Not exactly a purported image of Jesus in a piece of French toast

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But it's even better! See the outwardly mediocre photo below and try to find the super-awesome subliminal image embedded within it.

Shot at the Cowboy Monkey, Champaign, Ill., Friday evening whilst Big Rock Head was blowing some section work with the Parkland College In-Your-Ear Big Band.

And I will hasten to add that, no, the ugly motherfucker at center left is not your genial host. How could you even think such a thing?!?

Click to enlarge. Taken with an iPhone 4s in available light using its digital zoom capability. The camera in the thing is quite impressive. I'll share some of the landscapes I made over Thanksgiving in western Iowa, on the estate of one of this blog's correspondents.

After hours

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Apropos of nothing, here's a nice snapshot of Norma Jean Baker looking young and somewhat indisposed, getting fingerprints all over her 10 in. 78 rpm hit parader. I wonder what's going on here: it's a flash photo, but the outdoor light could indicate either twilight or dawn (noting that her makeup looks too fresh for a dawn after a late night). Her face and hair style look similar to her appearance in a 1954 wedding photo alongside Joe DiMaggio; did he take the picture? (Lucky slob.) The room's furnishings look mismatched and ratty, so I'd be surprised if the picture was taken in her own home. Questions, questions flooding the mind after hours.

Image linked from How To Be A Retronaught; original post attributed to Dangerous Minds.

OK, I gotta settle down now

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Between my current fevered speculations, which are intended to develop a plausible hypothesis about what is really wrong with Obama and his political flubs and miscues of the past 2 years; and some mind-bending reading about current events that I intend to comment on soon, I'm now ready for some west and welaxation. West and welaxation! That's right. So here's a nice-ish photo I shot last night from the back door of the garage.

I made the image on my mighty Nikon D700 using a Nikkor 24mm prime lens opened up to f/2.8 and with an exposure of 1/40th of a second (hand-held). Of interest to old-school photographers, I set the ISO to 6400---16 times faster than the old Kodak workhorse fast film, Tri-X. I didn't even bother to correct for visual noise, which would plague most digital images made at this speed on lesser cameras.

This picture astounds me in terms of how capable this camera is of capturing high-quality images in low light. The key light was a mercury vapor security light that inflicts itself on my property from the alley. I did very little postprocessing, just tinkering a little with the white balance to reduce the red/magenta tint of the light source, then applying the Adobe Bridge vignetting tool in the RAW processor to eliminate the "irising" effect at the corners of the frame, which is inherent to most wide-angle lenses.

I was amused by this sight last night because the patio looked all set up to host a conclave dedicated to booze and cigars, with the only obstacle being about 4 inches of highly packable snow covering everything. By afternoon today, incidentally, we had about 10 inches on the ground here in my small city on a swamp.

The plains of Persia

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Persia, Iowa: realm of the noble Rep. Steve King, a mile down the road from the simple country demesne of Rusty and Lucky (the Baby Boom's answer to Ma and Pa Kettle). A quick, crowd-pleasing creekscape, lightly processed using the Adobe Bridge RAW processor and Photoshop for exposure and color correction, fussily cropped. RAW is a file format presenting raw data from the camera sensor. The Bridge RAW processor gives you an insane amount of easy controls that are often sufficient to whip out a quick, crowdpleasing landscape.

I probably put as much effort into this shot and the postprocessing as Larry Kanfer puts into any given "prairiescape," i.e., not much, but at this point I don't have a way to sell mine for $600, bare, like Kanfer does. Kanfer's work has ornamented the great rooms of Champaign-Urbana Junior League types for over 30 years now. Myself, I've always felt his photos lack soul, and many of them appear short on aesthetics and even proficiency. But what do I know about it if an auto dealership heiress wants to pay easy money for the stuff?

Editor's note: any problems with the aesthetics of this image are the fault of the creek channel and not the photographer. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Apropos of nothing

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This is another iPhone photo taken during my spontaneous 60-mile, shoulder-trashing bike ride last Monday. The "developed" image shown here is actually somewhat more ambitious than it may look.

First, the sun blinded me when it peeked through the gaps between as each coupling passed, immediately alternating with deep shadow during the late afternoon. The finder was barely any help in framing. For that reason, shutter release timing was complete guesswork.

Second, the iPhone's digital shutter is pretty unresponsive compared with any mechanical shutter, and changes in the available light may slow it down in unpredictable ways. This "dynamism" further challenges the photographer trying to guess when to release the shutter.

Third, the scene was a worst-case example of extreme backlighting, which makes it very difficult for the low-end camera sensor to expose either the background or the foreground correctly.

I think the result is interesting. Making only two exposures, I lucked out and framed the train just as I'd hoped to. The classically bad lighting was treatable in Adobe Bridge, and it even gave me a bit of aesthetic lens flare radiating from upper left. The exposure and color adjustment tools in Bridge are very good for bossing pixels around; don't know why they don't use the same interface in Photoshop, but there's probably a reasonable explanation. Anyway, the exposure tools let the user get very selective about scene exposure, information recovery from blown-out highlights, and finding detail in deep shadows, even with an underwhelming cell phone camera. The Bridge detail tool helped a lot to define edges in the deep shadows. And the interface for the color adjustment tools made it possible to goose up color that was almost invisible in the raw exposure, in this case the greens and golds in the field beyond the carriage coupling and even some blue, reflected from the sky, in the rail heads.

The other interesting aspect, which was none of my doing, is the significant skewing of the railroad cars in the opposite direction of their movement. It's almost an animation-type motion-exaggeration effect like you might see in a cartoon. This effect is accounted for by digital shutter technology, which scans what the lens sees similar to how a photocopier captures the image of whatever is laying on the platen. A digital shutter can create other random interesting effects, too: if you snap someone who blinks shortly after the shutter is activated, for example, the result can be a portrait in which the subject has one eye opened and the other closed.

RubberCrutch status report

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Hi friends. How are you? I am fine. However, when I feel that this blog is looking lazy I like to provide a status report to deflect your negative attention from my laziness.

I started on a fairly ambitious post to denounce whistledick futurists, by whom I mean authors who pose as prophets or sophisticated insiders on the basis of ideas they've evidently gleaned (i.e., stolen) from dystopian fiction and Road Warrior movies. As I try to develop my own reliable synthesis of what's going on in this unsettling era I'm gathering information from history, which I believe is really important for context (and to avoid becoming a whistledick futurist myself). The stimulus of my wrath on this topic was a widely praised post by Douglas Coupland, the sort-of coiner of the term "Generation X," who appears to be an arrogant, under-informed hipster still huffing the vapors of his high-octane heyday. This past week I dedicated several hours to composing a high-dudgeon takedown of Mr. Coupland's condescending drool. But I couldn't get it right, and finally realized that a much more moderate and even-tempered response would do just fine. So I've scrapped the previous effort and will try again this weekend. To me, responding is still a worthwhile task because I feel many of us are buying into stock doomsday scenarios that paralyze our spirits. My preferred approach to social criticism is to avoid everyone's conventional wisdom, even if it comes from people who feel special because they had an Internet login in 1985.

Pictured above is a "cathedral of the prairie," a term I quote from a forgotten author who doesn't readily rise to the top of a Google search. I snapped it on the inadequate iPhone 3G camera, then doctored it in Bridge and Photoshop to approximate how I saw the scene when I felt compelled to interrupt my bike ride to document it. That selfsame bike ride, which took me halfway through Piatt County and terminated (before turning back) a few miles north of Deland, Illinois, ended up setting me back several weeks, sprained-rotator-cuffwise. Ended up being on the bike 90 minutes more than planned due to being waylaid on rural roads crumbling into gravel and dirt. Too much heavy lifting for Mr. Supraspinatus, evidently. So I've been pussing around the house this week instead of tackling the heavy lifting of blog augmentation.

Then there is the strange case of me actually finishing a woodworking project. It's pictured at the right, hanging under a kitchen cabinet. It may not look like much, but it involved some careful measurements, routing and sawing, and stock and stain decisions so it would match the in-place red oak woodwork. I finished cutting and assembly a year ago, then proceeded to stare at the bare wood, despairing about how to mount the thing in a non-remedial way. Finally, a recent chat with a cute lady carpenter on a completely different topic (strictly business) inspired me to buy a Forstner drill bit, apply a little mental elbow grease to hardware selection, then stain and seal it, and hang it up. Click the picture for a bigger view if you like, and note the scroll-sawed arch cut of the sides to match the arched sides of the spice compartment to its upper right. That's some pretty hot-shit woodworking for me, actually. Tonight I'm field testing the shelf to house a cute little AudioSource power amp with an old Sports Walkman (boasting "Mega Bass Groove") jacked in, and a pair vintage B&W speakers. It works!

Finally I've been distracted this past week by the unexpected return of some epic BP numbers, with my favorite being 182/88 (nowhere close to my "personal best," incidentally). I made an executive decision to return to my previous med protocol, which the doc had relaxed in response to my significant weight loss and general awesomeness as a physical specimen. The numbers are returning to where they were, which had been consistent with what might be expected for a world-class athlete at rest or a little old lady on life support.

And those are some reasons why it seems I've been neglecting you, but I assure you that you haven't left my thoughts during this hiatus. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Two roads diverged near a wood, and I...

*...I fucking "augered in," as the top gun pilots say, about 90 minutes later. Augered in how, and to what? one may wonder. On my road bike is how, and into a goddam curb that was supposed to be a curb cut, according to my beautiful mind, is what. Happily, I made the most of the time dilation phenomenon, which is well known to all who have witnessed themselves heading toward an inevitable high-speed calamity. With the grace of an Ed Sullivan acrobat opening for Freddie and the Dreamers, I relinquished the handlebars and handsprung onto the concrete sidewalk, pulling off a maneuver, with my arms, something like what parachutists do when their feet meet the ground too fast for comfort. Strangely, I suffered no hand abrasions from the concrete sidewalk, or any other scrapes except one about a quarter-inch in diameter at the crotchward side of the left knee.

However, I spent the next several days in fairly intensive pain, greatly fearing I'd ripped up my only unsullied rotator cuff. Now, after a negative x-ray and some healing time, it looks like I get off the hook with a moderate-but-manageable shoulder sprain. And that, loyal reader, is why I've been offline for almost a week. It also partially accounts for the muddled portions of my previous post.

Anyway, I took the photo at the early cusp of the photographers' "golden hour" with a highly limited iPhone 3G camera. I do believe that I may get on the bike again on Sunday and try again... but not 76 miles this time.

Apropos of nothing

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Office still life with margarita glass and melba toast resembling polar cross section of a lemon. Shot on iPhone 3G; cropped, slightly gamma-corrected, and sharpened using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop.

Special note to Anonymous

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Thanks for commenting on my post of 14 May 2009 and providing the JR link. But I must question your grasp of either mathematics or physics. Or the quality of your stereo vision. Jane may have been one-dimensional (I don't know for sure) but she was also very much three-dimensional. By my Simple Country Editor (TM) ciphering method, that makes her fully four-dimensional, putting her in a class with such notables as Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith and Eugene the Jeep, Popeye's "fourth-dimensional dorg."


Editor's note: fair use is claimed for the accompanying image of Popeye the Sailor and Eugene the Jeep for purposes of education and cultural commentary.

It's A Trap!

Well, it's a band formerly called Jackanapes. This is a shot of 3/7 of the members entertaining a robust crowd at The Iron Post, Urbana, late on 12 September. Just between us girls, I like to refer to this band as Skunk And The JuggLice. They play peppy tunes that might be categorized as gypsy-ska-punk. Pictured is an electric embodiment of the group. The acoustic version entertained guests at my place last New Year's Eve, and I think they were less cramped in my fireplace pit than on this dinky bandstand at the Post.

I shot the photo with my "see-in-the-dark" Nikon D700 set to ISO 6400, no flash. Interestingly, to me, I had to increase the shutter speed by the equivalent of about 2 stops (less light) compared with the exposure recommended by the meter. Was really nice to review each shot and find the correct exposure manually with little trouble or guesswork. The most amazing thing about this camera is how little noise (pixels of random color and brightness) there is in the image as shot in such low light at such high sensitivity. Right now you pay a big premium for this kind of tech; within 5 years (assuming the world doesn't end when the Aztec calendar does) we might see this kind of sensor quality in modestly priced snapshooters.

Side note: the band playing before IAT! was a five-man pickup jazz combo that also featured Big Rock Head (silver tenor sax) and Mike Eye (bari), plus local pal Aaron (not pictured, playing 40s and Dickie Dale-style guitar) and two others. They hadn't played together until earlier in the day (even if then --- don't know).

Take 5

An iPhone snapshot from early a.m. on 15 August 2009, composed by Big Rock Head during a sightseeing excursion in Chicago to visit some ne'er-do-well friends. Postprocessed in Bridge and Photoshop to boost the red objects a little and reduce color noise. Since I don't know anything about rendering for different color regimes and output devices, the reds don't look as vivid on my screen via the web as they do in my photo directory. But I'll worry about that tomorrow.

The photo is a found little gem of urban beauty. Thus spoke StuporMundi.

Bye, Bettie

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A lot of stories like these have been published in the past day about the passing of Bettie Page, who died Thursday evening, December 11, in Los Angeles. In the various reports I've read or heard on the radio, Bettie is packaged as some sort of bellwether of the '60s sexual revolution or an "infamous" bondage model. I am not a Bettie expert, but I do know a little about her and her contemporaries in the figure modeling profession. The obits are generally heavy on caricature and short on context.

First, Bettie did not "set the stage for the sexual revolution"; that had been under way since World War II even if it was mostly excluded from Hollywood movies and the other popular media. Second, she was really not a superstar in her day. She was a popular figure model who posed in lingerie and various stages of nudity, but only one of many, and I strongly doubt that she was ever the most popular pinup model even during her heyday --- the early and middle 1950s. At that time, the colossal sex symbols were burlesque and strip-tease superstars like Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr, and Lili St. Cyr (prononced "Sincere"), some of whom were pulling down four-figure wages per week in Las Vegas while bedding first-tier entertainers and mobsters, not to mention the occasional state governor or president. Then there was also Marilyn Monroe, who really did traipse fairly unabashed sexuality into middle class consciousness via the movie screen. And third, Bettie was certainly not the most infamous cutie to pose in fetish gear, bondage poses, or catfight vignettes --- there were plenty who specialized in that market, as advertised "back of the book" in pulpy paper in men's "cheesecake" and "adventure" magazines. But that fact is known mainly to the original purchasers of such photos and to latter-day collectors, not to corporate journalists looking for a way to sensationalize a light, campy takeout on the death of a faded sex symbol.

Photographers and publishers made carloads of money selling copies of Bettie's likeness. She was left to deal with exploitation and broken marriages, and a past of sexual abuse by her father, by herself. I've read that even though she turned to Christianity at the end of the Eisenhower era and remained devout to the end, she never disowned or even expressed shame about her modeling career. That struck me as touching, and an indication of strong character.

News media have their reasons for sensationalizing Bettie now, possibly because it allows even NPR to talk about her "endless legs, tiny waist, and beautiful bustline" --- not to mention bondage and leather --- in respectable, well modulated tones of voice. I, as an admirer of vintage figure and pinup art, have my own reasons, and here they are:

In terms of anatomy alone, during her prime time, Bettie was a force of nature. Physically, every molecule of Bettie was in exactly the right place when she posed. Strictly speaking, the molecules were the product of her genetic heritage. But I feel that what arranged those molecules so exquisitely in front of a lens was her spirit. The magic had to have been her personality. A few of Bettie's contemporaries may have rivaled her "physical plant." Lili St. Cyr comes to mind, but her molecules radiate aloofness and even arrogance. Others, such as Rose La Rose and Betty Howard, exuded terrific personalities but may have lacked certain indispensable fine points, for example, below the knees and above the ankles. Winnie Garrett, my favorite model, was a tall, "flaming redhead" who by all accounts overflowed with personality, intelligence, and genuine niceness. No red-blooded American he-man could ask for more, then or now. But even so, I must admit that Winnie was a bit exotic-looking in the direction of "school marm"; that's fine by me, but it nevertheless falls short of Bettie's unfailing appeal to almost anyone with a Y chromosome.

As in the Irving Klaw snapshot above, from my photography collection, Bettie stands alone. She was not a trailblazer or a self-promoter: she was exploited for her charm and forgotten by some of those who profited from the light that her molecules reflected and her personality radiated. I can't remember ever seeing a picture of Bettie in which she looks tired, bored, or bitter. It's as if the camera brought her to life, and she returned the favor. Bettie was stunning without even a hint of self-importance. She could clown for the camera without seeming stupid or trivial. She was supremely generous --- not to her photographer, but to her audience. Look at any picture of Bettie: you can almost hear her Tennessee accent, thick as pine tar, declaring "Sir, I am so glad to be able to share this picture with you."

Saturday afternoon

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These "guys" could have found something more comfy to do on 15 November in Champaign, Ill., because the wind was slicing through the intersection of Green and Neil at over 10 mph and the temperature was about 35 when I shot this.

The group's cause is self-explanatory from the sign on the left. The leaflets they handed me explain their view that Scientology is a "dangerous cult with a criminal past" that "uses brainwashing and intimidation to financially bankrupt its members." I did not tell them that, if their beliefs were true, that would put Scientology in a category similar to about half the organized religions I've heard of. But I don't have any problem with them having their say-so about cults on a college-town street corner in November 2008.

After kindly correcting my inexcusable assumption that they were observing Guy Fawkes Day ("no, that was on November 5th"), one of the "guys" told me that they wore the masks as a sign of solidarity with each other, and referred to the closing scenes of V. Another reason for the masks, unstated, may have been that they take L. Ron Hubbard's "Fair Game Law" seriously.

Photography notes: I grabbed this shot with my trusty Sony F717 snapshooter. Quickly processed the shot, uncropped, in Adobe Bridge to correct for overexposure and to recover highlight detail. I avoided "color correcting" the exposure to warm up the tones, though, because I wanted to try to depict how freakin' cold it was in that intersection. My exposure adjustment looked fine on screen in Bridge. But everything, colorwise, tends to change when I upload to Blogger. This is because I'm undereducated about color rendering on the web versus in a photo application on screen versus output from a color printer. I'll have to sit down and RTFM sometime.

From a cave somewhere in the universe

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This photo is a found object from the Astronomy Photograph of the Day widget that Mac users can install for free. A week or two ago I clicked past it thinking that it was an artist's conception of how the sky would look from some cave on a rocky moon orbiting Saturn. But last night I read the caption that the widget serves up on demand: was astonished that this is a genuine single-exposure photograph of the night sky shot right here in the good old USA.

The short story is that the photographer, one Wally Pacholka, lugged his gear to a remote cave and archeological site called False Kiva located in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. He waited for Terra to revolve the central band of the Milky Way into view, with Jupiter tagging along near the upper left of the cave arch. It looks like he used a fairly wide lens --- probably no longer than 50 or 55 mm (photo has no metadata, so I can only guess). The cave appears to be facing almost due south, judging from the orientation of the galaxy edge. The exposure is long, which was necessary to get any detail at all from the band of stars. Pacholka "painted" the inside of the cave with light from a flashlight during the long expusure.

Speaking as a photographer, I can tell you that this guy knows his stuff. Plus, speaking as someone who has dabbled in astronomy, it must have been flurking cold on location, even if it was mid-July. The photo above is copyright Wally Pacholka and is used here only for nonprofit educational or research purposes. The photo below, from the web site of a guy named Eric Zelermyer, shows a more routine view of False Kiva as seen during the day. But getting there is not routine, evidently requiring a certain degree of physical conditioning and foolhardiness to find within Canyonlands. The Zelermyer picture is copyrighted by the photographer and is displayed here for nonprofit educational or research purposes.

Work in progress

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I'm periodically reproducing recent photographs under the heading of Work in progress. What's "in progress" isn't the perfection of a given picture, but my work toward developing some genuine technical skill in photography. Several of my jobs dating back to 1977 have included photography as a central duty. In the '70s I was mostly interested in subject matter that appealed to me, composition, and capture of Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". Matters such as film exposure and high-quality darkroom printing were of theoretical interest, but they were too much to think about or too much trouble to achieve. So now, as I resume a formal interest in photography after a 25-year hiatus, I am starting with fundamentals. But they are the fundamentals of digital image-making, the technology of which in fact makes it possible to develop technical skill much faster, with less waste, and with much less expense.

The photo below was taken at the head of an odd little nature trail that occupies a vacant lot between two vintage commercial buildings across the street from WEFT, Champaign's community-operated radio station. The nature trail was constructed by a gentleman called "The Prairie Monk," who hosts a weekly radio show on WEFT. He has gardened the lot with plants typical of the native midwestern prairie, and littered it with purposeful-looking junk. I shot this view with the Sony F717, and was quite surprised by how much color the photo captured versus how I had halfway seen it via eyeball. Unfortunately, there is one small patch where the highlights are blown out by a sunray at left foreground.

I processed the Sony's JPEG using CS3's Camera RAW tool. Warmed the white point a bit, cranked up highlight recovery to 100, brightened a bit, sharpened somewhat using the clarity slider, and very slightly increased vibrance. The shot doesn't look like much at small scale, but I believe it would be much more interesting printed at a large scale where the forms and textures could pop out at you. Click the thumbnail below for a larger view.

As an aside, I will say that I'm surprised how differently the photo renders through a web browser versus what it looks like displayed directly in Photoshop or Bridge. Fortunately, Adobe provides a program called Adobe Device Central so one can inspect how a photo is rendered for different end uses (inkjet printer, browser, cell phone, etc.); unfortunately, I lack the energy to learn anything about it at this point in the evening.

Work in progress

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In order to skew this blog back toward Fifty50, and away from Seventy30, today I start inserting more nonpolitical content. Contrary to appearances, I do not hate fun: I like stories, songs, toys, and pictures as much as you all do. Work in progress is where I'll share a photographic study that someone other than me might be interested in seeing.

Here's my first one, shot with my Sony F717, an interesting, versatile point/shoot with a blue-chip Zeiss lens. Does not shoot in RAW format, but I discovered that Adobe Bridge CS3 can open JPEGs and TIFFs for processing with the Camera RAW plugin. Many of the controls in Camera RAW are obscure to a novice, but even the simplest ones are quite powerful.

The image depicts some local color (local grayscale, actually): the Chester Street (Champaign) viaduct under the Illinois Central RR tracks, looking approximately northeast. The original file was captured as an RGB fine-quality JPEG. I opened it in Camera RAW, desaturated all the pixels to gray, used the Fill Light slider to emulate the effect of having a huge soft box to even out the exposure to my liking. I may have sharpened a bit. Finally, I used the Skew tool in Photoshop to make the verticals vertical, then messed with the contrast curve a bit. Good learning exercise; halfway decent, if somewhat standard, view. Need to develop a better eye for dynamic range --- deeper darks and a few near-whites might help. Also need to understanding the differences between rendering for screen view versus hardopy print.