Thanks, Greg.
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Thanks, Greg.
Initially, the problems in the article were sparse and far between, and due to comments in this thread, they have been addressed in the revised version. How could the article be "full of problems" still? The burden of proof is on the accuser, who mentions only one. But is that one even a problem?
To find that out there is a simple experiment that everybody with a camera and a lens can replicate at home. With the camera in neutral settings, point it at a rectangular object from an oblique angle, like the table in my Figure 2, such that it almost fills the ground glass from top to bottom, and focus in the middle of it. Then use only front tilt to make the plane of focus flush with the object (and adjust focus as necessary). As you will see, the proportions of the object don't change. Set the front back in neutral position and now use back tilt to adjust the plane of focus. Consequentially, the part of the object close to the camera looks wider and bigger than before. This elementary knowledge on LF camera's is also illustrated in Simmons Using The View Camera (2nd ed) pp. 59-60. For photographs of people, it implies that when using back tilt on the horizontal axis, a face will look fatter than it is, and when using back tilt on the vertical axis, like in Fig.2, arms (or legs) will look disproportionally long. If such a distortion is not a deliberate and desired effect, like it was in Fig.2, use front movements, exactly like I said. No problem after all.
If you're still taking revisions, there is another contradiction to address:
Distribution of sharpness and lens personality
Although lenses of the same type and brand differ somewhat in sharpness across specimen and across focal lengths, they typically show up a highly similar distribution of sharpness (1) over their apertures (e.g. optimal at f16–f22), (2) over distance (e.g. optimized for short range), and (3) over the center-to-edge range (e.g. sharp almost to the edge versus only in the center); and, they have the same characteristics for bokeh, color rendition, contrast, and flare, that together determine skin tones. We may thus speak about the personality of a lens in terms of these traits.
This seems to be in conflict with:
150mm Tessars
To get great bokeh, there are much cheaper lenses than the Lanthar, among others some Tessars. Tessars have been built for over a century by many different factories, creating a wide variety of lens personalities with not many family traits that all of them share, perhaps only their bokeh, which is better than Plasmats’. Other traits, e.g. color, flare, distribution of sharpness, and contrast differ considerably, and not all Tessars are suitable for portraits, as we will see
Point taken, thanks.
I told myself I wouldn’t get drawn back into this, but I hate having people edit my words selectively.
I specifically differentiated between front movements for architectural purposes and rear movements for portraiture, something you edited out. In architecture, corrections are made with front movements when even slight distortions of straight parallel lines are critical. This comes at the expense of taking the lens off its optical axis, ie, it is no longer pointing at the center of the film, and you risk working at or beyond the edges of the image circle.
Yes, let’s look at your figure 2 as an example. You used a 150mm Sironar-S with a 231mm image circle on the 5x7 format that has an image circle of 210mm. You’ve got about 10mm, less than half an inch, for movement at each corner. By going outside the area of coverage and into just the area of illumination, you’ve sacrificed resolution to a degree obvious in even a web image, let alone a print. And that’s with a relatively wide-covering plasmat. Try it with a Ronar or Tessar, and you wouldn’t even have illumination.
The human face and figure have no grid of parallel lines to worry about. Without geometric grids, the amount of distortion that will occur from using normal rear movements is not apparent to the human eye. (What is very apparent to the eye is the spatial distortion you introduced by using such a short lens for a portrait with the hand so extended forward as to make it unnaturally large, an irony in an example of how to avoid distortions and preserve proportions...)
Trying to put it very, very simply, the concerns that are critical with straight, parallel lines of architecture are secondary to keeping a lens on axis in portraiture where there are no geometric lines to worry about.
This is one reason why dedicated large format studio portrait cameras, from the E&HT Anthony Portrait Cameras of the 1880’s, through all the Century Studio Cameras of the early 20th century, to the last of the studio cameras, the B&J Rembrandt Portrait Cameras and Master Pictorialist Cameras of the 1950’s and 60’s, were made with no front movements.
Seriously, setting all my points aside, do you claim to know more about what is necessary in a portrait camera than multiple generations of camera builders and professional portrait photographers working across the golden age of large format portraiture? (Somehow, I don’t think this will be answered…)
I will go through the basics again:
If someone comes from your site where you’ve linked to your article on “mostly old lenses”, they will believe that:
1.) They are learning about “old” lenses. (They are not.)
2.) If one is interested in “bokeh”, (a word your article used 51 times), a good recommendation is: “If the sitter can't stay motionless and I want to bet on the safe side, I use f16 or f22.” (There are multiple techniques to helping a subject stay motionless, and one need not sacrifice aesthetic control.)
3.) Century Studio Cameras (and others like them) are not adequate for portraiture because “you have to use mostly front movements”. (It is arguably one of the best choices one could make for studio portraiture.)
BTW, regarding your Lanthar, which you say "looks as if this lens has inbuilt yellow and green filters," and as a result, "The Lanthar’s color rendition is weird, looks like 17th century paintings, and needs Photoshop correction." The Lanthar's radioactive glass yellows over time due to radiation tracks in the glass, and can be bleached by leaving it in the sun for a few days.
...and to the rest of the forum, I apologize. It was a long day...
Multiple points to be addressed, for which I change the order.
The Lanthar.
Thanks for reminding me of bleaching the glass in UV light. I had read it years ago, then forgot about it, and will now try it. Depending on how good this works, I'll mention it in the next version.
Movements.
Shift is not the first camera movement that comes to my mind for portraits (although I use it if a person is in front of a building), as the prime target is (usually) to get the eyes sharp, for which tilts are necessary. Any more back tilt than a very little I do notice, as well as disgruntled sitters did on whom I tried this. The experiment I described in my previous message everyone can replicate at home to verify the distortion I talk about. Why did those studio portrait camera's back in the fifties that you mention only have back movements? Were image circles typically small, or were only little movements used? By the way, if we would have to deal with shift only, then shifting the front up or the back down amounts to exactly the same result, so then one of them can be left off the camera.
150mm Sironar-S.
Electrical guitars were initially not invented for rock 'n roll, and when they started being used for that new genre, some complained about the distortion and noise. We all know how that story continued. In general, finding new applications for existing materials is part of the creative process. The text in my article describes how to make portraits without distortions first, i.e. by using front movements, and when the novice knows this, (s)he can subsequently do whatever (s)he wants. For as long as some art collectors love my near-far portraits with the Sironar-S, and you don't pay my bills, I continue to use my Sironar-S beyond it's initial purposes and limitations. By the way, the 231mm image circle is at infinity, but at the close range where I work I have more.
Bokeh and focus.
The word bokeh (with some explication added) concisely summarizes what one wants for a portrait lens without going overboard on the technicalities of spherical aberration. For a portrait, even at f22, there is plenty of unsharp background that one wants it for.
In the article, there are multiple examples and mentioning in the text of portraits shot wide open before the reader reaches the sentence: “If the sitter can't stay motionless and I want to bet on the safe side, I use f16 or f22.” For sitters in difficult positions, multiple sitters who move with respect to each other (Fig 15), or non-cooperative ones, my advice makes it possible to get the eyes sharp. Additionally, many contemporary photographers want the entire face sharp, not only the eyes, and they deliberately use smaller apertures (e.g. the highly successful Rineke Dijkstra, among many others). So what's the loss of aesthetic control for you is the gain of it for others. But the world is big enough to contain a diversity of aesthetic views.
Old lenses.
Due to your earlier remarks, I've made it clear at the start that the article is about lenses that their manufacturers mounted in shutters. Experts then know that it's about more recent lenses than those from the "brass age" of photography. On my personal webpage outside the LF-domain I can write whatever I want, though, and for that matter say that I import my lenses from Saturn and use its rings as retainers. I say there that my lenses are old not only because most people think they are, but mainly because compared to their lenses, most of mine are actually relatively old.
Well, thanks to you moderaters. I can take off my flame proof suit now!
In fact, this can be (and IMHO should be) answered. Yes I am sure any knowledgeable photographer of the modern era (like the one whose article is being criticized here) knows much more about what is necessary in a MODERN portrait camera than the camera builders and photographers of the 'golden age of large format portraiture' - just because ALL modern anastigmats are VERY different from the 'golden age' glass.
No this was not the reason. The real reason was the curved, almost spherical field (=zone of sharp focus) of Aplanats (Rapid Rectlinears) and Petzval type portrait lenses. Imagine tilting a lens with a spherical 'plane' of focus, and literary NOTHING will change in the sharpness distribution across the image. Actually, the only change will be the fast fast running out of the lens' coverage - incredibly small compared to modern glass. With all lenses like this, why make a camera with front tilts and swings?!
Yes the 'golden age' folks WOULD build, and gladly use, front tilt and swing cameras - if only they had a chance....
I've spent the last month retesting all the TESSAR type lenses I have at hand. Most of them are too short for LF portraiture, but I got the idea. My sincere apologies for my previous claim.... and many many thanks for the correction.
Yes my 4.5/101 Wollensak Raptar and my 4.5/105 and 4.7/127 Tominons and my 4.7/127 Rodenstock Ysaron and my 4.5/135 uncoated Zeiss Tessar and my 4.5/190 Kodak Enlarging Ektanon easily beat my 100, 135, 150, 180 and 210 Convertible Symmars and Convertible Sironars - bokeh-vise. These tessars yield beautiful foreground blur and awful background blur at full aperture, and vise-versa from f/6.3 on. It is particularly interesting that the Ysaron, Tominon and Ektanon are enlarging lenses that certainly were not deliberately optimized for bokeh by their designers (go try an enlarging plasmat to see a really shocking ugly bokeh - both in the background and the foreground!). I wonder if the Ysarex and Ektar lenses are still better than the Ysaron and Ektanon.
The (hard to describe) IN-focus pictorial qualities are IMHO the best in the 101mm Raptar (but only within 24x36mm film frame!), with the 127mm Ysaron very close to it. Next I'd put the old 135mm Zeiss Tessar (within 24x36mm film frame only) and the 190mm Ektanon (within 6x7cm film frame) stopped down to f/8 (both are too soft for my taste at wider apertures). The Tominons are somewhat "dull and technical" in the sharp-focus zone.
That said, I would not use the (fantastic for a 24x36mm SLR) 101mm Raptar and the old 135mm Zeiss even on a 4.5x6cm camera as both have to be brutally stopped down to get reasonably sharp outside the central part of the field, and I like the 190mm Ektanon at f/8 and f/11 on 4.5x6cm to 6x7cm but no bigger. In fact, it was the poor field sharpness of the vast majority of the tessars that turned me away from taking them seriously, years ago....
(Sorry I would not list all the tessar-type glass I've put my hands on; hope the above examples are enough.)
Convertible Symmars and Convertible Sironars are still very good (and IMHO the best-bokeh plasmats ever made - though less beautiful then the best of the tessars) for background blur at all apertures, the Symmar IMHO having a very slight edge over the Sironar. The Apo-Sironar-S and the Apo-Symmar-L, if I remember correctly (don't have any of them at hand now), are to be stopped down to about f/11 for better background bokeh, this time the Sironar probably being better. I do not know of any other plasmats with good bokeh (I never tried the before mentioned 240mm Fujinon-A though).
And as I totally agree the back camera tilts and swings are better to be avoided in portraiture (and for a lot of other subjects, too), for me, the lens' coverage gets way more important in LF - which means at least the longer of my Convertible Symmars are not going to be retied yet....
You might find this interesting: Click on the photo above to see a comparison of the bokeh or blur rendition of 4 different lenses of standard "portrait" length: 210mm Braunschweig Heliar, 210mm Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar, 240mm Fujinon A (a plasmat), 240mm APO Nikkor (a dialyte). I've tried to match the images in terms of tone, size and perspective. (It's a fairly large image, and your browser will probably shrink it to fit the frame, but you can click it to see full-sized.)
These lenses represent a small sample of designs old and new, stopped down to f/11. I tried to focus on the bottle in the center of the image. The Heliar shows some focus-shift, of which I was unaware until after the setup had been dismantled. Closing the aperture to f/11 after focusing at f/4.5 shifted the point of focus closer, to the edge of the book. This may be why we see a slightly greater blur in the distance with the Heliar lens.
My conclusion: At this aperture, the only difference we might see, could be attributed to a aperture shape - but in order to see any compelling effect, we need specular highlights: small points of bright light. For "normal" scenes at "normal" apertures, any difference in blur rendition is negligible. Wide open, the Heliar would show the greatest amount of blur, because it's designed to do just that: it's a "portrait" design where aberrations disappear at around f/9. Stopped down even moderately, it is hard to see any difference whatsoever between these 4 samples.
Nice of you to speak for all those photographers, but, um...
The Century Studio Cameras came out in 1904, (http://www.largeformatphotography.in...-Studio-Camera). To quote Jay Allen, "The Century Studio Camera took almost all the professional portraits in America for more than half a Century (1904-1960) but today's modern photographers know nothing about this camera."
Flat field lenses available by the time the first Century came out included Tessars, Cooke Triplets, Heliars, Protars, plastigmats, Unars, Dagors, and many others. And there were field cameras with front movements available by the time the Century Studio Cameras were intruduced, so yes, those photographers did have that option, and most professional portrait photographers went with the studio cameras.
By the way, the manufacturers could have incorporated front movements into the studio cameras, but most didn't, and the Century (by far the most popular) never did, over several decades and many models.
So we're left with a reference article advising photographers to use narrow-coverage lenses (all of the author's recommended "favorite portrait lenses, a bunch that I call 'the seven samurai'") well off-axis. I consider this very bad advice. Vignetting will be a problem, and the sharper center of some of those lenses will be moved off-center, and for no good reason. Just a recipe for problems...
You've got to be kidding me. Are you one of those "modern photographers who knows much more than previous generations...?" How have you improved on the Scheimpflug principle (1904)? How are "modern" anastigmats different than the original Zeiss 1890s Anastigmat? Or from a Dallmeyer Triple Achromat from 1860? Relative to movements?
Have you ever actually TAKEN any photographs with a Petzval or Rectilinear? It doesn't sound like it. Movements are very useful for them, in 1870 and in 2012. And the RR was a radical improvement in terms of curved fields over the Petzval, that's what it's attraction was. Your statement "...all [older] lenses like this..." is absolutely wrong. You must not know about all the lens designs before the anastigmats.
Are you actually trying to say there WERE no movement cameras in the early 20th century? How about 19th century? What is the "golden era" for you, 1850? You're right, early daguerreotype cameras didn't have movements. But look at an old 1900 Sanderson or an earlier Chapman and you'll find front movements galore. My 1893 Rochester has them too.
I suggest Ridax and jeroenbruggeman should learn to do a little more research before posturing themselves as "experts" at anything.
So that little provocation was enough to see other people stating front tilts and swings were very useful and were in use indeed. :)
Though the least-flat-field Petzvals were also in production well into the mid-20th century and certainly in use up to the present day - along with the fixed-front cameras, and totally within the 1850s tradition.
I guess that's just a matter of style. And as such, it possibly should not be used as an argument on the original topic....
I strongly suspect the problem is just that - taking any word written for an authoritative advice, or even a recipe, not a mere description of the writer's personal style preferences. Yes I would hesitate taking (or giving) that (as well as many other ideas) as an advice. But I would never ever object to sharing this (and the strictly opposite) as anyone's personal way of creative photography.
The question is, has an article for this website to be constructed of well-proved universal truths only, or may it contain any concepts that some of the other photographers do not accept?
.... My apologies for the harsh style and the one-sided argumentation of that previous post of mine.
P.S.: Yes I have tried a circa 300mm 1850's French Petzval and a 600mm f/6 Bush Aplanat on my 8x10", offered for sale by a fellow photographer. No I did not buy any of them. Yes I admit I am an anastigmat person myself....
I've said this before. It is entirely within the capabilities of any author worth publishing to distinguish between statements of fact (which requires proofs) and statements of opinion, including the opinion of which facts are relevant for the task at hand. Opinions, when stated as such, don't demand proof. But they do demand reasoning grounded in what has been proved.
Authors rigorous in this way usually don't get challenged, if their proofs are valid. They either write the evidence into the article, or they explain it later (if they can).
One thing should be clear at this point: assertions are not facts, or proofs, and won't be accepted as such by knowledgeable readers.
Rick "finding that acknowledging gaps in one's knowledge is a sure step to filling them" Denney
I apologise in advance if I am stepping on anyone's toes in this thread or that I give the impression that I know what I am talking about, but as a newbie to Large Format photography I have done a great deal of reading over the last couple of months to try to understand the various movements on the camera and how their use effects the image, and, as I understand it similar front and back shifts actually give a different result with the front shift giving a change in vantage point. Am I wrong?
Shift or rise/fall, via front or rear standards, net identical results. Tilt or swing, via front or rear standards, net very different results.
I believe you are right, Ed. Movement of the lens changes the relationship of near and far things in the photograph.
Old-N-Feeble is also right in that if first you move the whole camera to the new lens position and then move the back back, this is equivalent to moving the lens.
This is described well in the Time Life book series, The Studio. and is best understood (by me) in how much I am looking up the nose, in portraiture.
I once had the entire Time-Life Photography series I accumulated as a teen. I might still them packed away somewhere. I can't remember. IIRC, they were a very nice thorough source for information.
I think the problem is that articles on the Reference Page, people should be able to trust that they are getting "authoritative advice" and learning sound, useful principles of working from people with some level of expertise and experience. The article in question gives bad information and teaches sloppy technique.
The question left in my mind is, are there any standards at all for Reference Page articles?
If Bruggeman is going to pronounce as wrong the working methods and well-proved universal truths from multiple generations of professional portrait photographers and camera makers, he needs to back it up with sound reason and knowledge.
Each creative act is a sudden cession of stupidity, apparently Edwin Land said that. Go and do something more interesting, like make some mushy portraits with rear movements only. Nobody cares except you.
I would not call it bad/sloppy but I agree the information is incomplete.
Good point. Sorry I had paid little attention to this before.
But what I know for sure from the first-hand experience in the book publishing world is, a quality work of fiction needs at least 2 to 3 editors, along with the author him/herself, editing and re-editing the text at least 2 to 3 times, and any scientific or technical paper surely needs a lot more - even when it is not meant to be a universal reference.
Setting the standards that high is surely nice but I'm afraid for this topic, a multi-year work of several of the most knowledgeable and experienced authors is needed to make it complete.
Well, may be that project has just started.... assuming of course the people participating in it exhibit a lot of good will and patience and tolerance.
I suppose we're just choosing different words, but advising people to use narrow-coverage lenses off-axis for no good reason is, for me, bad information. And in an article that dwells so heavily on "bokeh", Bruggeman's statement that if "I want to bet on the safe side, I use f16 or f22," shows sloppy technique. Closing the aperture that much has a significant effect on the image, and to do it "just to be safe" is trading away a lot of aesthetic control.
Other things, like defining "bokeh" as simply "creaminess" is very incomplete.
Now you're teasing us! :)
Yes I am.
Because I really wish to see the project completed - up to the very high standards you are advocating here. And also because I realize I would probably never do it myself as I think I do see what an enormous body of work it is. (That month spent on short focal length tessars alone is well enough for me. And please bear in mind that little survey of mine does not even include a single f/6.3 tessar - which are different beasts with similar pictorial properties but with less astigmatism and much better field sharpness.)
And because of this, I feel a lot of respect to the person who was daring enough to get the work started. And that's why I strongly prefer to be very careful in choosing the words I use to criticize his work.
The biggest reason for difference between the photos I see, is the lighting, not the lenses. What I see as outdoor portraits has nicer reflections of the skin than the studio portraits, so the "holy grail of portrait" is not the lens, but the light ;-)
The second edition of my review of portrait lenses is online. Changes with respect to the first edition are the following, along with a number of minor modifications.
As promised, a review of a Dagor is added.
The tea-colored front lens of a Lanthar can be cleaned by sunlight indeed, as Mark pointed out, so my earlier complaint about its color rendition has been deleted.
At the beginning there is a somewhat more balanced account of in-focus skin tones and out-of focus bokeh (versus a bias towards bokeh at the expense of skin tones in the first edition).
Also at the beginning there is a treatment of camera movements and image circles.
The-man-who-calls-himself-Ridax tested a bunch of Tessars (and I tested one more, a 180mm Bausch and Lomb wide open), reconfirming my earlier claim that in general, Tessars have better bokeh than Plasmats.
Nobody reacted to my proposal in this thread to review a 127mm Ysarex (f4.7), a Tessar attached to a hand-held camera, so I saved myself the trouble of testing it elaborately. What I can say briefly is that apart from its focus and image circle, it performs very similar to the 210mm Ysarex discussed in the review article. Of course wide open, bokeh shows up more clearly with a 210mm than with a 127mm lens. The image circle of the 127mm is tight, and from wide open until f5.6 the corners are mushy. Stopped down further, it performs as well as its big brother.
Sorry for going a bit off-topic but I just can't resist the temptation to put this in....
It seems that being positively sure about anything is just enough to get all one's beliefs ruined at once :). So, as an extra argument for the pedantic writing style, please meet a 180mm f/6 non-apo Doppel-Anastigmat Ronar, serial #1677, manufactured by G. Rodenstock, München (according to the published numbers/dates, well before 1910).
Unlike the modern Apo-Ronar, this Ronar is really a double (convertible) anastigmat. It is perfectly symmetrical and has 4 elements in 4 groups, but this is not a common Celor (dialite) type Ronar. It is a double Gauss, with positive menisci outside and negative menisci closer to the diaphragm. At infinity, this strange Ronar covers a field of about 10" in diameter, with excellent sharpness but naturally poor contrast due to the 8 glass-to-air surfaces and the absence of coating. Its foreground blur is nice at full aperture, and its background blur is very good at f/16 (at f/11, both are nothing to write home about). If I had no Symmars that are as sharp but are also coated, I would be very excited about a Ronar like this...
BTW, I guess this unsung Ronar may well turn out to be the earliest Rodenstock that still survives. Any collectors out there? ;)
Attachment 80235
Figure 16, designated Apo Ronar 240 f16, is definetly a mistake. Rules of Optics do not allow a depth of field of 30 or 40cm with a scale down of estimated only 1:4.
Jeroen, hello! Tahnk you very much fopr your artcile on the large format lenses, very informative and with examples. I have been very impressed with the photo made with the Rodenstock Apo-Ronar 240 where focus is so unique it looks totally amazing. I am thinking to buy large format camera and really would love to know what you used as such focusing makes my heart as a mainly a portrait photographer feel endless happiness. Also would love to ask about the size of the negative, i usually use 13x18 cm, 18x24 cm and plan to get 8x10 inches and 30 x 30 cm. Thank you a lot! Best regards from Moscow
Although, I know what Armin means... I would definitely have to agree with you here.
Over the years, I have learned that 'Lighting'... Is always of the very utmost and 'Primary' importance.
--
If, I ever had to make a choice between using the 'Best' Lens for the Job...
Or seeking the 'Best' Lighting for the Job -- I would always choose the very best Lighting. Thank-you!
Kind Regards, -Tim.
"Lighting is vital. Without that they've got Nothing."
~~ Joe Grant. ~~
"If, I ever had to make a choice between using the 'Best' Lens for the Job...
Or seeking the 'Best' Lighting for the Job -- I would always choose the very best Lighting. Thank-you!"
If you manage to realize the best lighting, why not have a good lens as well? A portait with a Heliar will then look much better than with an Apo-Symmar L.
Hello Jeroen.
Thanks a lot for this article and sharing your experience on the use of those lenses.
I was happy to see I choosed some appropriate lenses such as Schneider Symmar S 210 mm and Rodenstock Ronar 240 mm. They are very good for townscapes. I will use them for portraits.
Do you know of a book or article about the portrait in LF? I want to train with scheimpflung on it...
regards
Ariel
Dear Ariel,
There are inspiring books by good portrait photographers who typically do not reveal the technicalities, and there are technical books, e.g. on Scheimpflug, that do not explain how to make portraits in LF. So the only thing I could recommend is to practice a lot. It helps a great deal if you make your sitter feel comfortable and arrange some support for the head such that it does not move when you fiddle the knobs.
Best,
Jeroen
Hi Ariel,
Sinar published a book on people photography with Sinar LF cameras back in the 90s. The book is kind of pricey and short, but here is a link to the book on AMAZON.com:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...le+photography
Namaste,
Daniel
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...le+photography
"People Photography (Creative Large Format) People Photography is the fourth volume in the series Creative Large Format.
Photography in the large format is the new trend, especially in demanding advertising and fashion photography."
Product Details:
Series: Creative Large Format
Paperback: 95 pages
Publisher: Sinar Publications AG (April 1996)
ISBN-10: 372310049X
ISBN-13: 978-3723100493
Is this what you were trying to link to?
https://www.amazon.com/People-Photog...le+photography
[Cold thread, but I will post anyway...:cool:]
Although this thread seems to have gotten out of hand along the way, evidenced by the very numerous moderator‘s deletions and the residual incisiveness of some of the surviving posts, I would like to thank all participants, and, of course, the author of the topic article, because I have learned a lot from both the article and the discussion. Neither by completely accepting nor by completely rejecting the very disparate points of view, but by using them as jigsaw pieces to add to the concept puzzle in my own head, so to speak.
On a more general side, the article might have benefitted from a third party redaction before publication, and the thread’s discussion on the part of the primary author could have benefitted from a somewhat less defensive stance that sometimes comes across as self-righteous or even self-aggrandizing. The discussion on the other participant‘s side may have benefitted from a more compassionate demeanor- publishing such an opiniated article on the web takes courage, after all.
Anyway, again, thanks for everybody for the many, many useful bits of knowledge, sometimes even buried inbetween the lines of the more vociferous comments.
Kind regards