Category Archives: Photography

Kitchenaid Artisan 5-Qt. stand mixer

Cooking

An all time classic.

This is one of an occasional series on cooking devices which make a difference. For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

The BMW airhead motorcycle first came to market in 1922. The Kitchenaid Artisan stand mixer beats it by 3 years, having first been sold in 1919. Unlike that wonderful bike engine, last made in 1997, the Kitchenaid mixer soldiers on to this day. If you make dough for bread or cakes, it’s the only way to go and, surprise!, it’s made in Ohio. That’s Ohio, USA not Ohio, Wuhan, China.

I do not have that many hours of use on mine but the gorgeous, classic design of this model dates from 1936. Forty years of happy mixing with no failures are routinely reported:



Making bread dough.

The mixer has a sterling reputation for reliability and longevity. Repair parts are easily available and the commutator brushes are simple to replace, located under the black screw plugs visible in the picture. The mixing tool’s motion is planetary, meaning the tool rotates one way and the mixing assembly the other, conferring the folding motion your grandma used to use while kicking the dog across the kitchen. Mine came with a J hook for heavy dough and a mixer paddle for light work. The latter is ineptly designed and you will want to replace it with the scraper design which looks like this:



The scraper paddle tool.

There are all sorts of tools available and the circular chrome port on the top will accept lots of additional gadgets for pasta making and the like. I have never used that power take-off source as my main interests are making bread dough and saving my aging wrists.

That doyenne of America-French cooking, Julia Child, used one for ages and hers, along with her kitchen, appears in the Smithsonian. Only in America is this possible.



The Artisan in Julia Child’s kitchen.

Kitchenaid has other designs, including rising column ones in lieu of the tilt feature. These are for those with no sense of history and even less taste, like owners of post 1997 BMW motorcycles. Stick with the original. And it really must be white, though about five million colors are now available. The machine is exceptionally heavy and if I have one complaint is that it tends to wander over my polished marble countertop at higher speeds with heavy doughs, so I have placed it on a rubber mat. Kitchenaid needs to add a weighted counterbalancer to cancel out the vibes.

Note that it’s really not a tool you want to hump in and out of storage. It’s simply too heavy.



The original 1918 patent drawing.

If Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking‘ should be in every kitchen, it needs to share shelf space with Carol Fields’s ‘The Italian Baker‘ which does for bread what Child does for everything else.



Italian Pane Bigio, a delightful wheat bread courtesy of the Kitchenaid mixer.

Americans pulling together

Photography

My letter to Governor Ducey of Arizona.

Dear Governor Ducey –

3/16/2020

Let me start by complimenting you on yesterday’s decision to close Arizona Public Schools through March 27. Your decision, along with ASU’s action to transition to online tuition, remove large populations from the crowd risks posed by public assembly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I believe that you should also consider issuing broader regulations that seek to limit public assembly regardless of the institution, wherever possible, and require all returning travelers from foreign lands to be screened upon re-entry to Arizona. Further, visits by relatives to elder care facilities should be strictly limited as they expose our most vulnerable citizens to infection.

We have all been reading about the process of ‘flattening the infection curve’, one which seeks to delay the onset of infection and better control the spread of that infection once it is identified. Waiting for infection and death, the way some nations have, is exactly wrong. Along with aggressive testing and quarantine approaches, nations like South Korea are showing that flattening the curve is a real possibility. We must act likewise now, not when all those nascent infections in our population are eventually disclosed.

One dismaying aspect of public behavior throughout the United States has been the practice of hoarding groceries and essential supplies. A visit to any Phoenix or Scottsdale area supermarket discloses that this practice is common here, one which is contrary to the concept of ‘pulling together’ and alien to the American Way. Hoarding substitutes greed and selfishness for community spirit, is counterproductive and unnecessary. It also hurts the oldest, those least able to participate in this aggressive, anti-social behavior.

Some examples.

American hens have been producing adequate supply of eggs for American consumers since we won WW2. Hoarding a staple with a short shelf life makes no sense.

American paper manufacturers have seen to it that adequate supplies of toilet paper have been available over a like period, maintaining Americans’ high standards of hygiene. Yet visit your local grocery store and they are out.

The situation is identical for hand sanitizer and on and on.

Yet the solution is surpassingly simple. Simply require supermarkets to limit purchases per shopper. I note that the AJs chain in Scottsdale has adopted this approach and many essentials remain available on their shelves. However, other major chains like Safeway and Bashas have not, and their shelves are empty of essential goods. Trying to directly control shopper behavior, the behavior of those ‘fellow Americans’ of mine who think only of themselves, is impossible. But placing requirements on supermarkets to limit purchases by customers is easy and comes at negligible fiscal cost. Add a complaints hot line for whistle blowers and a low cost solution presents itself.

Mr. Governor, for this senior citizen to visit a supermarket and find that staples like eggs and lettuce are unavailable is unconscionable. 15.9% of Arizonans are senior citizens, the tenth highest for any state. These Arizonans are the most threatened sector of the population who most require that hand sanitizer and the protein in that missing egg. I urge you to implement these simple, low cost requirements as soon as possible.

Finally, a recent study published by the New York Times discloses that the supermarket cashier is one of the highest risk centers for dissemination of viral infection. In a week of eight hour shifts I calculate that a check-out cashier has over 3,000 unique person-to-person contacts with shoppers, all within infection range. That’s far more than any school teacher or college professor. Yet I have not seen one of these risk centers wearing protective gloves or masks. Please consider making this a requirement, one which carries little cost and brings potentially great benefits in mitigating the spread of infection.

Please consider implementing my suggested measures as part of your fight against COVID-19 and thank you again for the great work you are doing.

Thomas Pindelski
Scottsdale

Three hundred bucks a year

iPhone

High end photography has never been cheaper.



The iPhone 11 Pro lens array.

The ever bubbling rumor mill has it that this year’s iPhone 12 Pro will come with a 60+ megapixel sensor and a fourth ‘time of flight’ lens which will enhance virtual reality viewing as well as providing more granular depth map data for selective focus effects, rendered in software.

I will immediately list my iPhone 11 Pro on Swappa and will sell it for $300 less than its iPhone replacement. This is the extent of my annual hardware cost, the equivalent of a few rolls of film plus some prints or another lens for a DSLR or mirrorless body. Photography has never been cheaper. And I get a new camera annually, comfortable in the knowledge that every iPhone camera has been better than the one which came before it.

At Shake Shack

Dining, Photographs

Up market burgers.

A recent review of mass market burger joints suggested that Shake Shack had the best ones, so I rode the old motorbike to the local one in Scottsdale, avoiding the Porsches and Bentleys, and had at it.



$12.20 and a 19 minute wait.


Big winner for me – the place is dog friendly!


Lots of families and no white trash. The prices keep the latter away.


Porsches and Bentleys.


Table tennis while you wait.


Danny Trejo lives.


Eating off the floor.


An enjoyable, social setting with well behaved people on a gorgeous Arizona day.

It may not be La Grenouillère, but it’s still jolly nice – and the burger was indeed excellent.

iPhone11 Pro snaps.

Night Mode optimisation

iPhone, Photographs

A modicum of care does the trick.

Night Mode is one of those brilliant enhancements in the iPhone 11 which obsoletes every ‘serious’ camera on the market.

Those 8 billion plus transistors in the iPhone’s A13 chip are put hard to work taking multiple images and then stitch together the best bits for a stunningly good result. And the device’s outstanding HDR technology makes sure that the dynamic range is constrained to what the technology can handle. No highlights are burned out.

Still, a modicum of care will be repaid with the best possible images. If you use the iPhone’s default Camera app, Night Mode is automatically invoked when needed. You cannot force it ‘on’.

When Night Mode is active a yellow flag appears at the top left of the iPhone’s display and the image ‘seen’ at the time of exposure remains frozen on the screen. When processing is complete some three seconds later – and you are warned to keep the camera still – a second image appears on the display showing what was recorded. If you notice a significant shift between the locations of objects in the second image compared with the first then it’s more than likely that the result will be blurred. I obviate this problem by using a monopod, which eliminates vertical motion which is the real killer here. I don’t bother with any attachment device, simply holding the iPhone tightly against the top of the monopod. The results are peerless, as these two images from the garden at night illustrate. The extreme dynamic range will only embarrass your DSLR or mirrorless monster. Don’t bother. Get an iPhone 11 – these are SOOC, naturally: