Childhood traumas revisited

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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.

Friday Evening, Way After Hours

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Phone snapshot from a Friday evening field trip to the Metro in Wrigleyville, Chicago, to see The Eels, 1 October 2010.

Dramatis personnae, from left: P-Boo, Koool G Murder, Knuckles, Mark Oliver Everett (E, band leader), and The Chet.

The shorties and I have seen this band four times now. They first caught my ear, and the offsprings', on the University of Illinois college rock station in the late '90s with "Novocain For The Soul." Geezers: you've probably heard something by E in a movie or on TV (click through the Wiki link above). The man has been---and appears to remain---a tortured soul, who has been plagued not only by the loss and alienation well known to anyone who explores so-called romantic love, but traumatic losses to death during more tender years. Two of the performances we've seen have been skewed toward his more introspective, even bordering on maudlin, lyrical compositions. They are outstanding and unique compositions, often voiced with anachronistic instruments like the harmonium, the saw and bow, the autoharp, and even a drumkit fashioned from vintage luggage and (I think) a leather ottoman. I'm biased toward shows with more upbeat content, humor, and electric power. The Metro show fell into that latter category, mostly delivered by three guitars (including E's odd-looking collection of Danelectros), bass, and drums.

I'm not so good at remembering song names by latter-day bands these days, so I can't authoritatively report the set list. (Beer-D or Dutch Boy, Esquire [freshly minted by the Illinois Bar 2 hours before the show], feel free to document it in the comments.) As usual, E provided a little clowning with, apropos of nothing, two summer-themed oldies: "Summer In The City" and Billy Stewart's arrangement of Gershwin's "Summertime" (during which the snap above was, er... snapped). I say "clowning" because during "Summertime," he flung ice cream bars, popsicles, and Drumsticks across the main floor and in the balcony of the small 19th century auditorium. I was trying to catch a Drumstick when I should have been shooting pictures.

Here's a live TV studio performance by the Eels With Strings lineup we saw several years ago at the Park West in Chicago, minus their glamorous eveningwear. This is the most upbeat tune I remember from that tour. Note the drumkit. Also note E's choice of vocal microphone, the classic "green bullet," a vintage-design, low-def analog radio dispatcher's mic adopted by the postwar generation of blues harpists to help amplify their Hohner Marine Band harmonicas.



Hey Man (Now You're Really Living), Eels With Strings (2005, live performance on "Later... With Jools Holland," BBC Two), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

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.

The zombie of Billy Mays

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Back from the dead... For A Limited Time Only!!!

[Photo credit: Beer-D.]

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.

One-handed photography

Here's a photograph shot with iPhone earlier tonight, left arm held upward out the driver's window, about 20 minutes after weird "wall cloud" raced through the south end of Champaign ripping some tree limbs asunder. The image was snapped in a different location, though: driving northbound toward the North Prospect Ave. shopping district. Note that while the traffic signals are dead, the jumbotron billboard near lower right still blazes like a sun. Civic priorities require a review.

Applied some automatic color corrections in Adobe Bridge, then pulled back the right slider in Photoshop to bring up the highlights, and finally added a little sharpening (probably unnecessary).

Note: StuporMundi does not endorse the practice of driving while shooting photographs. Do not attempt to duplicate this form of stunt photography without in situ psychiatric supervision.

Snapshot [updated]

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Iron Post, Urbana, Illinois, about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, 11 March 2009. This is the 14-piece Parkland College In Your Ear Big Band, halfway through their first set. Big bands don't tour much because they're expensive and, presumably, don't attract enough revenue to cover decent salaries. The name-brand ones mainly play at festivals and otherwise mostly just stick to recording. Not sure why big band economics worked out OK during the '30s and '40s, but not any more for celebrity acts. But who needs celebrities when you can see a pickup community group open their chops once a month for the low low admission price of $2? These gentlemen and ladies play Basie-esque charts and, every now and then, some '70s-vintage fusion stuff arranged for a big, mostly unplugged group. The band includes veteran schoolteachers, university jazz faculty, regular old college students, a few talented high school kids, and stray community members who have been doing it for years.

In the photo I tried to capture the early spring sunset colors streaming in through the west windows, silhouetting the director while showing the band. But with an iPhone camera there was no hope of that --- it would be a tough exposure to balance manually using any camera without lighting the group from in front. Still, the handsome devil with the vintage silver Chu Berry tenor shows up OK.

And in case you might wonder why they call the place "The Iron Post," I assume it's because there's one in plain view no matter what direction you look in --- usually right in front of your bean.

Update: that's right, I can't count --- 5 reeds + 8 horns + 3 rhythm = 16 pieces. Sheesh....

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.

Work in progress [updated]

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A two-week project that probably will be completed successfully this weekend: right-brain residential wiring. Just tested the circuit and loops; one dumb mistake (black load at top left not actually connected to panel) and one understandable one (not visible, relating to some hidden wiring).


Snapshot taken on Sony F717 is lit by low-intensity fluorescent Sears worklight, hand-held at 1/30 second manual exposure at ISO 800, messed-with a bit in Adobe Camera Raw (my favorite new photo post-processing tool). Noisy exposure, as would be expected, but not bad in terms of sharpness; was expecting at least a bit of motion blur since it usually feels like I have the DTs when I'm trying to force myself to hold something very, very still.

Update: my slow but peerless right-brain circuit analysis capabilities turned out to be correct, and I have officially cracked the Circuit A15 atom! The black lead to the stove hood (upper left) was incorrectly spliced into a kitchen wall switch loop and the lead to the overhead sink lights (not visible) wasn't spliced into anything at all. The solution is shown below for education purposes; note how the junction has been simplified. The new snapshot was produced with the same camera, lighting, and Adobe Raw settings used in the earlier one, but my hand wasn't as steady (I really do have the DTs this morning, I think). Anyway, I have to go now: I'm waiting for those three new plumbers I just hired.

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.