The world is full of them.

A friend was visiting the other day and, once that most important of hours came to pass, namely the Cocktail Hour, I did the dutiful thing and prepared a couple of martinis. My avocation is for the gin martini, having come of age in Britain, but my friend preferred one made with vodka. No problem.

Well, once the magic libation began to take effect, he complimented me grandly on the magnificent drink and enquired of the name of the vodka maker.

“Why, Belvedere, of course” quoth I, “Is there anything else?”. This stuff sells for megabucks, by the way.

“But of course”, responded my guest, “I can always tell the great vodkas”.

Suffice it to say that what he was drinking was bottom shelf Gordon’s, ($10 the bottle), the vermouth made by Gallo ($2.99).

My friend, you see, is a Label Drinker.

They are everywhere.

In the sound reproduction world fortunes have been made by peddling ordinary copper wire advertised as ‘Oxygen free with all molecules aligned’ at twenty times the price of the stuff at Home Depot. The Label Drinker can hear the difference, you see, between HD speaker cable and the $50 a foot exotic which, he knows, at that price has to be good. Put a blindfold on him and things don’t look so good of course.

In wine, the Label Drinker is everywhere. Here in the States, John Q Public has wisened up and is buying Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, realising that he gets 95% of the flavor and 100% of the alcohol that the $30 variety sells for. The grapes from my vineyard go into a $38 a bottle wine, if you must know, and I wouldn’t be caught dead paying that sort of amount for a bottle of Zinfandel, pride of authorship notwithstanding. Mercifully, TBC is rarely available in Zinfandel.

Cars specialize in LDs. The Ferrari must be better at four times the price of the Corvette. Even if the latter is faster, stops better, uses less fuel, is dirt cheap to maintain, and on and on.

And in better sushi bars in America what do you see the Japanese ordering? Why, Coors of course. None of that mass market Kirin garbage when you are abroad.

In photography, the Label Drinker has several sub-species.

The most comical, of course, is the Leica fetishist. He thinks nothing of paying a $150 premium for a Leica DLux-2, which is nothing more than a Panasonic Lumix LX1 with a red Leica logo. $150 for a logo. A fool and his money are easily parted. Go Leica!

A more modern manifestation is the film Luddite. Like the guy who will tell you that LPs sound far better than CDs (he can usually pass the blind test as all the clicks, pops and scratches readily distinguish vinyl from CDs), this type of Label Drinker will swear up and down that nothing, but nothing, matches the tonal range, depth, emotion, blah, blah, blah, of film. But of course.

Which brings me to another recent LD episode. I was showing a bunch of 13″ x 19″ prints to another friend the other day. I like to keep a collection lying around to try them on viewers. Only snag was, this viewer was also a photographer. Of the Old School. You know what that means. “So what did you take these on?” he asked, trying to appear as cool and disinterested as possible. “Why, on 4″ x 5″ film of course”, I replied. “Can you even imagine using anything else for landscapes”. “Absolutely not”, he agreed, a flush coming to his cheeks, as he warmed to his subject. “I use it myself. Nothing beats the tonal range, does it?” Don’t even think of getting this fellow onto the subject of the superiority of monochrome over color. Life’s too short, bores too long.

A bunch of prints….

I have yet to summon up the courage to admit to my lie and tell this Label Drinker that everyone of the dozen or so pictures was taken on the Canon 5D. Not a piece of film in sight. And even had they been on film, they would have been digitised at some point though scanning. How else to print them?

But let’s not be too harsh on Label Drinkers. They can make us a lot of money while providing much innocent fun along the way. My exhibition prints, you understand, are always taken on film.

Postscript: For confirmation from no less august a source than the Wall Street Journal, download their piece on the same topic – which addresses the topic of fake expertise when it comes to wine – by clicking here.

One gets it. The other? Oh! well.

I’ve mentioned before that the greatest photographic companies of the twenty-first century will not have their roots in photography. As Kodak, Fuji, Minolta, Leica and Konica all die on the vine, new entrants like Samsung, Casio, Sony and Epson take their place.

And by any standards, two of the outstanding ‘new’ photography companies are Apple and Hewlett Packard. The former makes great enabling technology, both hardware and software, to make the photographer’s life an easy one. The latter makes some great digital cameras and drop dead fantastic printers like the DesignJet series (click ‘Printing’ in the left column for more).

Both companies have great chief executives – the one a driven visionary, the other an outstanding operator.

Yet what a contrast in governance. Whereas you never hear of Apple’s board, the one at HP takes the prize for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

Apple cleverly includes a former vice president of the US (you know, the guy who discovered the internet). Politicians are cheap and this one isn’t going to get in anyone’s way as he eyes the White House yet again, right after he fixes global warming. Plus you get all those sales to fellow travellers. The others – there are only six in addition to Steve Jobs – are the CEO of a clothes manufacturer (what?), the CEO of a genetics company (double what?), two techies (it’s lost on no one that the latest addition is the CEO of Google – now that’s a money making opportunity, no?) and a brilliant financier to give some gloss to the whole thing. In other words, Apple doesn’t let the Board of Directors get in the way of business. Clearly, Jobs is managing these not-so-cool dudes right, judging by the complete absence of boardroom leaks. Heck, he probably doesn’t tell them about the next great thing until it’s on the market….

Now look at HP. You cannot but help look at them, for they make the headlines daily. Here the board numbers no fewer than nine (and falling rapidly, thank goodness – it was an unmanageable eleven in May), including the CEO. This is the same board, recall, that gave us a predecessor CEO who had two goals in mind. Maximizing the number of glossy covers she made and maximizing time on her bottom in the corporate jet. Unfortunately, she also minimized shareholder wealth. Now why the new CEO simply didn’t fire the lot when he came in beats me. Not like he didn’t have the opportunity. So now HP is lost in umpteen investigations of how it tapped telephones to trace endless boardroom leaks and is mightily distracted from making the shareholders money. Every schmuck lawyer, in our out of government, is all over this like slime on a …. well, lawyer. And this board is a real dusie, as former NYC mayor Ed Koch might remark. A couple of women whose qualifications seem quite irrelevant to the job, and at least one of whom might end up in the Federal pokey for her part in a small matter of phone tapping. Time will tell. And six guys, some of whom cannot keep their mouths shut. You want to be on a board where one of your fellow directors is tapping your phone? How badly do you need the fees and free dinners?

And that’s bad for photographers because, despite having a board room full of dopes, HP – to borrow from Apple – makes some insanely great products.

Still, I suppose there’s always Samsung waiting to take its place.