Since 1999, it’s been a firm web-usability guideline to refrain from opening new browser windows for several reasons. All of these also apply to opening new browser tabs and are still valid today:
More windows or tabs increase the clutter of the user’s information space and require more effort to manage.
New windows or tabs can cause disorientation, with users often not realizing that a new window or tab has opened. This problem is exacerbated on mobile, where the old window is never visible.
Less-technical users struggle to manage multiple windows and tabs, especially on mobile. (On tablets, where users can have both multiple windows and tabs for the browser, it’s even more confusing.)
New windows or tabs prevent the use of the Back button for returning to the previous page and force the user to spend effort to find their way back to the previous content.
New windows or tabs are not inclusive for blind or low-vision users — especially when they open outside of the area that’s magnified.
I had been opening external links in a new tab in the hope of keeping visitors on my site but I had not thought about the confusion this can cause, especially on mobile:
Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the _Back _button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed-out _Back _button.
Robert De Niro plays a healthy but lonely 70-year-old retired widower named Ben Whittaker. Ben worked as an accomplished executive who ran a company selling telephone books. Ben wants to connect and be useful to other people. He starts by going to Starbucks each day but that doesn’t get him the human interaction he craves. One day, Ben sees an ad from an online women’s clothing vendor seeking to hire “senior interns.” The firm is loosely based on Google. Ben applies by uploading a video and gets the job. He’s assigned to work directly for the CEO Jules Ostin played by Anne Hathaway. The interaction between the two characters is charming.
The film was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, who also wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give, a 2003 film starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. That film is about a man (Jack Nicholson) approaching senior citizen status who has a taste for younger women. I also enjoyed that film so I guess I have a taste for Meyers’s work.
Manolhla Dargis, writing for The New York Times explains in magnificent prose that:
The director Nancy Meyers doesn’t just make movies, she makes the kind of lifestyle fantasies you sink into like eiderdown. Her movies are frothy, playful, homogeneous, routinely maddening and generally pretty irresistible even when they’re not all that good. Her most notable visual signature is the immaculate, luxuriously appointed interiors she’s known to fuss over personally – they inevitably feature throw pillows that look as if they’ve been arranged with a measuring tape. These interiors are fetishized by moviegoers and Architectural Digest alike, ready-made for Pinterest and comment threads peppered with questions like, “Where do I get that hat?”
Although I wish I could write the way Ms. Dargis writes, I think the film has something meaningful to say about the way older and younger people can relate to one another in the workplace and elsewhere.
It seems that the film was a hit in South Korea for just this reason (WSJ). South Korean viewers appreciated the healthy and positive energy emanating from Ben, the character ably played by Robert DeNiro.
I did too. And besides, what’s wrong with some eiderdown in one’s life?
Emmanuel Nataf writing on PetaPixel discussing his hit rate on the Leica Q3 compared with the Canon R5:
Going back to my “hit rate,” I simply can’t get anywhere near my R5. Part of it is due to the ergonomics of the Q3: a typical Leica without joystick to move the focus and poorly placed dials (the worst one being for exposure, placed on the outer part of the body and hard to reach with your thumb). With the temperatures dropping in the past few weeks, I used the Q3 with gloves and missed countless street shots by pushing the Play button instead of the arrows, definitely killing my shots. You may wonder why I’m not using subject tracking: because switching between subjects rapidly with the Q3’s buttons is completely unreliable.
The second reason for the low hit rate is the autofocus: average in poor lighting conditions and terrible in motion. With the Q3, I’ve had to stop shooting while walking. I have to stop, compose my image and shoot when the right subject comes into the frame — a much less spontaneous experience than what I’m used to.
Lastly, the camera is painfully slow to wake up. It should be on within a few milliseconds, but it takes the Q3 a second or two to start… far too long when trying to capture an instant.
I too own both a Canon R5 and a Leica Q3. The R5 is my main camera. I love it but it is big and heavy compared to the Q3. The Q3 is small, a pleasure to hold and the image quality is great, maybe even a little better than the R5.
I agree that the Q3 is slow to start. But I just leave it on and then it starts pretty fast. Sure it drains the battery but the batteries aren’t big or heavy. It’s easy to carry extra batteries.
I adjust exposure using the camera dial and find that works well for me. The camera can be adjusted almost infinitely. You just have to experiment and see what works for you.
I agree that the R5’s autofocus is better than the Q3 but find that I can shoot on the fly with the Q3. I feel I’ve gotten some nice street photos with the Q3. The eye detection on the Q3 works very well.
I made the photos in this post with the Q3 while on a trip to Japan in 2023.
In my opinion, when it comes to small, light weight full-frame cameras, Leica has the market all to itself. Would I love to see more competition in this category? Sure. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
I am happy to have the Q3 in my bag along with the Canon R5.
Update: April, 2024: On a recent trip to Europe my Q3 malfunctioned. The SD card would not click in the slot. After returning home, I took the camera back to the Leica Store in Washington DC. They returned the camera to Leica Repair in New Jersey. On April 30, 2024 I received the following email message:
4/30 Your equipment has been inspected by our technician. Your repair has been processed and placed in queue. No action is required.
Error description
strong traces of use adjust/replace printed circuit SD card slot faulty
I don’t yet know how long the repair will take. I miss the camera. I really like it. I will continue to update.
Update: May 21, 2024:
Dear Leica Customer,
During the repair of your Leica product, the technician found that a part required to fully repair your equipment to Leica standards is currently out of stock.
Our colleagues and worldwide suppliers are working together to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. However, this will most likely delay the completion of the repair.
We apologize for the inconvenience and sincerely appreciate your patience. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact Customer Care at 201-995-0051 ext. 9930 or email repair@leicacamerausa.com
Sincerely,
Your Leica Team
Leica Camera USA INC. Customer Care
I am thinking of buying a Leica M11-P but this experience with the Q3 gives me pause. Still one Leica does not feel like it’s enough for me.
Update: May 24, 2024
I called Leica Repair today to see how long the repair will take. They answered the phone right away and explained the part I need (the SD card holder) must be manufactured and shipped from Germany. The wait will probably be a couple of months. They offered me a Q3 loaner for the duration of the repair, which sounds great to me. They will send me the loaner next week. When my camera is repaired they will notify me. I will then return the loaner and they will then ship my camera to me. I am glad I called.
I added that I’m thinking about buying an M11-P and asked how long repairs generally take. The reply was 60 days – and longer if the camera has to go back to Germany. Analogue repairs take much longer – nine months or longer.
I guess Leica is a small company and this is the price of admission.
Update: May 29, 2024
My Q3 loaner arrived today. Once I held the camera in my hands, I realized just how much I missed it. Luckily, I saved my profile settings on my Mac so I only had to transfer them to an SD card and load them into my loaner.
Update: August 7, 2024
Leica notified me a few days ago that my Q3 has been repaired. Leica sent me a prepaid shipping label and I returned the Q3 loaner. Today, my Q3 arrived well-packaged and working just fine. The entire process took about 100 days. With the loaner, I am happy with Leica service.
Anna, a young woman training to be a nun in 1960s Poland is on the verge of taking her vows when she meets her only living relative for the first time and learns that she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Together they discover what happened to Anna/Ida’s family.
This jewel is only 82 minutes long and every moment makes good use of the viewer’s time. The story is one example of the decimation of Poland’s Jews during World War II. But in the end, this is not a film about Poland or the Holocaust – but about life.
The film, which came out in 2013, is in black and white. The places photographed are ordinary yet the cinematography is stunning. Each scene looks like a black and white photograph made by a Magnum photographer using a Leica camera. Łukasz Żal is a superb, young cinemaphotographer born in Koszalin, Poland.
Ida is played by Agata Trzebuchowska. Her character is sweet, innocent and beautiful. Her aunt Wanda – Agata Kulesza – is also a fine actress.
Pawel Pawlikowski directed the film. He was born in Warsaw in 1957. At the age of 14, Pawlikowski left Poland to live in Germany and Italy, before settling in Britain. In 2004, he directed My Summer of Love with Emily Blunt and Natalie Press.
This film touched me deeply and left me thinking for a long time about what’s important and what’s not. It is among the best films I have seen.
The second and final volume of German historian Volker Ullrich’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Downfall 1939–1945, opens with high praise for the wartime diaries of Friedrich Kellner.
Kellner, a court official in the small town of Laubach, had no special access to inside information. Yet he was repulsed by the Nazi regime and began keeping a detailed diary, recording what he read in the German press and what he heard from those around him. He hoped his writings would serve as a warning to future generations against blind faith and dictatorship.
Ullrich explains that Kellner’s diaries “show that it was entirely possible for normal people in small-town Germany to see through the lies of Nazi propaganda and learn of things like the ‘euthanasia’ murders of patients in psychiatric institutions and the mass executions carried out in occupied parts of eastern Europe.”
The Kellner diaries were first published in German in 2011 and are now available in English. They are also the subject of a moving 2007 television documentary created by Kellner’s American grandson.
Quote Investigator is a website that fact-checks the reported origins of widely circulated quotations. According to Wikipedia, the website was started in 2010 by Gregory F. Sullivan, a former Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who runs the site under the pseudonym Garson O’Toole. Many of the quotes examined on the site are emailed to him by readers.
Sullivan “tries to track down correct information about the provenance of sayings by utilizing the massive text databases that are being constructed right now along with other quotation history resources.”
The site reports that it had more than 4.2 million visitors between June 1, 2021 and May 31, 2022. It’s a free site.
The Library of Congress also hosts a list of quotation reference websites. However, many of these websites, unlike Quote Investigator, do not cite an original source. Even so, it is a good resource.
I made this photograph of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 2019. This was only possible because of the beautiful lights on the span. The lights have been on the bridge since 2013 when a public art installation called “The Bay Lights” was activated on the bridge.
The installation was designed by artist Leo Villareal and consists of 25,000 LED lights. This beautiful display stretches 1.8 miles across 300 cables on the western span of the Bay Bridge. Sadly, after ten years the display is worn out and and, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, will go dark on March 5, 2023. However, efforts are underway to raise $11 million to keep “Bay Lights” shining on the Bay Bridge.
Jim Hill is a Chicago photographer worth getting to know. He became fascinated by Chicago’s nighttime alleys and back streets during the pandemic:
I submerged myself in studies of how artificial lights penetrate the darkness of an urban environment. That darkness provided me comfort and cover from the events going on around me. The artificial lights transformed what is bland and ugly in the daylight into a beautiful hidden world, which is visible to those willing to risk the unknown, the shadows.
During the pandemic, fear and death seemed to permeate everything. Roaming forgotten places in the darkness to capture the hope of the light allowed me to confront the panic around me and gave me the strength to carry on. Ultimately, my work is about confronting fear and finding the beauty, which can emerge from the unknown, the darkness.
You can follow Jim Hill’s thought provoking photographs on Flickr and Instagram.
