Yearly Archives: 2024

The vintage Black & Decker electric can opener

Cooking

They don’t make ’em like they used to.

I wrote about an excellent and inexpensive manual can opener here. That design works well but increasing pain from stressed wrists suggested I look for a powered alternative.

I owned one of these years ago, but while functional it is quite specially ugly:



The current model

As the image discloses it is also ridiculously overpriced.

So I hunted around and found a beautiful, curvaceous vintage B&D design on eBay.



The vintage EC85 model

I had to craft four 2” stand-off metal ferrules to drop the opener sufficiently below the deep valance at the front of the cupboard base, to permit proper access to controls. Quality workshop time. These ferrules are invisible. The provided retaining screws are very long to permit proper height positioning, and the threads engage immediately. A well thought out design.



The invisible ferrules

Note how the cutter assembly ugliness is largely invisible – compare with the current model. B&D originally provided up to 5 sets of stand-offs (‘spiders’), but my opener came with only one (just visible in the first image) – hence the ferrules, which are actually more robust than the original design. The spider doubles as an alignment aide for the four 1/4″ through holes which are required for the pass-through retaining screws. The major complaint with these is yellowing of the plastic body and I lucked out with a decent looking one.

So if you can find one which is not yellowed and includes the spiders (make sure the screw washers are included), your outlay will not exceed $50 and you will not shudder every time you look at it. Of course, it’s only 40 years old, so it works perfectly. A bottle opener (lower left) and knife sharpener (right) are included. And yes, a magnet grabs and holds the cut off lid.

Enjoy – and no more wrist pain. And I would avoid free standing designs – there are better uses for your kitchen counter space and ‘free standing’ is a flawed design concept when you are struggling with that extra large can.

Pictures from my Window

Photographs

Thank you, Ruth.

In 1978 Central Park West resident Ruth Orkin published a book of pictures titled A World Through my WIndow which depicted her small slice of the world. Taken from her window overlooking Central Park she captured a host of pictures of New York, New Yorkers and the changing Manhattan seasons.

My rather more humble abode at 310 West 56th Street west of 8th Avenue, a few blocks south, offered less glamorous vistas, but no less interesting. 14 floors up and three blocks west of 6th Avenue (“Avenue of the Americas” to tourists) it was high enough and set back enough to offer interesting possibilities.

As losing my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher would have killed me – these were among the worst years for personal safety on the streets of Manhattan – I bought an inexpensive Pentax ME Super with 20mm, 40mm pancake, 135mm and 200mm Super Takumar lenses. Loss of any of these to theft would be inconvenient but not heartbreaking. While the quality of the body was ‘iffy’ at best, the camera was small, unobtrusive and the lenses were fine. The minuscule 40mm ‘pancake’ was especially sweet.


Wooden water tanks abound on older buildings


Night vision


Water tank with pigeons


My local restaurant on 8th Avenue, when my bank balance approached zero. The southern Italian restaurant just behind, Patsy’s was (is?) a favorite Mafioso dining place.


The MoNY (Mutual of New York) building was on my west side on 7th Avenue. The spire announces rain/snow/fog and so on, and the temperature and humidity were alternatively displayed below.


MoNY on a frigid evening, a storm approaching


Detroit steel


Old and new


6th Avenue skyscrapers. No architect was involved in the design of these horrors.


Carnegie Hall on 7th Avenue


Sunset


Birds


Tanning, with pup

Taken in 1980-86, Pentax ME Super, 40mm, 135mm and 200mm Super Takumar lenses, Kodachrome, ‘scanned’ with a Nikon D800.

Ripley

Movies

An orgy of monochrome cinematography.

“There’s no there when you get there”, Gertrude Klein once said of Oakland and when you look into Andrew Scott’s eyes in the new Netflix production of Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous character you have the same reaction. A cold blooded killer singularly interested in material possessions and La Dolce Vita, Tom Ripley has been filmed many times.

There’s the wonderful 1960 version directed by René Clément starring the physically beautiful Alain Delon, in French, named “Purple Moon”. A feast for the eyes.

Then there’s the 1999 Anthony Minghella version “The Talented Mr. Ripley” known to most viewers, with splendid performances from Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, with a thoroughly wooden Ripley by – who else? – Matt Damon. The movie is watchable enough, but a repeat viewing is reminiscent of perusing last year’s tourist brochures for the Riviera. All gloss, no substance with a sadly underused Cate Blanchett.

Then John Malkovich delivered a terse comedic version in Liliana Cavani’s enjoyable 2002 sequel named “Ripley’s Game” where a mature Ripley, now ensconced in worldly luxuries, retains and practices his killer instincts to preserve his luxurious lifestyle funded by theft and mayhem. There’s a fine performance by Dougray Scott as a weak willed frame maker and Ripley tool with the always lovely Lena Headey as the questioning wife. This is actually a remake of a Wim Wenders 1977 movie named The American Friend with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, with Wenders exchanging violence for the humor in Cavani’s version. Dark and foreboding.

Now, from the usually low brow production studios of Netflix who mostly seem intent in pouring money into a string of disasters, (check that cure for insomnia “The Irishman” with its truly frightful ‘de-ageing’ technology), comes a new interpretation in eight 45 minute episodes, and it’s highly recommended for aficionados of black and white cinematography. I’m watching it in high definition streaming 4K (if that’s not a contradiction in terms where data compression is the order of the day) and the cinematography of Robert Elswit proves why there’s an Oscar on his mantelpiece.

Here are some stills from the climactic Episode 3 where Ripley whacks the poorly acted Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf:











These monochrome images are reminiscent of the canvases of René Magritte and the photographs of Ralph Gibson and they are arresting. On several occasions I found I had to pause the movie to luxuriate in its monochrome splendor.

So, Andrew Scott as Ripley apart, you do not come here for the acting which is mediocre to awful (Eliot Sumner in particular should audition for fry cook when his/her/its acting career mercifully ends, which should be any day now), with Dakota Fanning an honorable exception as the Ripley-hating Marge. No. You come here for the cinematography which is very special indeed. Suffice it to say that this is HBO quality from a competing studio not known for its high standards in movie production.

Kodachrome – the only excuse to use film

Bio, Film, Photographs

Gone, but not forgotten.

The Big Yellow God. Thus was Kodak known in the 1970s because you mailed your exposed Kodachrome slide film in a yellow mailer to Rochester, NY and time and the USPS permitting, you would get your slides back, beautifully mounted in 2″x2″ cardboard, in a yellow box, in a couple of weeks.


The Ektachrome outlier was their 160ASA/ISO speed demon!

In 1970 Kodak lost a trust busting suit which allowed only the BYG to process Kodachrome and the floodgates opened to independent processing shops who could afford the costly gear and crack the 17-step process, which included a couple of re-exposure steps to effect reversal of the image. Consonant with that old economic adage that “All control drives up price” prices crashed and Kodachrome became the most popular film on the planet. That explains the above slides lacking the Kodak imprimatur on the cardboard mount. They were processed by indie shops which had a faster turnaround.


The Kodachrome process.

While my color snapping had seen but one roll of Kodachrome exposed in Paris along with one of grain crazy Ansco/GAF’s 500, I no longer had a darkroom after taking my last TriX monochrome image and, quite frankly, I was bored to death with black and white. So why not the best? I loaded up my Leica with Kodachrome 64 (I considered the 25 ASA alternative too slow) and had at it. This was in November, 1977.


My first color image in the US. November, 1977, Anchorage, AK.


Indie Kodak processing lab, Anchorage.


Harsh and high contrast.


Kodachrome yellows and reds were to die for.


On the Natchez, Mississippi River, New Orleans.


Brennan’s, New Orleans.


Bourbon Street, New Orleans.


New Orleans.


Bergdorf’s, NYC.


NYC.

Kodachrome was a very contrasty film with unique rendering of yellows and reds. It was not especially fine grained, as these ultra-high resolution scans from my Nikon D800 disclose. At ISO 100 on the D800’s monster 36mp sensor there is zero digital ‘grain’. You only see what was stored on the film itself. No matter. They print just fine.

Leica M3 and Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, ‘scanned’ on the Nikon D800.

Film was awful. It still is.

Film, Photography

Don’t waste your time on obsolete technologies.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.


All in one piece.

My film ‘scanning’ project is almost complete. You can see a video of the technique here.

Suffice it to say that this is the only efficient, high quality way of scanning a large number of film negatives or slides.

Starting on February 4, some 59 days ago, I have scanned over 164 rolls of 36 exposure monochrome film, totaling over 5,900 exposures. 2,198 or 37% of those were ‘keepers’, a high rate in an age of free imaging with vast, low cost digital storage technologies, where a 3% success rate is considered high. I spent 1-2 hours daily doing this for a total time sink of some 100 hours. That included printing the best images for my large format print albums.

To have attempted this project using either a dedicated film scanner (reasonable definition, slow) or flat bed scanner (poor definition, molasses slow) would have taken for ever and it’s simply not a good use of time. Further, the modest investment in a macro lens and illuminated film strip attachment for this project, both easily resold, is lower than any of the alternatives. And the quality of the ‘scans’ is drop dead gorgeous, more definition retrieved from 50 year old negatives than I could have possibly dreamed of.


Yellowed glassines but pristine film inside

What is good about film? Not much. All mine were developed in a Paterson System 4 developing tank, available still and little changed. What appears to be missing is the handy clip-in hose which was attached to a tap and pumped water through the reel into the bottom of the tank, displacing fixer residue and assuring permanence. You did this for 30 minutes, wasting shocking quantities of water. Why 30 minutes? Because no one new any better and, if you wanted your originals to survive, more was better than less. Maybe 5 minutes would have sufficed. We will never know.

As for scan quality, the Nikon D800 I used delivered in spades. I started using 14-bit uncompressed RAW which delivered a 75mp file. Later I switched to 12-bit lossless compressed and the quality was indistinguishable, the file size halving to 36mp. Key to the efficiency of this process was the Negative Lab Pro Lightroom plugin which automated the reversal of negative image to positive. I would do this once on the first negative frame then save the whole process as a Preset. That Preset was then set up in the LR Tethered capture dialog box, with the D800 connected by a USB cable to LR. ‘Scan’ the image and, Hey Presto!, 5 seconds later the properly reversed positive image appears in LR. LR does not allow crop settings to be saved in the Preset, but other than that the process is about as automated as it gets. I would ‘scan’ two films – 72 exposures – daily and the scanning part would take maybe 5 seconds an image.

Don’t even think of using some sort of copying attachment where the camera and film stage are physically separated. And forget about futzing with glass plates in a futile effort to keep the film as flat as possible. You will simply collect more dust and possibly Newton rings in the process. Anti-Newton ring glass? The quickest way to destroy the definition of your scanned image. I found that stopping down the 60mm Micro-Nikkor macro lens to f/13 provided adequate depth of field for edge-to-edge sharply defined grain and ISO100 means that there is no digital ‘grain’. Deny these realities and you will waste immense amounts of time framing and focusing, and many of your efforts will be duds. The hardware I used unifies the camera, the film stage/film strip holder and the included LED light source. Alignment issues are a thing of the past and auto exposure and auto focus are the bees’ knees. Camera shake? Impossible. Camera and film are one.

Which brings us to one of the worst aspects of analog film. Dust and dirt. It’s one thing to speed the scanning process to deliver a high quality image. It’s quite another to remove all the dust and hairs which bedevil the medium. Time varied but particularly dirty originals might take a minute to retouch using LR’s excellent tools for this purpose. Ugh!

Follow the above instructions and I can guarantee that really large prints from your ‘scans’ will be the order of the day, provided your originals are of good quality. Mine are.

Anyway, this whole process made me revisit some of the horrors of film. Now it’s not like there was an alternative in 1974 as no one had thought up digital imaging until the brilliant engineer Steve Sasson at Kodak came up with a prototype a year later. Kodak bungled development of the technology (“There will never be a time when film will be obsolete” said one of the brain’s trust board directors), went bankrupt in the process and a quarter century later Canon and Nikon marketed really good ‘prosumer grade’ full frame DSLRs which were almost affordable at $3,000 for the body. The Canon 5D and Nikon D700. Film died that day. These 12mp bodies remain superb, bargain priced performers to this day.

But film was genuinely awful as a recording and storage medium.

Metadata? Nope. Good luck finding that special image.

Robust, scratch and dirt free permanent image retention? Nope.

Oh! but the superior tonal range! Well, maybe cut back on the funny cigarettes.

And whatever you do, to deliver an image to the world, whether printed or on a display screen, you have to get film digitized in any case. So much for ‘analog workflow’. Use of film in today’s world is akin to three bald men arguing over a comb. An exercise in futility.

Tonal range? This is like vinyl LP nuts insisting that the quality of vinyl sound beats everything else. I challenge you to distinguish my D800 digital originals from the film version. Well, yes, you probably will. Just as the LP is distinguishable by its click, pops, scratches and poor signal-to-noise ratio, so is film distinguishable by its awful definition, low sensitivity, poor dynamic range and superabundance of dirt and scratches. It’s hard to think of a more fragile storage medium. If you are a crank who places more value on the backroom processes of developing and scanning film than on the taking of photographs, film is just the ticket.

For everyone else, film is awful. And it always was.


My last monochrome film image.
She is rushing to pick up a digital camera.

OK, Mr. Opinionated Weisenheimer, you say. So you used film for decades and maybe you know what you are speaking of, but I still want to use film. Then I suggest you cannot do better than the Nikon F100. It has auto exposure, auto focus, takes all Nikon Ai lenses and later and has auto film advance. It’s made to a high standard and can be found easily for $150 or less. This body gives you access to a large range of bargain priced Nikon lenses, MF or AF and, when you come to your senses and migrate or return to digital, those lenses will work seamlessly along with your newly found sanity.