sitting at the cafe today, trying to work on my book, when an elderly couple sat down next to me. I’d heard their loud conversation as they came up the stairs, but most of the old people there speak loudly.

Once they sat down, the woman began to wear the man down with a long, withering nagging session. It wasn’t just me, either; I’d bet most of the people in the room were worn down by it after just a short time. “You’ve got high blood sugar, high cholesterol,” she told him. “And you think you can work? You could die at any time, and then what?” Not a lot of it made sense as I didn’t know the background to the conversation, but the nagging, condescending tone of the woman grated. How could this man have put up with this for so many years? I wondered. Perhaps he just didn’t want to upset her and never told her the secrets in his heart, or perhaps he had just revealed them to her, expecting, hoping against hope, that maybe this time she would reveal some amount of compassion and sympathy for his plight. Either way, he was wrong. Did she know what she was doing to him, what she’d been doing all those years? But he could leave at any time, right? Yet for some reason it had become a choice between not being able to live without her and barely living with her.

I couldn’t keep working. I had to leave, lest the heaping pile of NO YOU CAN’T smother me as well as the rest of the room. It was a gray day outside, but I needed the fresh air.

The book is coming along fairly well, by the way; I’m over 80% done with this revision, and the word count is comfortably over 90,000. The last sections need more work than the earlier parts, however, so it’s taking more time and effort.

I walked over to the camera street instead of taking the MRT to my job in the afternoon like I usually do, trying to get the old woman’s soul-destroying tune out of my head. I was looking at prices of Leica M adapters for my GF1, but I was surprised to find a lens I’d been hankering after for months, just arrived today.

I didn’t buy it. Maybe the old woman was right. What a frightening thought.

Over the past few months, I’ve become dissatisfied with the place photography occupies in my life. For some people, uploading their pictures to Flickr and getting a few “Nice capture!”-like comments has become a kind of daily fix. But the whole exercise feels increasingly Sisyphean these days; what is it all for? Galleries? Books? The latter brings to mind those lonely souls I met in Shinjuku, sitting in small rented rooms, surrounded by expensive prints, waiting for someone to come in and sign the little book by the door. As for books, it’s easy enough to print up something on blurb.com, but what then? What does it mean when there are tens of thousands of such books coming out every month? Granted, I know nothing of marketing or promotion; both are anathemas to me. I don’t want to be A Professional Photographer per se, as that seems to imply wearing fugly vests, fussing around with lights and “shoots”, worrying about clients and what they think and generally ruining any enjoyment I get from making my own pictures because I would be too busy taking pictures for other people all the time.

But coming back to Flickr: if I were to take the gallery/book/whatever route, would that make Flickr extraneous? I’ve always found the usefulness of hard-to-navigate flash-based websites like johndoeimages.com or sallysomeonephotography.net questionable at best; what semblance of professionalism they might once have had has been negated by their ubiquity, and the flickr community has been like a built-in audience. However, over the past couple of years, The Great Unwashed Masses with their Great Unwashed Photographs of their Great Unwashed Spawn and/or Great Perhaps-washed Pets have taken over (he said snobbily as he took a sip of Earl Grey tea, his pinky waving in the air), and the quality in general has suffered since Yahoo acquired the site. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in the “Explore” pages, where the truly inspiring shots of yore have been eschewed for the most part in favor of the usual out-of-focus-flower-held-by-child-at-sunset shots that Italian people seem to enjoy so much.

These developments as well as my own have changed the dynamic I’ve felt with the site; it no longer gives me as much of what I want as it used to. Friends of mine have told me, even begged me to start publishing photography books, while warning me that if I put the shots up on flickr, they’d be “exposed” and useless for further publication. But what is the alternative? I honestly don’t know. It is a ridiculous situation, all of this thinking and whining about a subject I don’t particularly enjoy thinking and whining about. Photography should be something one simply enjoys, like movies or food or travel, not something to be dissected and endlessly debated on Internet forums. And yet, here we are.

I got off work about the same time as Jon Stewart, and we were walking out of the building at night (obviously, this is a dream). We looked at the empty lot next door, and I mentioned that I really missed the White House, which was apparently a joke as a building strongly resembling it, which had indeed been used as a stand-in for it on TV, had stood there until recently. He said he didn’t feel like going home and wanted to go take in a game, and would I like to go, so I said sure. I followed him up bounding easily up several flights of stairs (dream) to emerge into the upper seats of a stadium, to find everyone in the stands absorbed in almost every game you can imagine, games like UNO, Chinese checkers and Battleship. I knew then something was fishy, that I must be being filmed; this was obviously something Jon had cooked up for my benefit. I could tell that everyone, though apparently concentrating on the various games, was waiting for my reaction. So I looked around, put a look of realization on my face and said loudly so that some hidden microphone could pick it up, “Wait a minute, I don’t see any rock-paper-scissors!”

This was apparently a very funny thing to have said (dream). Jon came over with the camera, and we were joined by a very famous, very blond actress resembling the blonde cylon on BSG (now there’s a sentence that would have confused the hell out of me in 1980), who was wearing a glittery golden dress and, surprisingly quickly, me, as she wrapped herself around me and stage-whispered something suggestive in my ear. I thought to myself, I really should tell Jon I prefer someone more like Ice Cube or some other non-female person, but it would be a big deal and cause a scandal. Then I began to wonder how my subconscious had chosen all of this, and I started to wake up, wondering, in that strange state when dreams are fading but logic and reality has yet to take hold, why the hell I wasn’t a famous person trading quips with Stewart and writing award-winning comedies.

Of course, then I really woke up, and for some reason I felt like relating this strange dream to you, as you apparently have nothing better to do right now either, and it was a really good and bizarre dream, with nothing particularly bad happening, unless you count the actress thing.

But my Actual Life (c) isn’t bad, really; in a few minutes I’m setting off for one of the New Hampshire Bushman’s get-togethers at the beach, and though it’s cloudy outside, it might be an interesting time. Noname called up last week and asked me to play a couple of gigs with the group in the Xinyi District over the next couple of weeks. And I really should take a fall excursion somewhere before it gets too cold. I’m thinking Japan again, as it would be nice to see what it’s like there when I’m not freezing my ass off, but I’m not sure if another visit to Tokyo is the best idea. Perhaps somewhere else. If I just played it by ear, I’d probably end up taking the Trans-Siberian and end up in Istanbul, which wouldn’t be too practical as I have to be back at work in a week or so. But one can dream.

I met an old college friend, Xiao Bing, for a lunch of beef noodles in an alley off Chongqing South Road earlier today. The cold temperatures of the last week had relented to the sunshine, and Taipei seemed somehow cleaner for it. Fewer people out on the streets, walking more quickly because of the cold, hands in pockets less likely to discard trash, perhaps.

Xiao Bing works for the post office and has for the past 17 years or so. He told me that they had used stick-on posters that read “Taiwan Post” on their little green trucks when the DPP changed the name from Chunghua Post, as they knew it would probably be changed back soon. I told him that I had finally sold the motorcycle I bought from him so many years ago, and he didn’t believe that it was still working after all this time. The motorcycle, like our friendship, is about 20 years old, and I remember when he got it, brand-new. He was too short to ride it properly and sold it to me. “Xiao Bing” means “Little Soldier” -the nickname resulting from the fact that his gun was nearly as tall as he was when he did his army service. His son, in junior high school, is already taller than he is.

I’m feeling somewhat in between things these days; I’ve come down off the movie thing, I think, but I haven’t quite set things up for the next stage, whatever it turns out to be. I’ve got some new trappings, a new camera, possibly a new computer around the corner, but nothing seems set. As for what’s next: Working more on photography, rewriting my book, more video projects (much smaller, of course)…beyond that it’s hard to say. It might be simply because this is the strange time in between Christmas and the Chinese New Year holidays, the transitory nature of which I’ve only managed to exascerbate by planning two long vacations on either end. After I return, perhaps I’ll feel more ready to start into this new year and all that it holds.

I found David, Jez and Dana in the workshop on the 3rd floor of the Taipei Artists Village on Sunday afternoon, surrounded by some empty stools and a grand piano. Thumper showed up later, but Conor and Slim were out of the country, and Sandman couldn’t make it until later, so it was just us. I had no idea how a music workshop was supposed to work, and I don’t think many people there did either. So we just jammed on some tunes regardless of who was wandering by, and if anyone had any questions we would try to engage them. One family with small children enjoyed playing Thumper’s instruments for one song, and everyone seemed facinated by the washtub bass, which I’d placed on a piece of styrofoam so that it would make some sound on the carpet.

We took a break at one point, as nobody seemed to be coming in, and I started noodling around on the piano. A few minutes later I looked up to see about 30 people seated on the stools, all watching me. Oh shit, I thought; they think I’m actually doing something. I jumped up and went to get David back so we could play something that roughly corresponded to the literature about us spread out on the table by the door.

Eventually we had to stop for real, and took all of our stuff downstairs. I had a pizza at the cafe and waited for the shows to start. The first act was a percussion/digeridoo combo thing, mostly atmospheric music. Then Jez and Dana did a show. Sandman showed up, along with Jojo and Sandy Wee, and we took the stage. It was strange playing without Slim and Conor; the gaps they left were obvious, even though Jez and Dana did a great job helping fill them. It went well, but I was tired afterwards and went straight to bed after getting home afterwards.

I haven’t quite gotten back into the swing of things since I got back from Japan. I went to work this afternoon after over two weeks of time off, and had to resort to coffee to keep awake, though badminton last night perked me up somewhat. Work again tomorrow, and then four days off for the new year’s break. The days have been cloudy and full of rain, the kind of weather that makes staying inside all day an attractive prospect. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and though I’ve gotten some invitations, I’m not sure if I’ll be doing anything special. I have no clue about 2009. I knew that 2008 would see a lot of new things: The elections of Ma Ying-jeou and Barack Obama, the Olympics in Beijing, finishing (my part in) the film, two trips to Tokyo and Osaka. I won some photography contests and said goodbye to my trusty motorcycle this year. But 2009 is just a blank to me.

A while ago I wrote about how the Internet could eventually be combined with our physical reality in some fashion, overlaid so that our surroundings would basically gain all of the features of the Internet, including searchability and physical context-related information. At that point, a few mobile devices had GPS, but now that the new iPhone 3G is out and apparently selling like hotcakes, there are a slew of applications being made available these days that take advantage of the phone’s GPS to bring the virtual world of the Internet closer to our physical world. Basically, these devices know where you are (yes, I know it’s a scary thought, but I wonder if people might not be as frightened of this as it becomes more common), so information about everything around you is available through the device, a real-world Wikipedia: That interesting building across the street was built in 1903 and was the scene of a political assassination. There’s a tea house up this alley, but people say the Oolong is bit dodgy. Some got a really good picture of this empty house. There’s a squall moving in, we’d better get inside. That kind of thing.

Another aspect of this is that your phone not only knows about the physical world around you and your place in it, it will, through such (still rather sub-par) programs as Fire Eagle, Buddy Beacon, MyLoki, Britekite and the like, know where other people are, where they’ve been, even where they’re headed. This is a cool application, but I’m pretty sure I would lose a few friends when they see how I turn off my location beacon or hop on a bus as soon as they approach. Another strike against this will be not being able to send a text message I often send to people I’ve got appointments saying, “I’m almost there, just a few minutes!” when they can plainly see I’m still at home, in the bathtub, and I haven’t even scrubbed behind my ears.

Those little pixelated badges I’ve seen in the corners of a few websites recently confused me for a while. It turns out that they’re scannable QR codes that point your mobile device to a certain place on the Internet. Apparently they’re often used in Japan, and you can even make a badge to wear with such codes on it. If this kind of technology takes off, and it seems that businesses are designing these things into graphics, it will be another way the physical world is connected to the virtual.

Most of this interaction, so far, has been one-way, of the physical world being described and adjusted to by the virtual, but with the advent of 3D scanners, touch screens, interactive displays and even shape-shifting buildings, I wonder when and if the balance will tilt the other way, making the physical world “programmable” to a certain extent.

Every square foot of this planet has a history, whether people figure into it or not. Choose any street corner in your city and try to imagine all of the things that happened to all of the people standing in that very spot over the years. Now that we’re in a position to actually record these things and make them known, sooner or later a filter will be needed to deal with all of the massive amount of information that piles up. A good example of this is Panoramio on Google Earth: Eventually maps will be so covered in blue dots that you won’t be able to see the actual places unless you turn them off. Who will become the arbiter of such information? Who will decide what gets seen and what doesn’t? Now that’s the scary part, especially given the frightening, ongoing crackdown on personal photography in places like the US and UK, even as more and more CCTV cameras are put in place for the “official” version of the world. Give it 20 years, and the virtual world people have come to rely on overlaid onto and even able to change the physical world will be completely manipulable by those in control of the resources to do it. When that point comes, which reality will you believe?

You’ve probably been there: you’ve stumbled across a new Flickr user. Maybe they added you as a contact, maybe you found their page from a link. You look at their snapshots and think: hmm…more mundane, boring shots. Not terrible, just very…ordinary. Then you notice that underneath each mediocre image are hundreds of comments, favorites and notes. They also have pages of glowing testimonials.

How does this happen? These people aren’t celebrities of any sort, but somehow thousands of people are fascinated by their pictures of the seaside, their cat and various flowers.

In all fairness, there are no doubt people out there who see my photography in a similar fashion (and some have been nice enough to tell me so in the comments section below). However, I’m not the only one to have noticed a distinct decline of quality photography in Flickr’s Explore feature. A couple of years ago it was a treasure trove of beautiful, meaningful, powerful shots. These days, it’s full of pets, kids and women. It was inevitable, though, when you consider the huge influx of people from places like Yahoo! after they purchased the site. I’ve come to the conclusion, unlike some others, that “success” on Flickr is actually becoming antithetical to the goal of achieving good photography.

Speaking of the pursuit of street photography, I recently re-read Chris Weeks’ 2006 downloadable book Street Photography for the Purist. It starts out in an interesting fashion, with forwards by photographers describing their view on the subject followed by examples of their work. Then comes Weeks’ actual writing in what seems like a stream-of-consciousness-fueled rant. Basically, it boils down to this:

Chris Weeks really doesn’t give a fuck what you think, because you don’t know. You. just. don’t. If you don’t use a non-digital rangefinder, preferably a Leica, with black-and-white film, just STFU. Because you don’t know, you neophyte. You probably don’t know what depth of field is. But Chris Weeks doesn’t care what you say or do or what you got on your SAT. He really, really doesn’t give a fuck.

The advice is conveyed in short sentences and phrases that are paragraphs unto themselves, so that a relatively small amount of words spans an entire book. Weeks’ photography is also featured, and I have to say, no matter how basic a writer the man is, he does take some nice shots. But I didn’t learn as much from the book as I had hoped to. Basically, I learned that I need to stop being hesitant to take people’s pictures.

It did, however, peak my interest in just what it’s like to use a rangefinder. I went down to the Leica store near the train station the other night and got to play around with some of their models, both film and digital rangefinders. The cameras seemed very large and blocky in my hands, and the focusing block in the middle of the tiny viewfinder seemed distracting and difficult to work, though I imagine eventually I’d get used to it. You have to hold the camera just so that your hand doesn’t block the view, and bring together the two tiny shadow images in the center of the frame at the point you want to focus, and then recompose the shot. With fast glass and a knowledge of lens dynamics you should be able to shoot from the hip, of course. The build, naturally, was as solid as the brand’s reputation.

I dug out an old Nikon FG body that I have from the old days, and was surprised at how good it felt in my hands. I’ve really missed the solidity, the texture and feel of the traditional cameras I used before the advent of digital forms. Even my 20D feels nothing like the old Nikon, which is also much better looking. That said, while the digital Leica looks retro, it still seemed unwieldy and oddly proportioned to me.

I took a few shots inside as well as on the street outside the store. The M8 is a nice camera, I suppose, if you can get the hang of it. There’s a great deal of debate on whether it’s a “real” Leica or not, but even the previously anti-digital Chris Weeks likes it, I found after Googling his opinion of Leica’s only digital M. At a price of over NT$160,000 for the camera and even more for each lens, there’s simply no way I could afford a single lens, much less the camera itself. I could swing a much-used Epson RD1, but a lens to go with it would still be out of reach. I could probably pick up a used film version for the cost of a couple of Canon 5Ds. But from my limited experience using the rangefinders, I simply can’t justify going into massive debt for the privilege of using a camera that I don’t even know I’ll end up getting used to, much less liking. It’s a great leap of faith. Yeah, I know all of the Great Masters of Yore used Leica rangefinders, but I have a hunch that if you gave a young Henri Cartier-Bresson a Canon point-and-shoot he’d still manage to come up with some pretty nice work. To me, Leicas are like Moleskine notebooks; great people did great things with them in the past, and they are fine tools for the job, but I don’t think not having them is a barrier to going said great things. If I had money to burn, sure, I’d buy one and see if I could get the hang of it. But I don’t.

I would like to investigate these aspects of street photography, though. Despite all of the cursing and insistence that he doesn’t care what I think because I just don’t know, man, and honestly I can flame him all I want because he’ll just delete my comments, etc.,Weeks’ book had a few interesting observations on the subject that aroused even more of an interest in the practice than I’d had before.

But getting back to the cameras themselves, DP Review has just added a new category to their camera review stats: pixel density, i.e. the number of pixels divided by the space they occupy. In other words, the higher pixel density you have, the greater chances that that point-and-shoot you bought with the huge yellow sticker trumpeting the fact that it has 12 MEGAPIXELS! is actually going to shoot crap pictures, especially in low light situations.

Will it work? I doubt it. In all honesty, it seems that consumers these days are so enamored of the megapixel myth that they will justify anything in order to keep believing it. Our standards of what constitutes good image quality have fallen over the past few years in deference to features like Face/Smile Recognition and My Sepia Vacation Mode. Photographers scour eBay in search of old Fuji F30s made before the company (and all the others) started cramming so many megapixels onto the tiny sensors that the IQ of today’s models is far inferior. Camera review sites mention IQ less and less, as if it’s an afterthought that photographers can do without.

And maybe they’re right, in a way. After all, what does saying “I’m a photographer” mean these days, when everyone is a photographer? It’s like saying “I wear shoes.” Perhaps that explains the need for a camera like the M8. It’s not just any shoe.

In any case, I hope to make more progress in my photographic endeavors, Leica-equipped or not. Luckily for me there are still some affordable cameras with decent image quality out there.