Category Archives: Photography

Smoked beef brisket

Cooking

A tough cut.

There’s a well known Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ cartoon titled ‘Boneless Chicken Ranch’, showing the chickens all flat and splayed out, like so:


Boneless Chicken Ranch.

How does a brisket work?

The comparison with a brisket cut of beef is apt. Cows have no collarbones so without the tough brisket meat between and either side of their forelegs they would splay out helpless, just like those chickens. And the design of that brisket meat is ingenious. The triangular, tapering piece has the muscle fibers running transversely (the meat cut is referred to as the ‘point’) whereas the rectangular part sees the fibers running vertically (the ‘flat’). There is one point/flat brisket pair on either side of the animal. The muscle orientation provides strength along both the horizontal and vertical axes. Buy a whole brisket and you get both the point and the flat and that’s important to know as will be discussed below. How you carve the meat differs for point and flat briskets.


Brisket location.

As with many hard, heavily muscled meats, ‘low and slow’ is the preferred cooking method to allow the muscle fibers to relax and make the result edible. And smoking brisket meat, as any grill aficionado will tell you, is the way to go.

The best smoker:

You can get chintzy smokers, made from very thin steel sheet, at your local hardware store for $150 and they will last you one season. Or you can pay a little more for a Weber Smokey Mountain grill, made from heavy steel plate with an enameled exterior and a decade long life expectancy.

The WSM comes in three diameters and I use the smallest, the 14.5″ model, which nicely accommodates a 5 lb point brisket. Why point? Because it’s the fattier cut which does not dry out so making for a juicier result.


The 14.5″ Weber Smokey Mountain smoker. Click the image for Amazon US

This compact R2D2 unit is rather short of stature so I stand it on a metal side table when in use. Do not stand it on anything combustible!

Brisket meat:

Here is the point cut brisket:


A 5lb. point cut brisket.

The rub:

For the rub I combine 10 grams (1/2 oz.) of kosher salt with 10 grams of freshly ground black pepper and rub the brisket all over with the mixture. No fancy herb additions needed. Remove the brisket from the fridge an hour before starting the smoke to let it warm up to room temperature.

Charcoal and how to light it:

The beauty of the WSM is that it includes a water bath below the two grilles which results in indirect heat for the meat. No flames can reach around the inverted bowler hat design so a fat fire is not likely. Here’s how the parts go together:


#10 is the water bath.

To fire up the smoker 75 Kingsford charcoal briquettes (more for larger models) are arranged in a pyramid in the perforated retaining ring (#6 in the parts diagram) below the grilles with four Weber starter cubes disposed among these. Light these and let them burn off for 30 minutes with the briquettes exposed to the outdoors, after which the charcoal will have a white ash coat, smoking furiously. Then add four chunks of dried wood – Apple for a sweeter finish, Hickory for a smokier one – place the WSM’s cylinder section (#11 in the parts diagram) atop with the water bath installed and full, insert one or both grilles (I use only the larger top one) and you are ready to place the brisket on top. Be a man and use proper fist sized wood chunks, not those poncy shavings which burn up far too quickly.

The starter cubes have combusted and the charcoal is beginning to show white ash. It will be ready for use in a few minutes:


Ready in 15 minutes. The base vent is fully open.

Do not use charcoal starters (dangerous, as the hot coals must be transferred from the starter to the smoker) or lighter fluid (you really want to destroy the ozone layer and have hydrocarbons in your meat?). Use four of those tiny starter cubes and all the hydrocarbons will be thoroughly burned off once the coals are ready for use.

Temperature readings:

Place the brisket fatty side up on the top grill, make sure both bottom and top vents are fully open and place the hemispherical top on the smoker. You are looking at two temperature readings. The thermometer in the hemispherical Weber top reads the internal dome temperature and you are aiming at 200-250F dome temperature – don’t over do it or your meat will dry out. If the temperature rises above 250F partially close the base vent – this controls the oxygen intake for combustion – until you are back in the range. Leave the top vent in the dome fully open at all times.


Dome temperature in the sweet spot.

While the Weber’s built-in dome thermometer reports the inside air temperature, the constant reading thermometer inserted in the meat reads ‘doneness’.

The constant reading thermometer:

Before doing so, insert a constant reading thermometer in the thick of the meat. Now you can spend endless dollars on a wi-fi/Bluetooth/NASA-approved device, confirming that a fool and his money are readily parted. Or you can use one of these bullet proof ones, no electronics to fail, no iPhone or mainframe needed to read the results and get the same outcome.

The difference is that you will not be replacing it annually while ‘customer service’ in Shanghai refuses to reply to your desperate warranty claims for your $100 Tempogizmomatic.


The constant reading thermometer inserted. Click the image for Amazon.

Accuracy? When I bought mine I placed it in a pan of boiling water and instead of 212F it read 190F. A second sample read 211F, close enough. As that’s close to the desired ‘doneness’ temperature this makes for very accurate measurement.

As it gets smokey in there, cover the face of the thermometer with a small piece of Reynoldswrap silver paper, removing the paper when a reading is required. Otherwise you will have a heck of a job seeing the indicator needle.

We want to get to 195-205F for the right degree of doneness. Brisket meat is served well done, not rare or medium-rare. How long does this take? As a general guide I grill/smoke for 1.25 hours per pound of meat, so our 5lb joint will take 6 hours, give or take. Don’t bother checking the internal thermometer until at least 4 hours have elapsed as a) that’s futile and b) each time you pop the dome you will lose heat and have to extend the cooking time. If you keep the dome temperature in the 200-250F range there is no need to spritz the meat with anything until it’s done.

Wood:

How about wood management? Those four manly man sized chunks of wood will be largely burned up in 2 hours, indicated by a lack of smoke emanating from the fully open vent in the dome of the WSM. If you like a smokier finish, add a couple more chunks through the front door in the cylinder section of the WSM at this time, and you will get another hour of smoke. No more is needed. The WSM gets hot so use a pair of these using some of that money you saved by not buying an idiotic electronic Bluetooth thermometer. You can use those same gloves to manhandle the brisket when removing it to the cutting board.

Maintaining the water bowl:

The water bowl inside the WSM, which ensures only indirect heat reaches the meat and helps prevent fat fires, is checked once during the six hour smoking session, after 4 hours. I generally find the water in mine to be two thirds evaporated at that point and simply top it up by pouring additional water into the bowl through the grille(s), being careful not to slop any on the hot coals below. No need to risk removing the brisket with its grille for this step.

Managing the 170F ‘stall’:

I checked the internal thermometer after 4 hours and it read 170F. One hour later, after 5 hours, it still read 170F. This is known as the ‘stall’ and results from the ongoing evaporation of moisture from the joint, which prevents the temperature from rising. You can either simply wait it out – your guests will love you – or wrap the joint in heavy duty Reynolds silver wrap at the 4-5 hour mark to stop evaporation of moisture and help push the joint over the stall point. I did this after 5 hours and the stall ceased, with the joint’s internal temperature reaching 195F after 6 hours and 15 minutes.

Once the meat is removed from the WSM be sure to close both the top and base vents. That will starve the system of oxygen, ensuring the coals are extinguished and that any remaining water in the water bowl does not boil off, leaving hard to remove deposits.

Resting and carving:

Phew! After 6 hours or so you will smell of wood and charcoal smoke and have a beautifully rendered brisket with a dark exterior ‘bark’ ready to be removed to the cutting board, having first checked that the interior thermometer is reporting 195-205F. We are not done yet.

Let the brisket rest at room temperature for 30-60 minutes – this will make it easier to cut. Check back to the second paragraph of this piece and you will see that the brisket has a grain direction, just like pure, untreated wood. When carving the brisket we want to cut across the grain, meaning the knife has to be at right angles to the muscle fibers. Cut incorrectly, meaning in line with those fibers, and you will get a very stringy piece of meat which is no fun to chew. So how to determine the cut direction?

Simple. Cut off a piece thus:


First cut – incorrect.

This cut is wrong. You can clearly see the run of the muscle fibers, denoted by the red line.

Here’s the second cut at right angles to the first – no fibers are visible as the cut is at right angles to the grain:


Second and final cut – no fibers visible.

The best carving knife:

What’s the best knife to use? No, it’s most definitely not your utterly useless chef’s knife, especially if you have discovered the massive benefits of a cleaver.

You need a serrated bread knife, like this, to ease the ‘sawing’ through those muscle fibers.

Enjoy!

Nothing beats an Idaho baked potato with butter, sour cream and chives from the garden.


Juicy and perfect..

Cleaning HP DesignJet print heads

Printing

A blast from the past.

The HP DesignJet 30/90/130 printers (10″/18″/24″ maximum paper width, respectively) were as good as pro-amateur color printers were ever made. The three models, which date from 2006, use the same ink cartridges and print heads, six of each. The Vivera ink dyes used require special swellable HP paper which absorbs the dyes and is good for over 80 years of permanence.

I wrote extensively about the maintenance and care of these printers in a series of articles which you can find here. Suffice it to say that you will not find better blacks from any printer and even with glossy paper there is not so much as a hint of metamerism (bronzing). I have displayed prints for almost two decades in bright sun without a hint of fading.

When HP discontinued these printers I stocked up on the special paper at ten cents on the dollar and also bought a remaindered set of OEM print heads and ink cartridges. While I had all the prints I needed for home and exhibition display I knew that one day I would revisit making large prints so it made sense to lay in those supplies.

Well, the other day I decided that I wanted to make some new prints for framing, having become bored with what I had and knowing that some gems awaited printing in my catalog. But my HP DJ90 had seen no use in seven years and though I had kept it plugged in (and switched off) all those years, to enable the head warmers and the occasional automatic ink flush which HP’s engineers had cleverly built in, the display panel showed all sorts of weird symbols and no ink levels were to be seen. So I pulled all six print heads, cleaning the mating surface in the printer with a rag soaked in distilled water, and replaced them with the new OEM ones which I had kept in their sealed, foil wrapping. At the same time I replaced all the ink cartridges. After an extended period during which the printer primed the cartridges and supply lines (meaning they were filled with ink and air was purged) the printer fired up and worked perfectly! Joy.

Now the snag with these DesignJet models is that paper is no longer available, and ink and print heads, if found through web search can be very costly indeed. And as for spare parts they are largely unavailable so one day my printer will be so much landfill. Welcome to the disposable society. I had made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning clogged printheads in this piece which turned out to be so much time wasted. This time, rather than throwing the old heads away, I determined to do the job properly.

The print head comprises four parts:


Assembled head at left, dismantled, cleaned one at right.

In the above image these are:

  • The needle unit, top right
  • The cap with bellows – these act as an ink buffer
  • A rectangular gasket which seals the cap to the reservoir
  • The reservoir, bottom right

The design of the #84 (black) and the #85 (colors) heads is identical.

The print head is easily dismantled using a small, flat bladed screwdriver. First, put on some rubber gloves. Those dyes, once on your skin, are absorbed and hard to remove.

Then remove the needle unit, insert the blade of the screwdriver at the location shown in this image:


Removing the needle unit.

Carefully twist the screwdriver and the needle unit pops off.

Now it remains to remove the cap with its attached bellows.


Force application to separate the bladder unit from the reservoir.


How the cap with bellows assembly and reservoir are separated – side view.
Do this gently. Rotate too hard and too far and parts will break.

No tools are needed. Place your thumb at the location of the green arrow, the side of your forefinger at the location of the red arrow (on the underside of the protruding plastic, not at the side) and apply force in the direction shown by the curved blue arrow. The two will separate easily.

Being careful not to lose or damage the rectangular gasket which is between the bladder unit and the reservoir, flush all the parts with hot water from the tap, then soak them overnight to remove the last vestiges of ink. There is no need to use volatile solvents. Flush once more, air dry, then reassemble in the reverse order, being sure to place that rectangular gasket over the bellow assembly before snapping on the reservoir. The gasket nestles in a rectangular groove around the base of the bellows assembly. Be sure it is securely lodged in that groove, helping it along with a jeweler’s screwdriver if necessary, before snapping the reservoir and bellows assembly together. The needle unit is replaced last, snapping into place.

Your HP DJ print head is now ready to be put back in service. There is no need to pre-fill it with ink. The HP DesignJet will do that for you when first turned on with the new print head(s) installed. Give it 30 minutes or so to complete this process.

The Nikkor 16-35mm revisited

Nikon lenses

All that’s old is new again.

I last wrote about this ultrawide full-frame zoom in 2012. I must have been enjoying a period of more money than sense as I paid the full retail price of $1300 for what was a lens recently introduced by Nikon. At that time I wrote:

It’s bulky, the gargantuan lens hood is needed to shade the exposed front element, it’s set in a yucky resin body and at 24 ounces it’s no featherweight. The maximum aperture of f/4 is relatively modest and you will struggle getting dramatic differential focus effects. Being a ‘G’ optic there is no traditional aperture ring, aperture control being solely possible from the control dial on the body. I prefer a ring on the lens. Finally, at just under $1300 it’s anything but cheap.

The lens was sold after a couple of years’ use when I went all MF. That 16-35mm was in great demand at the time so the high resale price somewhat mollified the pain from the damage to my pocketbook.

When Nikon started transitioning from flapping mirror DSLRs to the mirrorless Z range, they did buyers of the old Nikon F mount optics a great favor. Stated simply, the bottom dropped out of the market on resale value on some of the finest optics known to man. Having recently added mint examples of the D800 and the 28-300mm zoom, I could not resist completing the focal length range with an ultrawide zoom and picked up a near new specimen of the 16-35mm ultrawide zoom for …. $315! Thank you Nikon and thank you Mr. Upgrading Seller. And thanks also for the free Hoya UV “Antistatic” (whaaat?) filter which sells for $70.

All the familiar characteristics of the 16-35mm are there. The awful barrel distortion at 16mm (the built in Lightroom Classic lens correction profile takes care of that with ease), the huge bulk and the slow maximum aperture. You can’t do anything about the bulk but the fact that this was the first ultrawide zoom with Vibration Reduction makes that f/4 maximum aperture more like f/2, and it works well.

But how wide, exactly, is 16mm? In full frame vernacular it’s plenty wide but not as wide as the claimed 12mm of the ultrawide optic in my iPhone 12 Pro Max, one of the best reasons for buying the iPhone. Yes, that device may have third world ergonomics and lacks reach at the long end of the lens range, but the ultrawide is excellent.

I set to checking who is who and what is what with two quick comparisons:


The 16-35mm Nikkor at 16mm**.


The 12mm lens on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

** With distortion correction using the Adobe profile in Lightroom v6.

The answer is that the iPhone is noticeably wider using the ultrawide lens, if not as wide as you might expect, but what is really interesting is the comparison of resolving power from the miniscule lens in the iPhone with the giant on the D800. Yes, the D800 is better, but barely so. And the lenses in the iPhone will only get better whereas the Nikkor 16-35mm has remained unchanged for over a decade.


Comparing definition at 1:1. iPhone at left.

Still, for a modest investment of under $1,400 I have a top class 36mp sensor body and a lens focal length range of 16-300mm with just two zooms. I’ll leave you to count how many fixed focal length optics those two zooms replace and the fact that I can stretch the 300mm to 1000mm with relative impunity is just icing on the cake. Can’t do that with an iPhone.

Here’s my complete D800 kit:


The 16-35mm and 28-300mm VR Nikkors with the D800 body.

Fake Nikon camera batteries

Nikon bodies

Watch out!

A few years ago B&H, a reputable vendor of photo hardware, was forced to recall a batch of EN-EL15b Nikon batteries which turned out to be anything other than OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). In fact they did not even ask for their return. They sent new OEM ones to purchasers of the bad batch and asked that the originals be recycled. B&H had been scammed and acted honorably to fix their procurement mistake.


The B&H recall advisory.

Battery fraud is common and my research indicates that saving $30-40 on an aftermarket or eBay ‘Nikon’ battery is false economy.

The D800 and many other Nikon bodies take the EN-EL15, of which there have been 4 versions – EN-EL15, EN-EL15a, EN-EL15b, EN-EL15c.

The D800 came with the EN-EL15 but all later models fit. The ‘a’ and ‘b’ variants appear to be complying with new labeling requirements as the first three versions are all rated at 1900mAh. The ‘c’, which came with later mirrorless bodies, has increased the capacity to 2280 mAH, or 20% more shots, which is a lot.

My D800 came with two EN-EL15; the one would only charge to 40%, the other would charge to 100% but then lose 20% daily even without use, so I bought a new Nikon OEM EN-EL15c. Neither battery which came with the camera, when fully charged (solid LED on the charger), would reset the shot counter on the D800’s LCD.

Advice from Nikon and others as to compatibility is all over the place. I have found no issues charging or using the EN-EL15c in the D800 with the original charger MH-25.

Disadvantage of the OEM battery? It costs two or three times as much as the fakes.

Reckon on 2000-3000 snaps per charge (assuming no LCD chimping and no wi-fi use on bodies which have it). So I only need one good one. No way I take >2000 snaps in a session.

One excellent article on the subject is this one. The comments are particularly worth reading.

After reading that piece and others on the interwebs, I conclude there are eight indicators to look for in spotting fake Nikon camera batteries:

  • The four notches on the long sides of the holographic gold label on the back. Real batteries have these. Fakes may not unless they are really good fakes.
  • Weight. A real battery weighs 78-87 grams. Fakes may weigh less as there’s less power storage material inside. My new EN-EL15c came in at 80 grams.
  • Tap for a hollow sound. Tap the rounded sides of the battery with a fingernail. A hollow sound indicates a fake. A solid one points to the real thing – or a really good fake. The hollow sound is the result of the internal void from lack of energy storage material.
  • Failure to reset the shot counter to ‘0’ after a recharge. The shot counter in my D800 can be found on the LCD tool menu->Battery Info. An OEM battery resets this to zero after a full recharge. A fake one may not.
  • Failure to reach full charge in the MH-25 (or MH-25A – identical) Nikon charger. My new EN-EL15c gets a solid ‘fully charged’ light in the OEM charger, from dead flat (as shipped), in 2 hours and 45 minutes. A fake or aftermarket one may not.
  • Loss of charge, as indicated by the camera’s battery indicator, even after a period of non-use. This can indicate a fake or a really tired OEM battery.
  • There is a small stamped lower case alphabetic letter between the ‘+’ sign near the connector and the connector. It’s ‘a’ for the EN-EL15a, ‘b’ for the EN-EL15b and ‘c’ for the EN-EL15c. It’s blank on the original EN-EL15 so this is not a foolproof indicator. To be safe if you battery is an ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ model and the stamped letter is missing, it’s probably a fake.
  • Price. If it’s much under $70 and/or does not come in a Nikon box with circular holographic label, it’s probably a fake.

If any of the above symptoms is present, the chance are that your battery is a fake. (You need to check for all eight as each can be countered by a really good faker. It’s unlikely all eight will be). The first eight digits of the serial number on the battery are the manufacture date in the format yyymmdd. If the battery is much used and over 4 years old, even if OEM, it’s probably close to the end of its useful life.


One of the four notches on the holographic label is arrowed.
Both of these batteries have all four notches.

There are many <$30 Nikon batteries on eBay which never seem to come with a Nikon box which, when included, should also carry a holographic circular label.


OEM box. The holographic circular label is at top right.

The broader issue is why waste money on a non-OEM battery which can swell and jam in the camera or, in extreme cases, catch fire when being recharged? The camera costs many times the premium for the OEM battery. And good luck with the home fire claim with your friendly insurance company. My brand new OEM EN-EL15c cost $70 from a factory authorized vendor, has the holographic label notches, does not sound hollow when tapped, resets the camera’s shot counter to ‘0’ after a full recharge, gets a solid glowing LED on the MH-25 charger when full charged and does not lose charge even after many days of non use in the camera. And yes, there’s a stamped ‘c’ near the ‘+’ embossing:


Arrow indicates the stamped ‘c’ on my OEM EN-EL15c battery.

Apply all of the eight indicators above when examining your battery and you will almost certainly know if it is OEM or a fake. (For original EN-EL15 batteries, disregards the seventh indicator in the bulleted list above).

As for private label aftermarket batteries, it’s a crapshoot. As Mr. Eastwood once put it “Do you feel lucky?”.