Site of the OK Corral.
For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.
Snapped in 1995. My relationship with – and love of – Arizona goes back decades.
Leica M2, 35mm Summaron. Kodachrome 64.
Tombstone, AZ
Category Archives: Photography
Mise en place
Everything in its place.
German, the language of killing, would have that expression as alles in ordnung. The French mise en place adds charm and subtracts brutality with none of the functional coldness of the English ‘everything in its place’. The beauty of French is at one with the quality of their cuisine.
Mise en place is quite my favorite part of cooking a meal as it forces order without discipline, generating anticipation without apprehension.
Here’s the setup for mussels and clams with garlic and fettuccine – as simple as it gets; the red peppers add a touch of zest in the broth:
The charming end grain checkered cutting board at left comes from Vermont, the last repository of American craftsmanship.
The shaved Parmesan is absent here, as is the white wine in which the shellfish are cooked. A Benriner mandoline is the best way to shave hard cheese into paper thin slices – but watch your fingers! Japanese make fabulous cameras …. and cooking tools. As for the white wine, this is strictly a bottom shelf choice.
iPhone6 snap.
The cardinal returns
This time I was ready.
The bird is very shy, and wary of the rapacious quail and doves which dominate the feeder. If doves are the ornithological world’s idea of timidity then I fancy I would rather keep the company of vultures. An early attempt appears here.
The cardinal is impossible to miss. One’s peripheral vision immediately catches the flash of bright red, like an electric shock to the system.
This time I was better prepared, the 500mm Reflex Nikkor attached to the Panny GX7 set at ISO800 which delivered 1/320 second. This at the lens’s fixed f/8 aperture. While hand-held, that’s poor technique as a 1,000mm FFE optic really needs a solid support. I got lucky, aided by the critical focus option in the Panny which permits enlargement of a selected area for proper focus. Of the twenty snaps the first (go figure!) was the only one usable. I would guess that depth of field at 30 feet distant is no more than a couple of inches. The image is from the full frame. I passed the file through PS to remove the out-of-focus ‘donuts’ typical with catadioptric lenses, and often quite distracting. More on that technique appears in the link in this paragraph.
In lieu of the use of Mirror Lock Up which I advocate with a conventional DSLR to cut vibration, I use the GX7’s silent and vibration-free electronic shutter. A Panasonic MFT body is superior in every way to a conventional mirrored DSLR with this lens if you need 1,000mm FFE. You get a vibrationless electronic shutter, a very light rig which can be easily carried slung over the shoulder all day, Panny’s superior magnified focus aid and, best of all, a bright finder image as the electronics automatically adjust for the small f/8 aperture. And to get 1,000mm FFE with the full frame DSLR you have to cut out a large part of the image in processing, rendering your DSLR’s sensor effective pixel count the same as the lower spec of the MFT’s sensor.
Here are the ‘after’ and ‘before’ images:
The Reflex is a special lens, small, light with delightfully smooth focus action, but easy to use it is not. Add a small, nervous subject and you have your work cut out for you.
To learn more of the design history of Nikkor’s reflex optics under Teruyoshi Tsunashima click here.
GX7 with the adapted 500mm Reflex Nikkor. Arca-style QR plate fitted.
Apple. Con.
Don’t be fooled.
Many have accused Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, of being nothing more than a number cruncher, a man untroubled by original thoughts.
The dearth of inventions since Steve Jobs died certainly adds credence to that opinion, and Cook’s financial engineering skills are testified to by the latest iPad campaign. This campaign, as I will show, is nothing more than a confidence trick in pricing.
$329 gets you very little.
Apple targeted the education market early on with its Apple II and Macintosh computers and did well. With the Mac’s introduction in 1984, students finally saw on the screen what they could print and the desktop computing world would never be the same. Then, around the fall of 2001 when the first iPod was introduced, Apple’s focus on the education market started to blur, to a point where now few in schools use Apple hardware. The iMac is ridiculously overpriced for what it delivers and the iPad is useless.
But that does not deter Mr. Green Eyeshades from trying to revitalize what is increasingly a failed product line – the iPad. His teaser offer to schools, a whopping $30 off to students, puts the device in your child’s hands, where it is waiting to be dropped, for $299.
But Wait! There’s More!
The stock memory of 16Gb (sixteen Gb!) is a straight forward cheat for what is a memory hungry device. Evert tried using a 16Gb iPad. I have. Useless once you have an app or two running. Thus you need the upgraded memory model, so add $100. The keyboard in the iPad is useless for extended typing, the sort of thing students have to do when cranking out those pieces on Richard III and his many depredations. So add a wireless keyboard (forget trying to use a wired one) and Apple has your number for a mere $93. Want to use that Apple Pencil to draw on the screen? $90 more. (Wow! $90 for a pencil ….) Then you have to support the tablet at 45 degrees to make it remotely usable at a desk and, hey, there goes another $20 and say hasta la vista to the iPad’s vaunted portability. And you don’t want little Johnny scratching that screen now, do you, so throw in $15 for a wallet/pouch. Let’s see, that’s $617. Plus tax.
Now let’s see what the sensible parent is buying. It’s called a Chromebook, comes with a folding screen like any laptop, no case needed, has a trackpad for drawing and all you need add is a mouse. Maybe not even that. Amazon lists some 500 of these little hummers for under $500. For the most part it’s hard to spend $250. Memory use is smart so you do not need much. Oh! and don’t forget too add $10 for a mouse. The laptop comes with the Google suite of apps (spreadsheet, word processor, calendar) and why, all 650 students and 120 faculty at my son’s prep school use those apps and no one is complaining.
Apple. Con.
A typical Chromebook. Touchscreen and tablet functionality included.
Back to the Past
Paper rules.
Some 20 years ago I cancelled my paper subscriptions to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and commenced online reading.
And while the WSJ online sub was, in turn, cancelled many years ago when the paper was bought by an Australian barbarian fascist, the NYT remains the paper of record and a superb one at that. If you want to know what is happening in our backyard or in Borneo’s, for that matter, this is where you go.
Anyway, a while back the NYT’s splendid journalist Farhad Manjoo (Cornell, 2000) detailed a two month experiment where he cancelled his online access and opted for the (costly) paper subscription instead. So I thought I would give it a shot, missing the physical experience of paper and realizing that by the time the presses have run most errors and omissions in the online version of a story would have been fixed. Plus, I’m not in that much of a hurry to learn of the latest porn star the leader of the Western world may have bedded.
My first concern was that a paper which is the bastion of liberalism and free thinking could not be delivered in the heart of redneck country, here in Arizona. Yet, amazingly, my zip code is on the delivery route!
There’s a sort of cyclical pattern to the week’s deliveries. Monday starts off thin, doubtless hungover from the weekend’s tweeting from Mar a Loco where the white powder and showgirls run freely. No ads on Mondays. The momentum – and weight – build through the week until, lo and behold, Sunday arrives and along with it the eighth wonder of the world, replete with costly jewelry ads:
The eighth wonder of the world. Sunday’s New York Times
But, superb as the paper is, and pleasurable as the experience of ink stained hands and rustling of the Arts section may be on sunlit patio mornings, there is a big snag. What I had not anticipated is that during the twenty year hiatus my eyes had also aged twenty years. And that small print is awfully tough to make out. So a valiant experiment, but one sadly doomed by age.
Subscribe to the New York Times. Keep America free.