I'm semi-seriously thinking about getting BW chemicals and a decent enough scanner for doing BW 120 rolls. I just sent off a few for processing and scanning today, and for the price of that, I'm halfway toward being able to develop them myself.

Speaking of Kodak... HG Wells's Time Traveller refers to it, wishing he had thought to take one with him to the Far Future.

#2: Hey, someone else noticed!

My father had a little darkroom under the stairs when he was a kid. I used his equipment for a little while, and also joined the photography club at the local Boy's Club.

My sister was more enthusiastic about shooting and developing. I don't think she ever got an enlarger; I know we had a wooden contact print box and that's about it.

Someday I'll have to try to explain film photography to my nieces. They are enthusiastic photographers, but I don't think they've ever seen, much less operated, a film camera.

No, I take that back. A certain world-renowned photographer is married to my mother's cousin and always has his camera with him at family get-togethers. He wouldn't touch a digital camera, much less use it. FWIW, he uses 126 roll film.

My wife has turned our spare bathroom into a dark room. She does gum prints, a sort of cross between photography and watercolor, where the negative is printed onto watercolor paper and washes of watercolor paint bring out the image. Lovely stuff.

My father did the B&W dark room thing. I have several memorable photos of me from that era. My mother used to say that my father, an only son, was more enamored of my brother, also an only son, that he was of me. I look at those photos, and know, even if my brother may have been the "only son" favorite, I was well and truly loved. You can't take pics like that without love.

When I finally got my first SLR film camera, I took oodles and oodles of tacky snapshot-esque color pics. For amusement's sake, I put in a roll of B&W, and took an entire roll of stunningly amazing candid family shots. I never quite hit that "entire roll" magic again, but now with a digital camera and all its fun buttons, I try the same shot color, sepia, B&W when I can. I never know what's going to be heart-stopping until I get it on the computer screen.

I grew up in a house with a darkroom when I was little, and spent my teens and early 20's traveling Arizona in a beat up jeep and taking black and white photographs. Won a few awards as a teenager. I wanted to be a photojournalist, but couldn't afford the cost of the paper for college classes. It was just completely unaffordable. So I just messed around with it for years, whenever I could scrape up the money, but eventually I couldn't even afford that.

I've dabbled with modern digital SLRs enough lately to know that everything involved is much cheaper in real dollars. I absolutely loathe the user interface on digital SLRS compared to old, manual SLRs, but I guess that's the price one pays for technology.

(I still have three Minolta 102's, but they don't make most of the really good 35mm films anymore, so they're basically paperweights.)

I miss the scent of acetic acid, though. It's just not photography if you don't smell like a cask of vinegar.

One of the great gifts of my upbringing was their habit of leaving little land mines of creativity lying around. The darkroom. The mandolin. The loom. The books of poetry. The paintings. Some of these were side effects of their own creative bursts, during which they did an exemplary job modeling craftsmanship, curiosity and obsessive learning.

Indeed -- and the general chaos of my house is a testament to having grown up with that same sort of creative bursts.

I went through a six year fascination with traditional photography. For some reason I just don't get interested in digital printing and digital manipulation; it's all full of computer crap and requires me to wrestle with my printer and scanner and USB dongles, in a way that messing with chemicals isn't, and I can't pin it down more finely than that. Developing is boring but printing is so bloody wonderful, and the process is so very hands* on in a way that clicking with your mouse isn't.

If you're interested in doing it, 120 is a really archaic format in a lot of ways but it's very forgiving and very easy to print and develop. The fact that the contact prints are big enough to actually get detail out of is tremendously important, and almost every enlarger ever made can do a 6x6 negative.

I've found the idea of developing and shooting traditionally, scanning it, and then doing the rest of the process digitally manages to combine the drudgery of waiting around swishing chemicals in a light-tight jar with the hassles of getting your scanner and printer to work right in a way that maximizes the irritation of both and minimizes the satisfaction of either. Accordingly I would suggest getting a cheap enlarger and at least making contact prints traditionally. You'll get interested in the rest pretty fast :)

* I should note that I have a strange psychological obsession wherein if I don't do something physical with my hands at least once a week or so I slowly go batshit nuts. Last couple years I've been doing woodworking instead, but I think I'm a better photographer than I am a woodworker.

When I was 15 my parents gave me an old Kodak bellows camera that used 135 film, and my aunt, a professional photojournalist, encouraged me to try taking B&W shots. I found I didn't like snapshots particularly, but I loved taking photos of textures and light. I didn't get into developing my own photos for several years, and when I did I discovered color slide film, which had a clarity and contrast that I preferred over color negatives. Developing my own color film was too expensive (especially when my one attempt to do professional work convinced me I didn't want to do that.

Despite looking at and admiring the photos of a lot of the greats, Ansel Adams, Steichen, and especially Walker Evans, I didn't find a photographer whose work resonated with my own vision of things until I discovered Cartier-Bresson. Ironically, he had been since the 1950's, and continued to be until his death, a close friend and colleague of my aunt, something I didn't know until I found a photo of her he took in the '90s.

I used a Nikon SLR that I bought in Japan in the '60s until about 5 years ago, when I switched to digital. That old camera needs some minor repairs, but it worked fine the last time I used it. I don't think they make them that robust anymore.

Take this and jell it as remembered light,
one simple gesture: laughing at a joke
in middle afternoon, and at one stroke
you've got it down, and kept it in plain sight
when all the other moments take their flight
or disappear behind the darkest cloak
of all forgetting. Where the world is broke
but yet we act to make things come out right.
Vision is sure and clear when you are young,
so slow to fade but still the edges pale;
we can't recall the colour of the stone
on the south wall, nor where the laundry hung.
Long years have passed and recollections fail.
Still there is crystal fire within the bone.

Photography's one of the things I really wish I knew, but that's been going on for about ten years. I got a pretty good film camera for Christmas some years ago, took a loooot of pictures on a trip to Costa Rica and Peru, and then... nothing. I generally don't tolerate being bad at things (working on this one) and the reward of physical pictures is offset by the cost of film and developing, plus I really don't understand composition, so seven hundred pictures, two hundred dollars in developing, and I had a feeling that a Better Person would have spent less, understood more, and gotten better pictures.

This sounds much whinier than it usually is. Part of it's that I know some really talented people with really good equipment; what's the point of me taking a picture if they're around?

That said, Mom and I keep throwing flower pictures at each other. I love color and brightness, her camera can get pretty good pictures of goldfinches across the yard, both of us have digital cameras so email is easy, all good.

Diatryma @ 11:

One of the things that the photography class I took drummed into me is that it's ok to take lots of pictures and then throw most of them away. Some of them will be bad, some will be perfectly acceptable, but only a few will really be good. I've taken probably thousands of photos by now (although not nearly as often or as many as I should). The reason that people tell me that I do well at it is that they never get to see all the ones that don't work, and even then I don't throw nearly enough of them away.

That said, while I do dearly like film, I went digital because it's more convenient and much cheaper. It also relaxes the inhibition about taking lots of photos, because the only remaining cost is the time spent deleting the ones that don't quite work out. Yes, I can talk all I want about taking photos only to throw them away, but developing costs were a limiting factor.

As to what the point is if other people are taking photos? You're not going to take the same photos that they do. You'll have a different angle, or a different idea about how something should look, or decide that you think that the subject of the photo should be something else entirely. And they'll be yours. I certainly don't think a lot of my photos are brilliant, but they mean something to me for having made them.

Abi @ 771 in OT 134:

...this community tends to ride libertarians pretty hard...

As one of the libertarians in this community, and comparing Making Light to other forums, I'd word that a little more gently: You people You all don't let me get away with unstated assumptions. By way of contrast, I was banned from Free Republic for mentioning the ACLU.

I would like to consult the collective intelligence here. I'm in correspondence with a gentleman in the UK who is working on a book on ornamental turning. He is realistic about the total potential market which is about 500 copies.

The work involves reproduction of material from a variety of sources. The illustrations include photographs of lathes and chucks, engravings from 19th century magazines, and plates of cycloidal patterns produced by substituting paper for the material to be turned and a pencil or pen for the cutting tool.

He has about 1200 pages of material and I've already advised him that the economics of the printing business dictate that he would be better off to split it into 3 or 4 volumes. Is there a print on demand solution that would produce acceptable quality? What binding options are available? I've suggested that he offer a numbered and signed collectors edition and a more utilitarian edition.

This book represents an effort to preserve material that is totally unique and in danger of being lost forever if not reproduced. He would like to produce enough revenue to pay some of the costs he has born in preparing the work.

For the curious, Google: ornamental turning, rose engine lathe, and Holtzapffel lathe. Be sure and look at the image results for Holtzapffel lathe. These machines are a steampunk's wet dream. Built of brass, steel, and mahogany many are still in use 150 years and more after they were made.

Howard Zinn dies at 87.

New York Times Obit here.

Love, C.

Stefan@3: "126" is not "roll film", and is an unlikely (though nothing is impossible) format for a "world-renowned" photographer to use. (126 is "Instamatic" cartridges, which were replaced by 110 "pocket instamatic", which was replaced by the "disc camera", which was replaced by auto-focus P&S 35mm cameras in the 1980s. Maybe "120", the most common film "medium format" cameras like the Hasselblad?)

Abi: Cool. My first darkroom likewise lacked running water. But I had to build it and equip it from scratch. I got a Durst M35 enlarger (35mm only). The framing (but not the black plastic that formed the walls and ceiling) are still there in what is now my sister's basement. I've got negatives going back to 2nd grade, didn't build the darkroom until 10th grade, after I'd gotten my first SLR. I'm mostly a people / documentary photographer; still.

The "135" (still 35mm) film format refers as much to the packaging as to the film size itself. They took the standard professional movie film and re-packaged it for use in still cameras (using twice as big a space as the movies did; the film moves vertically in a movie camera, horizontally in a still camera, so they're both "landscape" format). The movie film format was introduced in 1892. (The movie heritage is why the sprocket holes are so dominant a feature; they had to move the film reliably through the camera and projectors at 16 frames per second or so, eventually standardizing on 24 frames per second in the sound era.)

Fragano@10: Ooh, I like that a lot. That seems to capture a bunch of things.

Stuart @ 14 ...
I would like to consult the collective intelligence here. I'm in correspondence with a gentleman in the UK who is working on a book on ornamental turning. He is realistic about the total potential market which is about 500 copies.

... and in the small world that is makinglight, I believe I've already heard about the book in question, and am rather likely to be part of the total potential market (which I suspect may be larger than he thinks, given the correct price point...)

Stuart@12: I'm no expert, but I've seen a photo book from Lulu. It wasn't coffee-table quality, but it was roughly textboook quality; good enough on the images and color to convey information without it being unpleasant to look at.

I certainly support his goal of getting some payback for time and money spent documenting this very cool stuff. In the end, though, for his basic purpose of keeping the information extant, he should consider making sure the full digital archive is eventually released onto the net, so people don't have to find one of the 500 copies (if his estimate is correct) of the printed book down the road. Possibly arrange for it to be released after his death, or something.

Stuart, 14: make that 501--my brother would adore it.

Oops, should have been "Stuart@14", sorry!

David Dyer-Bennet @ 19 ...
Stuart@14: I'm no expert, but I've seen a photo book from Lulu. It wasn't coffee-table quality, but it was roughly textboook quality; good enough on the images and color to convey information without it being unpleasant to look at.

I'd be a bit leery about that -- part of the joy of things like ornamental turning is being able to extract as much detail as possible, to get a better understanding of how it was done...

B&W developing: Doing your own film developing is rather important in B&W (or having a lab or employee who will do exactly what you need; for a hobbyist, that means doing it yourself). The range of films is fairly large (still), and the range of commercial developing chemistry is very large (still), and you can go beyond that because you can formulate your own chemistry with relatively few easily-available chemicals.

You can optimize for light-sensitivity ("speed"), or for lack of grain, or for resolution. You can compress or expand the brightness range, non-linearly. Water bath development, two-part developers, solvent vs. non-solvent developers, and so forth and so on. And "staining" vs. "non-staining", if you go back far enough (I never worked with Pyrocatechol myself).

Ansel Adams' work on the "zone system" included documenting and characterizing a lot of these options. At the time he shot mostly sheet film, so each sheet could be marked for different development (with rolls of film, it's not terribly practical do try to develop different parts of the same roll differently). In addition to his Basic Photography series, which is first-rate for traditional B&W processes, he wrote a book called Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, which shows 40 of his photos, including quite a few famous ones, and recounts as much as he remembers about what options he considered, what he did in exposure and processing and printing, and why he did those things. As usually when looking over an expert's shoulder, you don't really need to be able to do it yourself to learn quite a bit from hearing what he says.

I haven't developed film since 1985. In my darkroom days, I mostly used D76 diluted 1:1 for Tri-X and Plus-X at rated speed. I used Autofine for a while as well. I used Acu-1 (one-shot version of Acufine) for pushing Tri-x to 1200. For some reason, I never got friendly with Diafine, which should have been my main developer I think. And I didn't make enough use of pushing Tri-X to 4000 using HC110 replenisher; I've gotten several lovely pictures out of that, despite the fog levels and the weird film curvature that results.

I'm all-digital these days, and have been doing any printing I do digitally since about 1994. Some interesting growing pains there, but I've made a lot of good prints. And I'm really enjoying displaying photos on the web, too; a lot more people seem to see them, and even comment on them now and then.

Xeger@22: It does sound like some of this material could really benefit from photogravure printing, say. But that's a HUGE upfront expense and a high per-copy price, too. I'm not saying Lulu is "good enough", just trying to describe the level of quality I saw in the book.

At the Door

Where are you going, little girl?
I am taking some sweets to my sick grandma, Mister Wolf.

Bitch, she calls her, and Slut
This is one of the good days,
when she does not recognize her at all,
but rails at this stranger who has come into her house.
Far worse are the days when the girl is mistaken
for her mother, or her aunt,
as she holds the hand of the woman with mad bright eyes,
eyes that somehow still hold flashes of gold.
Her hands tremble as she doses out the medications
(she has to hide them, these days,
lock them away in secret cupboards and hide the keys.
The mind is dimmed but the body is still agile.)
The lack of sleep is constant these days. Every night
up to put the woman back to bed
tell her the dog is fed
(Mischa died many years ago)
the furniture is where it needs to be
it is not dawn, it is not dawn
the cows do not need to be milked.
In return she gets the accusations,
the insinuations that she is a thief, a whore,
a stranger keeping the woman away from those who love her.
In vain she tries to remember the friendly voice,
the soft hands, the scent of cookies,
the laughing days at the house with the butter-yellow walls.

When the doorbell rings, she starts;
her friends, so few, rarely bother to come by any more.
Suddenly frightened, the woman proclaims,
"Don't open the door, not the door,
There are wolves out there.
The wolves are at the door."
As she signs for the delivery, those medications she will have to hide,
she looks over and sees in those fear-filled eyes the flash of gold and thinks, No,
the wolves are not at the door.

The wolves got you long ago.

N.B: Caretakers have almost a 25% increased chance of dying before their patients. The theory is that this is due to stress and physical strain.

I did black and white photography for years (started back in middle school, did it all through high school and college and, to my great shame, have not even taken my 35mm bodies out of their traveling case since I moved after college) . I found great joy in developing my own film (I am completely devoted to TMAX for black and white - I just love the sharpness) and relished the challenge of doing large prints well, and the manual skills I learned doing that have served me well until the present day (I now work in neuroimaging, where the same kind of eye is required to assess data).

I find that there is an immediately obvious difference looking at work done by people who learned on film and those who learned with digital - and I believe that a great something has been lost in that transition. I have a colleague who is trying to be a professional photographer without having mastered the basics in the almost meditative way that film forced you to - and it shows in her work. There is something to be said for telling those who aspire to do good photography to get some film, get some chemicals and to learn the hard way (as it is a far more rewarding way to learn than inconveniencing uncounted multitudes of electrons).

Great, now I miss my darkroom (I had the great good fortune in college to work for a lab which had their own darkroom - during my three years in the lab, it was, for all intents and purposes, mine).

#16: 120 most likely; the wide rolls with metal spools.

When there was a rumor the B&W was going out of production Lee bought crates of the stuff . . .

My father used the upstairs bathroom as a darkroom when I was about young - light-tight blind, red lamp, sandbag thing along the bottom edge of the door to block light, developer/fixer trays in the bathtub, enlarger clamped on a sheet of heavy plywood over the sink & vanity - so darkroom chemicals are one of those deep-in-the-bone scents that mean "childhood" to me in some strange way, like yeast and cinnamon.

He's never gotten back into darkroom stuff again, but I was heavily into it in high school; my senior high had a very nice darkroom - three good enlargers, enough space for three or four of us to work at a time. Took some very nice B&W shots, especially on a family trip to Mexico. My photography teacher was also awesome, and helped keep me sane during Grade 11...

I still have my used Minolta XE5 SLR and a couple of lenses, but I haven't even touched it in a couple of years, and haven't shot B&W for longer than that. Awesome camera, no electronics beyond the lightmetre, and I think it's almost as old as I am. My little Canon digital P&S is great, but not the same.

OTOH, my digicam is the size of a pack of cards, and is ALWAYS in my pocket. Having a camera, any camera, on you all the time means you get some good shots even if it isn't the greatest camera in the world.

That high school darkroom was probably replaced by a bunch of PCs ages ago for "photography" class. Pity.

B. Durbin @ 25 ...
Brrrrrr.

Damn!

I much preferred playing with the printing to figuring out what to shoot. Darkroom sessions tended to end up being six hours long no matter what I wanted to do. I've done some good photos, but not in quite a long time. Haven't managed to get hooked on digital, but my, isn't it cheaper!

B. Durbin.

Yes.

I don't feel like such a dilletante npw. I also had a brief fling with photography and actually got good at composition, but we got poor and the costs got too high.

I was going to compose new text to this thread, but I realized that I already have it in a back issue of my own (mostly dormant) site.

A teaser for you:

I can remember one image, of a lady "of a certain age" who had such a marvelously youthful mien that was lost completely if I printed the image as taken. Eventually I used my loup to focus the sharpest I could on the film grain, and then backed-off the focus just so, and underexposed the paper just that little gradient to appease that faction of "art," and found the face that my eye had seen, and the film had hidden.

I know that half the secret of good photography is taking so many pictures you can toss the bad ones and no one notices, but I am not quite there yet. It's kind of the feeling I got rereading an Elizabeth Moon book-- "I want to be this heroine. Except I totally could be, if I did X, Y, and Z more consistently. I am not willing to do those things. Um."

The astronomy class at my high school was, until recent years, a photography course better than that offered by the art department. It's all lenses and capturing light, after all.

B. Durbin @ 25

My mother is in a nursing home about 90 minutes away from where I live. Mid-90s in chronology'

When I visit the easy times are when I sit and play my harp while she drowses or sleeps.

Other times I just sit and agree with what she says. Usually she recognizes my wife, and the boys.

I often get mistaken for my brother or a social worker, or someone from her past I never knew. And she tells of a life that doesn't exist, and never did.

On those days I try not to cry on the drive home.

My mother is there. My mom is gone.

Diatryma, #11: Kathleen Sloan says it better than I can:
Take it back! Take it back! Take back the right to sing and play.
It will fill your heart, it will feed your soul, when you take back the right to sing and play!

If only the people who are "really good at it" do things, how does anyone ELSE ever get to be really good? One of the most pernicious myths of our culture is that only the best performers, the best artists (in any given medium) "deserve" to contribute.

I'm used to arguing this about music -- a hundred years ago you couldn't just pop a CD or DVD into the player, and professional entertainers were too expensive for most people, so people made music for themselves, and a lot of them got pretty darned good at it. But you can say much the same thing about any other art form; it's the mark of a passive society when ordinary people feel that they aren't allowed to create art just because they're not professional-level. What's the point of doing it yourself when there are professionals out there? It's to have something YOU did, and the joy of having done it.

I was never much of a film photographer, and the best film camera I ever had (from my POV) was a little 110 that I bought at K-Mart for $20 back in 1985 or thereabouts. But the process of taking pictures was tedious, and film and processing were expensive, and it just wasn't something that ever much appealed to me.

The digital revolution has been a revelation. My partner* gave me an inexpensive digicam, a "Push Here, Dummy" camera, a little over a year ago, and... well, you can see what happened. It's given me a whole new interesting hobby!

B. Durbin, #25: Wow. I have a friend who's dealing with that right now. May I point her here?

* Who was a film-camera enthusiast, and who has been observed looking at me with an expression that says, "Good ghod, what have I wrought?"

I still have three film cameras, an old (50+ years old!) Argus that Dad took to Antarctica when he wintered over in 1961-1962, a Petri 35mm SLR I bought in Japan in 1973, and a Canon A-1 that was a gift from my parents in the early 1980s. I was never anywhere near a darkroom, so I don't know if I'd have gotten hooked on the developing process, but heaven knows I took a lot of film pictures (I once got a book, The Joy of Photographing People; I had so many landscape shots my father gave it to me as a joke).

When I upgraded from a Canon Powershot 110 digital to a Canon Powershot 600 the built-in zoom went from 2X to 3X. Before that I still dragged out the A-1 for wildlife shots because I had a 35-105mm zoom for it.

#13 Allan

You got banned for mentioning the ACLU?!

Sounds like extremist nut cultists....

B Durbin @25:

Well, that got me crying. My grandmother-in-law went through that stage a couple of years ago.

She forgot most of the rest of the world after that, and finally slipped away this last Monday morning. When she died, what hurt me first was the loss of that secret hope that one day she would open her eyes and be her old self again.

Did anybody notice that Stephen Colbert came down on Harold Ford Jr. this week? As much as I love ya'll here, that was really freaking funny!

I'm something of a lazy point-and-shooter who makes up for a lack of knowledge about technique and composition by taking pictures of things that are intrinsically interesting (animals, plants and the odd landscape) and relying on the "yeah, it looks okay to me" factor. Having said that, I do make decisions about exposure and often bracket my shots where I can.

Some of the fun I derive from photography comes from overcoming certain limitations: a DSLR with just two lenses or a simple compact camera, ambient lighting, no tripod/monopod. If I have to crouch over a mushroom in dappled light or lean against a fence to take photos of birds in a tree and control my breathing and the tendency to sway -- a good result can be very, very satisfying.

#41 mcz:

Getting a good or even great photo in challenging conditions always satisfying. One of my favourite recent ones was a moving train at night in snowy conditions, with the station lamps as the only illumination.

Same with concert photography in small club venues with poor stage lighting; I remember trying to get some decent photos of the Welsh prog band Panic Room at a gig in Swansea (not the one Hedgehog was at, another one later in the year at a different club) - all the lighting was coming from the side of the stage, which meant the lead singer's face was permanently in shadow. Didn't manage to get a single good image of her at all, although I did get a couple of great ones of the guitarist.

Which brings us to another subject - I seem to have had a personal falling out with a former member of a band of which I'm a huge fan (I won't name names because I don't want Google to find this comment); he was trying to embroil fans in inter-band politics, and I wanted no part of it. Is it worth attempting to mend fences, or is it simply better to let sleeping dogs lie?

Lee, #36: Agreed. One idea that can be liberating is that you don't have to show everything you do to the world.

Every artist has sketchbooks full of crappy practice drawings. It's just like taking lots of photos: you work, and practice, and if you work and practice enough, whether or not you're a genius artist, you'll end up with a certain amount of work worth feeling proud of, and sending out into the world.

Afriend of mine has bought her 5 year old daughter a reasonable digital camera, because she liked using her childrens one so much, and was careful with it. My nephew has a digital camera now as well, and he's the same age. I don't know if it'll help their development as photographers, but I'm sure it gives a more unusual viewpoint, above knee height.

I can see them never using film at all, but they need to learn what photos to keep and what to delete.

Lee @#36: I always wished there had been a sequel to that book--at least, assuming I have identified the source of your Flickr ID correctly.

And, because B. Durbin's poem reminded me of something I did a while ago:

Falling

Hush little baby
she sings over her daughter's cradle,
this daughter black as ebony, red as blood,
and pale, even the linens look dun
against the tiny face.

Hush little baby
because that's all she's going to be able to give her
because she's chilled to the bone
because the snow is falling, making an envelope of silence
because she fears for her daughter, soon to be motherless.

Hush little baby
will have to stand in for all a mother's advice
not to fear the woman your father will marry
not to be too trusting of strangers
not to wait for a prince to rescue you.

Hush little baby
one more time, but it's hard to speak now
and she couldn't call to her ladies even if she wanted to
and anyhow she wants this time
with her daughter.

B. Durbin @ 25 Oh. Very evocative.

Carrie S. @ 45. Nicely written.

Photography/Darkrooms: When I was a child my mother had a darkroom; I was too young to appreciate it at the time. However, she got permission to go take pictures during rehersals of the local chamber orchestra and she still has some wonderful B&W shots she took of the conductor - just the face and hands visible. Also, somewhere in the famly albums are the "trick" pictures, where she cut out a picture of one of us sitting down, placed it onto a piece of fruit or a pepper or similar and took another picture - voila! -child sitting on giant fruit. Of course, everyone can do far more tricks much better with Photoshop nowadays.

Never got much past "point and shoot" myself, but digital photography removing the processing costs means I can take laods of pictures when I want to - mountains, animals, trees, waterfalls - and some of them come out pretty well. The 10 x optical zoom helps tremendously for the animals (I used to take all these pictures with the animal as a little speck in the middle).

Photography has always been a hit-or-miss thing for me, but not an expensive one anymore, with digital cameras, even though the results are more likely to be misses than hits. Still, sometimes I take photos I'm proud of, like this one, even though its working out was a total accident.

Kodachrome

(Says it all, doesn't it.)

The Leica camera was using the 35mm film format before Kodak packaged it as a commercial film. The first commercial release of the Leica was in 1925. You had reloadable cartridges, and a special template to cut the leader of the film.

Once Leica cracked the problem of interchangable lenses, finding ways to overcome the slight variations in optical focal length so that any lens would fit any camera, all you need is the M-adaptor, and any Leica rangefinder lens can be used in any Leica M-series camera, including the latest digital models.

Although there is a vignetting problem with wide-angle optics, arising from the difference between a digital sensor and photographic film.

B. Durbin: Chilling and moving.

guthrie@44: I'm kinda jealous of kids growing up now (in some ways). I was badly constrained in my photography by the cost of film and processing up until 1969; these kids get handed down a more-capable camera than I had before 1969, far better post-processing capabilities (in Gimp, say) than I had in the darkroom, and it doesn't cost anything. (Having the computer already available is part of the assumptions there of course, and of course is not true for every child on the planet.)

Digital is amazingly better than film for learning, especially for children. It drastically shortens the feedback cycle -- try something, see the result nearly instantly (sometimes you need to transfer the data to the computer and look at it on the big screen, if you're doing anything subtle). When I had to make a roll of film stretch for weeks, I wasn't of a mind-set where I could keep focus on just what I intended to learn from various photos when I finally got them back; and that is even worse if you weren't deliberately trying an experiment.

In the film era, developing the discipline to reliably produce technically competent images was a key part of becoming a photographer. Professional work demanded reliability above all else, and it got frustrating even to an amateur if you frequently got unexpectedly unpleasant results.

The whole technical side has become tremendously easier in the digital era, both inherently, and because you can easily check instantly in the field what you're capturing; so the detail oriented hyper-focus on technical details is much less crucial, which means there's room for more personality types to fairly easily get into photography. This can only result in a wider range of interesting pictures being made!

B. Durbin @ 25 -- That's very powerful stuff. Please consider offering it to organizations that offer support for caregivers.

Diatryma @ 11 and others re: not-quite-good-enough art: I create because I get an idea and need to explore it. I don't think there's any art form in which I'm anything like "one of the best" -- except, necessarily, "the art that Joel creates" -- and some things aren't all that great, and most don't really come close enough to what I really want for my satisfaction. But there are occasional happy surprises, and other people generally like my creations well enough.

Lately I've been using much of my (sadly limited) creative energy trying to make a design for a novelty toque come out giving something close to the observer-impression that I have in mind. Every attempt takes about a day and a half or two days, plus materials... but I want to get it right. And I think that even the "failures" will be appreciated as goofy gifts.

Living with a photographer, I've absorbed lots of stuff. I also took a photography class a little while back, which was loads of fun.

My fiancé, Keith, learned on film (both in class and in his first internship and job at a fashion photography studio), but really came into his own with digital. He says that film vs. digital is not really the issue: it's learning in full-manual mode on an SLR. When he teaches people about photography, he tells them to turn their digital SLRs to manual mode, put on a 50mm prime lens, and shoot for a month with that setup. Shooting manual forces you to master the technical aspects of your tools, and using a prime lens forces you to think hard about composition. There will be a learning curve. But it will be worth it. (I haven't yet tried this experiment; I cheat and use aperture or shutter speed priority modes, and sometimes program mode, which is almost like automatic. I should go manual.)

He covets medium- and large-format film cameras, but loves his digital setup for working photography. You can instantly preview shots, and with the right software, you can make a first pass through processing an entire shoot in a couple of hours.

I can appreciate the tactile aspects of working in a darkroom. While I've never done it, I like the feeling of physically working with things to make other things, and working on a computer doesn't scratch that itch for me in quite the right way. I like to make things on the computer -- it's a real thrill when I make a piece of software that works -- but it's something different from making something with my hands.

Processing photos on the computer does satisfy Keith, though. He can work in a darkroom and has, but derives no particular enjoyment from it. He derives enjoyment from the intellectual and creative process of making an image, much more than from the particular tools he uses to do it. He seems to just want the tools to not get in the way. With the right workflow setup, digital tools get out of his way and let him focus on the images.

We do have an old Kodak Duaflex II camera (a gift from my grandmother, who had it from new), which takes 620 roll film. 620 film is no longer made. The camera does have a spool -- and technically I could buy 120 roll film and respool. I haven't yet bothered to do so. I'd like to play with it, though -- and let Keith play with it and see what he does.

I bet Keith's favorite photography store would both sell him the 120 film, and probably even do the respooling. They like him.

David Dyer-Bennet #17: Thanks!

Lee:

Yes! I think something similar happens with most people w.r.t. science--like they figure there's no point trying to understand it, or even to take part in some way, because they haven't served the required time studying the subject.

ISTM that real golden ages in most fields happen when lots and lots of people get access to the tools and knowledge necessary, and start playing around with something--whether that's music or poetry or programming or evolutionary biology or combinatorics.

B. Durbin #25:

That was very powerful.

#36 ::: Lee

Greatness does not come out of a vacuum, but from a large number of people striving to DO SOMETHING, a large number of people who are vitally interested, and also, for whom the activity is fun. You wouldn't have had Shakespeare without all the other people he knew around him working in the theater, thinking about the theater, writing for the theater, dreaming of the theater, in every capacity.

Music, in particular -- that it has in so many ways in this country at least, become to be something done by 'professionals,' performers demarked off as separate and somehow superior to the rest, has been a terrible thing for music per se. Music is as old as language. It belongs to us all. It holds the record of our species'stime on earth. It's difficult for musicians to get really good without the audience. The best way to hear music is dancing. I could and would go on and on, to everyone's dismay. So wuill dismount, and get ready for the Haiti teach in.

Love, C.

B. Durbin @ #25: I am going to print that out.

I am going to print that out, and I'm going to hand it to the next person who asks why I have a bottle of pills labeled "If you don't remember what these are for, take them all."

I had lots of fun with what are now classed as "oddball" film formats (like the 620, 128 and 828 films) from some oldish (not-quite antique) cameras that I picked up at Post-Office actions of undeliverable packages.

They were battred enough, yet new enough to considerd just more trouble than worth for collectors and most resellers, but I had fun with them.
[[arning, photobug neep may follow]]
I especially liked the landscape format to the 120-sized film that the 620 format gave me, and forced me to be creative in composition and use -- the camera was old enough that it didn't have an x-sync, so my strobes didn't give full coverage (what is now classed as the "B-Sync" triggers when the shutter fires, so as to allow time for the bulb to fire and reach full intensity/burnout when the shutter is fully open, the "X-Sync" for electronic flashes triggers when the shutter is either fully-open (for a leaf shuttr) or the exposure curtain (for a focal-plane sutter) is fully out of the way))

For a leaf shutter, this results in a very intense section of the negative (sometimes a very *small* section)that has "full" exposure, with the rest of the negative at exposure for available light only.

For a focal plane shutter, this means that a strip of the negative is exposed to the flash and the rest of the negative is either blank or at available light levels.

To overcome this, I used to set the cameras on "open shutter" and hand-fire the strobe.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

But, after the bulb flash failed, and it wasn't worth trying to find a source to get bulbs anyway, that was my most viable option.

[[/end neep//]]

My first "real" camera was a Yashica-D twin lens reflex. I actually had two of these puppies, both were stolen.

The "vintage" cameras were lost to me by virtue of my divorce.

My, how we blather on...

Craig R. @33 quoted himself: I can remember one image, of a lady "of a certain age" who had such a marvelously youthful mien that was lost completely if I printed the image as taken. Eventually I ... found the face that my eye had seen, and the film had hidden.

This is one of my major art-goals with photography -- taking candids or semi-posed shots of people (both family and strangers) that actually look like THEY look when you're TALKING to them, instead of getting their "You're taking my picture" face or some random weird microexpression.

I'm an amateur with some skill. I can say this because my mother and grandfather both are/were professionals, chemistry and all; my grandfather spent over ten years as the official photographer for the Miss America pageant, inter multi alia. He used to finish off almost all his rolls on me when I was a child, so I now have reflex-level trained posing instincts.* I have to consciously remind myself not to overthink it when people aim a camera at me and are only going for snapshots. :->

On the other side of the lens, I can't hack the chemistry, so will probably never have a darkroom. I transpose digits in my head while trying to remember exact values, so I have a camera that does auto-exposure and such. But I've spent the last fifteen years or so trying to be mindful and critical of my own photography -- to try to figure out what makes one of my shots look 'right' to me and another 'off' -- and been trying to gradually up the percentage of them that I love.

I also amuse myself sometimes noticing the 'cliches' in my work: the things that will automatically, nigh-Pavlovianly, cause my artbrain to sit up and go OOOOH SHOOT THAT. A nonexclusive list: shadows, peeking through holes in things, silhouettes, the fractal nature of trees, repeated parallel lines or curves, interesting clouds/skypatterns.

----
* Posing skill comes in handy when doing things like having ID pictures taken -- everybody's always flabbergasted at how well I get those to come out. It helps when you KNOW that lit-from-the-top, straight-on, level-shot portraits are the SINGLE most unflattering set of options available, and have some tools to bring to bear to 'work it' a little.

A few ID photo tips for the interested:

• consider hairstyles, jewelry, and what you're wearing that day in terms of graphic design -- keep it simple, with bold colors that compliment your own looks. Beiges or busy-ness will only look bad.
• Lift your chin slightly for jowl-mitigation; also press your tongue to the roof of your mouth.
• Smile with your eyes (practice in a mirror beforehand). Think of something that makes you very happy, or something that is outstandingly cute; now feel what your eye-corners and upper cheeks do when you smile from it. Then learn to copy that. Takes a while, but pays off SO MUCH in not looking like a convict. Mostly they don't let you smile with your mouth, but they don't object to using the rest of your face to look pleasant and trustworthy.
• Find the light and angle your face slightly into it. Practice this at home, too, if you like, with a poseable desk lamp in a dark room with a mirror. Put the single light source in all kinds of positions relative to your head and see what the shadows it throws do to your face (mostly bad things). Then try subtly angling your face a bit, and pick what makes you look best.

I'm wondering when B. Durbin will have enough poems collected to have a chapbook published. I think the trees involved, if asked, would willingly sacrifice their all for such a worthy goal.

Elliott Mason, I usually photograph badly, and I am glad of the posing tips. My Facebook profile picture is the single example of me not in a group and not looking like a mole available when I joined up. The jowl thing will be really useful.

Various others, I know that my lack of skill shouldn't be a hurdle, but right now isn't the time for me to fail a lot at anything, even in pursuit of incredible success. Any tips on how to make things and see the whole rather than every tiny flaw? I don't do it with other people's work, but I can take only so much of my own before perfectionism kicks in.

A general question about the whys of DSLRs:

As far as I understand it, one of the main reasons for the existence of the SLR movement is that you get to see through the viewfinder exactly what will be captured on the film; it won't be offset. What is the point of doing this on a digital camera, where you can take the signal from the CCD and put it straight onto an LCD screen?

Diatryma @ 62:

Now that I'm not sure I can help you with, sad to say. I think that being self-critical is one of those sorts of things that goes hand-in-hand with making something of your own. All I can do is try my best to ignore it and focus on the things I like, but it doesn't always happen.

Sometimes it helps (it makes me more motivated to try to get my dancing right). Sometimes it doesn't (why I will probably never play clarinet again).

Diatryma: I forget where I saw it, probably theonlinephotographer.com, but the essence was to ask:

When you're editing, do you look for what works, or do you look for problems?

I think it helps to look at famous works, and to see that they're not all technically perfect. But invariably, there's a story.

Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. Personally, I'd go the hairshirt method and shove a 50 on and go full manual for a while.

KeithS @ #63 - One reason is that the LCD can be washed out in bright light. Another reason is that it can save power.

Can anyone identify this giant mole-like animal my dog found? (And ATE . . .)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/4311353641/

Eric #64

Don't know the precise technical reasons, but the big difference between a DSLR and a compact or so-called 'bridge' camera is that with a DSLR you have no shutter lag.

If you do landscapes of posed portraits it doesn't really make much difference - but as soon as you start on moving subjects that half-second of shutter lag makes the difference between a perfectly composed picture and something you'll immediately delete.

Doing train photography using a bridge camera I adjusted by estimating the speed of the train to predict where it would be when the camera took the picture - 50mph was about one-and-a-half carriage lengths. With a DSLR what you see in the viewfinder at the instant you press the shutter is the image you get.

Stefan Jones @ 66:

Looks kind of like a gopher to me, but I can't really tell for sure.

KeithS@63: First of all, until recently DSLRs didn't support "liveview"; the sensors they used didn't support real-time video output, so the reflex viewfinder was the only way to see where the camera was pointed. (Liveview complicates the sensor, and may require real-estate that has competing uses; but it's now included in the top-line professional bodies as well as others, so apparently with current tech the tradeoffs aren't too dire. Video has the same requirements, which may be what has driven the change.)

Second, the brightness (lack thereof) of the LCD is sometimes a problem in direct sun. One solution to this is the "EVF", an electronic viewfinder that you look into through an eyepiece, thus excluding the sun.

DSLRs started by putting digital sensors in the back of film bodies (all the early Kodak models, and the Nikon D1 and D100 and the Fuji S1 and S2), so the existing viewfinder system remained by default, as well as for good reasons.

The frame rate of liveview is such that it sometimes causes additional delay from what you see to what you capture. This is a problem for fast action or critical users.

There are advantages to liveview as well -- you can see a lot better in a dark room with the camera helping you, for example. You get 100% viewfinder coverage, which is only available in the top professional bodies (even the Nikon D700 doesn't have 100% coverage, only the D3 series). Other people seem to care about 100% coverage more than I do, but getting it free in liveview mode is kinda nice. The mirror and pentaprism and related mechanisms are expensive to manufacture and maintain. They require very precise alignment. The mirror flopping around causes some camera shake, limiting picture-taking under some conditions.

There's another very nasty dependency -- DSLRs use very sophisticated phase-detection autofocus sensors (they are faster, and they tell the camera which way focus is wrong which makes things even faster). Those sensors live on the bottom of the body, and the light reaches them via semi-silvered spots in the primary mirror plus a secondary mirror. If you remove the moving mirror from the equation, you lose the ability to use special auto-focus sensors looking through the lens. The Micro 4/3s cameras, and P&S cameras, use contrast-based AF software getting its data off the main sensor. This is cheap, and works well enough, but is much slower, and especially bad at things like tracking a moving object (which DSLRs do amazingly well).

Some people used to DSLRs sneer at composing on a screen on the back of the camera, but that's just Luddism (others have specific valid issues relevant to their photography; it's not all just Luddism). Lots of cameras still in use have different viewfinder mechanisms, including some that are just a screen (ground glass) on the back of the camera (and one so dim you need to put a black cloth over you and the camera to be able to see the image at all).

Eric@64: Mostly, I tend to immediately spot problems, sadly. I'm trying to concentrate on recognizing what DOES work, because that is in fact more important. If there's nothing especially good, then mere lack of problems isn't enough!

Craig@59: my highschool had one of those, that I used a tiny bit. Later I bought one of a pair of Yashicamat 124Gs that the other local wedding photographer (not "other" than me; I grew up in a small town, and there was "the" wedding photographer, and then another guy started up so he was the "other" wedding photographer) was selling to get Hasselblads. The extra negative area was definitely useful, especially with 1970s and 1980s films.

J.D. Salinger dead at 91.

Earl, #61: Seconded!

Steve, #65: Oh yeah, the taking-pictures-on-a-sunny-day problem. Fortunately, my camera is a better photographer than I am; I've learned how to take a good guess about where the image is and let it do the rest. Does anyone know if there's a removable polarizing screen available for digicams?

Tim, #67: I'm also getting rather good at anticipating when to push the button to get the shot I want. It's a different set of reflexes, and in this case I think not being used to film cameras is actually helpful.

One of my requirements when I bought a digital camera was that it have a viewfinder; I just couldn't imagine holding a camera still enough to compose solely with an LCD display. Or maybe it's just that I'm unwilling to change my ways.

My DSLR has an adjustment (manual) on the viewfinder which means my middleaged eyes vision can use the adjusted view, as opposed to having to sometimes hold a non-DSLR non-viewfinder digicam out at arms'length...
I do do lens changing on the DSLR, also.... and shoot in RAW format, and use the manual focus when trying for some particularly finicky focusing on what -I- want to focus on.... there is a manual focus on a Kodak non-DSLR that is almost impossible to use, because it's as bad as the rules of Fizbin to get to.... do this, then that, then something else, and have to remembmer which of the totally inane incomprehensible etc. sequences of actions, will get one to the manual focus option.... it's worse than infuriating.

Keith @63 --

Extremely -- 10 kUSD+ -- high end digital camera systems have electronic viewfinders that almost don't suck.

Moderately priced EVIL ("electronic viewfinder in line") cameras, such as the various micro-four-thirds cameras now gaining popularity, are usable within their limitations.

Optical viewfinders provide actual resolution views; allow for focusing aids that make use of the laws of physics (so no power, and effectively instant response); and which do not have brightness of the subject mediated by the display tech.

For most things and relatively static subjects in relatively good light, EVIL works fine. For bad light, manual focus lenses, rapid motion, or sharp illumination transitions, optical view finders remain preferable.

Not to mention, not affecting battery life; I'd be embarrassed to recount the number of shots I've missed because I hadn't noticed I hadn't turned the camera on because the view through the viewfinder was doing just fine.

I prefer composing with a viewfinder, even if it's not a "real" one like in an SLR. Using the back screen to compose -is- useful when you're trying to get the shot by holding the camera in a position such that you can't actually get your head to the same place to look through the viewfinder (mostly when I'm trying for shots of animals in zoos while avoiding getting fencing/netting in the picture).

The time lag with my digital camera is annoying; that's why I want to move to a proper (digital) SLR sometime (oh, and the lag between pictures. Being able to take more pics faster would be great - not that I can't take 1,000 in a day at a zoo even now). However, if/when I get an SLR, I bet I'll also be wanting to get one of those little cameras I can just slip in my pocket and have with me most of the time - when I won't be carrying the SLR.

Graydon@76: "EVIL" = Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens

Graydon@76: For most things and relatively static subjects in relatively good light, EVIL works fine. For bad light, manual focus lenses, rapid motion, or sharp illumination transitions, optical view finders remain preferable.

Disagree on the "bad light" case. One of the big wins with EVF is that you can see much more clearly in bad light with a bit of amplification. (And pretty much agree on the others.)

Linkmeister@74: If the P&S has a normal neck-strap, try holding it like this: Grasp the sides of the camera in your hands. Pull your elbows in to your stomach. Push out on the camera until the strap is tight. You have now created a remarkably stable structure of triangular rods and some tension members. In my testing I can hand-hold this way to considerably lower shutter speeds than I can with the camera pulled up to my face (and I've practiced the "to my face" thing for 40 years, and still use it with my D700).

Not to say that many people don't hold digital P&S sloppily and probably shake them a lot. But it's not inevitable just because they're "out at arm's length" or something.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
- Richard Feynman about Challenger

Another trick to holding a camera still is to tie a strong piece of string (long enough to go from your head to the ground) to a 1/4-20 bolt. Screw the bolt into your tripod socket on the camera, and then tie a large-ish washer to the other end of the string. Drop the washer on the ground, step on it, and pull the camera up until it's taut.

One good reason for the view on a digital SLR: immediate feedback on whether the view is the correct one, before you depress the shutter. This is immensely useful when you have attached a small rigid endoscope to your lens and are attempting to photograph the retina of a mouse. Without "liveview", it can take 600 shots to get 6 decent photos; with liveview, your return is nearly 1:1.

Just for those of you who attach endoscopes to your digital SLRs.

Ah, the smell of D-70 in the morning (and the afternoon, and the evening, and when drifting off to sleep; because it soaked into the skin of your fingers and lingered; as the cologne of one's beloved does, the faintest whiff enough to bring them back to mind).

My first step-father had a darkroom. It was converted to a bedroom when we moved in with him. Slide shows and cameras (he was a Canon user), expeditions he took with a Navy buddy collecting evidence for a lawsuit with the city about ham-antennae.

I knew my father was a photographer. Cameras were in the backgrouhd of my mind all my life.

135: Ansel Adams hated it. It let anyone just shoot a huge number of images; no time, thought or understanding required; just shoot enough and one of them will be decent.

And it was a revolution. It took awhile, but it made photography accessible. One need not spend time pondering the needs of the film, and the quirks of the lens; the falloff from the extention of the bellows. No need to learn to see, as through a glass darkly; upside-down and backwards, the faint image of the view. The corners were always going to be as sharp as the lens could render them; no worries that the boards weren't straight.

More, the wealth of opportunity it gave. Leica, Kodak, Minox, The Argus C3 (known, these days with affection as, "The Brick", which was my first "real camera"). Almost everyone I know who worked with B&W learned to see the light as a thing, and treat it as a quality, so as to be able to "know" what it would do on the film.

It, more than poetry, prose, music, or song, taught me to be consise (not the same as curt). It taught me story, and exposed me to the bones of narrative.

Adams was wrong. The secret of photography is to be able to find the image, and practice is where the craft of it lies. One must learn by doing (though it helps to have theory). Use makes master and the 135 made use readily available to pretty much everyone.

65 F last night -- had some windows open. Now ice coming rattling down on all surfaces. I can has move to desert plz?

I'm trying to figure out if the sentence below contains an error, or just a phrase I don't know. Can anyone explain it to me?

That every story is a body English of telling is a truism so obvious it hardly needs telling: maybe.

"body English?" One dictionary says this is a follow-through when throwing a ball, but it looks more like an HTML tag gone awry to me.

Graham Hughes: re 120/220 format. It's forgiving to print. It's tolerably forgiving to develop. Not all enlarger arrangements will handle it (the lensing is a pain).

That said, there are some other quirks. Lenses are neither cheap, nor as varied as with 135. DoF, is less, for given focal lengths (well, it's not actually, but the math is such that it might as well be).

I really like 120 (ok, let's be honest: I like film. If I had an 8x10, I'd like that too), but my Hassie is something of a hassle. Not as easy to use as 135 (in terms of loading/unloading/developing), and the metering is all done by experience, or with an independent meter.

The image is flipped R/L, and usually composed on a ground glass. A twin-lens (like the Rollei) is, largely, limited to the lens that came with the body. It's bulky, and gets attention.

One has to learn to think square, or plan to crop.

Stuart @ 14: I've made an inquiry with someone I know who has done such things. (edit, she was very quick in response. She used Blurb. She tells me she was quite happy with the detail in the final books)

mcz @ 41: You should see me in the field. All sorts of contortions to get the image I want. All done with an almost complete lack of care about where I am (I make a point to very carefully note my general surroundings, and if there is the slightest worry about footing, I make sure to remove my eye from the viewfinder before moving my body. I don't want to do what more than one person has done, and end up dead trying to get the shot).

I am told I am not allowed out of the house in the Ontarian Winter without snow pants, lest I die of hypothermia from crouching and flopping.

And now to a mid-term. There is much I want to address (and will be more before I get back to it), but the odds are I shan't be online again, to speak of, for a couple of days. I am off to Ottawa in the morning, and have plans for the evening.

The problem with semi-improv poetry: Sometimes you forget things.

"What big teeth you have, Grandmother."
"The better to tear your heart out."

Thankfully, though this was inspired by my grandmother-in-law, 1) she recognizes who we are, even if she can't remember my son's name; 2) her failing mind is definitely the result of her failing body, and "she's had a good innings" (she's 93); and 3) they've hired a night nurse, who just happens to be my sister-in-law and who is trained in elder care, so my MIL is getting good sleep now. So— I was inspired by the worst-case scenario, and we are nowhere in that ballpark. She's loved and cared for and if we're slipping past her the fact that she's getting professional care, so much the better.

———

On to photography. I'm definitely a digital type because the financial barriers to good photography were too high with film. I'm also a Photoshop expert (not ACE, but if I thought I needed it I could study up for it in less than a month.)

I work for a photography studio, actually, that specializes in high school photography. That's where I got a lot of my PS skills (until I had Gareth, I was their go-to person for all the tricky stuff, and I'm just grateful that they found somebody really good to replace me.) Many things you can do in PS are similar to the photo-enhancement you can do in a darkroom, and I highly encourage you to play with the help of someone who knows what they're doing. Scott Kelby's online tips, if you can't get someone in person.

Having said all of this, the photographer's goal should be to use PS as little as humanly possible. I know how to fix slightly out-of-focus photos. I can fix under-exposed photos. I can even, God help us, do something about that picture that you shot too damned close and cut off their feet/shoulder/hand. But I shouldn't have to. All the time spent on PS is costing money. All the time behind the lens is making money.

This is why, if I ever write a Photoshop book, there is going to be a chapter entitled "Beat the Photographer."

David Dyer-Bennet, we are encouraged to use the viewfinder for one reason— it saves power. When you might have to go to battery backup for a dance, this is no small consideration.

As for posing, a couple more things: Long sleeves look better, and pop your elbows out just slightly. Don't have your shoulders square to the camera. Put your weight on your back leg. And— this is interesting— ladies' heads always tilt towards the light, but gentlemen tilt their heads towards the back shoulder.

DDB@14:

There was also a smaller roll film, I think about 2" wide, called 127. Someone in my elementary-school class had a camera that took it.

I have a couple of 620 and 120 cameras, including a box camera I used to use at camp, but haven't tried respooling. There was an even wider roll film, I think 3" or so, called 116, with an alternate roller called 616. I have a box Brownie that takes 616, but I haven't gotten film for it. There are one or two guys on the Web who make film for it, by cutting down and taping together lengths of sheet film. Dad has an old tank that will develop 116/616, but I haven't plunked down the $20 or so for one roll, for what will probably be a light-leaking toy.

* * *

I used to develop & print film with my Dad. My grandparents had a darkroom in their basement, with a sink. When upstairs, we could communicate with whoever was in the darkroom by bending down and shouting into the hot-air grille in the middle of the living room baseboard - the furnace duct ran right through the darkroom.

After my grandparents sold that house in 1978, we used my sister's room as a darkroom, which involved taping a big sheet of black plastic to the window. That worked through high school, but starting in 1983, we have had a computer in that room, which is more fuss to clear away than Mom's miscellaneous papers.

Sometimes, if I was feeling like it, I'd set up in the kitchen, without covering the window. Use long exposures, so I can develop it fast, before the light from the window starts to grey out the paper. If I got it into the stop bath within a minute, I was generally safe.

Mary Dell 86: The phrase 'body English' is also used as a metaphor for what another writer might call slight-of-hand (again as a metaphor): using tricks to make something work.

'English', by itself, is a term I'm familiar with from pool (no, I don't play that game). You "put English" on the cue ball to make it strike the other balls in a certain way. In other words, you strike slightly to one side of center to give the ball a certain amount of spin (another word used for using language tricks to make something work better).

'Body English', literally, is waving your body around after the ball has left your hand or your cue has already struck. In other words, when it's too late. It's an ironic term IMU.

So the writer of your sentence is trying to say that storytelling involves a certain amount of handwaving. Or something. It's not very clear, at least to me.

Hypothetical open-threadiness -

What does it say about current TV programming that I find myself anticipating Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl with delerious excitement?

possible answers -

a.) yeah, that is some craptacular televisual programming. Thanks, Networks!

or

b.) PUPPIES!!!!!

nerdycellist @ 91... Well, the Other Bowl bores the skull out of me, so maybe it's the same for you.

I'm a terrible photographer- perhaps I could learn the skills of seeing, but I don't have them now.

Stefan@66: A young/small opossum, maybe? the tail doesn't look right based on this:

http://www.richwooders.com/appalachian/wildlife/opossum.htm

but the feet, in one of those pictures, look plausible.

... I'm going to give this to an expert. Wade Schuman, of the delightful but difficult-to-describe band Hazmat Modine, includes pictures of "mystery mammals" in his emails, and turnabout may be fair play.

What part of the country do you live in?

national public rhetoric gave almost a half hour to Salinger; to Zinn, two minutes, if that much, emphasis on the million copies of his history of the U.S. sold.

Says it all about the media and politics, one might think.

Of course, I've never been impressed with Salinger, from the time I was an adolescent and supposed to go all gaga about him. Feh.

Love, C.

Otoh, meeting our students for the first time today, they impressed the h*ll outta me. For starters, among them, on average, they speak about 2.86 languages. Or, if you factor in Mandarin with the now outnumbered Cantonese speakers, about 3.6.

Also they've never heard national public rhetoric, as no one under 40 listens to the radio anyway. Further they've never heard of Salinger either.

Thanks to everyone who answered my question about DSLRs. I figured there had to be reasons, but I couldn't figure out what they were.

Oh my, I can smell the chemicals even now. And I miss it.

I started talking pictures wth my dad's Nikon F. All manual, 50mm lens, and a broken light meter. No hot shoe, either. Then I got my own F10 with a good light meter, a hot shoe, and a 28-80 lens. Then I got a Canon Elan with a 35-80 and all sorts of auto modes....then the Canon Digital Rebel body that I could use with my other Canon lenses. I have to say, some of my favorite pictures were taken with that battered old F, during my 1st college photo course. (A lot of the photos I sell on Etsy are from those old Nikons.)

I had jobs working in darkrooms from college till about 5 years after. Since then, though, getting darkroom access has been very, very hard. It was the lack of access that lead me to buying the digital. And I love many aspects of the digital. But I want to get in there and burn and dodge and watch a print rise up like a ghost from the yellow (under the safelight) paper.

For a while I had a whole mess of darkroom equipment to build my own, but I am an apartment dweller with no place to put it. After storing it for years, I sold it this fall to a couple with a highschool daughter who has started photography. A darkroom was to be her Christmas present. I hope it works out well. They said that she was a kid who didn't do well with school, but a photo class she'd taken had really gotten her to connect. I like to think that she may have found a place to shine.

Now that I've taken the plunge in regards to selling my work on Etsy, I'm really considering ponying up and paying the (somewhat ghastly) membership fees to a local darkroom (the ghastly fees don't even include the cost of chemicals or paper). I realize the need to send my digital photos off to someone else to print when I want to sell them, but the BW film stuff...it just feels wrong to let someone else touch it.

I hope no one minds if I link to my Etsy store, I'm always up for feedback on my images (or at my blog, which is linked under my name): Irving Place Photography

And on other topics...B. Durbin and Carrie S.'s poems both gave me shivers. Bravo!

#93: I live in the Portland OR area.

It's definitely not an opossum.

Someone suggested a woodchuck. Maybe, but it doesn't have the same roly-poly ground-beaver look a groundhog has. But dead wet creatures can look very different than their fluffy live selves.

I added a better shot of the creature's head.

Oh, forgot to mention this earlier. A site I found really motivating and educational for learning to improve my shots (and giving me a LOT of examples, WITH commentary attached of varying quality) was ,A HREF="http://www.dpchallenge.com/">DPChallenge. They run several 'challenges' a week, and invite all members to upload entries, which all members can then 'vote' and comment on. I never scored any higher than 5.5 on a 10-point scale, but I didn't really deserve to, either. :-> There's a lot of people there who, if they don't professionally shoot stock, should.

Usefully, you can search by, say, what camera people used to take their photo, and see what other people are doing with your hardware. When I was actively shooting for DPChallenge, I found it made me look at the world differently -- I was always looking with the current challenge topic in mind, which got me to shoot more, and shoot differently than I otherwise would.

In re my #99, WOW I stunk that up. The first link should look like this. Typos and a faulty right shift key on my laptop, alas.

(I'd just like to say)

I have exposed
the rolls
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for something

Forgive me
they were calling
so colorful
and so expired

Back at the beginning of my Army stint (1972-75), I was trained as a Photographic Laboratory Technician at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Besides the darkroom instruction, there was also some training on using a camera.

The Camera of Availability for us back then was... yes, really... a Speed Graphic*. That big ol' hunk of camera you see news photographers using in old movies from the 30's and 40's.

Big, and heavy, and awkward. But the 4x5 film sheets could catch awesome detail in a shot.

Also, if you carried it around a lot: great biceps.

Towards the end of training, we were able to use some SLR 35mm cameras for a couple of days.

Most of the training was for darkroom techniques. Doing the B&W stuff could be fun, but the color developing was more complex and I didn't get much satisfaction out of it.

After training, I was sent to another Army base, where I filled a slot for that MOS in a Signal company's TO. But there wasn't any actual job for a darkroom tech with that company, so my time there was spent washing trucks and mowing lawns.

(Rest of the long story short: Being assigned to that company turned out to be one of the most hellish experiences I've ever gone thru. If I'd been offered a choice between staying in that company and going to Vietnam, I'd have started packing. I eventually managed to transfer to a Transportation company on the same base after a few months, where I was glad to work as a company clerk for the rest of my enlistment.)

(Sad side-effect: Being in that signal company was so traumatic that it left me with anxiety attacks at the idea of handling a camera or working in a darkroom again, for years. I didn't start shooting pictures again, except for a handful, until our friend Anne bought me an almost-top-of-the-line digital camera in 2003; I've probably done a few thousand since then.)

(Even sadder side-effect of that side-effect: I have almost no pictures of our son Chris as he was growing up.)

*the notes on the linked Flickr image give more detail on how the Speed Grahic was operated, and also an anecdote about how the Hindenburg Disaster was captured on a Speed Graphic by one very practiced photographer

Re 120/220 -- There are _many_ different shapes of camera that use 120/220, though finding 220 film is getting harder and harder. (it's the same stuff, 2x as long, without the paper backing so it can't be used in some cameras that have a window on the back of the film for seeing the image number)

I've got a Mamiya m645, and lenses for it are pretty cheap, nothing like Hassie prices. It also handles like a (big) slr, with a pentaprisim on top so looking through the viewfinder gives me a normal image. There are also waist level finders, and sometimes I run it with the prisim off so that I can act like it's a waist level finder.

A friend of mine brought an RZ67 with a polaroid back on the last photowalk and was handholding that monster. It's seriously huge, and not really for walking around with. Pentax made one that looked just like an ordinary slr, only bigger. There are some neat pano cameras that will take a 6x17cm image, and some that will spin and expose an entire roll of film over the course of 540 degrees.

Terry @ 87: oh, granted, the dominant 6x6 camera is a very slow and deliberate thing to use. I only have a little (very negative) experience with Hassies but my old Bronica is the same sort of thing, and while I liked it well enough it was never my favorite. The fact that it sounded like the bolts to the gates of hell shooting closed whenever I took a photo with it probably didn't help that impression. That was reserved for my TLR (which takes some getting used to but is incredibly quiet and sweet) and my unbelievable Fujica 6x7 and 6x9. I can't recommend the latter to anyone else especially considering how hard it is to find lenses for them but I loves them, I does... although not so much with the bringing them from one place to another. (the camera with a normal lens is like five pounds of metal and glass)

@ Fragano Ledgister #10:

I'm delurking to thank you for the sonnet. "jell it as remembered light" gave me a little chill. What a beautiful image!

I started taking pictures with a 110 Instamatic when my age was still in single digits. I switched back and forth between that and a 126 for a few years, and some of my best images are still from those cameras, despite their technical limitations. So I agree with Terry Karney about the most important part of photography being image selection.

When I got to high school, I signed up for a photography class as an art elective, and my dad gave me his old rangefinder Canon 35mm (he'd moved on to a more sophisticated SLR). No, I don't remember the model. It had a built-in light meter, but no other electronics. My dad had been an enthusiastic photographer for many years, and I think at one point he'd had a darkroom setup in our house -- my mother is still annoyed that he insisted on taking my newborn pictures in black and white, in case he wanted to print them himself. By the time I got interested, though, we no longer owned an enlarger. He did still have a sack full of the sort of flashbulbs you'd put on a Graflex flash tube. I'd been accustomed to the flash cubes and flash bars you could stick on an Instamatic. I say "sack," but it was actually a red canvas "No Parking" meter-cover that he'd swiped, somewhere in the misty past.

I got hooked. Developing wasn't particularly interesting, except for the challenge of doing something strictly by touch, but printing? Printing was heaven. Changing the light exposure timing until it looked just the way you wanted it to, dodging and burning to correct for things you couldn't solve with shutter speed and aperture when you'd taken the frame, timing the image in the bath to get all of the detail without overdeveloping... I could mess around printing for HOURS. And did. I applied to be a "guildmaster" for photography at my school, which meant I got a key to the darkroom and could use it any time I wanted, in exchange for agreeing to be present at certain times so the darkroom could be open without the teacher having to be there.

Our darkroom had running water and a goodly number of enlargers, and my dad donated his old glossy print dryer, but it wasn't without its problems. We hung the developed film in a series of lockers to dry, and we were downstairs from the ceramics studio, and there was clay dust EVERYWHERE. It was nearly impossible to get an unspeckled negative. Once I'd finished the offered classes, I got the negatives developed professionally, and just did my own printing, because the dust specks drove me insane.

One of the things I loved best was making hand-colored prints. I learned to make my exposure choices for a pale rather than a saturated effect -- almost the opposite of noir -- so that I could make the colors show effectively. I liked making the colors look realistic but faded. One of the best ones I did was of my oldest baby doll, whose painted features I'd nearly washed away over years of bathing her face.

One of the things I regret is never getting to use my dad's Mamiyaflex. I loved how it looked, and I was interested in using the large-format film, although the school enlargers had no plates for it and the one boy who was using one had to make his own enlarger plates out of manila folders. But my dad's Mamiyaflex was slightly damaged, and he judged it too expensive to repair, in the 1980s.

I haven't pursued photography as a hobby for years. But if I had ready access to a darkroom, it would be great fun to go in and just mess around.

Stefan, my thought on that critter is a mole or a gopher. (Shrews are possible, but they're smaller.)

abi, #39, I'm so sorry.

Stefan Jones, #66, it looks like a rat.

#87 Terry

I agree composition is critical.... I've sometime held a position for several minutes waiting for the right expression, viewing angle on the subject, etc. -- but with lag time on digital cameras, can miss it easily. On the other hand, there is the video option for most of them.... some cameras do 720p (1280 X 720 resolution 30 frame per second video))

various -- I remember the smell of hypo...

The Museume of Fine Arts had a room-sized camera that it shot giant sheets of Polaroid film with... one of the terminal at Logan had a series of photographs twice lifesize of silk-making drawings/paintings made with that camera.

abi, I'm sorry for your loss. I'm also sorry I didn't notice on my first readthrough that you just said your grandmother died Monday.

eric @ 101 ...
Forgive me
they were calling
so colorful
and so expired

Somehow I want to rephrase that as:

Forgive me
they were calling
so colorful
and Oh My!

Happy open-threadiness:

The Boy has been fascinated with planets and outer-space since he was around 3 or 4. Today he turns 8, and his big birthday present is a 6" Dobsonian reflector telescope - Orion Starquest XT6. (Unfortunately it's not arrived in time for the day, but he's getting a picture of it with a card.) Barring major accidents, it should last him through adulthood if his interest continues.

At 29, I may be the youngest one in this discussion. I had a cheap film camera growing up, and around fifth grade got really interested in photography. I started shooting a lot of film, and my parents, alarmed at the expense, discouraged me to the point that I didn't touch a camera again until college.

The college I attended had some of the early consumer-level digital cameras. I borrowed a Sony Mavica that took 3.5" floppy disks. With the proper resources and encouragement, I might have learned to do decent work with film. That first digital camera, though, was magic. The instant feedback meant that the learning process was so much faster, and even my eventual dSLR purchase was dirt cheap compared to what I'd be spending on film and developing.

I've never actually seen a darkroom and have no film experience whatsoever outside of dropping rolls off at the drugstore in middle school, but I think I'm doing all right. (That Flickr account gets used for all sorts of things, including quick shots for blogging and silly family shots, so the quality varies. The things I'm really proud of are like this. I'm sure there's experience that can only be gained with film and a darkroom, but there's also experience that can only be gained with, say, tintype work.

caffeine, I'm 27; my fiancé is 29. So we're of an age with you -- coming of age and learning about photography just as digital cameras went through their quick change from essentially toy cameras, to something professionals could use.

Rikibeth:

Printing was heaven. Changing the light exposure timing until it looked just the way you wanted it to, dodging and burning to correct for things you couldn't solve with shutter speed and aperture when you'd taken the frame, timing the image in the bath to get all of the detail without overdeveloping... I could mess around printing for HOURS.

This. This exactly. That was what was so great about my photography courses in college. They were rather lacking on anything to do with artificial lighting, but there was a strong focus on B&W darkroom, and I spent a lot of time in there. (Heck, I spent so much time there that I ended up getting a job as the lab assistant, and then a second job doing archival prints for the college art museum.)

I miss that unlimited access. When I do get access these days, I'm usually paying by the hour, and find myself watching the clock for more than just developing times.

"Underexpose, overdevelop" was my prof's motto.

Carolina @115, glad to know I'm not the only young'un!

I think being part of that transition of both the desktop computer and the digital camera, from curiosity to tool accessible to the common person, was part of what made both so special to me. Mucking around with chemicals doesn't sound the least bit fun, but Lightroom? Complete magic. It doesn't make up for bad in-camera work, of course, but you can tweak images so that they match the vision you had all along, or create something entirely new. I'd say the same about Photoshop, but my exposure to it's been limited by a bad case of tendonitis of the wrists. (One of the downsides of the transition to new technologies is the lack of sensible infrastructure to go with them, like properly supportive chairs and desks.)

In 30 years, when the next big photography breakthrough is out (holograms?), I wonder what young people will think of boring old digital.

caffeine, #114: Wow, pretty! I looked at a few more shots in that set, and they're very nice. You might be interested in this set that I took at the Smithsonian Gems & Minerals Collection this past summer. I was quite pleased with the way some of them came out.

Clifton @ 113 -

Excellent choice for a first telescope. A 6" will show him a great selection of lunar, planetary and deep sky objects. Orion has a good selection of economical instruments that aren't junk.

My father pushed us through practically every craft/hobby out there, so I had a B&W period. I can't for the life of me remember what camera I used, but I'm pretty sure it took 126 film. We developed it in the laundry room and made contact prints. My father had a Leica and shot huge numbers of slides when I was little and miles of 8mm when I was older. The film processing always punched some sort of code into the tail end of the latter so you always knew when the film was about to run out because the sprockets would make a different sound and the image would be shot full of holes. I took my father's Leica with me to Europe, where it stopped working somewhere around Prague; the guy at the photo shop in Vienna suggested pitching it, but I kept it and picked a disposable or something else cheap. It turned out all I had to do was mess with the lens the right way and it would have started working again. I later had a couple of low-end SLRs, one of which I still have though it hasn't been loaded in over a decade. Part of me wants to get a DSLR but the cost has always seemed daunting.

I've never really gotten good because the cost of processing always made me parsimonious.

Antivaxxer movement leader found to have acted unethically by the UK's General Medical Council, including unethical spinal taps of children

caffeine @ 114 : I am somewhat younger (23) than you; I trained in photography just prior to the absolute explosion of cheap, decent digital cameras - the program in high school that I learned through still issued decades-old manual bodies to new students (they loaned them out, and the teacher made the students swear fearsome oaths to not break them).

I wonder if anyone else feels as I do about B & W versus color, which is that (generally speaking, and there are exceptions) color is wonderful for landscapes and animals, but cityscapes and human faces, while stunning in color, can also be beautifully rendered, sometimes more so, in B & W. I don't want to sound too dogmatic here, since this is a matter of taste -- but some of my favorite photos of people I love seem more powerful and "true" in B & W.

I owned a Kodak Brownie, as a child. My father loved taking family photos; he even had a home darkroom, for a while, though I think the chemicals made my mother nervous. He was one of the first to buy a Polaroid camera, and loved the technology, though even he agreed that the photos looked like crap. I have several boxes of black and white (and various shades of brown) family photos. The oldest, which are more than 100 years old, are in excellent condition. My favorites are the ones of my parents in their twenties. The photos were taken in the late 30s and early 40s, and are as crisp and clean as if they had been taken today. I have several of my father in the army, in the South Pacific, taken around 1941. They were mailed to my mother, and of course, she kept them. They passed to me when she died.

I'm the photographer fiancé that Caroline mentions @53

She already said a lot of what I think here, but I think it's worth elaborating a tiny bit. What she really didn't mention is how much fulfillment I get out of the digital tools. It may seem strange to an older generation, but I actually do get the same visceral enjoyment out of working my images digitally that everyone here describes getting from the darkroom. Now, I know that feeling well; I like working in the darkroom, but at the end of the day, I can make my images faster and better on a screen than I can with chemistry. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. The tools don't really matter as long as they let you make the image you want.

The part of all this that is so absorbing is the creation of the image. I think one of the advantages to a darkroom method is that it forces you to take time and consider your choices. if you have to go through the whole process of exposing, developing and fixing an image every time you want a third-stop of exposure correction, you had better carefully consider every choice you make. Once you become accustomed to the tools, though, this starts to feel like a time waster.

I love post-processing, and can spend a ridiculous amount of time doing it, but as much as possible, I try to avoid it. Shooting things right in the first place, capturing a moment, is far more important to making an image than the time we spend in the darkroom.

Lee, I love that gorgeous pink specimen that's your set cover. How on earth did you get enough room to even use a camera in there? The one time we went it was so crowded it was hard to even move. I keep meaning to go back, but now that we're in Manassas it's a pain in the rear to go into the city on a weekday (which would theoretically be less crowded).

Ben @122, I know there are a lot of people in my generation who truly straddled that gap and studied (or study) both. I suppose the slight implication upthread that people who have never used film are somehow incomplete as artists/photographers got my hackles up a bit.

caffeine: I'm 32, so I guess I'm your generation.

FWIW, a color image can be converted to B&W in digital, but unless you've done some strange things with the lighting, you'll need to tweak the levels to look like a true B&W shot. I'm all for experimenting with that sort of thing, and in fact I'm fond of semi-color images, where you mask out part of the image and have little pops of color. Even desaturated color. I don't often get the chance to do that because most current high school seniors aren't interested in anything other than bright flash right now. It's rare we get a B&W order when the student is picking the images.

Anyway. Right now my photostream is primarily made up of Gareth photos, but I have a few that are a bit more artistic. So you can poke around a bit and understand— these are all my point-and-shoot camera. I haven't gotten an SLR yet.

For anyone wondering how to take more interesting pictures, I suggest you change your viewpoint, literally. Get down on your knee (or your belly) for low shots looking up. Try shooting straight down. Get too close. You may find that you're taking shots you didn't know you could take. Some of my best shots are accidental. :)

caffeine, #125: I was there on a Saturday, but it was midsummer, and maybe the heat kept some people away; it was busy, but not jammed except right around the Hope Diamond. I didn't have any trouble getting enough space to take my shots. And boy, did I learn a lot about shooting thru glass that day! There were a lot of deleted shots where all you could see was the reflection of my flash. :-) You have to stand off to one side a bit, so that the reflection doesn't come straight back at you.

I suspect that a lot of the "you're not a REAL photographer if you haven't worked with film in your own darkroom" attitude is a variation on a theme that goes back to "you're not a REAL farmer if you haven't pulled that plow with your own back instead of using an ox".

126 cartridge pinhole camera

My daughter and I made one; the processing labs around here can't make prints from them but they can develop the negatives. The results were somewehat better than Niépce's. The hardest part is getting the film registered properly so you don't have a bar running through the middle of your image.

You're not a REAL hunter if you haven't poked a mastodon with a fire-hardened, sharpened stick instead of using one of those fancy schmancy sticks with sharp rocks tied on the end. Everyone knows that using sharp rocks to hunt food offends the sky.

Carrie S. @45:
That one made me cry too.

It was my mother who pointed out that so many of these fairy tales start out by killing off the heroine's mother. We came to the conclusion that it was because one of the subtexts of the story is that "none of these terrible things would have happened if her mother were around". (My maternal grandmother died when my mother was 24.)

Xopher, Marilee:
Thank you. She was 94, so she had a good innings, and she used the time well. Which just makes us miss her all the more.

I've amended the entry; I apologize to anyone I offended or put off.

Digital v film?

I don't think it means you're not a "real" photographer or not to have bypassed film.

I means you are a *differently experienced* one

for me,the art is also bound up in the ability to see the image progress from blank sheet through the stages until the image is fully realized.

Part of it may also be the lack of precision of the analog process of emulsion-related film and paper.

Or it may be the more akin to the differences in the internal process of composition/contemplation that Us Olde Folkes remember from shotting negative v. slides.

they are *not* the same

abi @ 130... Belatedly, my condolences.

Three Wolf Moon t-shirt declared "the offical t-shirt of New Hampshire economic development".

Laura Gillian #105: Thank you.

I'm 50 now; I got my first camera at age 7 or so. I still have both prints and some of the negatives from then. It was a Kodak® Instamatic 126 cartridge, with two shutter sppeds and no other adjustments. I used it until high-school. My father had a 127 roll film camera that was a bit higher-end.
In high-school I did yearbook photography and developed and printed my own B&W, both at school and at home. My first paying job was in a camera store. Mostly I handled photofinishing bags; I sorted negatives for wedding photos; sometimes we sold a camera; and I did lots and lots of Polaroid passport photos. Every now and then someone needed an odd size passport photo, I developed and printed a few of those. I wound up owning things like a Russian rangefinder with great optics and bad mechanics and several strange 1970's Polaroid cameras.
My first after-university job gave me enough money to buy a used Spotmatic™ -- I still have it, although it's the old one with the unavailable battery, and none of the substitutes have worked well for me. I use a hand-held light meter. I did run a couple of rolls through it last year. I own a few lenses, one of which frequently appears on top 10 lists - the Tamron 105 f2.5 macro. For years it was my all-round lens.
We're now on our second digital p&s, which has a 2:3 aspect ratio option at 9Mpixels. It does the job for snapshots. When I shopped for a digital camera, shutter lag was something I tested.
An early experience was using a borrowed digital camera to try to take some shots of a moving bike. Frustrating - although missing the shot in film is more so.

One thing I notice is that many people aren't critical of their own photos. One of the guys at work is a serious semi-pro sports photographer; he does skateboard photos and so on. He entered a content and sent the "vote for me" link to a bunch of us. Some of the other entries were out-of-focus - in a sports photo contest - and they weren't artistically out-of-focus, they were just not quite focused.

I've shot two weddings seriously myself, one on film and one digitally. I bought three rolls of VPS 136-36 (VeriColor Professional type S) and got maybe a dozen reasonable shots out of 108 exposures. With the digital camera, the memory card holds about a thousand shots, I ran through maybe 250 and deleted most of them, but got a couple of dozen really good pictures.

I want a DSLR, but I don't want it enough to spend the bucks right now.

cd @ #134--

from the article:

The shirt has been worn by actor Rainn Wilson of "The Office" and Allan Hyde of "True Blood." It was also worn by the U.S. Marine's Bravo Company 1st Combat Engineer Battalion.

Grammar and syntax--what happens when they fail.

So, did the Marines stuff themselves into a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXL, or does the fabric just have a lot of stretch?

abi @#130: Wow. I don't know what to say except that I'm flattered--I consider myself a middling poet at best, and that's one of the few things I've ever done that I consider worthy of public consumption. So I'm glad it worked for you. Thanks.

Lee @127, sounds like a thousand variations over a thousand years of "kids these days." Ties neatly back into the last open thread's quote.

Abi, I think this may be a case, as I know has happened here recently, of overreacting to something said here because of baggage from the Rest Of The Internet. You certainly didn't offend.

Abi: I'm sorry about your loss.

D Bubin: That was really good--it put me back in a couple of situations with relatives and friends whose minds had fallen apart alongside their bodies. Damn.

Carrie and Fragano: Very nice poems. Each rather disturbing, though in different directions.

Right now, I find I don't have much poetry in my heart. I suspect I'd be a happier person if I ignored the news, these days. (A happier but more foolish man, I woke the prior morn.)

Open threadiness: This post talks about a sad contradiction between Obama's rhetoric and actions, this time on lobbyist-friendliness. This recalls one of my first posts here. Sigh.

Late to this discussion as usual. I have a digital point-and-shoot camera: annoyingly, in the last roll of film from my 35mm point-and-shoot it began to look like I'd worked out how to get some good shots, so I've had to learn it all over again. It's true (as caffeine said) that the trial-and-error process is much quicker with digital. But only one or two photos I've ever taken is in a class with the standard on show in the flickr sets here.

(I'm not at all bothered by this. I like taking photographs; one day I mean to start doing it a bit more seriously; but I have other things I like doing at the moment and they keep me busy.)

One thing I do find: I like reportage much more than landscape and details; but taking photos of strangers and even friends and family feels like invading their privacy too much. Also, if I'm in a situation where I am enjoying myself, I find I am reluctant to take photos. I think I'm afraid of ending up relating to it through a camera lens instead of enjoying myself in an unmediated way.

This isn't meant as a criticism of people who do take photographs at social events, obviously. It is mainly my own neurosis. I have enough of a tendency to withdraw from direct experience as it is.

Also, I know there are strategies around this. As I say, if I ever get on to taking photography at all seriously I will put some of them into practice.

Diatyma@62
Any tips on how to make things and see the whole rather than every tiny flaw? I don't do it with other people's work, but I can take only so much of my own before perfectionism kicks in.

Not something I do with photography, but it can be the same with poetry (this thread's other theme, evidently). I am beginning to wonder if one answer is the opposite of the "throw away the bad stuff" advice: let other people see it. You mentioned yourself that you are more willing to see the virtues in other people's work: maybe let them see the virtues in yours. You might still be unhappy with it, but you will have seen it from a wider perspective.

Of course, for this it is presumably necessary to have the opinion of someone you know you can trust to tell the truth and yet be sympathetic. Family and friends who will tell you it's great regardless are not a lot of help; and I guess it helps if you can find someone whose opinion will be halfway informed. And it occurs to me that any reduction in insecurity that comes out of this process may have nothing to do with the making or their views on it, but just the fact of having such a person to call on in the first place. Or maybe the making is good because it strengthens that relationship.

I don't know if that makes sense. It isn't aimed at Diatryma specifically, in any case. I've only just started showing my poetry to one or two friends whose views I trust, and the fascinating thing is how much I learn about the poems (and about myself). And this isn't because the poems are especially good. I carry on making my own decisions about their quality, but I'm beginning to realise the hidden virtues of even the less good stuff.

abi, you didn't offend me, and I think I can safely say you didn't offend Keith either. I read it as talking about your own experience with photography, not passing judgment on anyone else's. I think it's neat to talk about and explore the differences and similarities in people's experience with making images with film and with digital tools.

Other places I have seen people argue that photographers who shoot digital aren't "real" photographers, and people may be hearing and reacting to those echoes, but I didn't read you as saying that. I just read your own memories and experiences.

Furthermore, I just saw your comment about your grandmother. I'm so sorry for your loss.

My grandmother has encroaching dementia: she can't remember the years she lived in my hometown, during my childhood, at all. She still knows who all the family are, who she is, where she is, when she is -- but parts of her past are gone. I'm dreading what may happen to her memory in the future.

Earl Cooley 129

I was sure that link was going to go here:

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

re 127: I had a round of the glass/flash thing this summer trying to shoot pictures of a room through a glass door. After a run of less than successful shots and moving on to something else, it suddenly occurred to me that the secret was to hold the lens directly against the glass. I doubt they'll let you use that trick in the Smithsonian, though.

Last comment, I am for the road.

DDB: re in the field checking, one of the things I stress to my students is that can't use the camera back for anything but composition. The resolution of the highest quality screens is still orders of magnitude less than the image actually has information, and that's for .jpg.

KeithS: Part of it is habit. Part of it is that the LCD is a poor substitute for looking at something directly. If a camera has a viewfinder (even if it's just a window through the body. I'll use that. Oddly, that seems to mark me as special. I borrowed a camera at work, to take a photo of a dinner party, and someone commented, "Look at how he's holding it, he must be a photographer.

LCDs are late, have wierd artifacts, and the images drags and jumps. An SLR doesn't.

DDB: Liveview isn't (to the best of my knowledge) supported through the viewfinder, but through the camera back.

I don't like camera back/LCD composing, because of the lag issues, the drag issues, and the distractions of the outside world. I find the limits of the frame make composing easier. It's just anectdata, but this seems to be the case for more people than not; IME

Regarding viewfinder vs. LCD for composition, I've found that the live view LCD is more useful for rough composition, but the viewfinder is more useful for fine-tuning focus, particularly on a tripod.

cd, #134: That's a nice boost for Mountain. They have some really terrific shirts -- I've got at least half a dozen in my wardrobe, because Pegasus carries them, which means I get to see all the new stock. They print on high-quality blanks, too.

B. Durbin @126 said: Some of my best shots are accidental. :)

No joke. I should note that anything beyond a little bit of global contrast-correction, hue-shifting, or removing redeye is totally beyond me, when it comes to electronic photo-editing ... so it amazes my friends when I suddenly show up with shots like this (bird) or this (at my cousin's wedding). They look like I painted them, or spent hours in Photoshop, but nope -- in-camera effects. :->

The bird shot was gotten using my last camera, whose zoom was lacking, and holding our birder spotting-scope up to the lens in a frantic attempt to get some decent shot of a small bird halfway across our backyard, while standing inside our kitchen. The wedding shot is just what happens when it's dark and your camera can't cope. :->

My flickr account, since everyone else is sharing.

Heh. I've got a few photos up at flickr as well.

My flickr account, some film, some not.

I'll join the party and link to my Flickr account.

Stefan@98:
Doggiesnack update. I got an email back from Wade:

"It looks like some sort of Vole...!

I can look it up in my field guide...but it's rather hard to see it's face and body structure...the white belly makes me think it might be a water Vole...
but I can't be sure...also it's pretty big for a vole!"

I will let him know that there's a better picture up.

#137: Perhaps they wore it serially, instead of in parallel?

Scott Roeder convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Doctor George Tiller.

It took the jury less than 40 minutes to convict him. And the judge did his part, precluding the jury from considering a lesser charge of manslaughter based on the defense's "justified killing" defense.

Bravo. Now let him rot in jail, for a very, VERY long time.

Sandy @ #154--I hope so, because while I've heard a lot from friends who are Marines, over the years, about the special closeness you find in the Corps, I don't think that was what they meant.

Also, while the Marines are often expected to make do with less, I really think they deserve to have one shirt per Marine.

praisegod barebones @145, yep, that's a great link, but I'm just not cool enough to link to Dresden Codak on a regular basis. Besides, the comet strike ending the Clovis culture idea was pretty compelling.

cd (134): ...Amazon sells The Mountain t-shirts? I'm doomed.

Since we're sharing: Photos from my Alaska trip last summer. I just have a cheap digital point-and-shoot, with too little zoom for good wildlife shots, but I got some good landscape pictures.

Bruce 155: Good. Does Kansas have LWOP as an option? I think terrorist murderers like Roeder should definitely get the maximum.

fidelio 156: Also, while the Marines are often expected to make do with less, I really think they deserve to have one shirt per Marine.

Deserve? Absolutely. But I have to say I'm enjoying the image of a whole bunch of shirtless Marines all squeezing together to get into one giant shirt.

Or doing anything else, to be frank. Mmm, shirtless Marines!

To answer my own question, according to this page, Kansas does have LWOP, but they also have a death penalty.

I hope he gets LWOP, the filthy terrorist scum.

Terry@147: with a little configuration, my D200 and D700 give me 1:1 pixels (centered on the focus indicator used, too) with one button push, so I can check focus and sharpness quite easily on the LCD. I don't think most P&S make it this easy, but all the ones I've owned do let you zoom in enough to make useful judgments (IMHO) on sharpness.

Not fine color -- but I do that in post anyway, and I can catch gross weirdness. Not exposure from the image appearance (although with experience you can get quite a bit; in particular, any detail you can see on the LCD is present in the file). But I've got the option of blinking clipped areas, and overlaid histograms, which tell me a lot about exposure on the LCD but not directly by evaluating the thumbnail.

I seem to combine information from multiple sources pretty well when framing. I don't have to look through the camera, I can find it bare-eyed and then bring the camera up a lot of the time. And I'm not disturbed if the finder (using the broadest sense, to include LCDs, EVFs, reflex viewers, ground glass on the back of a view camera, wire frame sports finder on a Speed Graphic, whatever) view is sketchy or weird; when holding a camera at weird angles overhead or whatever and hence viewing the LCD from angles where I can just barely make out the edges of objects, that's okay too (and lets me frame accurately enough; I know what's really there by direct sight, and can then place the frame edges on the LCD). I'd still rather have a tilt/swivel LCD though ;-).

"Live view through the viewfinder" is not something current DSLRs have, but that's essentially what an EVF is and some cameras do have EVFs, including some of the EVILs.

Will there be a Fluorospherian get together at Boskone? (Feb 12-14 at the Westin Boston Waterfront)

Jon@89: Yes, 127 is the narrower roll-film. That's what my first camera used (a Pixie 127, I believe from Sears). I think it's 1 5/8 inches wide; at least to the same extent that 120 is 2 1/4" wide (I forget now if those are the negative size or the film size). They also made some miniature serious cameras for that format, but mine wasn't one of them, it was a basic P&S, no exposure adjustment. It did have flash capability, though. Used AG-1B bulbs (the "b" being "blue" for daylight balance).

B.Durbin@88: in-camera vs. post-processing is a debate that was resolved long ago -- in favor of post-processing, despite the position you express in your message :-). Ansel Adams describes the negative as the score for some music, and the print as the performance. If you don't "perform" your negatives (or digital files) well, you're not getting anywhere near the best photos you could. A good landscape shot of mine, in serious workprint form, will have 4-7 layers (mostly curves adjustment layers, mostly with layer masks, but also a few paint layers in different blending modes, and maybe other stuff I found suitable for that photo).

Of course in commercial work, there are severe time constraints. And starting with the best negative you can get is always best; ideally, Adams wasn't "fixing" the picture while printing, he was "improving" it.

B.Durbin@88: in-camera vs. post-processing is a debate that was resolved long ago -- in favor of post-processing, despite the position you express in your message :-). Ansel Adams describes the negative as the score for some music, and the print as the performance. If you don't "perform" your negatives (or digital files) well, you're not getting anywhere near the best photos you could. A good landscape shot of mine, in serious workprint form, will have 4-7 layers (mostly curves adjustment layers, mostly with layer masks, but also a few paint layers in different blending modes, and maybe other stuff I found suitable for that photo).

Of course in commercial work, there are severe time constraints. And starting with the best negative you can get is always best; ideally, Adams wasn't "fixing" the picture while printing, he was "interpreting" it.

Re: good, accidental photos -- I have a folder on my computer titled "Blurs", where interesting compositions get saved. One is here, a cool effect of snow with a slate wall in the background. Another favorite is this one of my daughter's gymnastics team marching into competition.

Comparing SLR cameras to digitals, I think overall I probably got better shots with my SLR, but between the portability and the nearly unlimited freedom to shoot pictures (and dare to make mistakes), I've been won over to my digital.

Storage is another issue. We have a couple of thousand slides that document some very important slices of our lives, and I need to figure out the best* way to get them digitized. In addition to making it easier to view them again, it would be nice to give both our kids a complete set of copies.

*cheapest, most efficient, and/or most convenient, preferably all three.

w00t! We got Whatever'd! Many thanks to KeithS for sending an e-mail about it; the shirt hadn't been put up on our website yet, but now it has.

Abi: sympathies on your recent loss of your grandmother-in-law - and on the earlier loss of the real "her".

Open-threadiness: "Weather improves to allow evacuations of Machu Picchu tourists." I'm pretty sure that wasn't intentional on the part of the weather.

Ginger @ 83

If I'd only known, I could have asked you when I needed pictures of rabbit retinas (or do you only do rodents?)

Debbie @ 166:

There are flatbed scanners that have trays for taking negatives and/or slides. This is the cheapest way I can think of, unless you go in for a really expensive scanner.

The convenient way is to hire someone else to do it. This is, however, not cheap.

There are no efficient ways that I know of.

abi @ 39:

My condolences on your loss. (And my apologies as well; I intended to post this much earlier, and, obviously, I didn't.)

Very much enjoying this image from Tim Walters. Also enjoying checking out all these Flickr streams! (And will check out the other sites when I'm not behind a firewall.) One of the other wonderful things about digital photography is the availability of others' work online to study and learn from.

Nobody has suggested a Nutria for the mysterious critter in Portland yet? We're getting quite a population of them now, especially around wet areas.

cd #134: Three Wolf Moon t-shirt declared "the offical t-shirt of New Hampshire economic development".

The best parody of that t-shirt I've seen features Sarah Palin (you may wish to take liquids-near-keyboard precautions before viewing).

By the way, I think it's high time that Narcissistic Personality Disorder had its own telethon and celebrity spokesperson.

dcb @ 169: Oh, I do all kinds of retinas. I'm trying out the same system for photographing rabbit retinas too. Let me know if you need anything, and I'll see if I can get it.

David D-B, "fixing" is what I refer to for sure. All of our photos go through a post-production process including but not limited to blemish removal, eye brightening, under-eye softening (to be fair, proper studio lighting will make anyone look as though they have bags under their eyes), vignettes, and of course color-corrections and saturation. We have our own printer so we can be very precise on those points.

Because we do those things for every photo, we have set up a process to do them very quickly. But invariably we get obnoxious requests that are due to photographer error— shooting too close for the cropping, offering the customer an out-of-focus image to chose from (and which they will want a poster of), under-exposed images which are so yellow that color is a bear, and so forth. I don't mind the weirder requests for special vignettes, or multi-photo compositing, or the really oddball ones (one mother asked us to tone down her son's vitilago so that it was not gone but not the first thing you noticed. Oddly enough, I just toned down the yellow in his natural skin tone and it worked beautifully.) Those things are a challenge; those things are fun and artistic.

IOW, I agree that your best photos should be treated to make them really shine. But you shoot so as to minimize the work you spend afterwards, because then you have more time to play.

#172: I've seen nutria. So has my dog; she can spot one amidst a pond full of geese & ducks and immediately go into "want to kill!" mode.

But this would have to be a very small nutria about a mile from the nearest body of water.

Everything about the critter screamed "mole," except for its nose and its size.

Slide (and negative) digitizing: From 35mm, even a fancy flatbed scanner like the Epson V750 is somewhat marginal. Issues with negative flatness become important, too. However, depending on your quality standards (and in some areas I'm certifiably insane) a flatbed might do. A regular film scanner with slide feeder is good for piles of slides; negatives require more attention, and good film scanners are amazingly slow (but get about the best scan of the image, short of going to drum scans or something really extreme).

There are two cheap and easy ways. Well, neither totally cheap, nor totally easy, but somewhat better.

Easiest, not wonderfully cheap -- somewhere like scancafe.com, which charges you about a quarter per picture, and lets you reject half of them and not pay for them. However, the review and reject process is web-based and rather slow.

Or, if you've got a macro lens, a DSLR, and a light source, you can get a slide/film holder, and photograph them into digital form quite quickly. Many people have spoken well of the results. It doesn't, however, support digital ICE, which is totally wonderful for color negatives and some color slides (not some, esp. older, Kodachrome) for automatically and very accurately eliminating scratches, dust, hairs, and the like.

Lee 167: YOU made that t-shirt?!?!?! Cool! I definitely want some, but I have to get sizes first. I know several people who are going to LOVE them!

DDB @78,79 --

Right you are on EVIL; whups.

Electronic image display acts as a view enhancement device in low light; it might be what you want. (I can easily see it being very useful.) If you want to be seeing the actual light level or wish to avoid being the guy with the glowy face/dead give-away while trying to take available light indoor social candid shots, perhaps not so much.

(I will admit to using optical viewfinders with polarized sunglasses on, but, well, that's what EV compensation on the camera is for. I don't consider my eyes expendable.)

Debbie @ 166
Even quite cheap flatbed scanners wth a tray for holding slides can do pretty good scans, if set on high resolution. Does take time, however (mine holds three slides).

Ginger: I was just looking for pictures showing normal and abnormal, back when I was finishing off the Wildpro volume "Rabbits and their Relatives: Health and Management". Sheila Crispin (veterinary ophthalmologist) let me use some of her pictures, which was very helpful - normal pigmented fundus and albino fundus. I also have images of cataract, aberrant conjunctival overgrowth and blepharitis, phacoclastic uveitis secondary to Encephalitozoon cuniculi, plasmalymphocytic keratitis, glaucoma and lipid keratopathy, but I could still use some more on keratitis and corneal ulceration, conjunctivitis, distichiasis, trichiasis, ectopic cilia, and prolapse of the glands of the third eyelid. Photocredit given and a link to your website/organisation if wanted, but no payment I''m afraid.

Critter-got-by-Stephan-Jones's-dog: I've tried researching it in the books on North American mammals available in my home library (Audubon Society Field Guide, Smithsonian Book of North American Mammals).

I was going for pocket gopher based on size and tail characteristics. Relative tail length (and lack of much if any hair) would also allow vole, but unless you have some very large voles... Well, some of the North American voles get to 18 cm long (about seven inches) - and some have a pale belly, so that's a possibility (tail characteristics - length and hair, or lack thereof, pretty much seem to limit the possibilities to voles and pocket gophers). It's obviously too small for a nutria. How long was it (I don't know how big your dog is)?

According to Walker's Mammals of the World (Sixth Edition), the Eastern pocket gophers (Geomys spp.) do have paler ventral fur, while the western species (Thomomys) don't.

Graydon@179: Yeah, there are certainly times when a bright 3" LCD on the back of the camera is intrusive. Not a problem with an EVF, where it's shrouded and sealed to your eye when in use (and is much smaller anyway). Although I haven't found the need to take my DSLRs off auto-review when photographing people in pretty dim conditions at parties; but these are mostly people I've been training for 20+ years to not mind me.

I haven't used an EVF camera or an EVIL (yet), just played briefly with them. The electronic viewfinders are getting better. I certainly wouldn't choose them for manual focus -- but I don't much like the screen in my D700 for manual focus either, and almost always use AF or at least focus confirmation rather than judging from the screen. Or live-view contrast-detect focus, for slow work on a tripod.

Film vs. Digital: It annoys me how many people, on both sides, see it as a religious issue. It shouldn't be.

I self-identify as a fan of digital photography, but hope that my fervor stops short of religious (I save that for important things, like text editors).

I do understand / sympathize with people being annoyed when their process is being forcibly changed by materials being discontinued. I even understand, somewhat, people being annoyed at being forced out of their comfort zones (or before they're ready, at least). I understand people late in their careers (this applies, obviously, to professional photographers) being unhappy at having to tackle a huge paradigm shift.

But, as somebody who worked primarily with film for 31 years (dating from my first SLR; 38 years if we go back to the oldest negatives I still have), I have to say that digital is SO MUCH better in SO MANY different ways. I get better color, better resolution, a wider brightness range recorded in a single exposure, better light sensitivity, less money per shot, and less time and money dealing with the images after the shot. I can make bigger prints than I ever could from 35mm film, by a lot. I can switch from slow color to fast B&W really quickly whenever I want to. I can carry enough media to record thousands of pictures without destroying my back. I can quickly check how my pictures are coming out in the field. Every single one of these things is a GOOD thing.

The equipment is more expensive, that's bad (DSLR bodies run about $600 to $8000 today). It requires heavy computer support and expensive software, that's bad (though I already had the computers for it, myself). The shooting is free, and if you shoot enough, that more than makes up for the equipment cost. The cameras are big and heavy compared to most 35mm SLRs. The cameras require battery power to function (so did all my 35mm film cameras made after 1987; i.e. I was used to dealing with that constraint long ago).

DSLR digital isn't competitive in resolution and hence potential print size with the better film medium and large-format cameras (there is medium format and large format digital, however, which is...for an even more appalling price).

Then there are workflow issues. A big one, for me, and an even bigger one for people with children, is that I don't have to commit to several hours of work plus an hour of cleaning up to justify setting up the darkroom. (I'm not talking about a temporary darkroom, that's even more work; I'm just talking about getting out the trays, mixing chemistry, and washing and putting away afterwards plus drying the prints). I can sit down and work on a picture for 10 minutes if I have 10 minutes, and I don't have to wander off behind a locked door to do it either.

This thread is really making me realize the importance of processing in producing decent shots; I can't seem to get the hang of it, however, without producing unnatural images that look processed. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good tutorial on basic digital processing?

(Despite all this I do have a few photos I'm proud of, since given a decent zoom any idiot can get a decent wildlife shot on occasion, like this one.)

David @ 182: I can sit down and work on a picture for 10 minutes if I have 10 minutes, and I don't have to wander off behind a locked door to do it either.

This is a huge benefit to digital. When I was growing up, my dad did wedding and portrait photography and he spent a lot of time in the darkroom doing work that a fidgety boy was a distraction to. Being able to do that work in Lightroom rather than a darkroom in the basement would have been something he'd have loved.

I do miss the darkroom, but as ritual and nostalgia mostly. It was meditative, gloriously solitary, and nearly magical. It was also, as mentioned up thread, time consuming, expensive, and had space constraints.

I love digital, mostly because it increases the possibility for serendipity. Settings on the camera are more malleable, and post processing lets a person try so many more alternate techniques without too much of an investment in either time or money.

To join with the others offering up flickr streams, here's a set of my favorites

Lorax, check out Digital Photography School. They have (free) tutorials on everything imaginable, and a wonderful community. They do both shooting and postprocessing tutorials/articles.

When I started shooting, I liked finished images that resembled exactly what I saw in front of me when I took it: this flower, beside this wall, leaning on this bench. My style has slowly evolved, though, and my postprocessing techniques with it. Now I find that I don't always want things to look straight out of camera. YMMV, though, of course.

#180: Thanks for the research!

Kira is German Shepherd sized.

The thing was about 10" long without the tail, say squirrel sized but pretty solidly built.

It had fur, but that was short.

I was expecting that Kira would drop it when I startled her with the flash. That is what happened right after I took this shot a few years ago:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/kira_squirrel_lo.JPG

This time she hung onto her prize, and it was shortly in process of being munched up, starting with the head.

I heard that Macmillian/Harper Collins books have gotten delisted or pulled from/by Amazon?

I was just going to ask the same thing as Paula. I am trying to order some books and I can't buy them from amazon? The Tor ones I mean. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

David Dyer-Bennet: There is one major disadvantage to shooting with digital, and that is a moderately compressed range. You don't notice it in regular photography much, but we photograph a lot of students with dark skin and white shirts and let me tell you, it sucks. You literally cannot light it properly to get the shot without either over-exposing the shirts or under-exposing the skin. We have to do selective color even then, but chances are that if we photograph someone with dark skin in a tux, there is no detail in the shirt. None. You can barely see the edges of the collar.

Incidentally, the worst skin tones to photograph seem to be Indian/Pakistani. They're the most matte and you have to do some truly weird things in post to get definition. (I did process one student of European heritage last week that had the exact same problem— a skin tone so even you could barely make out her nose. It wasn't the lighting because her hair was well-defined.)

This is the most mind-numbing time of the year, the time when we're putting the senior sections together. They have to be cropped exactly alike— not nearly so hard as it used to be, especially since we have one person doing all the cropping. Then we have to color-correct them so they're all the same. Not "all white", mind you, but so that one kid doesn't show up green. It's always a judgement call because you really have to guess what their actual skin tone is, and even then you probably have to skew it towards the norm. PLUS we've got to make the backgrounds match, and if you think getting the right skin tone is just a matter of matching the background, well, good luck. Somehow, pictures taken over the course of six months by many different photographers vary enough in lighting and minor shifts that the backgrounds won't tell you where the skin should be.

Thankfully, not too many "beat the photographer" moments. For once they seem to be shooting far enough out, and only a few wardrobe issues. (Suit instead of tux, mostly. That's actually a simpler fix than you might think.)

#189 B. Durbin
Are you using a DSLR in RAW format? They have a lot wider bandwidth/dynamic range than point and shoot JPEG cameras....

#186 Stefan
A friend who used to live on Possum Hollow Road, suggested that it might be an oppossum...

Stefan Jones @ 66...
Can anyone identify this giant mole-like animal my dog found? (And ATE . . .)

It looks like a vole to me -- the tail's not long enough for a rat, and it looks entirely too rounded for an opossum.

I was somewhat hesitant about posting links to some of my photos, but since others have been sharing, here are some of them:

skink
bee and leek flower
snake
lorikeets
pitchers

The rest can be found on my blog.

It just dawned on me that I have a similar photo to that Stefan's trying to analyze.

In my case, though, I know exactly what Tigger had in her mouth. Thank heaven she wasn't one to roll in her kills.

Bruce Arthurs: One of the interesting things about the Speed graphic is that one may use it as an enlarger.

Graham Hughes: I find my hassie to be pretty sweet, inside it's limits. What I do know about it (and most 2 1/4 cameras) is the DoF is tricky, and I have a numer of really good images I can't blow up becase I moved the focus, just a wee bit.

It's really quiet.

Re "the digital darkroom" I'm mixed. I like playing with the paper, and the enlarger. There is a certain sensawunder which comes of seeing the latent image reveal itself. It's also a matter of craft. I got to see a half dozen versions of Moonrise over Hernandez next to each other. It was a revelation, because they were all very different, and all of them were from the same negative.

But it's time, and work, and a skill which requires maintainence.

Once I found Lightzone (my preferred editing program), I got some of that on the computer. But printing is a bit trickier, and the image in the print is different from the image on the screen.

And B&W, takes a fair bit of work, because the profiles aren't the same. What I also notice is my "eye" for B&W isn't really there when shooting with a digital camera. It comes right back when I'm using film, but I have to ponder things, and work at it, to get a B&W image from a digital file.

C Wingate: Yes, you can hold the lens directly against the glass (this also allows for keeping the camera still for longer exposures). Drawback... working distance. Most lenses won't let you focus at the distance from the subject the glass puts the lens. I have a number of slides from the Gem and Mineral Exhibit, which were taken that way. I was using a 55mm macro lens, which let me focus at as little as 6".

DDB: The major issue of resolution I was talking about are color (the LCD is 256 colors) and light values. The range on the LCD is lacking for both of those. Even the D3 fails this test. Looking at the images (on the D3) and comparing them to the images when dowloaded... world of difference. Apart from composition, the images aren't the same.

I looked at the images which were giving me under/over warnings, and then looked at them online, and the values weren't the same. What bothers me with LCDs is that I can't pan the image and shoot. I have to stop if I want to know what is actually on the immage plane at the time of shutter release.

re slides: for the Nikons, there are designed attachments for duping slides.

and... My flickr

I'm hoping that an earlier comment containing links to five of my favourite photos will eventually come out of moderation at some point, but in case it doesn't, here's the blog from which they come.

Tim Hall @ #42: Do you have the train photo online somewhere?

Terry Karney @ #87: I've managed so far to avoid topping myself trying to get a good photo simply because my instinct for self-preservation still overrides most things. :) I will, however, watch my subject for a long time just so I can get the perfect "pose".

mcz @197:
OK, it's through now. Comment 195.

No idea why, but it actually got flagged as truespam rather than being put into the moderation queue.

I don't know why. I do not meddle in the affairs of spam filters, for I am crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Thank you, abi.

Who knew that, in 1962, Disney made a movie in which a drag queen appears?

Paula Lieberman @ 191: definitely wrong for an oppossum, on lots of counts (wrong nose, wrong tail, wrong fur...

Stefan Jones @ 186 I've e-mailed the best small mammal identification expert I know. Let's see what he says.

lorax @ 183 Great picture, great horns.

mcz @197: thanks for sharing. Some great pictures. This thread is making me wish I had a Flickr account so I could share some of mine. Oh well.

Serge @200: Title, please?

#189 B. Durbin

White shirts too white? I wonder if there's something about how they're washed. There are detergent additives that use various tricks to fool the eye, things such as fluorescence at the blue end of the spectrum. I remember from the film days that a UV-blocking or 81A filter (looked very slightly pink) could make a difference. Even colour film could be more sensitive to blue light. That might reduce the relative brightness of the shirt enough.

Filters seem to have dropped off the scope for a lot of things. Some effects filters are still used, but I suspect people just do Photoshop, where I would have used a graduated filter on colour, or a yellow filter on B+W (yellow because it blocked blue light).

Not much help now: filters were about getting control before the light struck the sensor. And a filter such as an 81A only cuts down a small part of the spectral range which is lumped together as "blue" in the imagefile.

Film also made you aware of colour temperature problems. And fluorescent lighting did all sorts of weird things. One advantage the professional portrait photographer had was a good lighting setup, which he was used to.

Supposedly there is some software which can as focus fixing for out of focus digital images.... I don't remember the name, and forgot how the stuff might work... (I still vividly remember the end of the last part of an image processing class that I took, where the professor projects a in image that looking like lots of pixellated noise, with an analog projector. He then used the optical manual focus, and an image of Lincoln came into sharp focus. Alas, I forget the words he said about what to remember, but the change from pixellated apparently visual noise, to sharp image of Lincoln, was very vivid....)

Elliott Mason @ 202... The movie is "Moon Pilot". At some point, the FBI, with the collaboration of San Francisco's police, both of which seem populated by twits, is trying to track down astronaut Tom Tryon (remember "I Married a Monster from Outer Space"?), who's on the run with a cute 20-year-old alien redhead who speaks with a French accent even thicker than mine. They round up all the red-haired women they can grab for a police lineup. This being San Francisco in 1962, that means mostly crazy beatnick girls, plus what may be an angry lesbian, and one very tall woman that, after a moment, I realized was a man in drag.

James Ray has given a thing-resembling-an-interview in which he makes a half-assed attempt to defend himself. Including claiming that he didn't mean it literally when asked about telling people in the sweat lodge "You’re not going to die. You might think you are, but you’re not going to die."

And on other things, he either refers the interviewer to his previous statements, or his lawyer says he won't answer.

I suspect he thought that offering New York an "exclusive interview" would get him gentler treatment than it did.

Condolences to Abi.
Digital, as soon as I could afford one. Years of wasted film, and developers that in one case were as clueless as I, pushed me over the edge.
The caregiving subthread cuts deep. My parents are getting frail, and one will be taken care off by a cousin but the other won't. Some disabilities that affect me, plus ...issues from my youth, prevent me from being a caretaker for them. I myself have no younger relatives, and figure that before I get too helpless I will have to do one of those things that ensure what passes for an elder care industry, won't take me alive.
Haven't seen the mystery-animal pic, but my other cousin came face to face with a mountain-beaver one time; might that be it?

I have to admit that I rather care for shoddy phone cameras and failing to get Lomography right.

(Although, I can't find the charger for the 7250i and newer phones have much less worse cameras. Damn you, progress!)

[FX: Shakey fist]

I should imagine that one day, digital cameras will have the form-factor and UI of a LC-A or XA2, but until then I'll stick to Fujicolor.

Paula Lieberman: We physically can't handle the amount of data needed to shoot everything in RAW. Each high school has approximately 400+ seniors, so the numbers add up quickly, plus there's that extra processing time that RAW takes if you want to get any good out of it.

We do use RAW for certain applications, particularly giant group shots. But those have all of their processing done in-house. (We send out our general retouching because we literally cannot get it done at the prices we get when we send it out.)

Dave Bell: Some of the craziest pics I saw were a dark-skinned guy in a white tux at a prom with outdoor photography. In sunlight. The sensor spazzed out so badly that we got what we call "mustard"— pixels of pure yellow— along the edges. Took a lot of fixing. That was a few camera models ago; I haven't seen that issue with the S5 models.

P.S. Why are studio photos so expensive? Part of the reason is camera maintenance and upgrades. A studio camera may take 300-400 shots a day while it's in use, though 60-100 is more common. To give you an idea, I've got 7000 shots on my Flickr stream over a five-year period, and you could get that many on a single camera in less than two weeks during peak times.

I always take notes, while using a given camera, on what I want to upgrade/improve in the next one (once I've run the current one into the ground; I mostly can't afford to buy a new camera unless the old one is dead dead dead).

When I switched from film to digital, I got the best camera I could afford then (end of 2001 after-Christmas sales; it was a Sony Cybershot P7). I was impressed with a lot of it, but missed something acutely -- right before the switch, I'd started shooting on 1000ASA film, which suddenly made my indoor, no-flash,* ambient-light convention snapshots NOT look like the people were in a fishtank. However, my new digicam only went up, barely, to 800, and WOW did it make a massive difference.

So I shot on that for a while and learned how to manage the camera and my (minimal) post-processing software to handle it so they only looked 'odd' and not 'omg wtf bbq', but light sensitivity went to the top of the pile of features to seek.

The camera after that (Sony DSC-W50), I suddenly found myself wanting more optical zoom,** though I liked a lot of the other features; I also started, with that camera, wanting to have at least a little bit of manual focus control. I replaced the W50 with a Sony DSC-H2, which I like very much; I don't like how (comparatively) huge it is. One thing I loved about the W50 and its predecessor is that I could shove them in a pants-pocket and shoot anywhere, anytime, but if I want optical zoom there's a limit to how small the body can be, alas.

I have stuck with Sony not from any ideological attachment because (a) their menus make sense to me -- I can't shoot on a Canon, because I can't find anything -- and (b) I already have a bunch of high-capacity memory sticks, so that's one new-camera expense waived, though I was annoyed to find that the W50 (et seq.) use the new 'memory stick duo,' which is half the size, so my older full-length ones became very unuseful.

I'm not sure what my itchy 'upgrade this feature' feature is, but luckily for my budget, the H2 seems to be holding up decently. Maybe better, less noisy low-light performance (blacks end up with dark-orange confetti on them sometimes); maybe a larger sensor, if there's any consistent way to find out how big the sensors are on the cameras I window-shop. :->

* I should note that I absolutely detest the results you get when you use the built-in flash on almost any camera I've tried it with; it flattens everything and makes it look awful and blown-out (or far too dark, for the background); I'd rather shoot without it and adjust afterwards, since it gives me more usable shots even with all the utterly-unusable pixelated hot-noise stuff. This may be me being serious-photography bigoted; I like the results of real, nice bounce flashes, but none of the cameras I've shot on recently has a hot shoe, so it's not exactly an option. I do get interesting results shooting by OTHER people's flashes, as when I'm at a wedding.

** I much prefer optical zoom to digital; with the cameras I've tried it on, I'd much rather have GIMP interpolate pixels than the onboard software, because if I use the 'digital zoom' the pictures get very bad very quickly.

(26 years, here.)

My first workshop experience was in photography. My father's best friend from high school pursued his love for for it and became a full-time nature photographer. Some of my earliest memories are falling asleep to the sound of a slide projector as my father's friend and he argued the merits of one shot or another for next year's calendar, choosing only twelve from literally hundreds of shots, and choosing the all-important cover shot. While it wasn't an official workshop, the process and spirit were much the same. And as the business grew from calendars to books to other products, those long nights with the slide projector happened more frequently. I think that on some level, nights like that prepared me to show my own work to other people later on -- academic, creative, extra-curricular, etc. I was (inadvertently, I think) raised to see the involvement of others in one's creative endeavours as simply another part of the process. More than anything else I might have absorbed about colour or composition, that was the most important lesson.

mcz: I have some shots like some of those:

Land Iguana, Pta Ayora

and

Jodhpurs

Dave Bell: Filters still work, but a lot of it is easier to fix (that is takes less time) in editing. I've written up the use of filters for B&W Digital, and some (polarizing, ND) are still useful.

It's the same as it was, but some of the filtering aspects (81A/81B) are built into the camera as settings (cloudy/shady), and others aren't worth the light loss any more.

Elliot: digital zoom is anathema. Better to crop in post. If the detail is there, it's there. If it's not, the camera can't create it.

On camera flash is too close to the axis of the lens. The first thing most photographers ought to do to improve the look of their shots is get an off-camera strobe (the second is a tripod). One of the things I reccomend for people looking to get a camera is to look at the strobe options. If a cable can be used, that's one more plus to that camera.

Stefan Jones: I have an answer regarding your critter: "It is definitely a Pocket Gopher (Thomomys sp.) several have distinctive white chin patches and I think a couple of species occur in Oregon."

My expert didn't have his USA mammal books with him, so he couldn't narrow it down to exactly which species. If you want that detail you'll just have to go to your local library and look for pictures of your local Thomomys spp. pocket gophers

mcz: Oh, and one of the things I noticed about the skink was the concrete. Much like the iguana, it looks like really fine sand.

#213: Ah, I think your friend nailed it!

None of the images I found via Google is exactly match the coat color pattern, but the build and size and coat texture of the critter Kira found and ate is close to them. Probably just one of the many variations.

Thanks!

Patrick, Thank you for the update on Phil Agre. (It was a low-level worry; we didn't actually know each other, but I was on Red Rock Eaters for most of its history, and when I apparently lost a pen yesterday, the thought went "It's a cheap pen, I can get more…Phil Agre, I hope he's okay."

Stefan Jones @ 215

You're welcome. I'd thought it must be a pocket gopher by process of elimination (as indicated earlier), but I really trust my friend on identification of small mammals!

B Durbin @209 --

400 25MB raw files is 10 GB; 40,000 25MB raw files is 1 TB, which is 100 USD or thereabouts.

Batch converters, such as dcraw, can be fed settings; I've never had to do it for production purposes, but if you've got 400 pictures against a specific background, you can get the white balance for that photographer's setup and run those settings on the whole batch of 400.

Now, admittedly, processing 40,000 raw files is going to take some time, but possibly less than opening 40,000 JPEGs and fighting with the colour balance does.

Teresa: I apologize if this is a frequently asked question and the answer is someplace that I should have thought to look, but do you imagine you'll revisit your Sandman re-reads?

I loved the first installment, and it inspired me to buy the new editions. I love them, and I've thoroughly enjoyed re-reading them, especially the bits that I was able to re-examine with the benefit of your article.

Graydon: There's one thing you're missing from the equation, and that is that we're not dealing with programmers here, we're dealing with photographers. Our system is this insane hodgepodge of computers dating almost as far back as there has been photography, with each idiosyncratic box having its own OS and programs.* Our primary tech guy has been learning this as we go along, because he's not an IT person, he's a photo production person who had to learn some programming to save our necks.

In fact, *I* have had significant input into the processes, both in and out of the computer.** Remember, I'm one of the digital artists.

So when I say there isn't storage space, it's partly because like many other companies, we're strapped for cash, but primarily it's because I'm amazed we've managed to set up our server system correctly.***

*The primary digital artist (used to be me, now it's this talented lady L.) works on a Windows 2000 system with Photoshop 7. The back-of-house secretary has CS2. I know somebody has Vista, and I also know that the color-correction monitor has not run Adobe Gamma (to adjust the color in-system) for three years. That's right, the person doing color correction cannot adjust the color on her monitor.

At least we finally got rid of the box running Windows 95.

**"When it says 'Fill out the back of the envelope completely,' that means fill it out, you idiot. And if you put 'STD' for the litho text again instead of the 'exact text wanted', I'm going to PUT that on the photo and blame it on you!"

***When Gareth was two weeks old, I took him in to show him off and spent five hours repairing damage from a server crash. As in, massive loss of data server crash. As in, five months of work and prep gone server crash. And of course the backup didn't take.

Not to mention the occasional network weirdnesses...

My Flickr (note that the recent stuff is more snapshotty, the sets somewhat more considered).

IANAPP, but if I had to make 400 shots look consistent, I'd be using Lightroom and RAW, and have the photographer shoot a colorbalance card or grey card each day, or on each lighting change. Also note, I'd go insane in less than one day on that sort of job, so feel free to disregard.

I've had three big inflection points in my photography, Getting my first (D)SLR (digital rebel), Getting Lightroom and shooting raw, and Learning about off camera flash (strobist.com).

The DSLR was the first big change. I could actually like shoot how I wanted to. I look at similar images from Pre and Post lightroom, and the later stuff just looks way better, even if I don't do a whole lot to it. I think that the RAW converter in lightroom is more pleasing to me than Canon's. Finally, I hit on a period of creativity when I found strobist.com, and it pushed me real hard for about a year. I lost a few things in the transition, but I gained a lot more.

(I'll also note that wearing out the rebel's shutter and replacing it with a 40d was at best, a break even for my photography. Quality might be better, but its less a part of me, and my best work has not been with the new camera, even after a year and 10000 images.)

My latest craft project: octopus-style toques.

Aaaaaaah! Cthulhu has devoured you!

...I kind of want one.

Abi, my condolences to you and your family. (Sorry, there's a lot of interruptions in my internet access right now.)

"insane hodgepodge of computers dating almost as far back as there has been photography"

...there has been digital photography. Blorf.

B. Durbin @225: Aw, darn. And here I was picturing someone sitting and enhancing daguerrotypes with the aid of a Babbage Numerator...

No, I have no idea how that'd work, but the polished wood and brass fittings, and the inevitable black curtain draped over the back, are lovely to contemplate!

I have a photography question on behalf of someone else. She has a very large collection of family photos she wants to scan. Now, she wants the quality high, so that interesting details don't get lost. She also doesn't want to dedicate all available hard drive space to the project. Would you knowledgeable people take pity on her ignorance and mine and offer some wise words about the tradeoffs of quality and file size, or point us at some good discussions of them elsewhere? Thanks!

Abi, much-belated condolences (thought I'd posted, was wrong).

Joel Polowin @222: Ooooh, want!

Bruce @ #227, we're trying to (get organized to) scan 60 years of photos ourselves. We've done about 14 Windows folders with 10-14 photos in each. It takes a long time.

The first step: the person with the most knowledge of the people in the pics has to determine which ones are worth saving. Those are separated out from the albums (envelopes are good). Then the contents of each envelope are scanned. Here's where it gets even slower, though. Each photo has about 3 or 4 data holes to be filled in: caption, tag, full description, and even photo name if you want something better than DSC030168. That makes for a bunch of typing.

What we've been doing: Mom identifies pictures, places each on scanner. I sit across room with laptop that has scanner software installed. I control the scan, including resolution and end location (which folder) in Windows Pictures. Once the scan is complete, I call up the picture and Mom dictates the info to me; I type it in.

14 photos = roughly two hours work.

If your friend wants to scan everything she's got and then add info, she's better off pricing bulk scanning companies. Some are pretty darned reasonable. I don't have names of them, because we looked at our quantity and decided that the task of going through each picture after the scan and trying to identify them was too daunting.

Addendum to my #229. We haven't run into a disk space problem yet, but we've been backing up the Windows folders to a CD-ROM as we go. Obviously, you can delete from the hard drive once you've done that.

Kage Baker died this morning. I found out from friends who also knew her from the decades she spent working the Faire in Los Angeles/San Francisco.

Dammit. Kage Baker. We loose all the best people too young.

My condolences to Kage Baker's family & friends.

lose, dammit. Not loose. Dammit.

My sympathies to her family and friends too. She had been a guest at ConQuest a while ago, and was very gracious and kind.

I hate cancer.

Abi,

I'm sorry for your loss.

Dumb question for folks in the UK: what was "The Routemasters" radio series about. Can't really find much about it online, but it *looks* like it may have been a series about time travelling busses. (?) Am I right? If I've got it right, how many episodes were there and were they any good?

I've recently joined a band called Reconnaissance Fly that specializes in settings of spam poetry. We'll be playing live on KUSF on Thursday morning, 11 am PST. They also webcast, so you can tune in from your home or cubicle.

The line-up is Amar Chaudhary on keys and Kaoss Pad, Polly Moller on flute and vocals, and me on bass and SuperCollider. Musical styles range from post-modern chamber prog to graphically scored electroacoustic to science fiction radio theater.

For those in the SF Bay area, we're playing at Studio 1510 (1510 8th Street, Oakland, CA) on Friday night, along with Matt Davignon, who does cool things with heavily processed drum machines.

Abi: Belated condolences.

"Moloch! Don't just stand there cringing!"

- Today's episode of "Girl Genius", and I'll try not to remind myself that my wife thinks Moloch looks like me 20 years ago.

Bruce@227: The first big distinction is scanning prints, vs. scanning the original film (negatives or slides). (The chances of anybody having the negatives still around is small, of course, but I include it for completeness.)

Surprising, I hope, nobody, you need to scan at higher resolution if you're scanning that little 24x36mm bit of film than if you've got a 4x6 print.

For prints, a flatbed scanner is the tool of choice. And there's little to no point at scanning above 300 pixels per inch (if the prints are very carefully made, 600 pixels per inch might possibly be beneficial maybe). Nearly any flatbed scanner does quite a good job -- the brightness range of a piece of paper just isn't that challenging.

(A digression on confusing terminology. The "dpi" or "ppi" value reported in graphics files does not mean anything significant, and the best thing to do is to ignore it and work with actual pixel dimensions. About the only thing software actually uses the dpi value for is the default size that an image is placed into a document at -- just the default, it doesn't constrain your ability to resize it.)

Scanning film is MUCH more finicky. A real film scanner is highly recommended, and if you're dealing with color materials, one supporting "ICE" (which magically eliminates lots of scratches, hairs, dust, and dirt). The fact that a flatbed supports scanning transparencies at 4000dpi does NOT mean that it will produce as good a scan as a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED at 4000dpi; in fact they almost never come close.

(Ice was invented by Applied Science Fiction in Austin, then bought by Kodak. They add a fourth scan channel, in the infrared. Turns out the dyes used in all materials except the cyan dye in old Kodachrome are transparent in the infrared; so that infrared scan channel gives them a map of damage. Then they use ordinary pixel interpolation to fill in the damage. It works amazingly well, though you should certainly clear off any loose debris before scanning. As you might guess, the metallic silver grains in a B&W image block the infrared, so ICE doesn't work on ordinary B&W film at all.)

The way I work, the goal of the scanning is to capture all the information; not to get as good-looking a rendition of the picture as possible. That second is the end goal, but by limiting my goals in the scan, I can make the scanning go faster, and reduce the impact of mistaken judgments during the scanning.

I strongly recommend storing the original scan in TIFF format (not jpeg, which uses lossy compression and produces visible artifacts). Do this before starting to edit it. Having the original scan to go back to when you decide your editing decisions have been wrong is wonderfully liberating. (Jpeg is great for storing a final version of a photo for most purposes; your scan is NOT the final version of the photo.)

Use the IPTC fields for "writing on the back" of your digital images. Keyword with people's names. Fill in the places and dates so far as you know them (annoyingly, the date formats aren't really friendly to partial dates, probably due to their historical origin identifying pictures transmitted over the newswire for magazines and newspapers). Places like Flickr and PICASA will pick up this information, and for that matter Windows Explorer knows about some of it.

A good digital asset management solution may possibly be overkill for family photos (some people use some of these things for collections of several hundred thousand photos); but then again, good tools for identifying, searching, comparing, and so forth, make the job easier. ACDSee is a good product that does many things pretty well. Thumbs Plus is what I use, and has advantages and disadvantages (ACDSee covers more bits of the process; I'm using a lot of separate pieces of software, each optimized for one job; when I come back from a weekend with 2500 photos, I need a really slick workflow to avoid going insane). or PICASA on your computer does quite a bit for free. Or Lightroom includes asset management, plus is a quite powerful photo editor.

I've used scancafe.com, a bulk scanning company. Their big gimmick is that you can review your order online and delete up to half of what you sent them, and you don't pay for the part you delete (and they don't send you the scans). The scan quality was quite good (I have professional-type standards for this stuff). My biggest problem with them was that the web interface for reviewing and deleting was slow and fairly inconvenient, so that step took a lot more time than it should. Furthermore, the preview they give you is small enough that I failed to spot a number of cases where the image was too out of focus to use in the review process (obviously they don't want to give you a preview good enough that you capture it and keep it instead of the real scan!). There are bunches of other companies with relatively similar terms in the bulk scanning for consumers business.

If I didn't already have lots of things in place from my own photography, I think I'd send slides and negatives to scancafe.com or a competitor, scan prints myself on a flatbed, and use picasa or lightroom or ACDSee to organize and mark things.

If stuff is old enough that you have non-silver-gelatin B&W, glass plates, and other older exotica, consult an expert or at least ask for more detailed advice.

Feel free to email me (I'm trivially easy to find) with more specific questions.

Graydon@218: Now, admittedly, processing 40,000 raw files is going to take some time, but possibly less than opening 40,000 JPEGs and fighting with the colour balance does.

Lightroom does well on batches of raws, but I don't use it so I don't really know how fast.

Bibble Pro processes my D700 raw files into web-resolution jpegs (with my group or individual adjustments included) at a bit over 1/2 second each, looks like it should be about 8 hours to do 40,000. Which, compared to futzing individually, is several orders of magnitude improvement; perhaps even "many". And you have to process the camera original JPEG for most purposes anyway.

Paula@204: Focus fixing software includes

http://www.focusmagic.com/
http://www.fixerlabs.com/EN/photoshop_plugins/focusfixer.htm

I use the first, have heard the second talked about favorably by others.

You can't do totally magical things with the digitized files, but sometimes you can move the photo from "not good enough" to "good enough", which is very useful.

Two URLs; I think this may appear late and trouble the admins, sorry.

Lizzy L @ 123

I totally agree. Color photos can be amazing and wonderful, but there is just something about black and white. Perhaps it is because we don't ordinarily see the world that way, so it forces us to see things in a new way, whereas color replicates what we usually see. We evaluate the images differently.

http://www.yenrelish.com/2009/11/pod-publisher-comparison.html

"Booksurge... Keep Away! I never saw any royalties from the book I published through themI ...they admitted that they had indeed pirated the book and were selling it without my permission."

A copyright infringement lawsuit against Booksurge...

http://www.boliven.com/legal_proceeding/1:08-cv-01068-WWC?q=

"CLOSED, HBG, STANDARD

"United States District Court
Middle District of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg)
CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 1:08-cv-01068-WWC

"Benjey v. Amazon.Com, Inc. et al
Assigned to: Honorable William W. Caldwell
Cause: 17:504 Copyright Infringement
Date Filed: 06/03/2008
Date Terminated: 03/02/2009
Jury Demand: Plaintiff
Nature of Suit: 820 Copyright
Jurisdiction: Federal Question

Bruce Baugh: One thing to note is that you scan for roughly 300 dpi at your target size, not the original. If all you have is two-inch contacts, and you want an 8x10 out of the process, make sure you do the math. (Scanners will often have the option to set the target size.) Most prints won't need 8x10s, obviously, but you might come across something precious.

I will have to look up scancafe. That sounds like a wonderful service. (Now I just need to find a video-to-digital file service closer than fifty miles away. I have about a dozen tapes that really ought to be dealt with.)

I'd also be interested in recommendation for video-to-digital (or rather film-to-digital) conversion services. My sister and brother-in-law have inherited about 35 reels of 8mm film - everything from family holidays and vacations to grandma's cakes. [Apparently his grandmother was hugely into decorating cakes, and several large reels are labeled "my favorite cakes".] While not so interested in preserving the cake-decorating and out-the-window-driving-through-Nebraska scenes in their entirety, they'd love to have the rest accessible for the family.

B.Durbin@246: No, that's that confusion about virtual resolutions I was trying to warn about. When scanning paper prints, unless they're very very unusual there's no information there above 300ppi, no point in scanning above 300ppi. For exceptional prints, maybe 600. (Okay, if you've got original Edward Weston contact prints from 8x10 negatives, you might need to go higher; haven't worked with that level materials.)

Also, philosophically, scanning does not have a "target size"; scanning, as I practice it, is attempting to capture the information present in a piece of paper (or film). What I do with it later I decide later (and often depends on what materials I can gather and identify and so forth; often the "later" is months or years after the scanning).

Political open-threadyness: Many of you have probably already seen this over at Atrios, but for those who haven't- I wish I could say something witty or snarky about this, but I can't.

Something I found amusing, particularly when thinking about the unbeatable juggernauts of today.

AOL owns the Internet.

Steve C @ 250... It's nice to be reminded that juggernautiness can breed arrogance, and people eventually tell the Juggie to go bleep himself. One can hope the same thing will happen to a certain online bookseller named after a South-American river. As for that Tom Hanks movie... Blech. I much prefered the original, and also the Judy Garland remake.

Open Threadiness:

Some time back we were talking knitting with cotton yarn and someone mentioned that if I was ever in a position of Stash Reduction that they wouldn't object to knowing about it because they Had A Use for the stuff.

Could that person email me at rebelsquirrel AT gmail DOT com please? I might have something for you.

Diatryma @62: Any tips on how to make things and see the whole rather than every tiny flaw?

First half-second rule: put the work away for a while, then pull it out and look at it. What happens in the first half second (before your mental image or artistic prejudices cut in) will be your best guide to whether the piece "works."

Also look at it in the mirror.

Thena,

That was cgeye here:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011047.html#328214

Serge at 251:
Juggernaughtiness?

Erik Nelson @ 255... That too. And 'juggernuttiness' for the bunch that was running the Country for the first 8 years of the 21st Century.

Belatedly, HERE is the gift I gave my wife for our wedding anniversary. TexAnne will be glad to know that his jacket comes off, and that he does wear an undershirt.

Thanks Nancy - I don't have their address so I'm hoping they are still around here someplace :-)

Colorado Springs, facing revenue woes, slashes essential services.

Two thoughts:

1) Focus on the Family is based in Colorado Springs. I wonder how much they're willing to contribute toward maintaining fire stations and road upkeep? Or will they just hire private security and say, "Let them eat cake" about those who can't?

2) If this works out the way it seems to be headed, it'll be an object lesson in what "starving the beast" REALLY accomplishes.

Serge @257:

You know, I had a dream the other night that someone on Making Light (Mary Dell, I think) had persuaded you to get into the lifelike and artistic doll community. When I woke, I couldn't quite place whether the dream reflected an underlying reality.

Weird seeing your comment with that still in my maybe-true mental stack.

Lee @ #259, It's not just Focus that's located there. According to Sharlet's book The Family there are or were over 300 fundamentalist organizations headquartered in that town when he wrote it (2008). Perhaps many more.

If you believe what he says in that book (and I mostly do), it's entirely possible they'd all decide to have volunteer fire units rather than pay the city taxes.

#259 Linkmeister
Colorado Springs has Space Command to its east, may still have Peterson Air Force Base, has Ft Carson at its immediate south, and the US Air Force Academy at its immediate north, and when I was there long ago was #3 military retirement area.... in the event of fire perhaps they are expecting military rescue?

abi @ 260... Coming soon, "Doctor Voodoom and the Living Dolls of Death"

And speaking of Mary Dell...

Happy Birthday, Mary!!!

America the Whiny...

Why are you so terribly disappointing?

I had thought about writing a blog post about the PPOs -- the Perpetually Pissed Off -- but Mark Morford does it much better than I can.

The Morford piece said it pretty well--thanks.
I suspect part of the problem is a lot of people don't know how to do much more than whine. The basics of activism are beyond them, let alone more advanced stuff. I myself aren't doing as much as I could. But I've done a few things to make my corner of the world a slightly better place.
Which I am going to use as an excuse for a new whine of my own, and it has to do with post #25. I read about these cases of elder abuse, and I wonder how many of them are someone trying to get revenge for being abused by parents or uncles or aunts many decades back--whether the old person is senile or just physically helpless.
That's why I am probably not going to be the caretaker for one parent, and definitely not for the other. It might require more restraint than I can muster, to not avenge myself--and even though I could probably cut deep enough with words alone, that still is not what I want to spend a lot of time doing. You folks had that thread some while back about relatives that are just unforgivable--well, I had something to add to it. I am 99% sure I would not do anything illegal--but I don't want that put to the test. I have discussed this a bit with the parent whose abuse was not sexual, and that parent doesn't know what's going to happen with the other one either. I think both have some help coming, 3 hots and a cot anyway, but not sure, and as for me when I get old, I am making plans.
They have expressed regret for most of the bad things, but even so, there's scars.
If I got rich I'd make sure someone took good care of them--but I don't want to do it, and in fact I think I can't, with these bad knees and all.
I don't love them, or anyone else--I'm not wired up that way--but I have a sense of duty, and some affection still. The last counselor I saw did nothing but parrot back to me how much my life sucked--I'm getting a better one [I hope].
Does anyone else suspect a connection between child abuse one decade and elder abuse several decades later? Is anyone tackling this aspect of it?

This seems, all things considered, a good OT to have this appear in.

I've been publishd in the Schmap Guide to the Monterey Bay Aqarium

Linkmeister, #261: But volunteer fire departments are Communist!

Lee @267: and particularly insidious Communism because they pre-date Marx! I must write a letter to the Times....

Raphael (#249)

I love the section header: "When Things Go Wrong"

Terry Karney @ 266: Nice one!

#259: Any increase in misery in Colorado Springs after a cutback in government services will be blamed on Mexicans, gays, liberal ideas in school textbooks, and a lack of taxpayer-funded Ten Commandments displays in public spaces.

Raphael @ 249: Actually, I'm more positive about the linked book (Basics for Bank Directors) than Atrios is. It's not written for bank *officers* or other people who run a bank day to day; rather it's meant for outsiders who are asked to serve on a bank's board of directors. (Generally banks have to have such people on their board to help oversee it.)

It's unfortunately pretty common for banks and other businesses to name prominent community people to their boards just for the prestige. There's been lots of those boards we've heard about lately that largely act as rubber stamps for whatever the CEO and management want to do. Even if the board members feel some sense of responsibility in their positions, they often don't know enough about how the business works to provide any sort of meaningful oversight.

That's what the linked book is intending to remedy. I haven't read through it all, but basically it's designed to train new board members to think like a bank examiner, and understand the basic things to watch for that affect a bank's soundness. Quoting from the preface, "You, like the examiner, must be able to draw conclusions about your bank's condition in a relatively short time without intimate knowledge of its daily operations."

For this audience, you want to start with the really basic principles, and then move on to the more detailed aspects of oversight (which it does, in the later chapters). That seems like a sensible approach to me; I'd like to see similar guides available for outside directors of all kinds of businesses.

And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells the US Senate that we ought to allow gays to serve openly in the military. By Crom, we'll drag them into the 21st century yet!

I knew that someone was working on a movie based on DC Comics's "Sgt Rock", but I just found out that the setting will not be WW2, but some near-future conflict.

WTF?

Of possible interest to fluorospherians: PBS's Frontline airs a 90-minute program tonight titled "digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier."

One can also watch the whole show via the Frontline Web site.

Bruce 273: Go, Admiral Mike!!

And of course that shithead John McCain has to put in his fucking oar. Sit down, John! And STFU. Your day is ended, and all other ruffians'.

Paula @ 262:

I think they're expecting Divine Intervention. I wonder what their insurance companies will say about that.

Serge @ 274:
"I knew that someone was working on a movie based on DC Comics's "Sgt Rock", but I just found out that the setting will not be WW2, but some near-future conflict."

Hey, maybe he'll run into Jonah Hex there in the future!

Credit where it is overdue: the poems in this thread are very fine work, most especially B Durbin's piece about caretaking. I need to get back to reading Making Light every few hours, so I don't fall so far behind, and maybe miss something really good like those poems.

Happy Groundhog Day! (Or in Alaska, Happy Marmot Day! http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/02/sarah-palin-marmot-alaska.html )

We now return you to your regular programming for the next six weeks.

McCain was a bad pilot.
McCain was a bad husband.
McCain is a dishonest politician (keeps selling himself and panders to extremist bigots).
McCain is a massive hypocrite.
McCain is no Julius Caesar, no Alexander of Macedonia, no James of Scotland and England, no Hadrian, no King of Spartan, no Mountbatten, no von Steuben... Not sure about King James, but Caesar, Alexander, Hadrian, the King of Sparta, and Mountbatten were bisexual leading warriors, James of Scotland and England was responsible for the King James Bible, and von Steuben was important soldier to the US War of Independence from Great Britain, and had come here because he was under a death sentence for homosexuality in Europe....

McCain was a bad pilot.
McCain was a bad husband.
McCain is a dishonest politician (keeps selling himself and panders to extremist bigots).
McCain is a massive hypocrite.
McCain is no Julius Caesar, no Alexander of Macedonia, no James of Scotland and England, no Hadrian, no King of Spartan, no Mountbatten, no von Steuben... Not sure about King James, but Caesar, Alexander, Hadrian, the King of Sparta, and Mountbatten were bisexual leading warriors, James of Scotland and England was responsible for the King James Bible, and von Steuben was important soldier to the US War of Independence from Great Britain, and had come here because he was under a death sentence for homosexuality in Europe....

McCain was a bad pilot.
McCain was a bad husband.
McCain is a dishonest politician (keeps selling himself and panders to extremist bigots).
McCain is a massive hypocrite.
McCain is no Julius Caesar, no Alexander of Macedonia, no James of Scotland and England, no Hadrian, no King of Spartan, no Mountbatten, no von Steuben... Not sure about King James, but Caesar, Alexander, Hadrian, the King of Sparta, and Mountbatten were bisexual leading warriors, James of Scotland and England was responsible for the King James Bible, and von Steuben was important soldier to the US War of Independence from Great Britain, and had come here because he was under a death sentence for homosexuality in Europe....

Bruce Arthurs @ 278... Don't you go giving them ideas! Luckily the Jonah Hex movie is sticking to the 19th Century.

Xopher @ 276 -- The report, and reactions to it, got some coverage on CBC Radio news this evening. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance -- it seems really weird to have important government officials gravely debating whether or not [significant minority group X] should really be allowed to serve in the military.

And yeah, McCain's "do we really have to make our armed forces deal with this, on top of two wars? Don't they have enough problems?" seemed awfully whiny.

McCain's a hypocrite--fine for him to hit on anything FEMALE that moved when he was a married fighter pilot before and after his Hanoi Hilton time, but not any male treating him the way he apparently treated women....

Paula @286:
fine for him to hit on anything FEMALE that moved when he was a married fighter pilot before and after his Hanoi Hilton time, but not any male treating *him* the way he apparently treated women....

That is exactly what so many opponents of gays in the military are afraid of. That guys will get treated the way that many female service members report being treated and have to do things like take a knife to the showers with them.

To which my reaction is generally, "Dude, please. You overestimate your irresistibility."

(Followed quickly by, "Now will you take sexual harassment and assault in the military seriously?")

Paula @ 281 - 283: Happy Groundhog Day!

abi @ 287: and in my experience, the guys who are most afraid this will happen are the ones who won't accept "no means no" from a woman. In other words, they, as individuals, expect gay men to treat them exactly how (badly) they treat women.

But I like your response.

Argh. I was listening to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) being interviewed on NPR yesterday. He said that if they let gays and lesbians serve openly, they'd have to let "transgenders and hermaphrodites" in! They'd have to let everyone in! It would be "like civilian life"!

I…I don't even know how to respond to that. Where to even start?

(I found the audio and a transcript over at Pam's House Blend. So you can see that I Am Not Making This Up.)

The British armed forces were not very happy about the idea, 10 years ago - and it turned into rather a damp squib: "There was this expectation that there would be problems, but it just didn't happen. People just got on with their work," and, what do you know, "Fears that allowing openly gay soldiers to serve on the front line would lead to a breakdown of discipline and cohesion within units also proved unfounded." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8493888.stm

Caroline @ 290... Hermaphrodites? Next, they'll allow shapeshifters.

Next, they'll allow shapeshifters.

Sergeant Angua, reporting for duty.

But only vampires who have taken the pledge.

Bruce Cohen (# 273)
Quoting the BBC article, quoting:

Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the committee, ......
"Has this policy been ideal? No, it has not," he said. "But it has been effective."

Effective at what? Promoting ignorance, bigotry and fear?

Is *that* what you want your military members of your citizenry to remember of the values from their time of service to the nation?

And then there's the other John McCain quote, the one nobody has picked up on except my friend Dusty:

"I understand the opposition to it, and I've had these debates and discussions, but the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to."
-John McCain, 2006 talking about "Don't Ask Don't Tell"

(emphasis mine)

Would the Latin enthusiasts among us tell me what I've gotten wrong in the following:

Ire domui non debere, sed non possum huc manere.

Much like Brian, I am particularly worried about the case of "domus".

For the amusement of the Fluorosphere, a typical incendiary blog post. Comments may not be safe for work, if your boss hates laughter.

Tom @297, which would be a lot more fun if you could read it. Whose brilliant idea was the black print on woodgrain???

Janet, #298: The page loads slowly (too much ad shit, I think). If you let it sit for a couple of minutes, you get a white background under the text.

Janet Brennan Croft@298: The *idea* is black text on a white pane, with wood-grain sidebars. Your browser is losing the white pane part.

(Having spent much of the weekend trying to get that kind of web design working in IE, I sympathize. I failed, by the way.)

The arguments against gays serving, here and in England, are nearly word-for-word the arguments against blacks serving in combat units alongside whites (there were all-black combat units, not very many, back to the opening of the west at least). Truman gave an order, and the military obeyed it, and it worked. Where's the only place in the US that whites routinely take orders from blacks and nobody on either side gives it a second thought? Where are the tables in the cafeteria (er, mess hall) integrated even if you just let people walk in and sit down with whoever they want?

(I know, Congress fucked that approach up by enacting DADT into law, the idiots. So they need to unenact it, and then order a change in policy.)

I want one of these: "We've Got Some Work To Do Now"

The t-shirt is available on Threadless.

John Mark Ockerbloom @272, oh. I stand corrected.

For my Canadian friends, who've probably seen it already...I wanna be Canadian, Please.

Here's another sporadic update on my friend whose chronic illness threatened to destroy her family financially:

After spending her working life in a career she loved, she is now retired at forty-five, much against her will. Her chronic illness is now under control; she doesn't look sick anymore and her doctors recommend that she go back to work part time. Unfortunately, the job she was doing can't be split into two and there aren't any other openings for her skills that fit her medical needs. So she's retired.

The good news is that she works for the government. The even better news is that she works for a branch of government that offers an excellent disability plan at the state level. So, although she will have to present her case at least twice and wait about a year before seeing any money, she may be able to draw 70 percent of her pre-retirement salary and receive full insurance coverage. I didn't know this at the outset and neither did she.

So, possibly a much happier ending than if she had worked for a private business. We'll see.

305 ::: Jenny Islander @305: Glad to hear that your friend is medically improved and that there's possibly somewhat-good-news re. pension etc. But sympathies for the enforced early retirement. Hope she manages to find something else she really wants to do with her time.

Tom Whitmore @ 297: thanks for the link; I just managed not to end up with beer-over-keyboard.

I can't remember the name of a blog that gets linked here pretty often...it has a picture of a quizzical-looking dog on it. Maybe a border collie. Entries tend to be long and very smart. Any ideas?

And I want one of these too: Steampunk Cheetah

(You do read this blog, don't you, Santa? And you're taking notes, right?)

Mary Dell @307:

Jim Henley's excellent Unqualified Offerings, the contraindicator to the easy meme that all Libertarians are [crazy/stupid/deluded/insert similar adjective].

And I want one of these too: Steampunk Cheetah

(You do read this blog, don't you, Santa? And you're taking notes, right?)

Bruce Arthurs @308 & 310:

Of course I read this blog. We get a lot of people for the naughty list from the internet (we have IP tracing that you would not believe here at Santa Central).

Speaking of which, I'm noting your preferences, but I'm also watching you.

Just so you're clear.

Ho, ho, ho.

Santa:

It's been 45 years.

Still no pony.

You bastard.

Best Wishes,

Stefan

P.S. I finally went and got the puppy on my own, thank you very much. Prick.

Coming soon... "Blood on Santa's Claw"!!!

James Ray charged with 3 counts of manslaughter in "sweat lodge" deaths.

(apologies if this has already been posted)

AP Reports that James Ray was indicted for 3 counts of manslaughter for the sweat lodge deaths, and arrested with $5M bail.

Santa Claus's View All By: the secret identity revealed.

In that case, how come your handwriting always looked so much like my mother's?

Not unexpected, even kings must die,
it was no secret, everyone had heard.
There was no cloud across the winter sky.

You sense the shaping, know that what went by
though it was sudden was, when it occurred,
not unexpected; even kings must die

at their due time, emit their one last sigh.
While many gathered hoping for some word
there was no cloud across the winter sky,

no final opening of one bright eye,
not a hoarse whisper, we had long inferred,
not unexpected; even kings must die

in a bright room with no friend there to cry
a century's tears, nor declare absurd
there was no cloud across the winter sky.

You have to dance as if you were to fly
a man no more, but a returning bird
not unexpected. Even kings must die.
There was no cloud across the winter sky.

Fragano, 317: Breathtaking.

Fragano, thank you for that. Beside it being a piece of art, the idea of writing that form (villanelle?) had intrigued me but the outlines of it were lost last June when the a-h broke into our house and stole Stardust, my Mac iBook.

I now have Stardust II, a MacBook (courtesy a lot of surprising but good things happening for once). Stuff to move us forward is happening now and I'm happy.

Is this the one that was covered in Making Light a while ago? Very good news.

"Self-help guru charged over sweat lodge deaths"

(http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2810195.htm?section=justin)

Ray charged with 3 counts of manslaughter --

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bruce Arthurs #308:
The steampunk cheetah reminds me of a demoreel from Japan that wowed them all at SIGGRAPH '84. (possibly from a company called Toyo Links?)

It had a sort of robot lion and running skeletons.

There was momentarily a ghost-image of the lion's body with muscles flexing appearing over the robot lion. For a minute the audience thought "that's the image they sampled the data from" and then they realized that image was rendered too, and they cheered.

Here is the real problem with the fixing it by executive order is that Art 125 is part of USC 10. It takes the Senate and House, together, to get it changed.

That said, there is a way an EO could change it: Absolute enforcement.

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.

If that were applied to everyone, across the board, the hue and cry would be enough to get it repealed.

yes. It is, they've indicted the a-hole.

His responses after the fact indicate he's a self-centered, totally self-involved idiot, who doesn't give a rat's arse for the people who trust him. Screw him, he needs to be in jail.

Open-threadiness --

The U.S.Tax Court has reversed the IRS and will allow deductions from federal taxes for sex reassignment surgery

Stefan @312:
No pony has asked for you for Christmas, so my hands are tied. And as for the puppy, my gift to you that year was self-sufficiency.

Caroline @316:
Why do you assume that, being an accomplished housebreaker, I haven't also perfected the art of forgery? Remember that I have handwriting samples from pretty much everyone, and plenty of time and privacy to practice. Come to that, have you never considered the impact of my extensive internet and forgery skills on Making Light's (view all by) functionality? Maybe next time I'll use your email address.

Any further questions?

Santa @ #326, It's February already! You appear to be still exhausted from your December labors, judging from your tone. Maybe you should take longer naps?

CarrieS@296: Your first clause needs a finite verb -- looks to me like you want "Eo" instead of "Ire". Constructions describing motion to take the accusative case, so "domum" not "domui". Lastly, I think you want "hic" instead of "huc" (though since you didn't provide the English that you're trying to render, I can't be absolutely certain).

Actually, now that I look at it again, "Ire" should remain as is, it's "debere" that should become "debeo". Argh, I hate it when my brain does that kind of thing.

#328: I was going for "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here".

I thought it was "hic", but the reference I consulted gave me "huc", so I went with it; if it's wrong, that's reassuring. :)

I was wondering which verb needed to be not-an-infinitive. I should imagine "debes" rather than "debeo", since it's 2nd person, yes?

Corporation running for Congress

The best democracy money can buy

TexAnne #317/Paula Helm Murray: Thanks.

abi @#309: That's the one, thanks! I'll have to commit the name to memory. Googling "blog with dog on it" really doesn't work.

Xopher @#90: thanks, that's very helpful. The sentence is still fairly opaque to me, but at least now I can mentally file it under "awkward phrasing+new-to-me term" instead of "bwuh?" (It's from here, in case you're curious - the first line in the article).

Steve C. @331, what I'd like to see would be some petty crook who's been convicted of some white-collar stuff, and sentenced to jail time, appealing the sentence on Equal Protection grounds, by pointing out that a corporation wouldn't go to jail for the same action.

David Goldfarb @ 296: The centurion in Life of Brian claims that, in the case of motion towards, "domus" takes the locative (which he agrees is "domum").

That scene constitutes my entire knowledge of Latin grammar, so I would be sad to find it was incorrect. Is it true about the locative?

In other Latin-related news, yesterday I spent a good bit of time grumping about the upcoming changes to the Roman Missal. The English is being changed to hew more closely to the Latin grammar and the extremely literal meaning of the Latin words. I think this is silly at best. I can understand liking the Latin Mass (though I was raised in enough of a post-Vatican-II, liberal Catholic household that I don't feel a draw to it), but Latinizing the English? I just don't see the point.

An example: Much discussion centers on the change from "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed" to "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." This is, of course, a quotation (Matthew 8:8, Luke 7:6-7). The NRSV, which I've been taught is probably the best, most scholarly translation at least of the Gospels, renders the Luke version "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word and let my servant be healed." (Matthew deletes "do not trouble yourself, for" and "therefore I did not presume to come to you.")

If we're insisting on literal accuracy, then why the change to "soul"? The centurion (presumably not the same one from Life of Brian) is asking that Jesus heal his servant, not himself. Furthermore the entire point of the story is that the centurion recognizes Jesus as a man of power, like himself, who can command things to happen and they happen -- which is the next line of dialogue: "For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave 'Do this,' and he does it."

If we are deliberately taking it out of context to use the metaphor of receiving Jesus in the Eucharist, then why not stick with "I am not worthy to receive you"?

In my religious studies degree, I did not learn about the history of the wording of the Mass, when and how it was written. I'd like to; I could think about these changes more intelligently, with an understanding of context.

Partly I'm having an emotional reaction against changing the words I grew up with, yes. But I don't see the reason for it, unless Latin grammar is considered inherently more sacred than English, which just seems silly to me.

(P.S. I am aware that the Gospel quotation is actually from the Greek, which just confuses the issue further.)

Caroline, #336: unless Latin grammar is considered inherently more sacred than English

There's certainly a case to be made for that proposition, as it's what gives us the entire "no split infinitives" nonsense.

unless Latin grammar is considered inherently more sacred than English, which just seems silly to me.

That was literally true for a long period in the history of English grammarians, and to some extent still is. Where do you think some of that truly stupid shit like "don't split an infinitive" and "don't end a sentence with a preposition" came from? Trying to impose Latin grammar on English, because Latin was seen as intrinsically better, rather than just the language a whole big blob of converts happened to speak.

If the Irish had had a worldwide empire and been largely converted, those dingbats and their dingbat descendents would be telling us that "Is Brian at walking" is better grammar than "Brian is walking."

Heh. I didn't see Lee's post before posting mine (I fell asleep for a bit there). Lee: click!

Xopher @ 339: Me, at the thinking of you at the writing, it becomes the laughing in us. You have the winning at the internets. Having the water-of-life in the hands, me, saluting at you.

Ginger #341: riverrun

It might be germane to point out, wrt grammar issues and Christianity, that the final blow in the fight that split the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church in twain was over the addition of "filioque" to the Nicene Creed. It was well-intended; they were just groping for greater clarity in the Nicene Creed, when said in Latin rather than Greek--and things went downhill rapidly.

I'd explain, but it makes my head hurt. Read the Wikipedia article, and follow its links to other sources, if you have the strength. You are dealing here with people whose principal religious text identifies their Supreme Being with "Word*". The significance of, as well as the sacredness of specific language is not taken likely by this faith's theologians, whether that makes sense to us or not.

*Not the word-processing thing.

Caroline@336: In other Latin-related news, yesterday I spent a good bit of time grumping about the upcoming changes to the Roman Missal. The English is being changed to hew more closely to the Latin grammar and the extremely literal meaning of the Latin words. I think this is silly at best. I can understand liking the Latin Mass (though I was raised in enough of a post-Vatican-II, liberal Catholic household that I don't feel a draw to it), but Latinizing the English? I just don't see the point.

Church of England folk sometimes use the term 'liturgical fidget' for pointless tinkering with the words of a service, and that's what I immediately thought of on reading that list of changes. Explicit English-language nods towards odd bits of the Latin mass that have stuck in the cultural memory: sometimes translations, sometimes not-quite-translations. The Nicene Creed goes from third-person plural to third-person singular, which matches the Latin but makes less sense if you're all chanting it together; "And also with you" => "And with your spirit", cf. Et cum spiritu tuo; "through my own fault" => "through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault", cf mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

(Old joke: the priest, annoyed, taps his dead microphone. "There's something wrong with this." Congregation responds: "And also with you".)

I'm too young to have a memory of the Latin mass: to me, the Tridentine lives in the same universe as the pre-Beeching steam railway—lovely thing, but you can't bring it back. The English text of the mass is pretty well drilled into me in spite of my very infrequent attendance over the last several years, and I don't want it to be mucked around with, even in my absence.

(But if you are going to muck around with it, get rid of the phrase 'for ever and ever', which always used to set my teeth on edge a bit: it sounds too storybook, too happy-ever-after; to my ears it always made the poor priest sound a bit of an idiot to have to come out with such nursery-rhyme stuff. 'For ever and ever'. Grr.)

Fidelio #343:

"In the beginning was the Word Perfect"?

Caroline @ 336:

Our Latin teacher, who otherwise seemed to be a bit of a stuffed shirt, actually showed us impressionable kids that scene from Life of Brian. I would therefore assume it was scrupulously correct.

Also, while I have no dog in the race, I find the attempt to Latinize English for its on sake annoying. For one, translation is a tricky art (cf. the Don Quixote thread). Also, Latin grammar fits English about as well as a square peg fits a round hole, as Lee and Xopher commented.

There is something to be said for doing it if you want to give non-native speakers a flavor of the language. Xopher and Ginger give good examples. The Fox translation of the Torah is another interesting one. But it's not for everyday use.

Caroline at 336: Yeah, I'm also irritated by the changes in the Missal. I like what we say now. However, in the list of Things I Dearly Wish My Church Would Not Do, these changes in the liturgy appear far, far down from the top. I'll get used to the changes, even the ones I find silly or clumsy.

And then there's the Things I Dearly Wish My Church Would Do list....

As Teresa put it in 2005, "the language Latin that same thing as English not is."

Fragano @ #345, or worse: "In the Beginning was the Wang."

Lizzy L @ 347... I'm also irritated by the changes in the Missal

...enough to go ballistic?

fidelio (#343): The filioque also becomes a plot point in one of Harry Turtledove's Basil Argyros stories.

Ginger 341: Not to me, the having Irish good as to you. Am I also at laughing. To was thousand good at you.

Lizzy L 347: Things I Dearly Wish My Church Would Do

Ordain women? Let priests (of both sexes) marry? Elect a Pope who isn't a former Grand Inquisitor? More generally, catch up to the 20th Century, never mind the 21st?

Sometimes ISTM that for any of those things to happen everyone in a red or white zucchetto would have to drop dead simultaneously. I hope it won't actually require that.

I sit to laugh because we the Dutch as languageish paradigm not have. He should will funny be well.

Lizzy L @ 347: Oh yeah, I know what you mean with that one. I'm pretty well non-practicing these days, largely because of the Things I Dearly Wish My Church Would/Would Not Do list. (My relationship with being Catholic is complicated.)

The language thing is just much easier to grump about without getting depressing.

Tangential from fidelio: I did see someone online, in all apparent seriousness, arguing that the change from "one in being with the Father" to "consubstantial with the Father" was preferable because the small words trick us into thinking we can comprehend the mystery of the Trinity, and the big word tells us that we can't. I do not agree with the Mysteries Should Have Extra Syllables line of liturgical reasoning.

Oh, and s/third-person/first-person/g in my previous post. Oops.

(The prospect of the Pope's visiting Britain later this year seems to have brought a lot of residual anti-Catholicism out of the woodwork. Though it's fair to say that Benny's recent remarks haven't helped matters.)

I do not agree with the Mysteries Should Have Extra Syllables line of liturgical reasoning.

It's worse than that. It's a Big Words Are Incomprehensible line of reasoning. What a frakking moron.

I wonder how much of the "Vatican II: How we hate it and will now make it go away" mindset is behind some of this. (Not "if", btw.)

Re the NBC employees' cafeteria particle:

Oh dear, they forgot the watermelon.

abi #353: In Dutch is two words one Romance one German for the same thing to have. That progressive and foroutstriving being.

If you people keep talking funny, I'll have to do an impersonation of Pepe le Pew. Without the smell, of course.

Serge, I hate to break it to you...

ONLY KIDDING! HONEST! DON'T KILL ME!

Pew Pew Pew

Caroline @336: As someone who remembers the newly-translated-from-the-Latin liturgy (with the exception of 'consubstantial') from 1967, I have to say that any recitation causing double or triple train-of-thought switches is going to be seriously disruptive. And as far as I can tell, that's what the new Roman Missal does.

I wonder if there are plans to restore second person (familiar) singular. Not that there aren't remnants of that, and not just in the hymns.

Xopher 352:
Dogs and Cats Living Together!

Steve C @ 362:

The pew, the proud!

Xopher @ 361...

Le kittee quel terrible odeur!! Pardonnez-moi ... Joseph ... après-midi le fudge is burning!

In the beginning was the TextEdit?

Thinking about the Pew Charitable Trust and Research Institute....

And around here, shouldn't we have The Final Word, from Mark of the Unicorn software? (First word processor I learned to use, why do you ask?)

As far as I'm concerned, in the beginning was the WordStar.

^KD

CarrieS@330: Yes, "debes". I was confused by your use of "possum", which is first person -- your second clause is "I cannot remain here", not "you cannot". The second person form is "potes".

I'm not completely sure, but I think the "possum + infinitive" construction you've used has the nuance that not staying is a matter of physical capability: there are irresistable forces sweeping you away whether you want to remain or not. If, as I guess, you're going for "I don't want you here, go away", I suggest using a passive periphrastic: "sed non hic manendus es." (Or "manenda" if addressing a woman. Unfortunately this construction, like LiveJournal at a certain time, doesn't leave the option of leaving sex unspecified.)

Caroline@336: The locative is a weird case that doesn't fit into the usual scheme of 5, and is always identical in form to the genitive or accusative anyway. I don't really worry about it.

You know Alpha? Workshop for young genre writers to which you can donate?

And you know the Dell Award? Which is pretty cool and prestigious and seriously squeeful?

Alphans have collectively done well with the Dell Award in the past. Most years, the deadline passes and various Alphans take note of who else sent in stories because by February, they're all going a bit crazy and just waiting for celebratory Livejournal and Facebook posts to let them know that the winners have been chosen.

Today, the list came out. Four Alphans took two honorable mentions, fourth, third, and the Dell Award itself.

I wish I could get to ICFA to see them. I am so happy.

Re retranslated Catholic liturgy: The change that annoys me about the new Roman Missal is what they've done to the Gloria. Why? Because some idiot is going to try and cram the new translation into the older musical settings— and there's a whole extra line in the new version.

I wrote a mass setting for my wedding, but have held up trying it out on OCP pending these phrasing changes. Now I'm staring at the Gloria and wondering "how on earth am I going to make this work?"

Le sigh. I won't send it in until it's ready, and that just got pushed back pending inspiration.

If Janet Croft sees this, or if someone who knows Janet Croft sees this, would she mind writing to me? She's supposed to be here in Albuquerque on February 13, but I don't know when exactly. My address is sergeunderscoreljatcomcastdotnet. Thanks.

Xopher @ 352: The studying of Irish I had, for a little time, in the past. Complicated! Latin organized, more fun, enjoyed.

Serge @ 373: Sorry, the only Croft I've seen recently has been Lara.

Serge -- writing to you now!

fidelio (# 357)

The "Lets pretend Vatican II never happened" attitude is one of the reasons I now worship in an Episcopal church these days.

(and if I wadn't already jumped rowboats, the recent papal offer for sheperd-stealing to /r/e/a/c/t/i/o/n/a/r/y/ /b/i/g/o/t/s/ disaffected Anglican priests would have had me checking my oarlocks)

Carrie @296 et seq. and David Goldfarb--
I am put in mind of the song "Closing Time", with the first verse:

Closing time, open all the doors
And let you out into the world
Closing time, turn all of the lights on
Over every boy and every girl
Closing time, one last call for alcohol
So finish your whiskey or beer
Closing time, you don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here

(Bold added by me, just in case the bit in the last line slipped by people)

Ginger @ 374... Was she a sight for sore eyes?

Janet Brennan Croft @ 375... And I just wrote back to you.

For those who might be interested... I recently found that 1985's "Paladin of the Lost Hour", based on Ellison's story, and starring Danny Kaye, had been posted on YouTube. I took the liberty of posting links to the story's segments HERE.

Tom Tancredo addresses the Tea Party Convention:

And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word "vote," or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.

Pardon my language but . . . what a fucking asshole.

And the worst part are the cheers from the audience.

Stefan Jones (#381): I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Tancredo couldn't answer 6 out of 10 questions from the US naturalization exam.

Stefan Jones @ 381... This reminds me that, during last week's trip to the nearby comic-store, I came across a comic-book that left me wondering if I should laugh or groan. It's title was "Barack the Barbarian vs Red Sarah".

Christopher Davis @ 382... Yup. How many of them, if asked when the Constitution was written, would give the correct year?

Open threadiness:
I just got an "urgent" snail mail notification, that my property at 9800 Topanga Cyn Blvd may be eligible for special modification program. Based on public records and information obtained through Fannie Mae... Really?

That's the commercial property that holds my mailbox. Fannie Mae's records must really be screwed up.

Or the snailmail-spammer is. Is it silly season?

I love it when right-wing loonies go after each other.

Steve with a book @344:
Problem with changing "forever and ever" is that they're translating from the original (yes, even in the NT; the language may be Koine, but they're following an established formula) לעולם ועד and there's not much in the way of alternative translations. (Maybe "now and in the afterlife", but I'm not sure that works exactly as stated given the different interpretation Christianity gives to that.)

Various:
Somehow, "In the beginning there was the Electric Pencil" just doesn't have the same ring.

Sign at work: "GBS is coming".

My first thought: "They're bringing in George Bernard Shaw? Isn't he a bit ripe by now?"

It turns out it's some updated timesheet, payroll, and other stuff application. Disappointing, to say the least.

KeithS, 388: Rats, I thought it was Great Big Sea!

A quick question: I have been doing work with An Electronic Device. That's all you'll get out of me: I like being employed and I had to sign papers. Anyway, in the course of using it I visited the Android Marketplace and found an electronic book app that's called Aldiko. I visited the section of "Free Public Domain Books" and downloaded a few, then started looking through the B's. Much to my surprise Ben Bova was listed--and one of the books was "The Dueling Machine" which as far as I know is not public domain. How does one handle this: contact the folks who have the program, or Mr. Bova's agent, or what?

Let me be clearer: I can't really do anything that might draw attention to the Device...

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 390:

Aldiko simply uses Feedbooks as their provider for public domain ebooks, so I'd take it up with them first.

In the beginning was the purr.

KeithS @388: Thank you, I feel less alone on the GBS thing.

Snowy here in VA, again (twice in the last few days). My cat went out to watch the falling snow, but she came back in after only five minutes. The other day she stayed out there for a half-hour! (She has a sheltered spot behind the bushes, and a path to get there from the door. Happily, I can see her there from the door.)

Good day to bake bread, but I've had a tech failure there -- my new scale seems to be dead. I originally thought the problem was a dead battery (and indeed, the battery proved to be drained) but with a new battery, it doesn't start up at all. (Ditto when I replace the old battery.) This isn't a killer -- I do have another scale (cruder and smaller), but it's annoying.

Usually I'd take this to my EE stepfather, but have I mentioned lots of snow? I've been using the scale just long enough that I've surely discarded the receipts and packaging, so returning it is likely out. It was only a $30 item anyway -- but the lifetime was short enough to switch brands for the next one.

And on another note, What the hell?? When did National Geographic start making pasteup cartoons with their animals, instead of actual clips of the animals?

Bruce E. Durocher II @390

I just checked, and Bova's "The Dueling Machine" is on Project Gutenberg. Since I know that Gutenberg requires contributors to checks copyright, and I'm absolutely sure that Distributed Proofreaders is paranoid about copyright (and this particular edition was produced through DP), it's almost certainly out of copyright, or at least that particular edition is. The copyright probably wasn't renewed.

--Cally

Gah. How did I write "particular edition" twice to mean two different things? Let me try again.

The Project Gutenberg ebook was produced by Distributed Proofreaders. The dead tree edition that the folks at DP turned into the ebook was in the public domain, almost certainly due to lack of renewal. Other dead tree editions might or might not be in the public domain.

I know gweeks, the person who shepherded that book through DP, has been spearheading getting a lot of science fiction (largely short stories from the pulps) onto PG using Rule 6 copyright clearances.

Cally Soukup:

The Project Gutenberg ebook was produced by Distributed Proofreaders. The dead tree edition that the folks at DP turned into the ebook was in the public domain, almost certainly due to lack of renewal. Other dead tree editions might or might not be in the public domain.

Thank you very much for the clarification! Looking at the artwork over at Feedbooks (and thank you, KeithS.), it looks like they used the original short from the large-format Analog from the 60's instead of the novel version, which may explain what's going on: I don't know how diligent Street and Smith was with renewals of material from that period outside of The Shadow, which they seem to have kept up-to-date. I just didn't want anyone ripping off the writer, since a good portion of our finances depends on my wife getting paid royalties on art she's produced. (Thank heaven for determined warrior penguins!)

I'm marking the first essays of the semester, and this particular statement came to my notice: "In between their frequent breakups Wollstonecraft had committed suicide twice."

Fragano Ledgister @400: She's either a vampire or a zombie, y'know. She's probably reading what you wrote right now.

Fragano Ledgister @ 400 -- So the "reanimate the dead" premise of Frankenstein was at least partly from personal experience?

Fragano @400:

Well, OK, thus the theme of reanimation in her daughter's book. Write what you know...

</grim humor>

Pendrift #401: Are you sure the student in question has the BRAAAAAAAAAAAAINSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?

Joel Polowin #402: Her daughter was certainly influenced by it.

Pipped at the post!

Following on to what Cally said about Project Gutenberg--here's a list of science fiction on Project Gutenberg. There are SF stories from magazines such as Astounding and Amazing, as well as a few pulp novels, that could be made available on PG because they are out of copyright because of non-renewal.

Fragano Ledgister @404: They were eaten by Wollstonecraft, of course.

And you just made me remember this. I'm reading it now and slowly going insaaaaaaaane.

Pendrift @408:
You remind me of my intermittent series of verbal sketches for my kids entitled "My neighbor was a zombie for six months before I noticed anything".

Little rants like, "I remember the day he wanted to tell me something about the DRAAAAINS. It's true that they've never been good in the neighborhood. And his must be blocked, judging from the smell. But I was late for work, so I just drove off."

>abi @ 409... I presume the problem was caused by excessive downpours, during which your neighbor could be seen and heard singin' in the raaaaiiiiiiiin.

Serge @410: but it's winter now, so he just sits inside the house watching the snow through the windowpaaaaaaane.

a note to the SFBA Fluorosphere:

As I forgot to mention earlier, B. and I are having our 8th annual SuperB commercials party tomorrow (Sunday the 7th) up in the City (Richmond district). See my lj for slightly more info, or email me for details.

Grammar/style question. When using an ellipsis to indicate a pause (but not an omission): space before, space after, both, neither?

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 237:

The Routemasters on the BBC's website. It appears that there were four episodes of it, and that it is, indeed, about a time-travelling bus. I can't speak to the quality of it, since this is the first I've heard of it.

Lee, I prefer no space before and a space after... like that. I'm not sure what's written in style books, but it looks and reads better to me than the alternatives.

...whereas I prefer neither, Lee.

... and I tend to want spaces at both ends ...

Hmm...no, I find that spaces really break the flow. And certainly there should never be a space between a period and a final ellipsis....

TexAnne @ 418... Speaking of typographical conventions, I really dislike the ones used in French for conversations. And I grew up with them.

418
With you on that one.

Serge, are they the same as the ones in Spanish? You'd think that, with all the Spanish-class editions of Spanish literary classics with footnotes and explanations and such, there would be one with the dialogue formatted the way it is in typical English. That threw me every time.

I'm with TexAnne...no spaces before or after.

Diatryma, 421: Footnotes and explanations don't change the text.

Diatryma @ 421... In English, someone's response can contain some narration in it, then the response resumes, all of this in the same paragraph, with the actual conversation identified by double quotes, right? In French, it's all kept in separate paragraphs. And the only identification that it's someone speaking is if the line begins with a double dash.

Damn, I just heard the Phil Klass -- aka William Tenn -- passed away. I loved his stories.

http://webnews.sff.net/read?cmd=xover&group=sff.discuss.obituaries

Wow. Just saw this video. Sarah Palin reading cheatnotes off her palm at a convention of morons teabaggers.

Xopher @ 426... My wife just came across it on a blog that illustrated the whole thing with a picture from Night of the Hunter - the scene where Robert Mitchum shows the words 'love' and 'hate' written on his knuckles.

#426: She could have done that interview with the CEO of Throwing Kittens in a Wood Chipper, Inc., whispering in her ear as she spoke, and they would still have loved her.

Remember the SubGenius mottos:

"Act like a dumbfuck and they'll treat you like an equal."

"You'll pay us to tell you what you really think!"

OPEN THREADNESS: Geaux Saints! Who Dat? Who You With?

Which is the only time in the history of the world, my dears, I will have ever cared about football.

Between the disasterous conclusion of trying to get a dear friend's daughter out of Haiti, and fears of what is happening to her, and a whole bunch of related things, this helped. Also we received some good phone calls, right after the bad part of the third quarter, that gave us good advice of something more I, meaning ME, can do to help with our friends' daughters' situation. And then other good news after that.

This day ended better than most of it.

Love, C.

#426: I saw the video. My GAWD.

There's also this story, with close-ups of her hand, showing her talking points:

Palin's Tea Party Crib Notes

"Energy," "BudgetTax Cuts," and "Lift American Spirits."

I can't wait for John Stewart to chew on this.

Stefan #430:

That's just odd. I mean, having notes for a speech is nothing weird at all. But four or five words scribbled on her hand? WTF?

It's not bad, exactly, just really odd.

So much for their making fun of Obama using a teleprompter.

That's the $100,000 palm pilot.

Well, not that I ever had any doubts before, but it's definitive: she sure as hell hasn't read Twain.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 434... Never the Twain shall meet. Still, it sounds like an interesting premise for a story. (Remember the ST-TNG holodeck having Enstein and Hawking chatting with Data and Newton?) Sam Clemens may have made fun of Democrats, but I think that what he'd say about the Republican Party's current presidential wannabe would not be fit for airing on national TV.

Lee @ 413: MLA style is that ellipses within original material should be spaced out, thus . . . while ellipses indicating deleted material should be close together, thus ... . I prefer to take the optional extra step of enclosing ellipses for deleted material in brackets [...] to eliminate any possibility of confusion.

Serge -- given what Mr. Clemens had to say about snake oil salesmen, his remarks about contemporary events and people would surely be a thing of wonder..

Debbie @ 437... Ah, the kind of sarcasm that could burn a hole thru plasteel... Should he turn it against la Rouge, there'd be a flash of light then nothing but a very tiny pile of ashes.

It's a really nice reminder about the nature of our political system, right? This lady came within a few percent of the votes/one big scandal at the last minute of being the VP to a very old man who's lived a hell of a hard life. She could still find herself in a position of enormous power in this country. This isn't a one in a million shot, this is like a one in ten or one in twenty shot.

There's this natural wish to imagine that the powerful are wise, or smart, or at least competent. But they aren't. Our political mechanisms don't necessarily bring the wise, smart, or competent to power. Nor do those mechanisms offer incentives for people to behave as wisely, intelligently, or competently as they are able. We face the consequences of that every damned day.

I don't know what will have to change to fix this. Perhaps it's unfixable. But after awhile, it becomes impossible to hold onto the hope that incompetent and evil people in power are some kind of aberration. They're not--they're a big chunk of the distribution. And that's even scarier than considering Palin as a potential presidential candidate.

Constance, #429, that's great!

albatross, #439, she sure doesn't look wise in the FOIA emails from her husband. It looks like he's running a lot of the government, plus trying to figure out how to make personal things look governmental.

The Burj Dubai building particle;

I say all the pictures of it look like they aren't real.

They look like cover paintings, complete with vast areas of sky to put typeset copy on.

Damn. Just found out that William Tenn/Phil Klass died.

His "The Liberation of Earth", read back when I was ten, was one of a small number of stories which woke me up to what SF could be.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale@412, thanks to you, B, and the Internet Archive folks for hosting yet another enjoyable party.

The Internet Archive's new building is a former Christian Science church just south of the Presidio in San Francisco, and a number of people commented that they'd obviously bought it because it looks like their logo. Brewster gave a tour of the place, including their scanning room that's one of ~20 around the world scanning about 1000 books a day that are in the public domain.

Serge @424, that explains a lot about the English translation of The Day of the Dolphin.

The one which I read in the Seventies, that is. I assumed there was something a bit odd about the style of writing of the original: that Franch has something that functions as a quotation mark.

I don't recall it ever being explained at school by the teacher of the French language. But he'd pitched cobblestones at the CRS and wrote poetry.

The nearest I came to reading French fictional narative was Asterix the Gaul and a couple of copiues of Metal Hurlant (accent marks misremembered) I picked up in a side-street bookshop in Grimsby, near the docks. (A few months later it was busted for selling porn.)

Dave Bell @ 444... A few months later it was busted for selling porn

Events later recounted in Asterix in the Gaol?

I was used to the French typographical convention, since that's what I had grown up with, but when I discovered the Anglophone convention, I fell in love with it. For one thing, it felt so much more active, so much more like a real conversation would be. After all, who talks with all those pauses - aside from William Shatner?

Actually, the FBI was "Mirandizing" people long before it was called that. When the infamous decision came down, sane people pointed out that the FBI and the better police departments had been advising suspects of their rights all along.

Open threadiness: if you haven't read the personal ads in the London Review of Books, you're missing out.

OT: I hate to blow my own trumpet, but the computer game version of Dante's "Divine Comedy", predicted on this site in 2007, has now been released.

ajay @ 448... I read about that on another site a couple of weeks ago. One woman then suggested that maybe the next thing would be Milton being given the X-men treatment, an idea she found ridiculous until I suggested that lots of people wouldn't mind seeing Hugh Jackman as Milton.

At least Paradise Lost has a bit of action in it. Especially Book VI. (Satan constructs enormous siege engines to fight God! But Michael destroys them by chucking mountains at them!)
I'm just not sure how you make a good game out of the Divine Comedy. Dante doesn't do anything in the Inferno, he just watches stuff. And if you have him trying to beat various challenges in order to get from level to level in Purgatory, then it turns into Dante Kong.

albatross #439: But after awhile, it becomes impossible to hold onto the hope that incompetent and evil people in power are some kind of aberration.

Because they aren't -- looking at history, and even mythology that's exactly the usual failure mode of government! At the moment, we're barely a year from the reign of a full-fledged "King of Misrule", and Obama (our new "Sun Child") is still dealing with not only the neocon bullies, but Stockholm-smitten Democrats as well.

Ajay #450: Oh, they just replaced the whole plot -- Dante is now a knight chasing Lucifer to reclaim the soul of his beloved Beatrice.

#449 Serge

Jacqueline Carey's two volume The Sundering duology -- Banewreaker and Godslayer -- have a great deal of Miltonian aether about them. They are very good, also.

Love, C.

Constance @ 453... And there was Brust's To Reign in Hell.

Bruce@390: Magazine versions of a lot of SF are unexpectecly in the public domain in the USA, due to lack of renewal of the copyright. When it was published as a book the authors generally considered that the preferred and main version, and didn't bother with paperwork and fees to renew copyright on the magazine version.

Hence the original magazine version of Doc Smith's The Skylark of Space (very different from the 1960s paperback version) on Gutenberg. Also Skylark Three, which is not nearly so different.

nine levels with a boss fight on each level?

South Dakota reservations snowbound, desperate, people dying.

... and the ONLY media coverage it's getting has all been kick-started by Daily Kos. Is it okay for me to hope for Rupert Murdoch's karmic debt all to land on him at once?

Pendrift 447: do those things work/

Erik Nelson @458: Personals editor David Rose mentions a wedding of a couple who met through an ad, so it's worked at least once. I don't see why they wouldn't work the way other personal ads do, actually. If anything, you'd get a better glimpse of someone's sense of humor from the LRB ones.

What I'm finding is that someone, either at Aldiko, Project Gutenberg, or at Distributed Proofreaders can't spell worth a damn and has pretty poor reading comprehension when it comes to the Dr. Thorndyke novels. If any of Fragano's students wants to pick up some pin money doing copyediting, there's a job out there waiting... I'd go into detail but it's just depressing.

#454 Serge

I haven't read Brust's To Reign in Hell since it hasn't come my way, but -- VERY LARGE BUT!!!!! -- we're supposedly going to be creamed by humongous snowstorm here tomorrow, and I have Iorich -- which I've chastely ignored for days, and even tonight (which I'm spending ALONE for spouse is at Duke, so I get even more points), saving for just this this kind of imprisonment.

Love, C.

#457 Lee

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.

[Wait -- I haven't lived there since I was able to escape at age 17. Escape was the operative action word ... this before cable, before internet, which of course, the prevailing religious ruling class also rules there.]

The Dakotas are really not part of the U.S. in so many ways, sez she who grew up out there -- meaning nobody pays us any attention, unless it's something Really Special.

But we bring enormous amounts of what you eat to your table, ultimately.

And some of the rest of the world.

The rezes -- they've been ignored and exploited since day one.

Love, C.

ajay @448: I had a similar notion for a video game, which would have been titled Where In Hell is Carmen Sandiego?

Lee #457: Why am I remembering a certain scene early in the Sandman series, involving the loss of a protective amulet?

Depressing open-threadiness:

The Obama administration apparently holds that it has the power to murder US citizens without any oversight at all, as this Greenwald post discusses. This was discussed on Democracy Now today, as well. If the Bush administration's claim of power w.r.t. Jose Padilla was grounds for impeachment[1], then so is this.

This falls in with the pattern of this administration, which has made it absolutely clear that nobody important will ever see the inside of a courtroom for torturing or murdering prisoners, or for spying on Americans. Perhaps not even for murdering Americans.

I no longer have any faith that electing Democrats can change the direction in which our country is moving. I wish to God I did. These policies will be the far-left edge of the Overton window, when the next Republican is in office. "Even the far-left Obama administration agreed that...."

I have no idea where we go from here. Probably nowhere good.

[1] I think it was. The Bush Administration had a US citizen seized on US soil and thrown into a deep, dark hole with no trial and no oversight. There are good reasons to believe Padilla was tortured in captivity, but I don't know of any proof. The previous administration claimed the power to declare US citizens enemy combatants and have them disappeared. The current administration claims the power to declare them enemy combatants and have them assassinated--perhaps while sitting in their homes or driving in their cars, far from anything remotely resembling a battlefield. Why is the first more wrong than the second?

The current trendy euphemism is "unprivileged enemy belligerent".

Open threadiness: Germans not liking the Google StreetView car. (video, language NSFW)

According to this article, it's due to privacy concerns. (Dutch)

Bruce wrote @ 460

"What I'm finding is that someone, either at Aldiko, Project Gutenberg, or at Distributed Proofreaders can't spell worth a damn and has pretty poor reading comprehension when it comes to the Dr. Thorndyke novels."

*Perk*

This moose has quite a number of original hardcovers (being rather partial to those stories), and most of the rest in recently reprinted paperbacks. I will have to investigate further. (Not sure what's required of a copyeditor/prufreeda though.)

abi @467 -- nope, many Germans aren't happy about StreetView at all. My city is trying to charge Google a fee. It'll be interesting to see how (if) that works.

Debbie #469: nope, many Germans aren't happy about StreetView at all. My city is trying to charge Google a fee. It'll be interesting to see how (if) that works.

If Google had a big overlap in their board of directors with Amazon, they'd probably retaliate against the city by removing it from Google Maps entirely (leaving a virtual Chernobylesque hole in the map, here there be dragons), and removing all web links that can be geotraced to the town from Google search results; then they'd follow up with a demand that Google be paid for the "service" of violating the privacy of the town's citizens with Google street view truck cameras. Then they'd escalate to removing all mention of Germany from all of their legion of services, just like Paypal did to India recently.

I have just written about The Inchoate Reviews of Google Books.

There's a certain beauty to these. They're unearthed by a blind, unconscious, inarticulate robot, yet they bring resonances to the human reader's mind, and spark the imagination. There ought to be a way to make a game, or a poem-like object, or something, out of them.

Earl@470: I'm solidly with Google, not the Germans who feel that way, on this one. There is not, and there should not be, any reasonable expectation of privacy against being seen by a truck driving down the public street. That's an absurd view, which would also happen to make my hobby largely impossible if taken seriously.

In my local paper today: ex-soldier charged with waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter.

He bragged that it was effective in teaching her to recite her ABCs.

DD-B @ 472: It's a matter of degree, and of a change in degree of observation-by-others that was not initiated, or concurred in, by the locals. That's what's disconcerting to them, and produces howls of outrage -- not so much the fact of change, but the degree, and especially the unilateral imposition by "outsiders". (Hmmmmm, where have we encountered that before?)

Google Maps (including Streetview) is hardly the Panopticon, but some people clearly believe it represents a long stride in that direction, and don't like the idea. You (and I) may think such reactions are excessive, but that doesn't make the associated beliefs any less real.

On the legal and philosophical fronts, this topic takes us into areas with few obvious breakpoints -- degrees of public observation which are clearly separable from one another. Rather, there is a pretty smooth continuum of increasing public visibility of a subject's activities, from the random casual glances of individual passers-by, to monitored and recorded 24/7/365 video surveilance of every location that is not actually inside a private dwelling. (And don't forget to keep the doors shut and curtains drawn.)

Once again, technological advances make it necessary for us (our society) to have some very awkward conversations about where to draw lines between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" behaviors. And as usual, the range of "acceptable" will be extended, with the usual kicking and screaming, to include the newly identified portions of "can't be prevented".

ObSF: Isaac Asimov, "The Dead Past"; T.L. Sherred, "E for Effort".

I'm wondering if they understand that Google Streetview isn't live, or updated even monthly (more like yearly).
Also, Google blurs out the faces of people (and, in one instance that I saw, the picture of a person's face on a banner).

Leroy@474: While some areas will be more covered than others, visitors and tourists passing through snap pictures everywhere, and I don't see that as being any different from the Google Street view truck. I'm an outsider most places I go to take pictures. And an awful lot of people put their photos on Flickr. More and more cameras are including GPS chips to automatically tag the location.

I'm not sure where the line is between the video cameras on every light pole constantly recording, and a guy walking by and snapping his shutter, but I'm pretty sure that a truck that drives through at most every few years is on the "guy walking by" side of the line.

I don't think any meaningful privacy is gained by stopping one particular one-picture-every-few-years survey of any given area. I don't think it's right to forbid random picture-taking in public, or the posting of those pictures. So I think Google street view is just fine (you can see my old car out in front of my house, last I checked).

DD-B @ 476: We are, I think, in vigorous agreement, particularly about where Google's current activities fall in relation to a very blurry and constantly shifting line.

Sometimes, one of the first steps in persuading someone to accept an unpleasant-to-them change can be to publicly acknowledge that the other person's concerns are based on understandable reasons. Then, if possible, show how the disconcerting new development is really just a modest change in degree, and not really inconsistent with the other person's underlying values and world-view. This can be an annoyingly slow process, but at least provides an option, in principle, to more drastic forms of social upheaval.

Leroy@477: The thing is, from my POV their position is so loony that I'm at some pains to avoid giving it any shred of credence or support. They're proposing a drastic upheaval to the law that would have horrible consequences (making it illegal to photograph policemen misbehaving, for example; it's the general right to photograph in public that gives us that).

David and Leroy:

They're uncomfortable at the feeling that their civic life is going to be visible to the wider world. It's one thing for your house to be visible to anyone who takes the trouble to walk by. It's another thing for it to be visible to someone who happens to find a photo that's got the relevant geographical data. And it's yet one more thing for all that to be pulled together, indexed, and presented to the viewer with no effort at all.

This bounces off of Clay Shirky's point about information and filters. People's privacy was based around the inconvenience of getting the information to compromise it. As that inconvenience has been eroded by technology, people feel exposed.

On a more general basis, I find dismissing people's arguments out of hand, when all you've heard of them has been thirdhand, fairly inadequate as an intellectual exercise. Why not start from the basis that they're rational and see what their concerns are, then figure out if they cross your desired rights? Then figure out which should matter more?

I'm actually quite vexed at this turn of conversation, because much of it is driven by a kind of provincialism of American and techie culture, which basically assumes that any objections that American techies don't agree with can be dismissed out of hand. Living among non-Americans and non-techies, I find this arrogant and unproductive.

DD-B, Leroy, Earl, and all -- my personal opinion is that Google will eventually win this one. Too many Germans enjoy too many interactive services and social networks these days that it seems unlikely that one corner of the net would be cornered off.

That said, it's been interesting to me to observe how serious Germans are about their privacy, particularly with regard to institutions and companies exchanging data. There have been big brouhahas over the census, for example, which predated the internet.

In some ways this* all reminds me of the Amish approach to technology -- they're not necessarily agin' it, but they take their time weighing pros and cons before adopting something.

*general approach to information privacy

I'm wondering what happens if (or when) those complaining find out how useful street view can be for finding things that don't show up in aerial views or on street maps, that they might need (or want) to find fast.
Or, more simply, when you're going someplace for the first time, you might want to know the local landmarks so you won't get lost so easily.

abi@479: Since I said it in #478, and you don't mention it, am I to assume that you don't think it's important to be able to photograph police misbehaving? Or that you don't think it's hard to protect that except as part of a general right to photograph in public?

Because if you DO consider those to be relevant points (not necessarily enough to settle the case, just relevant), then I have to be a bit vexed at your attributing my position simply to insular American techie culture. I not only think my position is based on more than that, I've specified some of the details already. (I've also lived in Zurich for two non-consecutive years, and am near the edge of being ineligible to donate blood due to amount of time spent in England, and listen to the BBC a lot more than to Fox news.) Similarly, your suggestion that all I know about the topic is what I've heard in the immediately preceding thread is incorrect, and somewhat insulting. This is of course a big issue throughout the photographic community, and is being widely discussed by people all over the world, and I've been listening to a lot of those discussions.

DDB @482:

The person photographing police misconduct is on a different place in the individual effort/invasiveness curve than Google Street View preserving forever, and displaying to the world, that one's house needed painting and lawn mowing on that particular day. One does not lead directly to the other; indeed, someone concerned about the pantopticon society might find your conflation of the two rather strange.

I'm sorry if telling you that you are prioritizing your values over others' to such a degree that you sound provincial and arrogant bugs you. My suggestion would be to find a way to approach the matter that doesn't sound condescending.

Maybe we come out at your place on the spectrum. I tend to. But I also know that to elide the process of understanding and addressing the concerns of the other side, to say their position is so loony that I'm at some pains to avoid giving it any shred of credence or support, is not actually helpful.

I think the Google street view controversy falls under the heading of "it stops being funny* when it starts being you". I know I had a brief qualm when I saw my house on Google street view, but I had no problems with seeing other houses or buildings.

* or cute or useful or harmless

Abi@483: Consider the Overton window. I really don't want to let that start to look "normal"; it's very, very dangerous.

What, other than a general right to take photos in public, do you think protects my taking photos of policemen misbehaving?

The Google streetview pictures aren't particularly permanent, they update them every few years (at least so far). Somebody might grab a copy to keep, but that's equally true of any snapshot posted on Flickr.

I believe that the concerns of the other side consist very largely of a complete misunderstanding of the current rules.

PJEvans@481: Yes, and businesses start seeing a measurable decline in business from people outside the neighborhood, because people won't go somewhere they can't check out a head of time. This does seem likely.

I strongly suspect that a lot of the anti-streetview people think it's somehow realtime.

DDB @485:

The way to avoid that becoming the new normal is not to sneer or dismiss, but to persuade. You cite the Overton Window; let me, without implying that these Germans are engaged in similar things, cite tea parties and defiant subcultures with persecution complexes as an example of what I think we should act to avoid.

I believe that the concerns of the other side consist very largely of a complete misunderstanding of the current rules.

I believe your dismissal of them consists very largely of a complete misunderstanding of the current customs, particularly the local customs of their culture. Which are stronger and stickier than rules, and cannot be changed by fiat.

Those customs also exist for good historical reasons. Why, do you think, would Germans be cautious about too much data being collected and collated about them?

DD-B @485:

There's also this little bit from abi's earlier reply, to wit:

It's another thing for it to be visible to someone who happens to find a photo that's got the relevant geographical data. And it's yet one more thing for all that to be pulled together, indexed, and presented to the viewer with no effort at all.

It's that Big Brother aspect that separates it from sites like Flickr, and it's what people find creepy.

DDB @486: