Since this is a whole little series inspired by LuLa's (in my opinion) dismal failure to deliver anything on their "Get Back To The Print" series, I thought I'd put a table of contents here, to make it a little easier for the occasional visitor to make sense of it. This is just a series of links to the previous 5 posts, in the order they were posted.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Back to the Print, But Why?
The last few pieces covered some methods I use for handling hard-copy photographs, but I haven't really talked about the why. Why do I do these things? You might well think the question is dumb, but that's probably because you have your own answer, so it seems obvious. This is my answer.
There are really two separate things here that have pushed me down this specific path.
The first is the digital revolution. When I was a kid, the standard family photography film roll in the USA had a Christmas tree on each end, and covered one year. This was a common joke, at any rate, and rooted in reality. In my family, we shot a bit more than that. Nonetheless a few hundred exposures a year was a pretty high count for even a photographically inclined family. These days I shoot several thousand frames a year, and many people shoot a lot more. Even if you're not particularly good, you're likely to wind up with dozens of photographs of your kids, your family, your life, that are worth printing. These are the pictures that are good enough to get through every stage of culling, good enough to commit to that final endpoint: the print, the hard-copy.
So I have, simply by the vagaries of statistics, more pictures flowing out of this pipeline than did, say, my father.
The second factor is my movement toward project based photography projects. I no longer see particular value in chasing the single iconic picture, which I will then print out large, frame, and stick on my wall like a stuffed tiger's head. This is simply not something that resonates with me. It makes no sense. Therefore my "Art" such as it is consists of making groups of pictures.
These two factors result in my having quite a few pictures that I want to make a part of my life. Some of them need to enter my life in a group, not as a set of one-by-one pictures.
By entering my life, I mean being integrated into my life. I could use digital picture frames, I suppose, but that's a lot of money and probably hackers get into them and replace my pictures with porn. Probably not even good porn. I dunno. Digital picture frames also typically operate in a slideshow mode to show more pictures, and that's absolutely unacceptable to me. I am not going to stand around and wait for the picture I want to look at. I am not going to accept the picture I want to look at sliding away after the designated interval. Nope. This is a personal problem, but it's my house so I get to decide.
The computers are in designated areas, or small, or in-use, so that's out as a mode of complete integration with my life. Phones are too small.
Anyways, digital screens are awful. I very much need not to be able to check my email on my picture viewing system.
The prints on my wall are present, always. They don't distract me like a tablet, phone, computer. I can mass 20 or 30 prints (remember, I have a lot of pictures) for a few dollars a print using my cheapskate DIY mounting methods. The books are also present, portable, and single-purpose. I can take a book to bed and simply look at pictures without wandering off to facebook or email. A book doesn't need to be charged. It's tactile and beautiful in its own right. It simply suits me better, in so many ways. And, again, it provides a way to collect a number of prints, and to group them up sensibly.
These things allow me to integrate my pictures into my life, seamlessly, easily, inexpensively, beautifully, and without unnecessary distraction.
That's my answer.
And by the way, screw those guys at LuLa. The latest installment of their version of Get Back To The Print is literally Kevin Raber, Jeff Schewe, and an Epson rep standing around an Epson printer pointing out various random features of the thing and extolling its virtues. It is explicitly not a review, and not a tutorial. To be exact, it is literally an ad for the Epson P800, which you have to be a LuLa subscriber to watch. That's not just lame, it's utterly insulting. The sheer hubris of these men, their utter disdain for their subscribers, is staggering.
There are really two separate things here that have pushed me down this specific path.
The first is the digital revolution. When I was a kid, the standard family photography film roll in the USA had a Christmas tree on each end, and covered one year. This was a common joke, at any rate, and rooted in reality. In my family, we shot a bit more than that. Nonetheless a few hundred exposures a year was a pretty high count for even a photographically inclined family. These days I shoot several thousand frames a year, and many people shoot a lot more. Even if you're not particularly good, you're likely to wind up with dozens of photographs of your kids, your family, your life, that are worth printing. These are the pictures that are good enough to get through every stage of culling, good enough to commit to that final endpoint: the print, the hard-copy.
So I have, simply by the vagaries of statistics, more pictures flowing out of this pipeline than did, say, my father.
The second factor is my movement toward project based photography projects. I no longer see particular value in chasing the single iconic picture, which I will then print out large, frame, and stick on my wall like a stuffed tiger's head. This is simply not something that resonates with me. It makes no sense. Therefore my "Art" such as it is consists of making groups of pictures.
These two factors result in my having quite a few pictures that I want to make a part of my life. Some of them need to enter my life in a group, not as a set of one-by-one pictures.
By entering my life, I mean being integrated into my life. I could use digital picture frames, I suppose, but that's a lot of money and probably hackers get into them and replace my pictures with porn. Probably not even good porn. I dunno. Digital picture frames also typically operate in a slideshow mode to show more pictures, and that's absolutely unacceptable to me. I am not going to stand around and wait for the picture I want to look at. I am not going to accept the picture I want to look at sliding away after the designated interval. Nope. This is a personal problem, but it's my house so I get to decide.
The computers are in designated areas, or small, or in-use, so that's out as a mode of complete integration with my life. Phones are too small.
Anyways, digital screens are awful. I very much need not to be able to check my email on my picture viewing system.
The prints on my wall are present, always. They don't distract me like a tablet, phone, computer. I can mass 20 or 30 prints (remember, I have a lot of pictures) for a few dollars a print using my cheapskate DIY mounting methods. The books are also present, portable, and single-purpose. I can take a book to bed and simply look at pictures without wandering off to facebook or email. A book doesn't need to be charged. It's tactile and beautiful in its own right. It simply suits me better, in so many ways. And, again, it provides a way to collect a number of prints, and to group them up sensibly.
These things allow me to integrate my pictures into my life, seamlessly, easily, inexpensively, beautifully, and without unnecessary distraction.
That's my answer.
And by the way, screw those guys at LuLa. The latest installment of their version of Get Back To The Print is literally Kevin Raber, Jeff Schewe, and an Epson rep standing around an Epson printer pointing out various random features of the thing and extolling its virtues. It is explicitly not a review, and not a tutorial. To be exact, it is literally an ad for the Epson P800, which you have to be a LuLa subscriber to watch. That's not just lame, it's utterly insulting. The sheer hubris of these men, their utter disdain for their subscribers, is staggering.
Back to the Print, PoD Books
Onwards to print-on-demand books.
This post will have no illustrations, you can find those out there on the webernet by the trainload. These things look like books, you make them with more or less intuitive software tools, and you press print. A while later a box turns up with books in it. I own several, but they're either too boring or too intimate to share.
These things have their own satisfaction, less in the making but more in the holding. I may be more likely to pull my own book from the shelf, everyone else is more likely to pull the Blurb book. They look and feel more like ordinary books, and are much more approachable. The page weight, while heavy, is within normal range rather than the massive chunky stuff I use.
Overall I have been pleased with the results I've gotten from blurb. At the cheaper end, there's a little show-through from back to front which can be a good thing or a bad thing, but knowing about it seems to me important. The blacks (and my photographs often have huge areas of black and near black) sometimes show a very slight mechanical pattern from, I suppose, inkjet printing. The print quality, while excellent, occasionally falls visibly short of the basic machine print. Not that I care, much, but again something worth mentioning.
Book design tools for print-on-demand books seem to be universally awful, I've test driven several. Blurb's deprecated program (booksmart?) was better on the design front. It had a library of decorative elements and so on, the newer one lacks these and has reverted to the industry standard "you can drag and drop photos one by one, and shove in rectangles of text". Blurb's text management is atrocious, by text editing standards, but I think fairly good in terms of PoD "book design" tools.
What they are good for, as Mike "Chiz" Holmes mentioned somewhere in my hearing a while ago, is in sequencing photos. Being able to slosh photos around, even clumsily, on a set of virtual "pages", is tremendously helpful. For making a basic sequence of photos bound into a basic codex, PoD is absolutely adequate.
For my next trick I am going to start experimenting with modifying these things. I have some slight experience popping paperback/perfect-bound text blocks into hand built hard cases. Daniel Milnor says, and he is right, that blurb books are an obvious starting point for cutting things up, for painting and writing on, for remixing, rebuilding, remaking. Getting a bunch of prints onto a decent "book weight" paper is powerful. You can treat it as a book. You can cut it up into a pile of lightweight prints. And anything in between. Go over to Daniel's site at Shifter Media to get some ideas.
I'm kind of excited to see where it goes.
This post will have no illustrations, you can find those out there on the webernet by the trainload. These things look like books, you make them with more or less intuitive software tools, and you press print. A while later a box turns up with books in it. I own several, but they're either too boring or too intimate to share.
These things have their own satisfaction, less in the making but more in the holding. I may be more likely to pull my own book from the shelf, everyone else is more likely to pull the Blurb book. They look and feel more like ordinary books, and are much more approachable. The page weight, while heavy, is within normal range rather than the massive chunky stuff I use.
Overall I have been pleased with the results I've gotten from blurb. At the cheaper end, there's a little show-through from back to front which can be a good thing or a bad thing, but knowing about it seems to me important. The blacks (and my photographs often have huge areas of black and near black) sometimes show a very slight mechanical pattern from, I suppose, inkjet printing. The print quality, while excellent, occasionally falls visibly short of the basic machine print. Not that I care, much, but again something worth mentioning.
Book design tools for print-on-demand books seem to be universally awful, I've test driven several. Blurb's deprecated program (booksmart?) was better on the design front. It had a library of decorative elements and so on, the newer one lacks these and has reverted to the industry standard "you can drag and drop photos one by one, and shove in rectangles of text". Blurb's text management is atrocious, by text editing standards, but I think fairly good in terms of PoD "book design" tools.
What they are good for, as Mike "Chiz" Holmes mentioned somewhere in my hearing a while ago, is in sequencing photos. Being able to slosh photos around, even clumsily, on a set of virtual "pages", is tremendously helpful. For making a basic sequence of photos bound into a basic codex, PoD is absolutely adequate.
For my next trick I am going to start experimenting with modifying these things. I have some slight experience popping paperback/perfect-bound text blocks into hand built hard cases. Daniel Milnor says, and he is right, that blurb books are an obvious starting point for cutting things up, for painting and writing on, for remixing, rebuilding, remaking. Getting a bunch of prints onto a decent "book weight" paper is powerful. You can treat it as a book. You can cut it up into a pile of lightweight prints. And anything in between. Go over to Daniel's site at Shifter Media to get some ideas.
I'm kind of excited to see where it goes.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Back to the Print, Hand-Made Books
Apart from attaching my pictures to my walls, I make books containing my pictures. These books take, in the broadest strokes, two forms. I hand-build books and book-like objects containing physical prints. I design and publish books using Print on Demand services (blurb.com is what I use, but there are many).
This post has some remarks on hand-built books and the issues I find there. There next will cover, briefly, my experiences with blurb. Then I will attempt to wrap up with some summation and a something perhaps resembling a coherent statement of philosophy, once I work out what that might be. This is not intended as a tutorial on book building, just a discussion of some of the issues and benefits of one structure and another. If you're deeply interested in details, contact me and I will see what I can pull together.
There are some common themes in all hand-built books of the sort I make. The first is that I am putting physical prints into them, and physical prints have a thickness. This means that any pages separated by a print, or by many prints, need to hinge in a way that allows for that space. I will refer to this extra space, this looseness or whatever you care to call it, as "slack" or "slackness" in the hinge/fold. This is largely a non-issue with one of the structures, an easily managed detail for another, and an almost incredible pain in the ass for what seems at first glance to be the simplest structure.
The second common issue is paper weight. If you're sticking a physical print to a piece of paper, that paper needs to be tolerably heavy. I use 140 pound watercolor paper, or mat board, generally. Heavy papers present their own issues in the standard western codex (an ordinary "book" book).
Board Books
Have you any familiarity with the heavy books made for under 2-year-old children? The books where the "pages" are in fact rigid chunks of cardboard? These are actually a wonderfully ingenious device, and are absolutely fantastic for containing small portfolios. They're also a remarkable pain in the ass to build. This thing is 8 inches by 8 inches, 12 photographs, 13 "pages" in all (1 extra for the cover).
The basic structure is a stack of identical squares of cardboard. Imagine a stack of cards, neatly stacked, edges all aligned. Now between each pair of cards, insert a hinge along one edge, connecting the two. Normally this hinge is a sheet of paper twice the size of the card, folded exactly in half. This creates a bifold exactly the size of the cards. Glue the outside "pages" of this bifold each to one of the cards, with the fold forming the hinge.
Your basic children's book is precisely this, with the content of the book printed onto the inside (non-glued-side) of the bifolds. Each page will open to completely flat, without any forcing whatsoever, and will usually open slightly past that before any resistance occurs. The heavy cardboard "page" provides a natural feeling substrate for the photograph.
I have been known to use a smaller hinge, but have come to the conclusion that this is harder and less attractive, ultimately. Depicted below we see the Edsel book hinged with a strip of mismatching mulberry paper. I had hoped the mismatch would look rustic, but it mostly looks dumb. Quite strong, but not very attractive, and it didn't help with the hinge slackness problem at all to use the small hinge:
There are a bunch of issues here for hand-building these things. First, exact alignment is absolutely required on the spine, the hinge side, otherwise the whole thing looks ridiculous and does not open properly. Second, the thickness of the inserted prints screws everything up unless you are careful. The hinges formed by the bifolded paper need to have sufficient "slack" to accomodate the thickness of prints. So, I have a system in which I align the spine carefully, and build the book up with shims between the pages to get the hinges properly slack. The bifolds are cut too big, and trimmed on the three non-spine edges, and then the whole thing is sanded to evenness on those same three edges.
Essentially, when building the book up, I get the spine as exact as possible and let the other three edges go where they want, and then "fix it in post". I embrace a little roughness in the final product. Then I reinforce the spine by gluing a sheet of bookcloth around the outside of the spine (this is not standard child's book technique, which relies entirely on the bifolds for strength, but with the "slack" I am forced to build in to accommodate print thickness, a little more support seems indicated.)
Finally, the cover is a glued-on sheet of heavier paper, creased just so, and glued on very very cleverly. Also, this is what it looks like when the shims are not right, and the hinges don't have enough slack, note how the "pages" at the spine bend together, as the spine is narrower than the main body of the book.
Hinged Foldouts
My second, and I think my favorite, structure is the hinged foldout. I cut identical squares (although any shape is possible, within certain broad limits) and fasten them together with hinges of mulberry paper. For these I design the folding-up pattern first, which tells me roughly how much slack I need in each hinge. Sometimes one hinge brings a page down flush onto another (so, no slack required) or over a print (some slack) or over a whole stack of folded pages and prints that have been folded in first (lots of slack).
The biggest design limitation here is that the folding pattern should never fold a print face-against another. With these sorts of physical prints pressing them face-to-face invites adhesion and ruined prints. So this book is designed to fold pictures against paper, always.
Then I glue up the structure, guessing at the degree of necessary slack in each hinge. Extra doesn't hurt in this design, it turns out, but not enough would be a problem. Then I attach prints, write in text as necessary, and finally glue on the cover.
This creates a compact book-like structure when folded up, but has the potential to unfold into a wall hanging, if you liked. Structure can follow the flow of the book, as you can build non-linear structures this way. The cover is a sort of big matchbook made of a single piece of heavy paper large enough to wrap around, with a slot and tab closure arrangement. Variations, endlessly, are possible. Manifesto is 6 inches by 6 inches, and contains 6 pictures and some text.
It may not be obvious, but one could make the sideways-foldout be many sections long, turn corners, and so on.
Here's a probably not very visible hinge detail. It looks very much like the not-very-pleasing hinges I used on the Edsel book above, but the paper match is better and it works a lot better as well:
A smaller version of this design (2x2) can be seen in this post from the past.
Sewn Codex
This is a basic hardbound book. I use 140 pound watercolor paper for the pages, almost exclusively, here. Covers are several layers of mat board (2 or 3) laminated and covered in the usual way shown in any number of internet tutorials. The issue of print thickness is least for this structure, I find, as the natural flex in the pages simply allows the prints to fit in. The spine of the hardcover does need to be sized properly for the finished book, with prints in it, and it doesn't hurt to sew the thing a trifle loosely.
This is a book I made as a memorial when my father died. Some basic documentary photos of things he owned or made, and some of my crummy calligraphy with little snippets of things I learned from Dad. It's roughly 8 inches by 8 inches.
Endpaper detail (that's the thin purple stuff), also showing the stiffness of the 140 pound paper pages.
The biggest problem I have discovered is with the sewn book is in the heaviness of the paper. These things really have to be "backed" to make the book work well, otherwise the turning the pages is always stiff, and the book won't open particularly well. (Backing is a process by when you literally hammer the spine of the sewn and glued block of pages into the classic mushroom shape you see looking down on the top of an older book). I am still working on my backing skills. The book works well, but the back doesn't look too great.
This is the very first photo book I ever made. The prints in it at 4 inches by 4 inches, for scale. Again, you can see the stiffness of the pages, and you can probably get a sense of how stiffly the book "opens" and lies from the fanned out pages just standing there. I did not "back" this volume, and it shows. I used a single layer of mat board in the hard covers, which isn't stiff enough. I do like the torn paper edges, still.
The most useful resource I have ever discovered is Conservation Book Repair by Artemis BonDea. A quick google search ought to turn up a downloadable copy from the Alaska State Library. It has a host of material on tools and techniques. I learned a great deal about simply handling paper from this book. While it does not actually tell you how to make a book, it gives you a lot of useful grounding. Then even the slapdash tutorials you find on the Internet for actually making a new book will be much more useful.
There are no actual rules of book-making. You can do anything you like. If you're thoughtful and make appropriate tests and prototypes as you go, you can build most anything you put your mind to. If you're clumsy, like me, it probably would serve you well to embrace a sort of rustic, rough-hewn, look!
This post has some remarks on hand-built books and the issues I find there. There next will cover, briefly, my experiences with blurb. Then I will attempt to wrap up with some summation and a something perhaps resembling a coherent statement of philosophy, once I work out what that might be. This is not intended as a tutorial on book building, just a discussion of some of the issues and benefits of one structure and another. If you're deeply interested in details, contact me and I will see what I can pull together.
There are some common themes in all hand-built books of the sort I make. The first is that I am putting physical prints into them, and physical prints have a thickness. This means that any pages separated by a print, or by many prints, need to hinge in a way that allows for that space. I will refer to this extra space, this looseness or whatever you care to call it, as "slack" or "slackness" in the hinge/fold. This is largely a non-issue with one of the structures, an easily managed detail for another, and an almost incredible pain in the ass for what seems at first glance to be the simplest structure.
The second common issue is paper weight. If you're sticking a physical print to a piece of paper, that paper needs to be tolerably heavy. I use 140 pound watercolor paper, or mat board, generally. Heavy papers present their own issues in the standard western codex (an ordinary "book" book).
Board Books
Have you any familiarity with the heavy books made for under 2-year-old children? The books where the "pages" are in fact rigid chunks of cardboard? These are actually a wonderfully ingenious device, and are absolutely fantastic for containing small portfolios. They're also a remarkable pain in the ass to build. This thing is 8 inches by 8 inches, 12 photographs, 13 "pages" in all (1 extra for the cover).
The basic structure is a stack of identical squares of cardboard. Imagine a stack of cards, neatly stacked, edges all aligned. Now between each pair of cards, insert a hinge along one edge, connecting the two. Normally this hinge is a sheet of paper twice the size of the card, folded exactly in half. This creates a bifold exactly the size of the cards. Glue the outside "pages" of this bifold each to one of the cards, with the fold forming the hinge.
Your basic children's book is precisely this, with the content of the book printed onto the inside (non-glued-side) of the bifolds. Each page will open to completely flat, without any forcing whatsoever, and will usually open slightly past that before any resistance occurs. The heavy cardboard "page" provides a natural feeling substrate for the photograph.
I have been known to use a smaller hinge, but have come to the conclusion that this is harder and less attractive, ultimately. Depicted below we see the Edsel book hinged with a strip of mismatching mulberry paper. I had hoped the mismatch would look rustic, but it mostly looks dumb. Quite strong, but not very attractive, and it didn't help with the hinge slackness problem at all to use the small hinge:
There are a bunch of issues here for hand-building these things. First, exact alignment is absolutely required on the spine, the hinge side, otherwise the whole thing looks ridiculous and does not open properly. Second, the thickness of the inserted prints screws everything up unless you are careful. The hinges formed by the bifolded paper need to have sufficient "slack" to accomodate the thickness of prints. So, I have a system in which I align the spine carefully, and build the book up with shims between the pages to get the hinges properly slack. The bifolds are cut too big, and trimmed on the three non-spine edges, and then the whole thing is sanded to evenness on those same three edges.
Essentially, when building the book up, I get the spine as exact as possible and let the other three edges go where they want, and then "fix it in post". I embrace a little roughness in the final product. Then I reinforce the spine by gluing a sheet of bookcloth around the outside of the spine (this is not standard child's book technique, which relies entirely on the bifolds for strength, but with the "slack" I am forced to build in to accommodate print thickness, a little more support seems indicated.)
Finally, the cover is a glued-on sheet of heavier paper, creased just so, and glued on very very cleverly. Also, this is what it looks like when the shims are not right, and the hinges don't have enough slack, note how the "pages" at the spine bend together, as the spine is narrower than the main body of the book.
Hinged Foldouts
My second, and I think my favorite, structure is the hinged foldout. I cut identical squares (although any shape is possible, within certain broad limits) and fasten them together with hinges of mulberry paper. For these I design the folding-up pattern first, which tells me roughly how much slack I need in each hinge. Sometimes one hinge brings a page down flush onto another (so, no slack required) or over a print (some slack) or over a whole stack of folded pages and prints that have been folded in first (lots of slack).
The biggest design limitation here is that the folding pattern should never fold a print face-against another. With these sorts of physical prints pressing them face-to-face invites adhesion and ruined prints. So this book is designed to fold pictures against paper, always.
Then I glue up the structure, guessing at the degree of necessary slack in each hinge. Extra doesn't hurt in this design, it turns out, but not enough would be a problem. Then I attach prints, write in text as necessary, and finally glue on the cover.
This creates a compact book-like structure when folded up, but has the potential to unfold into a wall hanging, if you liked. Structure can follow the flow of the book, as you can build non-linear structures this way. The cover is a sort of big matchbook made of a single piece of heavy paper large enough to wrap around, with a slot and tab closure arrangement. Variations, endlessly, are possible. Manifesto is 6 inches by 6 inches, and contains 6 pictures and some text.
It may not be obvious, but one could make the sideways-foldout be many sections long, turn corners, and so on.
Here's a probably not very visible hinge detail. It looks very much like the not-very-pleasing hinges I used on the Edsel book above, but the paper match is better and it works a lot better as well:
A smaller version of this design (2x2) can be seen in this post from the past.
Sewn Codex
This is a basic hardbound book. I use 140 pound watercolor paper for the pages, almost exclusively, here. Covers are several layers of mat board (2 or 3) laminated and covered in the usual way shown in any number of internet tutorials. The issue of print thickness is least for this structure, I find, as the natural flex in the pages simply allows the prints to fit in. The spine of the hardcover does need to be sized properly for the finished book, with prints in it, and it doesn't hurt to sew the thing a trifle loosely.
This is a book I made as a memorial when my father died. Some basic documentary photos of things he owned or made, and some of my crummy calligraphy with little snippets of things I learned from Dad. It's roughly 8 inches by 8 inches.
Endpaper detail (that's the thin purple stuff), also showing the stiffness of the 140 pound paper pages.
The biggest problem I have discovered is with the sewn book is in the heaviness of the paper. These things really have to be "backed" to make the book work well, otherwise the turning the pages is always stiff, and the book won't open particularly well. (Backing is a process by when you literally hammer the spine of the sewn and glued block of pages into the classic mushroom shape you see looking down on the top of an older book). I am still working on my backing skills. The book works well, but the back doesn't look too great.
This is the very first photo book I ever made. The prints in it at 4 inches by 4 inches, for scale. Again, you can see the stiffness of the pages, and you can probably get a sense of how stiffly the book "opens" and lies from the fanned out pages just standing there. I did not "back" this volume, and it shows. I used a single layer of mat board in the hard covers, which isn't stiff enough. I do like the torn paper edges, still.
The most useful resource I have ever discovered is Conservation Book Repair by Artemis BonDea. A quick google search ought to turn up a downloadable copy from the Alaska State Library. It has a host of material on tools and techniques. I learned a great deal about simply handling paper from this book. While it does not actually tell you how to make a book, it gives you a lot of useful grounding. Then even the slapdash tutorials you find on the Internet for actually making a new book will be much more useful.
There are no actual rules of book-making. You can do anything you like. If you're thoughtful and make appropriate tests and prototypes as you go, you can build most anything you put your mind to. If you're clumsy, like me, it probably would serve you well to embrace a sort of rustic, rough-hewn, look!
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Back to the Print, Wall Mounting
I'm going to cover, essentially, the variations on a single method of wall mounting here. My approach is wildly cheap, and can create a number of pretty appealing looks.
Tools and Materials
I do pretty much everything with an Exacto knife, a large cutting mat, and a good quality 24 inch steel ruler. Any standard cutting mat is marked with a good grid, allowing easy cutting of right angles and fairly exact dimensions. For more precise cutting, I measure with the ruler and use light pencil marks. It may be necessary to first correct any un-squareness by recutting materials to exact right angles using the grid on the cutting mat.
With a little practice, cutting papers, mats, and other materials by running the Exacto knife along the edge of the ruler becomes easy. Hold the ruler down firmly. More firmly than you think you need to.
My go-to glue is pH neutral PVA glue. It's essentially just Elmer's white glue, but you know what you're getting. Cheap white glue could, in theory, be something quite different, and might not bond with things you want to adhere. I've never actually seen this occur, but I always buy actual PVA glue because I know it works. It bonds, somewhat to my surprise, to the back side of standard drugstore machine prints perfectly well. For gluing wood, I will often use a designated wood glue, but I see no reason PVA would not work just as well for these applications.
You will want good paintbrush for spreading glue. I have a synthetic bristle brush I favor. The synthetic bristles seem to clean up more easily. When cleaning glue out, first remove as much as reasonable with a paper towel, then wash thoroughly, then leave it in a cup of water overnight. PVA glue is remarkably persistent. Minimize the amount you wash down drains, unless you're at a friend's house.
I use foam core board, decorative papers, heavier papers (I generally keep in stock a 70-80 pound paper, and a 130-150 pound paper), and scraps of wood 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.
Substrates
I have transitioned almost completely to using foam core board for wall mounting purposes. It's incredibly light, easy to cut, takes glue well, and is both stable and stiff. In the past I have used mounting board, which is really a double-weight mat board. This material is incredibly difficult to cut without some fairly robust tools, which I do not have. Wrestling this stuff down with an Exacto knife and a ruler is fairly tough sledding. If I want some sort of heavy mat board in future, I will likely cut standard weight mat board to size, and them laminate 2 or more layers up at the proper size with PVA glue. Mounting board and laminated mat board does have the advantage that you can sand it, with ordinary sandpaper, to create a clean edge. As we'll see my preferred methods tend to conceal that edge.
Gluing...
You're going to be using an increasingly glue-covered brush in this process. Plan where the brush gets put down, and always put it down there. Be mindful of the gluey brush end, and don't let it touch anything it's not supposed to touch. Have clean rags or paper towels handy to clean your fingers, and then clean your fingers obsessively. Be mindful of what has glue on it, and what does not. Keep the two separate, and have a plan for this. Perhaps you put some newspaper on the ground, and glue-covered scraps, rags, etc, get dropped on that? That sort of thing. Glue gets everywhere unless you're quite disciplined.
... to the Edge
In general I will glue prints out to the edge, to create a clean glued-down edge where the print meets the backing material (substrate). Holding the print carefully, back side up, run a small bead of PVA glue around the edge, and then a squiggle or X of glue in the center. Working fairly quickly from the inside out, brush the glue out to the edge, and spread it around in the center. You can tilt the print to see the glisten of glue, to ensure you're got the entire edge glued. You will likely find it hard to keep glue off your fingertips and thence the print, so practice a little.
You will almost certainly use too much glue the first few times. The glue bead shown below should be brushed out to the edge, but also into the interior, as it is a little too heavy:
Brush out toward the edge, to bring the glue all the way out:
Now turn the print over and position it carefully, one edge down first, laying the print gently down into position. PVA glue does not cure instantly, so you can reposition. Be ruthless about lifting and repositioning, it's OK. Once it is in position, gently lay a clean sheet of paper over the print and, working from the center outwards, press the print firmly down trying to work out any air bubbles under it. If you've used too much glue, it will squeeze out around the edges at this point. Regardless, assume your scrap paper has glue on it now, and dispose of it appropriately.
You will ruin some prints early on. You will probably ruin the occasional print later on as well, but less frequently.
This whole exercise is somewhat fraught, and altogether too often results in glue on the front of the print, so I really prefer to apply glue to the substrate rather than the print. This will result, however, either in glue appearing beyond the edge of the print, or in the print edges not being glued. Either must be dealt with.
I glue to the edge when the background material, the substrate, will extend beyond the print's edge, to create a matted look. This can be simply the white of the foam core, or you can dress it up a bit.
A design I employed once, as much to entertain my then five year old daughter as for any other reason, was to glue strips of decorative paper around on that mat area. I used a torn edge for the strips, and tacked them down with deliberate crudity (designs that embrace clumsiness are a boon when a 5 year old is helping you), and let the edge of the paper overlap both the edge of the substrate, and the print's area. I am still very pleased with this approach.
This is what it looks like. The whole thing is floated 1/2 an inch or so off the wall. The detail shows the print glued out to the edge, overlapping the strips of decorative paper, and also the wrinkled look of the paper. The torn edge is obtained by painting a narrow bead of water onto the paper, letting it soak, and then tearing along that weakened line.
There is, under the print, a bare rectangle of mounting board. The decorative paper in this case is four overlapping chunks of the same stuff, but there's no law you have to use the same paper on all four edges.
..."Floating" the bare print
I'm rather fond of the floating print look. Here I cut the substrate a little too small. 1/8 to 1/2 an inch too small in each dimension, depending on the look I am going for. If you want the print to float quite flat, you'll want the substrate very nearly the same size at the print, so cut it perhaps 1/8 inch too small each way.
Place the print face down on a clean, smooth, surface. Apply glue not to the print, but to the substrate, as indicated in the previous section for prints. You can be more careless, because the front surface of the print is safely face down and will remain that way, so a few glue-blots here and there will not be as big a deal. Position the substrate on the print, just as you positioned the print on the substrate in the previous method, being careful to let the print slop over the edges of the substrate very slightly.
This is part of an installation I made for my wife's office space. 13 small prints (4x6, 4x4) of our kids in an arabesque wrapping around her monitor. Total cost, under ten bucks.
Rear view of one of the prints. The print floats off the wall by the thickness of the foam core board, which itself rests against the wall:
For a somewhat different floating look, cut the substrate a bit smaller, 1/2 inch perhaps, in one or both dimensions. This will allow the print to curl. Do not bring the glue all the way out to the edge where you want to see some curling. After you position the substrate on the print, allow to cure completely (24 hours), and then gently curl the print up and away from the substrate. This creates a slight "scroll" flavor to the floating print.
This isn't a photograph, but the idea is the same. The whole is floated 1/2 an inch or so off the wall (see below):
Wall Mounting
I use two approaches. The first floats the whole assembled object off the wall by some distance, and consists of, essentially, just gluing wood scraps to the back of the piece. This is how all the pieces shown above which are floated 1/2 inch or more off the wall. The tulip photograph with decorative paper, and the Japanese print are both mounted this way. I use wood glue, and put a weight on the whole assembly for the glue curing time, but I see no reason PVA glue would not work just as well.
The upper block is simply rested on a nail driven into the wall. The lower block is merely a standoff, to make the print hang parallel to the wall. For more security, you can bevel the lower edge of the upper, supporting, block, to let it "hook over" the head of the nail. Here is a side view, with the blue outline indicating the wooden block and the green indicating the nail.
For a mount closer to the wall, especially with very small and hence light pictures, I simply pop a hole in the back of the foam core board, exactly half-way across the top. This hole is pressed over the head of a finishing nail (a common nail type that has nearly no head) driven into the wall and slightly protruding. As a final touch, I apply a dab or two of ordinary caulk to the bottom edge of the back, to give a little grip. Foam core board is quick slick, and the dried caulk's texture helps the print stay put on the wall. This is how the collection of small prints of my daughters is mounted.
For additional reinforcement (or if you botch the hole up) you can glue a piece of heavy paper over the hole. Use one of the finishing nails you'll be using in the wall later, punch a hole in the paper the right size to admit the head of the nail. Apply glue to the back of the paper, and slip it over the nail. Put the nail-head into the hole in the foam-core, and slide the gluey, sticky, paper in to place. The holes will be aligned by the nail, and will be the right sized to accept the nail's head.
And that's all there is to it!
No need to worry about museum glass versus anti-reflection glass or any of that.
Tools and Materials
I do pretty much everything with an Exacto knife, a large cutting mat, and a good quality 24 inch steel ruler. Any standard cutting mat is marked with a good grid, allowing easy cutting of right angles and fairly exact dimensions. For more precise cutting, I measure with the ruler and use light pencil marks. It may be necessary to first correct any un-squareness by recutting materials to exact right angles using the grid on the cutting mat.
With a little practice, cutting papers, mats, and other materials by running the Exacto knife along the edge of the ruler becomes easy. Hold the ruler down firmly. More firmly than you think you need to.
My go-to glue is pH neutral PVA glue. It's essentially just Elmer's white glue, but you know what you're getting. Cheap white glue could, in theory, be something quite different, and might not bond with things you want to adhere. I've never actually seen this occur, but I always buy actual PVA glue because I know it works. It bonds, somewhat to my surprise, to the back side of standard drugstore machine prints perfectly well. For gluing wood, I will often use a designated wood glue, but I see no reason PVA would not work just as well for these applications.
You will want good paintbrush for spreading glue. I have a synthetic bristle brush I favor. The synthetic bristles seem to clean up more easily. When cleaning glue out, first remove as much as reasonable with a paper towel, then wash thoroughly, then leave it in a cup of water overnight. PVA glue is remarkably persistent. Minimize the amount you wash down drains, unless you're at a friend's house.
I use foam core board, decorative papers, heavier papers (I generally keep in stock a 70-80 pound paper, and a 130-150 pound paper), and scraps of wood 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.
Substrates
I have transitioned almost completely to using foam core board for wall mounting purposes. It's incredibly light, easy to cut, takes glue well, and is both stable and stiff. In the past I have used mounting board, which is really a double-weight mat board. This material is incredibly difficult to cut without some fairly robust tools, which I do not have. Wrestling this stuff down with an Exacto knife and a ruler is fairly tough sledding. If I want some sort of heavy mat board in future, I will likely cut standard weight mat board to size, and them laminate 2 or more layers up at the proper size with PVA glue. Mounting board and laminated mat board does have the advantage that you can sand it, with ordinary sandpaper, to create a clean edge. As we'll see my preferred methods tend to conceal that edge.
Gluing...
You're going to be using an increasingly glue-covered brush in this process. Plan where the brush gets put down, and always put it down there. Be mindful of the gluey brush end, and don't let it touch anything it's not supposed to touch. Have clean rags or paper towels handy to clean your fingers, and then clean your fingers obsessively. Be mindful of what has glue on it, and what does not. Keep the two separate, and have a plan for this. Perhaps you put some newspaper on the ground, and glue-covered scraps, rags, etc, get dropped on that? That sort of thing. Glue gets everywhere unless you're quite disciplined.
... to the Edge
In general I will glue prints out to the edge, to create a clean glued-down edge where the print meets the backing material (substrate). Holding the print carefully, back side up, run a small bead of PVA glue around the edge, and then a squiggle or X of glue in the center. Working fairly quickly from the inside out, brush the glue out to the edge, and spread it around in the center. You can tilt the print to see the glisten of glue, to ensure you're got the entire edge glued. You will likely find it hard to keep glue off your fingertips and thence the print, so practice a little.
You will almost certainly use too much glue the first few times. The glue bead shown below should be brushed out to the edge, but also into the interior, as it is a little too heavy:
Brush out toward the edge, to bring the glue all the way out:
Now turn the print over and position it carefully, one edge down first, laying the print gently down into position. PVA glue does not cure instantly, so you can reposition. Be ruthless about lifting and repositioning, it's OK. Once it is in position, gently lay a clean sheet of paper over the print and, working from the center outwards, press the print firmly down trying to work out any air bubbles under it. If you've used too much glue, it will squeeze out around the edges at this point. Regardless, assume your scrap paper has glue on it now, and dispose of it appropriately.
You will ruin some prints early on. You will probably ruin the occasional print later on as well, but less frequently.
This whole exercise is somewhat fraught, and altogether too often results in glue on the front of the print, so I really prefer to apply glue to the substrate rather than the print. This will result, however, either in glue appearing beyond the edge of the print, or in the print edges not being glued. Either must be dealt with.
I glue to the edge when the background material, the substrate, will extend beyond the print's edge, to create a matted look. This can be simply the white of the foam core, or you can dress it up a bit.
A design I employed once, as much to entertain my then five year old daughter as for any other reason, was to glue strips of decorative paper around on that mat area. I used a torn edge for the strips, and tacked them down with deliberate crudity (designs that embrace clumsiness are a boon when a 5 year old is helping you), and let the edge of the paper overlap both the edge of the substrate, and the print's area. I am still very pleased with this approach.
This is what it looks like. The whole thing is floated 1/2 an inch or so off the wall. The detail shows the print glued out to the edge, overlapping the strips of decorative paper, and also the wrinkled look of the paper. The torn edge is obtained by painting a narrow bead of water onto the paper, letting it soak, and then tearing along that weakened line.
There is, under the print, a bare rectangle of mounting board. The decorative paper in this case is four overlapping chunks of the same stuff, but there's no law you have to use the same paper on all four edges.
..."Floating" the bare print
I'm rather fond of the floating print look. Here I cut the substrate a little too small. 1/8 to 1/2 an inch too small in each dimension, depending on the look I am going for. If you want the print to float quite flat, you'll want the substrate very nearly the same size at the print, so cut it perhaps 1/8 inch too small each way.
Place the print face down on a clean, smooth, surface. Apply glue not to the print, but to the substrate, as indicated in the previous section for prints. You can be more careless, because the front surface of the print is safely face down and will remain that way, so a few glue-blots here and there will not be as big a deal. Position the substrate on the print, just as you positioned the print on the substrate in the previous method, being careful to let the print slop over the edges of the substrate very slightly.
This is part of an installation I made for my wife's office space. 13 small prints (4x6, 4x4) of our kids in an arabesque wrapping around her monitor. Total cost, under ten bucks.
Rear view of one of the prints. The print floats off the wall by the thickness of the foam core board, which itself rests against the wall:
For a somewhat different floating look, cut the substrate a bit smaller, 1/2 inch perhaps, in one or both dimensions. This will allow the print to curl. Do not bring the glue all the way out to the edge where you want to see some curling. After you position the substrate on the print, allow to cure completely (24 hours), and then gently curl the print up and away from the substrate. This creates a slight "scroll" flavor to the floating print.
This isn't a photograph, but the idea is the same. The whole is floated 1/2 an inch or so off the wall (see below):
Wall Mounting
I use two approaches. The first floats the whole assembled object off the wall by some distance, and consists of, essentially, just gluing wood scraps to the back of the piece. This is how all the pieces shown above which are floated 1/2 inch or more off the wall. The tulip photograph with decorative paper, and the Japanese print are both mounted this way. I use wood glue, and put a weight on the whole assembly for the glue curing time, but I see no reason PVA glue would not work just as well.
The upper block is simply rested on a nail driven into the wall. The lower block is merely a standoff, to make the print hang parallel to the wall. For more security, you can bevel the lower edge of the upper, supporting, block, to let it "hook over" the head of the nail. Here is a side view, with the blue outline indicating the wooden block and the green indicating the nail.
For a mount closer to the wall, especially with very small and hence light pictures, I simply pop a hole in the back of the foam core board, exactly half-way across the top. This hole is pressed over the head of a finishing nail (a common nail type that has nearly no head) driven into the wall and slightly protruding. As a final touch, I apply a dab or two of ordinary caulk to the bottom edge of the back, to give a little grip. Foam core board is quick slick, and the dried caulk's texture helps the print stay put on the wall. This is how the collection of small prints of my daughters is mounted.
For additional reinforcement (or if you botch the hole up) you can glue a piece of heavy paper over the hole. Use one of the finishing nails you'll be using in the wall later, punch a hole in the paper the right size to admit the head of the nail. Apply glue to the back of the paper, and slip it over the nail. Put the nail-head into the hole in the foam-core, and slide the gluey, sticky, paper in to place. The holes will be aligned by the nail, and will be the right sized to accept the nail's head.
And that's all there is to it!
No need to worry about museum glass versus anti-reflection glass or any of that.
Back to the Print, Introduction
Luminous Landscape is rolling out, with all the dizzying speed of a glacier bounding down its mountain valley, a series entitled "Get Back to the Print." This was launched, supposedly, in response to Kevin Raber's experience with a box of photographs, with the tactile feel, the longevity, the sense of history. It had the potential to be an interesting series, but of course it's turned in to a series of reviews of software and printers. This will presumably allow you to make enormous prints with hyperactive detail and precision color of whatever it is you've shot merely by spending enormous sums of money and time.
You know how else you can get prints?
Any number of online services. The local drugstore, grocery store, department store.
You know what else?
The prints are pretty good. If getting the shade of green to exactly match what you see on the monitor is somehow vital to your vision of your soulless interchangeable landscape, then by all means subscribe to LuLa and start wading through their incredibly boring videos (why they insist on overlong badly made videos full of ums and ahs instead of writing I do not know.) If you can muddle through with a little less precision, consider spending 17 cents a print instead.
Onwards.
Why do I print? I print for a couple of reasons. I print because a physical print defines an endpoint, a place where I can stop mucking around with the picture and call it Done. This is surprisingly important in this era of digital imaging and software. Sitting in front of a computer fiddling endlessly with something, anything, is an incredibly compelling activity and incredibly bad for us. I print also because the physical object has a purpose. I can look at it, I can put it on the wall, I can put it in a book. I am interested in presentation, and the print affords me possibilities for presentation. The computer, ultimately, does not. Yes, I can embed the pictures in an eBook or a Gallery or whatever, but ultimately it's always the same thing: a glowing picture on a screen.
I don't print for longevity, for future generations. I know perfectly well that my children will, at best, treasure a small handful of objects from my life, possibly including a 2 or 3 or 10 photographs. The generation after that will winnow the stash down to 1 or 2, and then it's gone. I am OK with that.
My approach to print and presentation embraces the ephemerality of it all. One of the beauties of the digital world is that it is, at least in theory, trivially easy to bang out a new print whenever I want. My presentations need not be robust, preservation of the physical object is simply not a priority. I don't even need to preserve it for a year, let alone for future generations.
In the following pieces I'm going to break down some details of how I stick things on walls, and how I stick things in books.
Now is the time to step out for a smoke and a coffee if you're not that interested in the details of cutting and gluing.
You know how else you can get prints?
Any number of online services. The local drugstore, grocery store, department store.
You know what else?
The prints are pretty good. If getting the shade of green to exactly match what you see on the monitor is somehow vital to your vision of your soulless interchangeable landscape, then by all means subscribe to LuLa and start wading through their incredibly boring videos (why they insist on overlong badly made videos full of ums and ahs instead of writing I do not know.) If you can muddle through with a little less precision, consider spending 17 cents a print instead.
Onwards.
Why do I print? I print for a couple of reasons. I print because a physical print defines an endpoint, a place where I can stop mucking around with the picture and call it Done. This is surprisingly important in this era of digital imaging and software. Sitting in front of a computer fiddling endlessly with something, anything, is an incredibly compelling activity and incredibly bad for us. I print also because the physical object has a purpose. I can look at it, I can put it on the wall, I can put it in a book. I am interested in presentation, and the print affords me possibilities for presentation. The computer, ultimately, does not. Yes, I can embed the pictures in an eBook or a Gallery or whatever, but ultimately it's always the same thing: a glowing picture on a screen.
I don't print for longevity, for future generations. I know perfectly well that my children will, at best, treasure a small handful of objects from my life, possibly including a 2 or 3 or 10 photographs. The generation after that will winnow the stash down to 1 or 2, and then it's gone. I am OK with that.
My approach to print and presentation embraces the ephemerality of it all. One of the beauties of the digital world is that it is, at least in theory, trivially easy to bang out a new print whenever I want. My presentations need not be robust, preservation of the physical object is simply not a priority. I don't even need to preserve it for a year, let alone for future generations.
In the following pieces I'm going to break down some details of how I stick things on walls, and how I stick things in books.
Now is the time to step out for a smoke and a coffee if you're not that interested in the details of cutting and gluing.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Innovation II
Here's some more basic Business 101 stuff about Innovation, and maybe a little blather about what it all means to Canon and Nikon and all those dudes.
This is the first thing:
When something genuinely new turns up as a product, the acceptance of it occurs in very distinct phases. Roughly, we start with a bunch of so-called early adopters who buy it. They're typically enthusiasts who enjoy things that are novel (this applies both to people and to businesses). They may or may not have problems that are different from the mainstream's problem, but they are largely identified by essentially social/personality as entities predisposed to try novel things.
Early adopters often make a lot of noise, but there generally are not enough of them to actually sustain a business.
Then there's a pause. The early adopters are often making a big fuss about the new thing and how great it is, and yet, mysteriously it seems, the new thing is not flying off the shelves. Sales are flat or even dropping, despite the apparent hue and cry. This where innovative companies die. Almost all of them. This is sometimes called "the chasm" but it has other names. It always happens.
Then, finally, sometimes, the mainstream market begins to shift and accept the new thing. Sometimes the unique problems that the early adopters experienced begin to afflict the mainstream, demanding the new solution. Sometimes the mainstream simply gathers itself to move away from the status quo because of the now very obvious benefits of the new thing. And so on. Sales begin to pick up, slowly. After a while, nobody can remember a time when the new thing wasn't ubiquitous.
The mechanisms vary but the pattern is weirdly constant. There's some sort of Central Limit Theorem in here. Early adopters, chasm, mainstream. Then there's some stuff at the end, too, "long tails" and whatnot that we're not concerned with.
This is the second thing:
The major players at any given time are actually not permitted by the market to innovate. Nikon and Canon are constantly innovating, and everything they do is reviled and dismissed. The Nikon 1 was innovation, but conventional wisdom is that it sucked, and that Nikon, having built a D5 that is a very safe evolution from the D4, is simply not innovative. Say what?
The only companies that the market will "allow" to innovate are the new players, which is why Sony is innovative and Canon is not. It hasn't got anything to do with the products they're building.
The Nikon 1 is indeed a useful case to look at. The usual crowd ridiculed it because of one flaw or another. The innovative new company is permitted to roll out almost any kind of wildly limited product, because they are by definition innovative and of course there will be bumps. Sony, Olympus, Fuji, have all rolled out dogs but since they "get it" the dogs are seen as mere evolutionary steps along the way to perfection. Nikon, who doesn't "get it", cannot roll out anything less than perfection. The flaws in the Nikon 1 are proof of Nikon's cluelessness.
And that's not to say the pundits are bad people who have it in for Nikon. This is how it always is for the established players, the pundits in this case are simply following their appointed rounds.
So the standard game plan for the majors is to wait and see. They experiment, they roll out new products, but they don't get fully behind any of the massive flock of Wild New Things. They leave that up to Lytro, to Light, to Sony. These companies are trying out tons of innovation. Most of those innovations will die in The Chasm. Many of those companies will die in The Chasm. A few things will gain traction in the mainstream.
Then the major players, having kept their hand in with the small products they've been rolling out here and there, swoop in and attempt to dominate the now-established market. There are now one or more established "innovative" players who have to be knocked out of the game, so it's harder for the majors to take control.
It's not easy, but at least it's possible. Nikon and Canon actually cannot be that innovative player who ushers in EVFs or whatever to mainstream acceptance. No matter what they do, it's just going to be the Nikon 1 story again. These guys know where they fit in the minds of their customers, and they know perfectly well that if they diverge too far from that the reviews will fall in to lock step "it sucks, they fucked it up." Nikon cannot invent the next new camera paradigm any more than IBM could invent the home computer or Microsoft could invent the web browser.
Step back a few steps and take in the whole mirrorless camera market.
There's been endless fuss, all the pundits have been rolling their eyes about how this is SO OBVIOUSLY the way forward and what's UP with all those old optical viewfinder cameras? (early adopters). This goes on for a while. MILC sales remain mysteriously flat, despite the obviousness of the solution (the chasm). Nikon and Canon are widely reviled for sticking with their horrible optical viewfinder cameras and not jumping on the mirrorless segment despite the fact that they are constantly rolling out mirrorless cameras in various segments.
Today, maaaayyyyyyybe, we're beginning to see actual mainstream acceptance. The very real problems with mirrorless cameras are legitimately being shaken out right about now.
If we see an actual substantial uptick in sales coincident with a substantial corresponding downtick in SLR cameras, then look for Nikon and Canon to start positioning to crush the remaining MILC manufacturers. Sony knows this, obviously, and is without question girding their loins for battle. This may be why they're hurling new models out at such a blistering pace. They need to establish the strongest beachhead possible because D-Day is right around the corner and those fuckers at Nikon and Canon are gonna hit the beach with extreme prejudice, and loaded for bear.
This is the first thing:
When something genuinely new turns up as a product, the acceptance of it occurs in very distinct phases. Roughly, we start with a bunch of so-called early adopters who buy it. They're typically enthusiasts who enjoy things that are novel (this applies both to people and to businesses). They may or may not have problems that are different from the mainstream's problem, but they are largely identified by essentially social/personality as entities predisposed to try novel things.
Early adopters often make a lot of noise, but there generally are not enough of them to actually sustain a business.
Then there's a pause. The early adopters are often making a big fuss about the new thing and how great it is, and yet, mysteriously it seems, the new thing is not flying off the shelves. Sales are flat or even dropping, despite the apparent hue and cry. This where innovative companies die. Almost all of them. This is sometimes called "the chasm" but it has other names. It always happens.
Then, finally, sometimes, the mainstream market begins to shift and accept the new thing. Sometimes the unique problems that the early adopters experienced begin to afflict the mainstream, demanding the new solution. Sometimes the mainstream simply gathers itself to move away from the status quo because of the now very obvious benefits of the new thing. And so on. Sales begin to pick up, slowly. After a while, nobody can remember a time when the new thing wasn't ubiquitous.
The mechanisms vary but the pattern is weirdly constant. There's some sort of Central Limit Theorem in here. Early adopters, chasm, mainstream. Then there's some stuff at the end, too, "long tails" and whatnot that we're not concerned with.
This is the second thing:
The major players at any given time are actually not permitted by the market to innovate. Nikon and Canon are constantly innovating, and everything they do is reviled and dismissed. The Nikon 1 was innovation, but conventional wisdom is that it sucked, and that Nikon, having built a D5 that is a very safe evolution from the D4, is simply not innovative. Say what?
The only companies that the market will "allow" to innovate are the new players, which is why Sony is innovative and Canon is not. It hasn't got anything to do with the products they're building.
The Nikon 1 is indeed a useful case to look at. The usual crowd ridiculed it because of one flaw or another. The innovative new company is permitted to roll out almost any kind of wildly limited product, because they are by definition innovative and of course there will be bumps. Sony, Olympus, Fuji, have all rolled out dogs but since they "get it" the dogs are seen as mere evolutionary steps along the way to perfection. Nikon, who doesn't "get it", cannot roll out anything less than perfection. The flaws in the Nikon 1 are proof of Nikon's cluelessness.
And that's not to say the pundits are bad people who have it in for Nikon. This is how it always is for the established players, the pundits in this case are simply following their appointed rounds.
So the standard game plan for the majors is to wait and see. They experiment, they roll out new products, but they don't get fully behind any of the massive flock of Wild New Things. They leave that up to Lytro, to Light, to Sony. These companies are trying out tons of innovation. Most of those innovations will die in The Chasm. Many of those companies will die in The Chasm. A few things will gain traction in the mainstream.
Then the major players, having kept their hand in with the small products they've been rolling out here and there, swoop in and attempt to dominate the now-established market. There are now one or more established "innovative" players who have to be knocked out of the game, so it's harder for the majors to take control.
It's not easy, but at least it's possible. Nikon and Canon actually cannot be that innovative player who ushers in EVFs or whatever to mainstream acceptance. No matter what they do, it's just going to be the Nikon 1 story again. These guys know where they fit in the minds of their customers, and they know perfectly well that if they diverge too far from that the reviews will fall in to lock step "it sucks, they fucked it up." Nikon cannot invent the next new camera paradigm any more than IBM could invent the home computer or Microsoft could invent the web browser.
Step back a few steps and take in the whole mirrorless camera market.
There's been endless fuss, all the pundits have been rolling their eyes about how this is SO OBVIOUSLY the way forward and what's UP with all those old optical viewfinder cameras? (early adopters). This goes on for a while. MILC sales remain mysteriously flat, despite the obviousness of the solution (the chasm). Nikon and Canon are widely reviled for sticking with their horrible optical viewfinder cameras and not jumping on the mirrorless segment despite the fact that they are constantly rolling out mirrorless cameras in various segments.
Today, maaaayyyyyyybe, we're beginning to see actual mainstream acceptance. The very real problems with mirrorless cameras are legitimately being shaken out right about now.
If we see an actual substantial uptick in sales coincident with a substantial corresponding downtick in SLR cameras, then look for Nikon and Canon to start positioning to crush the remaining MILC manufacturers. Sony knows this, obviously, and is without question girding their loins for battle. This may be why they're hurling new models out at such a blistering pace. They need to establish the strongest beachhead possible because D-Day is right around the corner and those fuckers at Nikon and Canon are gonna hit the beach with extreme prejudice, and loaded for bear.
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