Inedible Ink

I was reading a post on photographer Alec Soth’s blog where Alec linked to this Entertainment Weekly article by Stephen King.

Stephen King: Lessons from ”Ellen” | Entertainment Weekly
…a customer shopping in Best Buy — just an ordinary fortysomething dude dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and sunglasses. Looks like that male-pattern baldness thing is starting to make itself known in his life. He’s shopping, I guess. Then the clip’s audio kicks in with one of the greatest rock songs of all time: ”Going to a Go-Go,” by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. (No, it’s not on my list. Silly me, I forgot it.) Shopper dude with the thinning hair starts to move a little. Checks out something on the counter of a momentarily unattended checkout station. It’s of no interest to him, but the music starts to hit him. He pops a hip. And then — great God A’mighty — he starts to dance. Before long he’s really busting moves; I mean this guy is doing his duty and shaking his booty. If your Uncle Stevie is lyin’, he’s dyin’.

The Best Buy dancer video is on YouTube right here.

As I read the King article it dawned on me that is Uncle Stevie’s birthday today. Happy B’Day Uncle Stevie!
I’m not related to Stephen King whatsoever as far as I know. We’ve never met. I call him Uncle Stevie, and he calls me “Constant Reader”. It’s a pretty cozy relationship.

He has an auction up on eBay right now, in case you don’t have the Dark Tower series yet and five grand is burning a hole in your wallet.
What makes you boogie in the aisles?

For “Photographers Who Are Not Weston or Adams month”, I offer you Yousuf Karsh for consideration. His name was completely new to me just this month, but if you click here, you’ll see that his photographs are already stuck somewhere in your mind.

If you said “Hmmm, he looks a lot like Dwight Eisenhower.” I apologize, that is Eisenhower, the photograph is by Yousuf Karsh.

Two books of his work on Amazon:

Happy September.  I’ll be observing Photographers Who Are Not Adams Or Weston Month:

Photon Detector Blog : Proposal: Photographers Who Are Not Adams Or Weston Month
It seems not an online discussion thread about large format photography can go by without invoking Their Holinesses, Ansel Adams or Edward Weston.

Brett Weston will be the baby thrown out with the bathwater.

I’ve neglected to celebrate the solstice… yet again. Shame on me, I’m a poor pagan indeed. Time to amend that.

Flickr user jbum posted this “Tag Graph” chart. It is made up of tiny image thumbnails from pictures posted to flickr where the image is tagged “Sunset”. He has charted the time the image was taken as the vertical position and the date the image was taken as the horizontal position. The result is a nice waveform. See that? The dip just left of image center is the summer, when the sun sets later in the day. *

Today, we are just after the bottom of that curve.

The wave rises up as sunset pictures are taken earlier and earlier in the day later and later in the year. The light of day decreases until December. The wave crests on the December solstice, and then the sun starts to set later in the day. The light of day increases until June.

Jbum noticed a faint echo of the sunset curve at a 12 hour offset. His guess, and I agree completely, is that some few camera users have their cameras’ internal clocks set incorrectly with AM for PM.

* The sun sets later in the summer, but the June solstice is in summer only in the northern hemisphere. South of the equator, June is a winter month. Flickr must not have enough southern hemisphere users to show up on this chart.

That fat wave of sunsets appears to be a swath 4 hours wide, while a “sunset” can only occur at a given moment each day. What gives? I have a few ideas and there might be more.

The time of sunset varies each day by latitude, that is, how far north or south you are from the equator. Think of “Land of the Midnight Sun” being used to describe far north locations like Alaska.

The time you observe sunset is also effected by the time zone. If you are standing at the western most edge of your time zone, talking to a buddy who’s standing just across the state line, you will see the sunset at the same moment, but your watches (and presumably your digital cameras), set to the local timezone will show 1 hour of difference.

Further, the thing we photographers call a sunset is vaguer and more tolerant of interpretation than the event astronomers call a sunset. So we end up with a wide variety of times being reported for sunsets observed.

Saint John the Baptist, also known as Saint John the Forerunner, was born on the June solstice. After the June solstice the sun must decrease.

John is the one foretold in Isa 40:3 “Prepare ye the way of the LORD”. His unique role is to precede Christ.
John the Baptist said this of Christ:Jhn 3:30

He must increase, but I [must] decrease.

Jesus, the light of the world, was born on the December solstice, at which time the sun must increase.

We now come to the part of the show called “If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying!”

Red Green

I completed and tested my first homebrew lens assembly last weekend. Looks almost for-real, doesn’t it?

The lens is a 75mm Minette from an enlarger (with a working aperture iris). The lens was won for tuppence at auction on the ‘bay. The bellows are from a steering strut grease boot which I picked up off the floor at my mechanics’ shop (”neat! can I have this greasy thing?”) which I later washed out in the kitchen sink when my dearest wife was not looking, and the mount is a sawed out Nikon body cap.

The whole deal is held together with one half gob of epoxy, which has dried amber colored and translucent. I need to paint over that as it is a possibly problematic light leak.

I’ve used it on my Nikon D70, which I note with some dissapointment does not have a “Stop-down” mode which would help in this kind of experiment.

Some results - overall I’m jazzed. It is at its best when the subject is pretty close. like this:

If the subject is far, then the squeezy-tilty thing doesn’t work for beans.
tilt test:

(I wouldn’t normally photograph my lawn, but it makes for a nice demonstration of the effect of tilting the lens out of parallell with the film plane. See how it’s blurry on the right and sharp on the left.)
bokeh test:

(sorry, that’s Japanese because English doesn’t have a word for “the way a lens renders out of focus light.”)

My voluminous thanks to the flickr Homemade lens group, MKAZ and the MKAZ enlarger lens, and Mark Tucker’s almost hideous plunger cam for the required inspiration and information.

Did you make a camera Sunday? Take any pinhole pictures?

I hacked apart a camera to make a pinhole, but the wild ideas I had for a shutter mechanism didn’t seem to align with one or another principle of physics here on earth, I’ll have to keep at it. I managed to take a few shots with an older pinhole camera, including this one:

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is Sunday. This means you’ve just 4 days left to build a pinhole camera, shoot some film (or paper), get the shots developed, scanned, and uploaded to celebrate in style.

Start at f295 for bunches of info about making pinhole images.

One of my images from a homemade pinhole camera:

monky bombOriginally uploaded by marinegirl.

This made me smile.

My internship days have long since passed, but someone ought to snap this up.

This from Written Road, the travel writing blog

By Abha

Take photos, travel, write, interview world renowned photographers, get to critique new camera equipment on the market, get helicopter flying lessons, AND get paid for all of it. Yes, these opportunities still exist!

The internship is being offered by Photo.net, which is an online community with over 100,000 active users, 5.4 million hits a month and a gallery of 2.7 million photos.

The job entails an all-round variety of activities that cover both the technical and the social aspects of photography. It is a year-long position open to any US-based person with a degree and experience in photography/photojournalism.

The job has a very detailed application process, which can be looked at here.

These from the Photo.net job description:

As a fringe benefit, you will get to fly in the photo.net fleet of two helicopters and one airplane. Your Editor in Chief is also an Airline Transport Pilot certificate holder and an FAA certified flight instructor and will be happy to teach you to fly both the airplane and helicopters.

Having a point of view, being able to write a two-paragraph summary explaining the significance of a manufacturer’s press release putting the annoucement into context for our audience of advanced amateurs and professional photographers

Chuckle and dream. It should be my job description around here. One of my dreams appears to have come true today, or so it is rumored. So I chuckle.
(Only, it looks oddly like a nightmare from here, one of those nasty nightmares where strangers murmur unintelligible things at you in mixed languages while you drown in soap bubbles. The nightmarish effect comes from a robot translating the rumor from Korean, It does a pretty good job, for a robot.)

Photocamel, citing the mechanical translation of SundayShooter:

Canon rumors - 40D, 1D Mark III, 1DS Mark III - PhotoCamel Photography Forum, Gallery, Contests
SLR club SundayShooter writing

30d Currently 5d with it equips the almost similar evening sunlight in size and 5d as the reed which is cheap coming out does. With additional function square damp-proof (it probably is dust removal which probably is place square damp-proof which becomes anti dust… well it will not know.) The cross sensor comes to be many. D Jig 3

Currently 5d 16Mp the sensor it is sweet in size and 5 degummed yarn and square damp-proof (anti-dust) the cross sensor comes to be many, the reed which affixes D Jig 3 coming out Rab ni all.

Can’t see my dream coming true in that? Yeah, it’s an effort. The basic idea is that Canon is developing interchangable sensors for digital cameras. The sensor is the part of a digital camera that stands in for film. My dream is that one day I’d be able to buy a sensor that would mimic the rich colors and depth of a film like Velvia. If I was shooting portraits, I could swap it out for the sensor that was as good as Kodak’s Portra at capturing skin tones. Maybe I could send one out to be cleaned while I used the other one. Maybe… (dare I?) I could upgrade the sensor of a well-loved and finally understood camera without ditching the whole body.
If this doesn’t sound like a thing worth dreaming about, find an old photographer, someone who shot a lot of film in his day, but isn’t senile quite yet, and ask him what the best film ever made was. The answer won’t matter, just watch for the twinkle in his eye and the way his voice gets just a little musical when he says: “Ahhh… Kodachrome.”

Found it on flickr