Monday Musings: I Found an Old Mind Dump

Org-mode is my choice for a writing environment. Gedit is the Gnome default text editor. Tonight I installed Leafpad, a simple text editor and made it the default (instead of Gedit) for automatically opening txt files. Leafpad isn’t just fast, it loads instantly, exactly what I need when I want to write a short note without fussing or to have a quick look at a text file. No frills like spell checking, word count, etc., just raw speed and simplicity. Sometimes simple is best.

I loaded a few text files to test and play with Leafpad. I found an old mind dump, actually a dump from my Neo: neo_dump_05_26_09.txt. Neo has eight files and I must have decided to clear Neo out. I thought two of the files would make for fun musings this week so here goes:

File #1 — Friday, Dec. 12, 2008 — Morning Pages

An experiment this morning. Instead of the dry, stupid, diary crap morning pages, I clustered around the word paralysis. Because I was stumped and uncertain of what I wanted to think about this morning.

My left brain likes concrete answers. It wants to know what’s likely to happen before I get started. My right brain wants to play. Right brain just wants to have some fun. Let’s play let’s find out.

My right brain loves the contrast while old left gets uncomfortable when I’m not organized, when outcomes are uncertain. When you play what if, you might not succeed, you might even fail. Is that so terrible? Not for a playful person it isn’t.

Contrast. The risk of success is worth the risk of failure. Failure is such a terrible thing in our upcoming (I wonder what I meant when I wrote upcoming? probably upbringing). Catholic school in the 50s taught that failure was a sin. Well, that sin is giving in to temptation. Better explanation is that sin is a mistake and mistakes are bad things.

How can a person possibly stop mistakes? Can’t be done. Minimize by paying attention, but stopping before the fact? That’s paralysis. Not doing because of fear of failure [and success]. It’s so much easier to stick with the known. Who knows what lurks out there. Who knows what might happen if the silly and irresponsible right brain takes center stage.

Right brain says let’s find out. Let’s play what if while left brain sits paralyzed by indecision. Just do it. Not recklessly Mr. left brain says. OK then, we’ll work together. You don’t judge ahead of time or stop me because you think I’m being silly and after I play awhile, I’ll be quiet and let you organize and make sense of my playful discoveries.

File #5 — no date

Years later I read the same book with different eyes, different mind and the tumblers click into place and the safe opens. How did I find that combination?

What makes us want to get out of bed in the morning?

PS — I wrote / assembled this post using org-mode

Read Full Post »

Monday Musings: Who Made This Mess?

OK, you’ve been free-writing, letting the words flow without judging or editing and you’ve exhausted your idea pool or think it’s time to stop. What do you do with the mind dump, first draft now?

I wondered the same thing and wished someone would program a decent text editor for writers. Most, if not all, text editors are written with computer programmers in mind. They are powerful, fast and can do some amazing tricks, most of which are useless for a writer.

Writers are supposed to use word processors (I wonder who started that myth?). I seldom use a word processor and why writers think they should write using a program designed for secretarial tasks in a business office puzzles me. (reminder to self — write an article explaining why word processors suck for creative writing).

Creative writing needs good software that helps instead of getting in the way. What if I had a good text editor that could help make sense of a first draft? What if I had a good text editor that helps me organize my thoughts? What if I could start at the beginning of a shitty first draft and whenever I found a word or phrase that resonated, highlight the word or phrase, press a key combination and send that word or phrase to a list?

I got the idea when using NoteTab Pro which has a neat function that lets you use a file as a ‘pasteboard’ so each time you copy anything from another file, the text appears in the ‘pasteboard’ file. Keep going and you create a nice list of all the ideas culled from your draft.

Unfortunately, NoteTab is a windows program and I need a native Linux editor. I discovered a solution that works even better than the NoteTab ‘pasteboard’ function.

I like gedit, the default editor for the gnome desktop and use it a lot. Gedit has a tools plug-in that let’s you create scripts that can either run from a pull down menu or an assigned shortcut key combination that runs the script when pressed. I figured out a script that appends a list to the end of a file and it works without taking my hands off the keyboard.

I move through the file using the arrow keys. When I find something I want to add to the list, I highlight the selection using Ctrl/shift and the right arrow key, then press Ctrl/F12 and the highlighted text is appended to the end of the file as the next item in the list.

When I’m finished, I can simply copy the list and paste it into a new file. Another gedit plug-in lets me sort the list alphabetically and I can move items up or down the list easily using the Alt key with the up or down arrow — neat ways to help distill and organize the meat of a first draft.

I set the tool to use the current selection and append the output to the end of the file. Here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh
sed ‘s/[a-z]*/\n&/’

I tested my idea with this article. After writing the first draft on my Neo, I plugged Neo into the USB port on my desktop and dumped the draft into a new file in gedit. Then I played around with a list. It worked fine, but since my first draft was reasonably coherent, I pulled another neat gedit trick instead.

I opened another empty file in a new window and simply dragged and dropped the text I wanted from the draft into the new window. (Gedit doesn’t delete the original text so you are moving a copy of the selection). Then I edited and added to the second draft until I was satisfied.

The point? Go ahead and make a mess with your first draft. The job of the first draft is to get your thoughts out onto the page. Editing comes later. A tool like my list builder can help. And until I find the perfect text editor for writers, I’ll build my own any way I can.

Read Full Post »

Monday Musings: MaxThink, The Only Idea Processor

MaxThink satisfies a need for thinking with a computer that I wrote about 30 years ago and reproduced in a post on September 12, 2009, Time Travel: Musing About MaxThink & More… I invite you to hop back and read the earlier post before continuing.

MaxThink (for DOS) opening screen

I’ve been using computers for about 30 years and in all that time, I’ve only found one program that comes close to the genius of Neil Larson and his old DOS version of MaxThink, the unique and wonderful idea processor, and that’s Brainstorm, a thinking and planning aid program that I used and liked for a few years on my Windows desktop machine. Brainstorm was close but not quite, lacking some of the key features that made MaxThink special.

I began migrating from Windows to Linux almost four years ago and made a complete break over a year ago. I do everything on my Linux Mint 9 Desktop now. Brainstorm runs under Wine but loses some of it’s best features and MaxThink for Windows won’t run at all under Wine (I tried the demo twice last week with no luck), so I’ve installed my old DOS copy of MaxThink94 using DosBox, a DOS emulator created to run old DOS games. MaxThink runs perfectly with DosBox and I couldn’t be happier.

My fingers never leave the keyboard when I’m cranking out ideas and reorganizing them with MaxThink. The keystrokes are intuitive and I was up to speed in a matter of a few days. Not having to use the silly mouse is a huge advantage when you are thinking and typing away.

At first glance, MaxThink is a powerful outliner, but the real power is under the hood. MaxThink came with a fat, printed manual that by some miracle, I still have. Neil’s book is more than a user manual for MaxThink. It’s a well written tutorial on ways of thinking: Evaluative thinking with the Prioritize command, synthesis thinking using Binsort and Randomize to combine information in new ways, curiosity or experimental thinking with the Lock command, systematic thinking using Get, Put and Gather, creative uses of the Sort command, and one of my favorites, segmented lists.

And yes, I end up with a well thought out, complete outline. I can’t print directly, but Neil provides a Write command that saves outlines to an ASCII file that opens in my favorite text editor where I can print the way I prefer anyway.

The journey is everything in creativity and MaxThink makes that journey more productive and pleasant. I created a two and a half page outline mirroring and assisting my writing as I go through lesson three in WritePro. MaxThink helps me to generate new ideas, to discover relationships among ideas, to organize my ideas and to preserve them so I’ll remember and build on the ideas.

The synergy is amazing. Begin a new writing project with an open mind and a blank screen in your editor. Write whatever comes to mind without judging or editing. When you go back for a look, pick out the good stuff, the best ideas and start a MaxThink outline to help organize those insights and discover new ones. Then back to the editor for revisions or a complete re-write. Back and forth between insight and editing until the project is complete. Love the creative journey which is never complete because when one project is finished another beckons.

Read Full Post »

Photo Book How To: Next Steps

I finished the last of six new photo books late Sunday night, tweaked one of them just a bit on Monday morning and ordered hard copies from AdoramaPix. The sale on 8×8, 14 page photo books ended Tuesday. Who doesn’t like a sale, especially one this good? I saved $15 + sales tax on each book so when my latest order arrives next week I’ll have a 10 volume library of my best images and $160 in savings.

This is an image of the cover from one of the photo books I ordered on Monday. All of my photo books use the same simple template inspired by a wonderful little book, “On Reading” by Andre Kertesz: White cover with photo, simple title, my name in a smaller, lighter font and one photo with a generous white border on each page.

Here’s an example of one of the inside pages from this photo book. As I mentioned in my previous post, Adorama’s (or your vendor of choice) on line templates will suit many people. I used Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program to format and lay out my books before uploading the final version to Adoramapix. It took less than an hour to upload and create six books using my method.

When you fire up Scribus, you get a setup screen that allows you to choose the book size, number of pages (you can add or delete pages any time), margins and other page settings. I set my book(s) up as 8 inches by 8 inches. I accepted the default margins of .56 inches for right, left and top. I set the bottom margin to .88 inches and chose 16 pages — Front cover, back cover and 14 internal pages.

I moved the bottom margin up slightly because I wanted each image to look centered on the page. If you center an image vertically, it looks too low on the page because of a quirk in the way our eyes see things.

Putting your image on the page is easy. Draw an image frame in the middle of the page (exact placement and size don’t matter). Right click and select Get Image. Pick the image you want from the drop down file window, click and the image will appear in the frame.

Then right click and choose adjust frame to image. To get the image where you want it to go, click Align & Distribute from the Windows menu. A sticky sub window will pop up. There are 10 align buttons in the window. Choose relative to: margins then click on center vertical and center horizontal and you’re there. Just a few mouse clicks places your image quickly and easily.

On of the neat things about Scribus is the sticky windows stay until you dismiss them so the window will be there for the next page and so on.

The cover takes a bit more work. I use a smaller version of one of my images on the cover so I need to size the frame so suit the cover design. Follow the same procedure to get your image into the frame. Then right click on the image and click properties. The properties window has all the properties of the image. Click image then check off scale to frame size (proportional) and the image will shrink to fit the frame. If the image doesn’t fit the dimensions exactly, you can fiddle with the frame to get the image to the size you want. Then click on adjust frame to image.

Drag the image to where you want it vertically then click to center between the left and right margins. Draw a text frame where you’d like your title, enter the information via the text editor where you can choose font, size, alignment, etc.

So why go to all this trouble when you can upload your photos to Adoramapix and use their online tools? Glad you asked. Scribus can output a high quality PDF file of your book. I use this interactively because all design is a recursive back and forth until you are happy with the results. And when you are finished you have a high quality ebook.

I ended up doing more triage with my Red Bank book as I went along. Two of the images just weren’t right for the book so I found better ones, edited them and loaded them instead. The page order wasn’t quite right either so I moved pages around in Scribus until I was satisfied. It’s very easy to move pages. Simply pick move page from the page menu then tell Scribus where to put the page relative to any other page.

When you’re ready to upload your images, choose export/save as image and Scribus will export each page as a jpeg file. For my 8×8 book, each page is exactly 2400 pixels in each dimension (300 dpi) and 100% quality. Scribus writes each page with the book name and sequential number. Takes a minute or two.

When you log in and choose to create a book, you go through the steps of picking the cover type, the size, number of pages, etc. Then click upload from your computer, select the image files and within a few minutes all images will be uploaded.

I chose a custom book with no template. The next screen lists all the images on the left, empty pages (in pairs on the bottom) and the page(s) you are working on in the main window. With my method, I simply drag the image and drop it anyplace on the page then click size to page. It’s fast and easy. Each page only takes a few seconds.

I haven’t figured out how to do the spine lettering with Scribus so I pick the text tool and type in my title and my name. You must rotate the text 90 degrees and size it by hand. Not difficult but a bit of a pain. When you’re done, click preview where you can review your book. If all is well, then click order and follow the prompts.

If you aren’t ready to order, your book will be saved for 90 days. I believe you can upgrade for something like $24.95/year for unlimited storage.

It’s lovely to have an archive quality ‘real’ book you can hold in your hands and pass on to future generations. It’s also nice to have a high quality e-book for viewing on your monitor screen. When I’m proofing my books I use the dual page display in Adobe reader. The book will display exactly the same as the printed version. The image is a bit smaller 82% on my screen but large enough to enjoy.

The real treat comes with a full screen display. Each page fills the screen vertically and because the book has been formatted at 300 dpi, the typical 96 ppi lcd screen displays each page with no loss of quality.

If anyone has questions about using Scribus for photo book creation, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email message. I’d love to help as best I can.

Read Full Post »

Photo Book How To: First Things First

So you’ve decided to make a photo book. Where do you begin? Start with a concept, a theme for your book. What’s the book about and what kind of photos will I include? When I made my first photo book a few months ago, the theme was easy. I had dozens of photos from my grandmother’s life and I wanted to tell her story, at least part of it anyway. My next project was to make two photo books of my best images from my year in Saigon, one B&W and one in color.

Here’s the cover of my latest project: “Flowers — A Closer Look.” I haven’t ordered a print version of the book yet but I do have a finished e-book. The ability to make high quality photo e-books is one of the main reasons I’ve chosen to use a desktop publishing program for page layout and book construction. When I finally decide to have the Flowers book printed I’ll use Adoramapix. Adoramapix has printed four photo books for me so far and they’ve done a marvelous job with each. You won’t be disappointed in their work.

When I’m ready to submit my photo book to Adoramapix, I simply upload my pages as individual jpeg files and use their online flash app to quickly and easily add my preformatted pages to the new book. In other words, I do all my page layouts offline using Scribus then complete the book using the Adoramapix flash app.

As an alternative, Adoramapix has dozens of preformatted templates that make it easy to create a photo book. Most people will be very happy using one of these templates. Me? I’m climbing the steep learning curve of Scribus and I’ll explain why in detail in a subsequent post.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, first things first. Once you decide on a theme for your photo book, it’s time to gather and sift through your images. I create a new folder and name it accordingly. For instance, my flower folder is simply flower_book. My Saigon B&W folder is saigonBWbook. Then I gather scattered images and make copies that I put in the new folder.

Once I have all my images in one place, I go through a triage process. If the image isn’t good enough or I decide to leave it out, I delete it. Remember that only copies go into this folder so all my originals are safe. I may end up with more images than I can use but that’s OK. I’ll make final decisions as I work on the page layouts.

Adoramapix expects your images to be 300 dpi and either tiff or jpeg format in sRGB color space (even if your images are B&W). I load each image into my photo editor and convert to sRGB (it’s easy). I prefer one photo on each page and I resize the image (making sure it’s 300 dpi) to fit my page layout. When I say resize, I mean downsize. If the version of the image I’ve chosen is too small, I’ll either dig out a larger image or rescan.

For an 8 inch X 8 inch photo book, I’ve been sizing my images so I get a nice wide white border on each page. This means about 4 x 6 or 4 x 5 for rectangular images and 5 1/2 inches or thereabouts for square images.

While in my photo editor I make tonal adjustments and add moderate sharpening as needed. In a few instances, I’ve rescanned to get a better image. The main thing here is to tweak your photos so they will be ready for the next step.

First things first means choosing a theme, then collecting, sorting and preparing your images for the next step: Either creating a book using a desktop publishing program like Scribus or uploading directly to Adoramapix. I use Adoramapix as an example because I use and like them. The principles remain the same no matter who you choose to print your photo book.

One of the real benefits of this first step is it forces you to choose and organize your best work and assemble it in one place. My images are all over the place but as I build each photo book, I know where to find things and can easily back up.

I’ll explain my next step(s) in the next installment in this series. Stay tuned…

Read Full Post »

Grandmom & Uncle Harry circa 1898

Among the mother lode of old photographs my mother found in her bottom dresser drawer was an old photo of my grandmother (Frances K. Sullivan) with her Uncle Harry (Clifton). My grandmother was born in 1888, the photo was taken around 1898 so grandmom was all of ten years old. I set out to restore this photo as best I could.

Here’s a scan of the original that I made for illustration purposes. It’s a faithful reproduction of the original and not suitable for restoration.

Here’s the scan I used as the basis for the restoration. I made the scan on my Epson V600 flatbed scanner using VueScan Pro software. I scanned 48 bit RGB tiff at 1600 dpi. The high resolution and the color made it easier to isolate damage once I got the scan into Picture Window Pro for editing. I learned these two tricks from Ctein’s excellent book: “Digital Restoration from Start to Finish — Second Edition.”

Here’s where I am now, a work in process. Am I done yet? For now yes, but I expect a better result as I learn more. This was a tough one.

I experimented with different scan resolutions. I played with scanning as B&W, but in the end, I followed Ctein’s advice and used the color scan as the basis. I extracted a monochrome version from the color scan using the channel mixer monochrome transformation in PWP. The idea is to combine one or more channels into the cleanest possible B&W image.

Quite a bit of the damage was blue so I boosted the saturation of the color image by about 60% to exaggerate the damage. This made it easier to make masks of the damage.

I still had to do most of the heavy lifting by hand. The toughest issues were reconstructing my grandmother’s mouth where the emulsion was missing and getting rid of the massive stains across the front of the photo.

I’m still not satisfied with grandmom’s mouth. Believe me, reconstructing her mouth was a serious challenge.

Digital restoration has a steep learning curve which is why I picked this image for practice. I figured if I can restore this one, the next one will be a lot easier. I haven’t used masking all that much in the past. Making good masks is an art form and another steep learning curve.

I think I’ll put this image aside for now and work on my next challenge. I have a photo of my grandmother’s grandmother (my great great grandmother) that was taken well over 150 years ago. It’s a simpler portrait that appears to be in better condition. I’m eager to show a finished restoration print to my granddaughters. I can tell them this is a picture of your great great great great grandmother. Hmmm. This is fun.

Read Full Post »

Trees: Tone & Texture (Backstage with Curves)

Dragonstar made a nice comment about my latest (April 2) The Weekend in Black and White contribution: Trees: Tone & Texture — Ceres 2010. “One day I must try to understand what you do with your negatives…” Margaret Gosden is also interested and I’ve been meaning to write a few new tutorials (it’s been too long), so…

I decided to kick off the series with an introduction that recreates the sequence of steps I took to improve the tonality of the scanned negative prior to sharpening. The illustrations are screenshots from Picture Window Pro. Click to enlarge so you can see the details.

Click to enlarge

The image on the left is a medium resolution (1410 dpi)16 bit scan I made using VueScan with my Minolta Scan Dual III film scanner. I did some preliminary rough tonal adjustments using curves in VueScan. I did the fine tuning with PWP.

You can see the histogram and my adjusted curve in the Brightness Curve dialog in the middle of the screen. I felt the shadows needed some darkening and the overall image a contrast boost.

Click to enlarge

This screen shows the same before and after images with the alternate view of the Brightness Curve dialog. It’s easier to see the curve I applied.

The dialog shows the existing histogram on top and the new histogram on the bottom. I established two control points using the double headed arrows, one for the shadows and another for the highlights. I moved the bottom of the shadow arrow to the left and the highlight arrow to the right.

The new curve is superimposed on the histogram display. The image on the right is the result. It doesn’t take much to make big changes. As you can see, I moved the shadows just enough. I anchored the highlights and boosted them the tiniest bit. If I hadn’t anchored the highlights, the entire curve would have been pulled down.

The result is a steeper curve which increases contrast, deeper shadows and a wee boost to the highlights.

Click to enlarge

Here’s where I applied a bit of local contrast enhancement. The unsharp mask dialog shows Amount = 10% / Radius = 30 / Threshold = 0, very conservative settings. Some people use amounts of 20% or more and radii of 50, 60 or more. I use higher settings sometimes depending on the image.

Local Contrast Enhancement (LCE) can work magic on some images. I use it all the time now. Rather than try to explain how LCE works, here’s a link to a good tutorial on the subject.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/contrast-enhancement.shtml

The next few steps (final sharpening and size reduction for the web) were done using Gimp. The Gimp can’t handle 16 bit files so I converted and did a save as 8 bit (different file name) and opened the file in the Gimp. I sharpened this image using smart sharpening. I’ll get into different sharpening methods in another tutorial.

Think of this article as more introduction than full blown tutorial. Next time I’ll get into more details.

Read Full Post »

Monochrome Photography: Sisters

Over the past week I’ve sorted and filed the negatives from dozens of rolls of film. Most of the latest batch have been from color film. I already had a scan of the two sisters. Not satisfied, I dug out the negative for a better scan now that I have VueScan installed.

Click to enlarge

This image is better. The lady on the left is my mother, the baby sister. My late aunt Martie Ann is on the right. I took this candid portrait of the Sisters during a family get together over the holidays in 2003 with a Pentax Spotmatic and 50mm Takumar lens I had just won in an ebay auction. I’m pretty sure the lens was wide open (or close to it) for this hand held available light shot.

I used Kodak Porta 400BW, a black and white chromogenic (C-41 color process) film at 400 ISO box speed. I’m lucky that my shots were in reasonable focus because I discovered that I couldn’t get proper infinity focus. I took the spotty to the shop and they corrected the problems and gave it a good CLA in the bargain to bring it up to spec.

The built in meter was DOA but I expected that. Otherwise, the Spotmatic works as good as new. They built that camera like a tank. I remember reading an article with a title something like “Camera as a hockey puck” where the author talked about the ruggedness of the Pentax Spotmatic and the Nikon F. He said you could drop it on the floor, kick it around (like a hockey puck), then pick it up and it would keep on shooting.

I have a couple rolls of the latest Kodak B&W chromogenic film in my refrigerator. I’m anxious to try the new stuff. This film has an entirely different look from traditional silver B&W film. It’s not as sharp, but it’s virtually grainless and has a smoothness that makes it ideal for portraits.

Couple this film with the 50mm f/1.4 Tak and you have a superb combination for available light candid portraits. I bought a new body, a Bessaflex, about 5 or 6 years ago so I would have a modern body for my screw mount lenses. Aside from the built in stop down metering, the camera is 100% mechanical.

I use it instead of the Spotmatic because the Bessa’s viewfinder is much brighter and I can see the entire image while wearing my glasses. Shutter speed goes up to 1/2000 of a second and it’s lighter and smaller than the Spotty.

Drop on by The Monochrome Weekend, especially if you are a monochrome maniac. There’s lots links to some great monochrome photography. And some of the monochrome maniacs still use film like I do.

Read Full Post »

Photography: How Cropping Can Improve Your Images

Don’t ever be afraid to crop an image in your digital darkroom. Even a modest crop can be a big improvement in a photograph. And other times a more radical approach yields surprising results.

Night Reflections (click to enlarge)

This image is an uncropped scan of a 35mm negative. I really like this shot and I didn’t want to “ruin” it by cropping. I want a drum scan and an exhibition quality print made from this negative. This would force me into choosing a different print size.

The original is a 2:3 ratio and an 8×10 is a 4:5 ratio which means at least a modest crop. So I sat at my desk with a print this morning and played around with pieces of white paper, a ruler and a calculator.

As I played around with different cropping, I realized that a 4:5 crop for an 8×10 could be an improvement. I fired up my computer and cropped very carefully. Here’s the result. I had to drag myself kicking and screaming, but now that I’ve done the deed, I like this one better.

I knew I had to keep the window frame on the left, and as it turns out, the left side of the image is cleaner now. When I cropped from the right, I realized that I didn’t need the bright reflections at the end of the street and that maybe the image would be better without them. The eye is naturally drawn to bright spots and I don’t want the viewer’s eye to wander outside the image.

I like the 8×10 proportions now and don’t think I lost anything of the original. In fact, I think the image is stronger because I reinforced the central message. I’d call this a modest crop. I never touched the vertical, and only cropped enough horizontally to change the proportions to suit an 8×10.

I took a more radical approach here. A very tight crop gave me this nice portrait.

Here’s the original full scan of the 35mm negative. It hasn’t been spotted so you’ll see the signs of dust on the image. I grabbed this moment with my little point and shoot. By the way, the street scene above and this shot are from the same roll of film.

The full negative is a nice shot, but it’s much too cluttered. I suppose I should have (or could have) turned the camera when I made the photo but that can be awkward sometimes. In any case, this is what I had to work with. As you can see, I cropped in radically from the left and a little from the right. I ended up with about half the frame and a much better image.

I scanned this negative at 2820 ppi, my scanner’s highest resolution. I still have enough resolution to make an 8×10 print if I like. Don’t be afraid to experiment with cropping. I do it all the time because I’ll often see things I didn’t see when I made the shot in the first place.

The goal is the print. Post processing in the digital darkroom is an essential part of the creative process. Straight out of the camera is horse hockey. Experiment. Imagine your delight when you can transform that OK shot into a photo you want to hang on your wall.

Read Full Post »

Photography: Why I Still Use Film — Part V

I like my coffee black — no cream, no sugar, and certainly no fancy flavors that stand between me and the rich taste of a cup of good coffee. When I pull up a stool at my favorite diner and order coffee, I know exactly what I’ll get. I don’t need a fancy Starbucks menu.

Nikon F3HP w/ 50mm Nikkor-H lens

When I pick up my F3 I know what to expect. No wait for the camera to “boot up.” I simply switch on the built in meter (if it’s not already on), put my eye to the viewfinder and begin taking photographs. My left hand cradles the lens, my thumb and fingers select the aperture and focus. My right hand controls the shutter, shutter speed and film advance — all without ever taking my eye away from the viewfinder.

Press 1 for English… Press 2 to clear up a billing mess… Press 3 to inquire about your order… and on and on. When I use the telephone, I expect to speak to a human being thank you. Press the thingy wheel on the right to access menu 1… Press the dooflinger on the right while depressing tiny switch “A” with your fingernail to enable pseudo manual focus…

Please! When I pick up my camera, I want to make images. When I pick up my camera, I want it to disappear so I can concentrate on pictures. A good camera should be an extension of the photographer’s vision, an able assistant who knows when to shut up, do their job and stay out of the way.

It’s not rocket science. Set the camera so the proper amount of light hits the film (sensor), frame your subject, focus and press the shutter release. OK, so I’m lazy sometimes. I set my shutter speed dial to “A” (automatic), select the aperture I want (to control depth of field) and my F3 selects the appropriate shutter speed for me. All I need to do is frame, focus and shoot.

How about auto-focus? Manual focusing is easy enough, but I have another Nikon body (N8008s) that’s AF and I finally sprung for a nice new Nikon AF 35mm f2.0 lens. When I want auto-focus, I have it. If I don’t, I flip a simple switch and focus the lens manually. Piece of cake.

Did I mention that my F3 is tough enough to survive combat photography? And that the two tiny silver oxide batteries last a year or more and never need recharging? I can change focusing screens in seconds and if I want automatic film advance, I just attach my MD-4 motor drive. My F3 is the heart of a modular system that I tailor to suit my needs.

Nikon produced this top of the line, pro level camera for 20 years. I’ve had mine for almost 9 years and it never once let me down. I paid $290 for it on ebay. A few years after I bought it, I put it in the shop for a CLA (clean, lube and adjust) that cost me less than $100. No problems, I simply wanted assurance and got it. Everything was on spec and the repairman cleaned, lubed, adjusted and replaced all the light seals and mirror damping foam.

These days, Nikon and every other camera manufacturer come out with new & “improved” cameras every 18 months that “obsolete” the old models. Their top pro models are big, heavy, carry huge price tags and are so complex (with multiple, deep menu systems) that they can get in your way.

Digital cameras are finally catching up with film (almost). When I pick up my F3 loaded with black and white film, we work together as partners. We eliminate all the bloat and get down to the basics of making images, good B&W images. Even the finest, most expensive digital cameras on the planet can’t match the richness of black and white film.

And we do it simply and elegantly. Photography with a top of the line camera, fine optics and quality sensors (film) is pure joy and an extension of my vision — never an obstacle.

Read Full Post »