Monthly Archives: December 2024

Hardware changes in 2024

Photography

More of the same, really.

For my demanding Studio Dogs project big prints were de rigeur. The project took most of the year to complete, concluding with thirty-six large prints, all made on the excellent Epson ET-8550 printer, as frugal as it is reliable. After one year and over 400 13″ x 19″ prints I have had but one paper jam, probably my fault as I may have overloaded paper in the feed tray.


The Epson ET-8550 photo printer.

More software than hardware, the later images were printed on Canson paper from France and that paper is proving superior, as regards gloss retention, to the many sheets of Hewlett Packard dye ink paper which preceded it.


Canson high gloss printing paper.

Those Studio Dogs were all photographed on a Nikon D800 whose over ten year age makes it ancient in these digital times, yet there’s no improving on the images it delivers at a fraction of the cost of Nikon’s latest hardware. As for triggering the strobes, a remote strobe trigger, now almost two decades old, makes for a wireless connection.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012.

And if you think 2012 is old, how about the Novatron studio flash outfit I continue using, manufactured over a quarter of a century ago? Sure it has wires not rechargeable batteries (ugh!) but it’s as reliable as a hammer and puts out a lot of light.


Novatron outfit with Bert the Border Terrier.

And speaking of the Nikon D800 and its splendid 36mp sensor, another major project in 2024 was the re-digitizing of old film images at a quality level significantly superior to that obtained with dedicated Nikon film scanners. And we are not talking about a handful of scans here. How about over 2,200 in a matter of a few short weeks? This setup is not only good, it’s also spectacularly fast.


Inexpensive and outstanding film scanning setup.

The biggest hardware change in 2024 involved migration from the behemoth 2010 Mac Pro with its seven cooling fans and vast bulk to a minuscule single fan Mac Mini M4 which is a fraction of the cost of the oldie, confers the latest security updates via the Mac OS and delivers performance which is …. identical! Sadly the old Mac Pro will have to go to the recyclers as selling it with attendant shipping costs and transit risk is not a viable proposition. It is, in other words, worthless and I hate Apple for forcing me to upgrade from a bulletproof machine by obsoleting it with its truly useless annual OS upgrades.

And the Mini ‘upgrade’ with its Apple Silicon CPU/GPU meant that my old non-subscription Lightroom and Photoshop processing applications would no longer work and I am now on the hook for $10 monthly to Adobe for Lightroom Classic until I croak, and even my heirs will likely see these greedy bastards continue to make money off my estate. As for Photoshop, fughedaboutit. I bought Affinity Photo 2 which does every thing I need for a one-off payment.

On the movie display front I added a second ancient Intel Mac Mini to the living room TV to permit routing of movies, stored on hard drives in the remote home theater, to that TV. You would think the existing AppleTV 4K attached to the TV would suffice to do this but Greedy Timmy in Cupertino sees to it that routing of content from hard drives attached to remote Macs is impossible with the AppleTV puck. He wants you to buy more hardware and a sub-$150 ancient Intel Mac Mini is more than up to the task.

As for the Home Theater with its 120″ screen and LG UST projector, allied to a fine Sonos sound system, all is sweetness and light. The Theater continues to show a movie every night, the hardware has proved to be robust and fault free and the recent addition of a magnificent 1955 Rolleiflex 2.8D to the display of photo hardware adds that special touch.


The Rolleiflex 2.8D, manufactured
between Aug 1955 and Sep 1956.


The Home Theater with the LG Ultra Short Throw projector.

So 2024 paid homage to the old belief that buying the best is consonant with a long life, along with some ingenious gadgets which cost little but truly deliver. I only regret being forced to remainder that great Mac Pro and having to give Adobe more of my hard earned money.

Frank Horvat

Book reviews

Wit and class.

You can view my library of photography and art books by clicking here.

“You’re using a Rollei? Did God put your eyes on your stomach? And a flashlight? It’s an arbitrary interference! And color? I would only use color if I had my own palette, but I certainly wouldn’t rely on Kodak’s!”

The year is 1950, the city is the center of the western world – Paris – and a very young Italian photographer named Frank Horvat (1928-2020) had just received this tongue lashing at a weekly critique session. The lashing came from none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Suffice it to say that Horvat traded in his Rollei for a used Leica and went on to become one of the mainstays of fashion photography in the last great decades of haute couture, the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the Englishmen Duffy, Donovan, Bailey and Armstrong-Jones, Horvat ditched the large format negative swapping it for the much grainier one from a Leica or Nikon and took the model out of the studio and into the streets. Lots of fun. Luxuriate in the host of images contained in the book’s 250+ pages, Horvat’s work filled with wit and whimsy.


Paris, 1958. Givenchy dress.

Tracking Charnier

Movies, Photographs

The French Connection.

This post contains spoilers regarding the conclusion of the movie The French Connection II so if you have not seen the movie and it’s on your list, quit now.

The original The French Connection was released in 1971 and was directed by William Friedkin. Famous for its car chase under the elevated subway, it’s a far lighter movie than its 1975 successor, directed by John Frankenheimer. Both movies address the smuggling of heroin through the French port of Marseille and the sequel has some truly horrifying footage of a heroin addicted Gene Hackman nearly dying from his captors’ ministrations.

Suffice it to say that the last ten seconds of the second movie are some of the most dramatic on film, culminating in the death of the drug kingpin Alain Charnier, splendidly acted in both movies by the distinguished Spanish actor Fernando Rey.


Montpellier to Marseille.

My son Winston spent an extended sojourn in France during the first half of the year, extending his French studies with a tour of Europe, centered in the beautiful ancient town of Montpellier, some 70 miles west of Marseille on the Mediterranean Sea, and he came up with the idea of finding the exact location from which Hackman fires the deadly shots at the evil Charnier. He did this using his memory of the documentary style ending, no GPS involved, but his image of the shooter’s location comes with GPS data courtesy of the iPhone he used. This is from the shooter’s viewpoint, though Charnier’s luxury yacht is missing:


Winston’s image of Charnier’s location.

And here are the exact coordinates:


The site of the climactic closing seconds of the movie.

Tremendous fun and encomiums to Winston for his diligent tracing of a great movie location.


Hackman, as ‘Popeye Doyle’, fires the killing shots.

Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

Paintings

A fascinating review.

You can view my library of photography and art books by clicking here.

Published in 2019 this splendid anthology of Hopper’s painting centers on the theme of hotels and travel and is recommended for the many illustrations it contains. You certainly should not buy it for the prose which is stultified and lugubrious in the extreme. The fact that the noun ‘dialectic’ occurs regularly suggests that the writer(s) learned English as a second language and are intent on having you know that they understand the rules of grammar better than you. Example: “As a frequent painter of hospitality sites, Sloan provides object lessons how a hotel can suggest value in the vernacular and comfort in the commonplace” (p.21). Please.

Well, forget that nonsense and luxuriate in the host of images contained in the book’s 200+ pages.

One of the really fun inclusions consists of two maps documenting road trips Hopper and his wife took in 1941 and 1952-53. Lots of fun as they show the exact places he stayed and (often) painted.


The book with Hopper’s road trip maps.

The long, sharp shadows and miserable people which Hopper so often depicts are abundantly present. He pulls no punches, even when the humor is sardonic as in this amusingly titled ‘Excursion into Philosophy’:


Excursion into Philosophy, 1959.

And those miserable people can only be described as exceptionally physically ugly:


Ugly. Morning Sun, 1952.

Hopper’s vision is intensely photographic but one interesting educational point of the book is that he was also a fine cartoonist, creating no fewer than 18 covers for an industry periodical named ‘Hotel Management’. Not the most thrilling of subjects, true, but he glamorizes the travel experience and its travelers – his style is reminiscent of George Barbier:


Hotel Management cover, May 1925.

The book is recommended for all photographers looking to enhance their vision.


Click the image for Amazon.

Thank you to my son Winston for the fine Christmas gift.

The Fight to Save Googie

Photographers

American optimism under threat.

A splendid article in the New York Times relates how preservationists are fighting to save Googie architecture, the whimsical style of the sixties largely found in Los Angeles.

While nothing quite beats the Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills, which is not mentioned in that article, the splendid photography is worth visiting.


The Googie Union 76 in Beverly Hills.
Click the image for the article.