The Online Photographer

All There Is to See

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

                              —William Blake

There's one more little point that needs to be made with regard to those three mystery pictures I posted two days ago, and the brief explanations of what they are. Most of you will know it already, but it bears articulating once in a while.

It's this: As long as a photograph is an accurate and truthful report of the lens image, with the usual sensible and expected connection to the world of visual appearances (i.e., not faked, fabricated or fudged), and if it was made thoughtfully and perceptively by a human being who is trying to show something or simply see "how something looks photographed," then most photographs—many, let's say—not all, but many—will have facts behind them. They will have meaning of some sort. There'll be a story there.

This is sort of a long and careful way of saying they're "of " something.

It's very easy to look at photographs and simply dismiss their implications. Oh, a guy with sticks on his back, what's he doing, collecting firewood? Oh, a woman in a weird costume. Where are her legs? Oh, some guy in a clown suit. Wait, is that the McDonald's logo? And then...closure. As in, we close down, slam the door, move on. Nothing more to see here.

Nothing? Actually, there's usually something more to see, if only we could know what it is.

Hit man
I wish I could find this, but I can't, so I'll just describe it. I have (somewhere) an old B&W 8x10 glossy that came from a newspaper archive that was being sold off on eBay. It's a simple picture—there's a middle aged man in a trench coat and a fedora hat standing by the back of an old car that has its trunk lid open. In the background is a grassy field, and there's an overcast sky.

But because it was a newspaper photograph, though, it has its caption pasted to the back, some notations and so forth. I was able to look up the story. Amazingly, the whole story was online, in a very long "enthusiast" account that took me a while to read. Turned out that a mob boss had ordered a hit. The hit man had done the job, but in removing identifiers from the body (including, if I remember correctly, the guy's head and his fingertips), he had left the label inside the victim's overcoat. It was a custom-made coat, and the haberdasher had a record of who bought the coat. The police were then able to identify the victim, and from that, detectives were able to deduce the identity of the mob boss who had ordered the hit. They didn't have enough to convict the guy, but the incident brought down a lot of heat on him, which he resented. So, to get the point across to other hit men, the mob boss had ordered the original hit man to be murdered, and then had his body left in the trunk of his car—stark naked. The message was, when you kill somebody for me, you'd better remove anything from his clothing that might help identify him. The picture was of a detective standing next to the hit man's car, in the trunk of which the body (which had been removed by then) had been found.

So the picture doesn't have a lot of information in it, but there's actually a lot of significance behind it. Sometimes the meaning is not contained in the photograph, but only adjacent to it.

Beauty and mystery
At the other end of the spectrum you can have pictures that are so mundane there seems to be no possible reason to look into the meaning of what they show. For example, as I look out my window right now, I see a little circular garden bed. There's a spheroid bush about three feet high. Next to the bush is a boulder. In front of the bush and the boulder is a a wire rod with a red reflector at the top, and in back of the bush and the boulder is a young, medium-sized deciduous tree with no leaves. What can you possibly say about that? It does form a sort of "composition," but there's nothing specifically interesting about it. No real reason to look into it. Nobody who's sane would have time for such a thing anyway.

But of course there are still facts there. The tree and the bush are of particular species, and you could identify them. Somebody planted the bush, and you might be able to find out who and when. The lawn is used for parking, and it's possible that the bush, boulder, and reflector were placed there to protect the tree when it was younger and smaller.

Just because the facts, the meanings, are trivial doesn't mean they're not present.

Trivial content is sometimes purposely pursued by photographers. This is evident in the "rocks and trees" genre of subject matter. Rocks and trees are just...pretty, and they're pleasant to look at. We're not intended to think "what species of tree is that?" Or "what type of rock is that and what is its composition and origin?" Or "where was this taken?" You're supposed to look at its beauty and mystery, its detail or color or tone, and take from it a feeling, and you're supposed to accept it as if its meaning were trivial and not worth pursuing. As if the subject were generic. And that's OK. The tree stands for the idea of tree. The rock stands for the idea of rock. But...drawings and paintings can be generic, but honest and authentic photographs almost never really are. Even if the photographer wanted you to look at them as though they are.

A famous rocks-and-trees photographer (whose work really is beautiful and pleasant to look at, so he succeeds) once submitted an article to the magazine I edited that featured a picture of an odd sort of whirly, figured, ridged formation in rough flat rock. He titled it something similar to "Family Crest" if memory serves, and it did kinda resemble that. I didn't think twice about it. But then, three weeks later, I received a letter from a reader. He was a geologist, and felt put out by the fact that we didn't understand what we had showed a picture of. He spent two pages explaining what it was called, how it formed, where they're typically found, how rare they are, who studies them, etc., etc. It was all very interesting. And of course it had gone right over the heads of both the photographer and myself.

The doors of perception

It pays, I think, to be alive to the fact that every picture at least contains the germ of its story, its facts, its meaning. We don't always know what any of those things are, but that doesn't mean they're not there. That's all. What I'm saying is, don't accept complete closure; always leave the door cracked; never assume you're seeing all there is to see. Because you almost never are.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "And sometimes, the complications of even straight photographs take you all over the place. When I was a reporter for the St. Paul newspapers, a photographer was sent out to take a photo of a fairly inane event—perhaps a fender-bender. For some reason, there was a shoe lying near by, and in a kind of silent protest against the inanity of the assignment, he tossed the shoe in the photo, which added a kind of mystery to the thing. Then, thinking that this bullet was not entirely spent, he put the shoe in his car and took it back to the paper. Thereafter, photographers being hurried off on inane assignments (of almost any kind) would sometimes take the shoe with them and subtly insert it into a photo. It became known simply as The Shoe. If you have nothing better to do, it's mildly interesting to contemplate the meaning of The Shoe. Those photos were (some of them anyway) moved online, and if a super-AI sometime in the future begins scanning those photos and finds an identical shoe in many totally unrelated photos, I wonder what it will conclude?"

Speed: "Since you were unable to find the photograph that is subject of today’s TOP post, I asked Midjourney to create several based on your description."

Mike replies: From today, photography is dead!  —Mike "Paul D." Johnston

Terry Burnes: "We moved to our current house about 20 years ago and had it landscaped. When that was done I took some rather mundane photos to document the finished project. I recently came across those photos and was struck by how much things have changed. I'm glad I took those mundane photos and, though not intended to do so, they did in fact end up telling part of a story, about our life here and how it has evolved, a story that continues for now."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I love this post and the types of photographs that is speaks to. My favorite photographs are those that evolve over time because the story evolves. The location changes, the people age and all of the 'information' in the photograph evolves and changes in unpredictable ways. I remember Jay Maisel speaking of the 'information' in a photograph—I had never thought of it as that. In many ways it changed how I view and photograph scenes, trying to be more mindful of not just the visual elements of a scene, but what information is in those elements."

Old Photos Answers

To answer the questions from the previous post:

One: Yep, the man in the lower right is "Stick Man" from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, the 1971 record album that now has sold 37 million copies worldwide and includes "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven." The photo album was discovered by a researcher named Brian Edwards. The picture in the photo album is titled "A Wiltshire Thatcher" and is believed to be of a man called Lot Long. The photographer has been identified as one Ernest Howard Farmer. Edwards, the discoverer, called the local Wiltshire Museum about the find, and the Museum ended up buying the photo album for £420.

It's not the exact print from which the record album cover was made. That one was a hand-colored copy that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant found at an antiques shop in a town called Pangbourne. Over the years, whoever had the original that was used on the record cover lost track of it, so it no longer exists as far as anyone knows. Wonder how much that would have been worth on the collectibles market today? A lot of associated "rock history interest" there.

Personally, I was always bemused by that odd choice for a cover picture and never could figure out what it was supposed to mean.

Two: This is probably one of the more unusual author photos I've seen, although of course it probably wasn't taken as such. The woman is P.L. (Pamela) Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins books. She was a mysterious and interesting character, with many semi-aliases. Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia, and called Lyndon, she then became Pamela Lyndon Travers in England where she lived most of her life, and where she was Pamela to her friends...and yet she considered herself Irish. A friend said, "she always wanted to back into the limelight, but she wanted to be there." The picture shows her in 1924 as Titania in a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She lived to be 96, long enough to negotiate with the director of the musical, and she evidently had a lot of Mary Poppins in her own nature. Like Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne, she was a children's author who was a sensitive writer with a real feel for words.

Another odd thing I learned browsing around about this: Emily Blunt's children were much more drawn to Julie Andrews' depiction of Mary than to their own mother playing the part! She said so herself on a talk show.

Three: I'm afraid I thought this was much more obscure than it is. I haven't had a TV since 2014, and wasn't a big "television culture" person before that, so it had escaped my mind that Willard Scott was famous from NBC's Today Show, which I seldom if ever watched. I remembered Willard as a local news weatherman in D.C. from the time I lived there. I think I knew even then that he had been one of several performers who played Bozo the Clown, and that he was the creator of Ronald McDonald, the fast-food restaurant's ambassador in their marketing to kids.

Willard actually did me a small favor. My brother Scott and I encountered him one day at Wagshal's Delicatessen in Spring Valley shopping center on Massachusetts Avenue. Scott said something, and Willard kind of blew us off on the way out the door. Scott, who was witty and quick, might have said a quiet word about the unexpected treatment. When we got outside ourselves, Willard was waiting there, and he apologized to us. He explained that it was difficult being a local television personality because everyone in town knew who he was and wanted a few minutes with him, and "sometimes you just want to eat lunch." He said that sometimes he wished he could walk around anonymously like everyone else. He actually spent more time with us than he had to, almost as if in atonement for not being friendlier earlier. He said enough to let me imagine what it must be like to have every stranger know your face and name. Being introverted by nature (I enjoy socializing but have a limited tolerance for it), I decided right there and then that being famous was not for me. I like being able to walk about in the world anonymously.

A little lesson courtesy of a well-known personality whom everyone knew wherever he went.

That must have been before 1980, when Willard left the local affiliate for the Today Show. He replaced Bob Ryan, who replaced him! They switched places. In the mid-1980s, I introduced Bob at a lecture, so I met him too. I think Bob was more interested in meteorology and its challenges than he was in celebrity, so maybe the exchange of jobs was a good thing for both of them.

Guess I need to meet Al Roker next!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Old Pictures

Three mystery photos for you. No fair looking, and, if you already know the answers, please wait just a bit before commenting so others can guess first.

This is a spread from an old 19th century photo album called Reminiscences of a Visit to Shaftesbury, dated 1892. Anything look familiar?

Any idea who this mystery woman might be? Clue: she wasn't actually in show biz.

Finally, know who this guy is? Life points for creative answers.  :-)

Answers to come!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

JTK: "Gotta have a 'Whole Lotta Love' '4' one of the pics in the first spread. See what I did there? —JTK"

KeithB: "I am pretty sure I know who the author is since I was looking her up (Is it OK to say it's a her?) because we watched the 2013 biopic the other day. Why do we need to wait to post the name? You can just hold it in moderation for a bit. Anyway, it is Helen Lyndon Goff, and the picture is on her Wikipedia page."

David Comdico: "Maybe in one of those homes there is a stairway to heaven."

AlexV: "Regarding the old photo album, any pictures of stairways or black dogs?"

hugh crawford: "I had read about the first one a while ago. One question: Do kids today read the name of that band and think it’s some sort of an L.E.D. light up sign on a blimp?

"The second will probably pop in to my head any moment now.

"I had the weirdest experience one time in elevator at the RCA building. Stepped onto the elevator, and it was Willard Scott, except that I didn’t recognize him. I mean, who watches television in the morning anyway? But he was super 'on' and did the whole celebrity-expects-you-to-recognize-them thing which I of course interpret as they recognize me. So I’m having this crazy conversation trying to figure out who this manic very large person who seems to know me is. I don’t think he was dressed like that, but the affect was pretty much the same."

Søren Engelbrecht: "In the photo album spread, the bottom-right picture shows one of the founding members of Led Zeppelin. Amazing that some of them are still active musicians today  :-) ."

David Raboin: "A spoonful of sugar helps buy the stairway to McDonald's and tells you tomorrow's weather."

eBay Returns

[Is it safe to peek back out of the rabbit hole? That last post dang near killed me—took two days to write. I would have gotten it done yesterday, but yesterday was my birthday and I spent half the day on the phone! I talked to my friend-of-longest duration (this is how we avoid the word "oldest"—we're both writers) for two and a half hours. We've been friends since second grade, and that's been a minute. I got to talk to my son and a number of other relatives and friends as well. I still have other calls to return. So pleasant.

This one's just a toss-off, just in case it might be something useful for you to know. —Mike the Ed.]

-

While I wasn't looking, eBay has made returns a whole lot easier.

This is just a little aside for people who happen to be in the same situation I was. I used to sell a lot on eBay, and used it constantly, but not so much in recent...well, decades. However, recently I had to return an item I bought (a keyboard that looked like a great bargain but arrived broken, proving once again that you get what you pay for), and the process was almost—dare I say it—pleasant.

You don't even have to deal with the seller. You fill out a form and add some pictures, and they issue you a QR code that you take to the Post Office. The PO generates the label. Return shipping is free, and your refund, which includes the original shipping cost, is back in your account the same day! You have a generous deadline for getting the return shipped (March 8th in my case).

I have to admit it's pretty slick. I thought I was in for a big hassle having to return a $45 item, arguing with the seller and paying shipping costs both ways, making my refund a paltry small percentage of my out-of-pocket. But I got every cent I spent back. And no arguments.

Accumulations
I don't have a camera and gear collection, I only have a camera gear accumulation. But I'm going to be selling a lot of it off soon, including some personal treasures such as two mint Rolleiflex 6008AF's (with rebuilt batteries and a number of the coveted battery housings, which everyone who uses that series needs but which are mighty thin on the ground) and things like an original signed Arnold Newman print. I'll have to get to grips with eBay again. It's nice to know that while I wasn't paying attention, eBay has been evolving. I was pleasantly surprised. So I thought I'd pass along the news.

Well, it was news to me.

And now I'm off to the Post Office! But breakfast first.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Patrick Perez: "I hope the Newman print isn't either Stravinsky or Mondrian, otherwise I'll be in trouble."

Mike replies: Mondrian.

Yoshi Carroll: "I'd like to request a post or two about the Rolleiflex 6008AF. Based on looks it seems to compete with the Hasselblad 500 and Mamyia 645, but I've heard almost nothing about the 6008AF and I'd appreciate the Mike take on it."

Mike replies: I'll take that under advisement. I believe I reviewed it (or maybe the 6008) when it was current, but I don't know how to find that....

Jim Grey: "I love eBay's returns as a buyer, but not as a seller, as about one in 10 buyers of my stuff want returns for spurious reasons and I have to eat it."

Mike replies: See also Scott's comment in the full Comments section. I can see how this would be frustrating.

In the past, though, I had more trouble as a buyer than as a seller. For example, a seller in Japan sold me an "as new in box" lens that turned out to be fogged, and when I complained he responded that the fog was the only problem and that he had reduced the price slightly to compensate. Otherwise, he opined, the lens was perfect. Except that it was unusable. Later, I tried to get it repaired, and I learned that the fog was caused by the cement between two cemented elements, so it was unrepairable to boot. Total loss. I could go on, but it would only put me in a bad mood!

Open Mike: Do This With Your Hands (OT)

Question: Do you think it's weird that there's a whole category of keyboards marketed to gamers, as well as many aimed at software developers, coders, and other adepts and computer ninjas, but no category of keyboards marketed to writers? Serious question.

Sign o' the times, as Prince once sang.

I'm having a lot of anxiety about this keyboard situation. I've had a number of situations or experiences in my life when my settled habits and hard-won competencies got blown up for some reason, and I went off the rails and never got back on. The idea that I might never get comfortable typing again is probably irrational and untrue. But irrational fears make you fearful just like rational ones do.

Supine with a shotgun
Here's a brief rundown the main problems with typing posture on flat rectangular keyboards, of which the Apple Keyboard or any laptop keyboard are leading examples.

Starting position: stand or sit with your arms down and your elbows by your side. Raise your forearms till they're parallel with the floor and put your hands straight out, palms down.

Wrist extension: First, from that starting position, move your hands at the wrist till your fingers point upwards. Then flatten just your fingers. That's wrist extension. Wrist extension happens when your flat keyboard is above the level of where you're resting the heels of your hands. It also happens when you're angling your forearms up to reach your desktop. This is a perfectly comfortable movement for healthy hands, but if you work your fingers for hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades with your wrists fixed in an extended position, it becomes a recipe for RSI. It's one reason why your hands are supposed to "float" above the keyboard, with the heels of your hands not touching the desk. Of course few people do that. What many keyboards do instead is to provide little fold-out legs on the underside of the keyboard in the back, to angle the keyboard the wrong way! Because it makes the face of the keyboard and the legends on the keys easier to see. 

Hand pronation: In starting position again, with your elbows by your sides and your forearm extended parallel to the floor again, rotate your thumbs upward until your palms are again flat, but facing the ceiling. That's called supination, related to supine, which means lying on your back. T.S. Eliot wrote, In "The Fire Sermon":

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.

The poetic image is of a body lying on its back. Palms up, hand supination; palms down, hand pronation (relates the prone, the position of a soldier firing a rifle lying down; but not in the case of Edwin Throckmorton ("Ebby") Thatcher, who was so drunk when he was trying to shoot pigeons off the roof of his family's empty mansion that when he slipped on the thick wet grass and fell down, he found he could not get up again, so he commenced to firing shotgun blasts at the pigeons while lying supine on the grass. The neighbors called the police). Anyway. If you sit at a cleared table and place your elbows on the table and bring you hands together or nearly together on the table in front of you in the most natural and comfortable position, you'll find that your palms are not dead flat but angled upwards somewhat. When you have to keep them flat with your palms down, as you do when typing on a laptop keyboard, the ulnar bone and the radius bone of the forearm twist and pinch, and the problem is called pronation.

Ulnar angling: This is my term; typing folk rather lazily call it "ulnar deviation," which, strictly speaking, is a medical condition, a semi-permanent deformity caused, usually, by rheumatoid arthritis, not just a way of holding your hand or hands. (The more poetic description for the deformity is windblown hand.) From the starting position, still with your palms down and fingers straight, rotate your flat hands outward towards your pinkies until your fingers of each hand are pointing away from the other hand. Then bring them together in the middle. That angling of the wrist is what causes trouble. (If I had another person here a few photos could illustrate these positions in a jiffy, but the only other nearby being is Butters.)

Hunching: When you bring your wrists together in front of you, then look down, it tends to bring your shoulders forward and inward, curve your back forward, and crane your neck downwards. Sit in this posture persistently and it begins to transfer a significant amount of tension to your shoulders, back, and neck. Ever feel like you need a good shoulder and neck rub after you've been typing for a long time?

Fingertip impact: The last of the major RSI problems is fingertip impact. High-speed typists really pound away at the keyboard. Barbara Blackburn, born 1920, was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest typist, with an unofficial speed of 212 WPM on the Dvorak layout. (Keystroking records were removed from the Guinness Book from 1986 onwards.) Evidently it's not feasible to type with a light, delicate, diaphanous touch and still be a speed demon.

Solutions
And here are the ways "ergonomic" keyboards usually try to correct the above problems. The common way to ease ulnar angling is to split the keyboard, almost always along the T-G-B / Y-H-N line. This can either be done by placement on a single, fixed board, like the keyboard I've been using for 30 years, angling each bank of keys inward at the top and outward at the bottom. A custom becoming more common recently is to physically split the keyboard into two independent halves, making it possible to place and angle the keys in relation to your hands in whatever way feels most comfortable. Fascinatingly, I've noticed that some YouTubers, when trying split keyboards for the first time, will angle the halves the wrong way in order to reproduce the undesirable ulnar angling of their wrists that they've long been used to!

Wrist extension can be solved by devising a "wrist rest" for the heels of the hands to rest on that's level with the keys, or by manipulating the relationship of chair, desk, and keyboard until the fingers can rest on the keys with the hands in a relaxed position.

Pronation is solved either by moving the two halves of a physically split keyboard far apart, or by what's called tenting, which means propping up the halves with the inside edge higher than the outside edge, or some combination of these two things. Just keeping the keyboard in one piece prevents adequate tenting, and all the Microsoft-style "ergo" one-piece keyboards offer only a mild bump in the middle for a very low degree of tenting. 

A keyboard that is split, has integral wrist-rests, and is tented

Hunching is solved by moving the split halves of a keyboard back toward the body so that the shoulders open up and straighten, the spine can be held straight, and the arms can relax. It takes some getting used to, but it's extraordinary how comfortable it is.

As for fingertip impact, consider what TOP reader John Camp, AKA John Sandford, who has not one but many No. 1 New York Times bestsellers to his credit, said here the other day:

I estimate that I type roughly 400,000 words a year. But the thing is, I'm not trying to type 80 or 60 or 40 words per minute, or any other number, because I frequently pause to think, and reconfigure what I'm about to type, or to rework something I already typed, and I don't know how that would fit into an efficiency calculation. I think I'm efficient enough, and wouldn't get any better with any of the other keyboard styles, but what I really need is something that would keep my fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work.

Human beings love superlatives, and social media reveals a constant striving for extremes. Fastest biggest richest strongest best; idiotic GOAT arguments and "winners"and "losers" separated by hundredths of a second. But in writing (and perhaps even in typing in general) there's no real need to take things to extremes. Nothing much is wanted in most cases past the point of relaxed and accurate competency. Maybe this was not the case when a "draft" of a novel involved retyping the whole thing from start to finish; but now we make corrections, revisions, and emendations inline, thanks to the computer. And words look the same on the page regardless of whether you typed them quickly or slowly. The overall average speed of all typists is believed to be ~40 WPM. Many of the world's greatest authors wrote their works in longhand—some with a sharpened goose feather dipped in ink, and that can't be fast. And one can be a writer typing no faster than Archy the cockroach hopping around on the keys of Don Marquis' mechanical typewriter, the only kind they had in those days. That's probably why there are no keyboards made specifically for writers. (Although wouldn't it be a good marketing strategy?)

However, safety is something else. Apple could be leading the way here, but it chooses instead to contribute to the problem, leaving innovations in RSI prevention to small independent (and typically undercapitalized) companies like the pioneer Kinesis or the next-gen innovator ZSA. As many as 60% of people who type all day for their jobs will suffer RSI at some point in their lives (my right hand hurts right now). It is the number one cause of lost productivity in the white collar workplace, keeping workers out of commission for an average of 23 days per injury. Its more insidious forms, such as the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome, are frustratingly persistent and slow to heal.

So while moderate typing speed is usually enough, it's still of crucial importance to "keep [your] fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work," in John's words. It's a field in which not much progress has yet been made.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Joshua Rothman: "As a writer myself, I know exactly what you mean. I use the Keychron Q11 split keyboard. I think it has brown switches. I'm nowhere near as far down the rabbit hole as you, but I did have my own little keyboard adventure, and since landing on the Q11 my wrist pain has gone away—even my tennis elbow seems better!"

ASW: "When I was a kid my mom put me in piano lessons. I remember that after 10–15 minutes of playing (very poorly) my wrists and forearms would start to hurt. The hand placement never felt natural to me. I've never had a similar issue with typing (on a basic desktop or laptop keyboard). I think that my perfectionism might play a role. I rarely type more than a few sentences at a time before pausing to reconsider, and usually change or even delete the majority of what I just typed. It makes for horribly inefficient writing progress, but gives me plenty of rest, and so far has prevented any RSI issues despite spending lots of time at the computer most days.

"As far as the key pounding goes, my wife's typing (even through walls and doors) sounds like a high-speed jackhammer in action. I'm a pretty light typer, again because I spend far more time pondering than typing."

Ken James: "Hi Mike, Have not typed you in a long time.

"How high is your desktop? Standard desk height? I over the years have made several desks. I make the top surface be 24 inches give a take a bit. My current desk is 25. In the past I used plywood for the whole thing but for this last one I bought legs on Etsy and put 2x12's on top. I did a bunch of stuff to the timber to make it pretty but you don't have to. This might well solve all or most of the wrist problems. Might. I also find a trackpad to be much better than a mouse. I designed home office systems for 12 years or so, so have thought about this a bit."

Mike replies: I have a sit-stand (adjustable height) desk that's 25" off the floor in its lowest position, and that is indeed what I use with the keyboard in the illustration above—I'm happy to have an expert encourage it! The adjustable height from a standing position is great for experimenting.

Elliott's $11.5 Million Fixer-Upper

When I wrote about Elliott Erwitt's house for sale in the Hamptons this past week, someone said it would be a long commute to the City. Not really—because it's a trip you make only once a week, or less. Elliott's real commute was eight stories. And apparently he enjoyed the trip. His New York City apartment and studio are for sale as well. The three-bedroom apartment (with two rooms for staff) was "a stretch" when he purchased it for $75,000 in the 1960s; it's listed for $11.5 million now, and the agent is a bit sniffy about it, saying it's only in "estate condition," meaning, it hasn't been fixed up in a while and needs a little work. In addition to the purchase price, the condo fees etc. amount to another $11,428 per month. That all seems like a lot of money for a fixer-upper!

Eight floors down is his studio, which is also for sale. If you can get to the article in The World's Best Photography Magazine, there's a lovely shot of Elliott working in his studio. He apparently took it of himself, as it's credited to him. As someone who's always loved pictures of photographers—that's what I would have collected if I could have collected anything—I love that shot!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Time to Pay the Computer Tax

I need to get a new computer by mid-August. I wonder if anyone could give me advice on new Macs.

It's kind of funny that just the other day I was bragging about how I can do a deep dive on a subject and get a handle on it pretty quickly. Well, that has never included computers. I have no aptitude for computers. I realized that at Dartmouth, where the then-President, John Kemeny, a former research assistant for Albert Einstein and the inventor of the early computer language BASIC, made Dartmouth the first college or university in the country to institute universal student access to the college's mainframes. Realizing early that I had basically (pun intended) zero aptitude for computers, I decided I had better go into something that was satisfyingly hands-on, something visual, and mechanical, and multi-faceted, and that had something to do with art, something with a history and a literature—and that had nothing at all to do with computers. Such as, you know, photography.

My life is full of irony.

I plan to get a new Mini and a dock. The Studio would have much better ventilation, which has been a problem with my current computer. It would be nice to have an SD card slot on the front of my computer, but it's not worth hundreds of dollars just for that. The Studio still doesn't have enough ports for me. And it's much more expensive. Unless you think the M2 Max Studio is better choice for some reason you know about but I don't.

The thought just this moment occurred to me that it would be very interesting to compare the computing power of Dartmouth's mainframes in the basements and sub-basements of the Kiewit Computer Center—rumored to be 60th on the Defense Department's list of backups in 1976—to the computing power of an M2 Mac Mini. Just a hunch, but I might bet on the Mini.

Regarding the Mini, I'm comparing the current choices to a 2018 i5 Mini. Scroll down a little ways here, and you come to a performance chart with a 2018 i7 Mini (better than my 2018 i5 Mini) as a baseline. Do I need 16 GB of RAM? I hear that RAM goes a lot further now in Apple Silicon than it used to. Could a moderate-intensity user get by with 8 GB? I don't do anything intensive on my computer; I suppose moderate Photoshop use is the biggest drain. Although I do have a tendency to have a lot of things open at one time.

I figure the M2 is enough for me. I plan to boost the RAM to 16 GB and the internal storage to 1 TB.

Good choice? The Mini starts out cheap, but gets very expensive very fast. Interested in your opinion. Do bear in mind that, on this subject, I am a dolt. Thanks for any help!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Kirk: "Maybe just buy a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the newest M3 chip and be done with it. All in one package. Very, very high performance. Attach a monitor if you need to.... Nothing you are doing with Photoshop will require higher performance. I guarantee it. And you can easily take it on the road. Which you might find delightful. SXSW is coming up here in Austin...."

Richard Ripley: "Take a look at this article by Thom Hogan. I think he really has done a good job of putting all the different permutations into an easy to understand piece and I do TRUST his opinion. I have a Mac Studio and I think it’s great. It’s an M1 model with 4 TB of internal storage and 64 GB of RAM. Probably more Mac than I need, though it has been a rock solid computer, much better than my 2013 trash can Mac. Have a good time with your research!"

xfmj: "I don't know exactly about the 1976 Kiewit mainframe collection, but I strongly suspect you are right about it versus the Mac Mini. My former department chair, Ed Lazowska, liked to say that the computing power equivalent to a Furby toy is what got Apollo 11 to the moon. He also liked to claim that, if car technology had progressed like computers did, a modern car would be 'a fifth of an inch long, travel at 6 million MPH, sip a half cup of fuel to go coast to coast, and cost only $10.'"

Chris Kern: "Unless you expect to use specialized software that demands a lot of compute cycles, I suspect any of the current Apple desktops—or laptops, for that matter—will meet your needs. With respect to primary memory, remember that there is no option to upgrade memory with the new Apple architecture ('Apple Silicon'). My personal metric is to max out primary memory on a new Mac, but I don’t think Apple offers any configurations that are unable to exploit the performance characteristics of their central and graphics processors.

"I wouldn’t be concerned about overheating; the thermal properties of the current Apple architecture are excellent.

"Finally—and somewhat off-topic—I was a few years ahead of you at Dartmouth, and took a number of courses taught by John Kemeny, who was still in the math department in my era. He provided my introduction to computer programming. Kemeny was a brilliant lecturer and his own occasional off-topic remarks demonstrated that his interests were much broader than mathematics and computation. These included what I might describe as a philosophy of acronyms—and I can assure you he would have been aghast at your reference to the 'Basic' programming language. It’s BASIC, an acronym for 'Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code' and I heard Kemeny opine more than once that any acronym that isn’t formulated from a meaningful plain-language phrase is worthy of contempt. So in the future, all-caps please."

Mike replies: Fixed, thanks! Wah-hoo-wah.

gary bliss: "You will get loads of advice on Apple choices, but not from me. But I do have some experience in super-computing in the mid-1970s. Typically we would rate machines in that era in 'FLOPs' or single-precision floating point operations per second, using a linear algebra program called 'Linpack.' I was programming on a NASA-owned CDC STAR-100, rated at a sizzling 100 million FLOPs (1E8). It was used to optimized airfoil designs at NASA but also nuclear weapons' explosion sequences at Los Alamos, etc. I doubt your Dartmouth machine was faster. These days CPUs are not really where the action is for compute performance (at least flops), but GPUs are. The Apple M2's GPU is rated at 3.8 Teraflops (3.8E12). So Apple M2s are something like 40k times faster than your undergraduate machine...for compute-bound tasks...like video rendering or de-noising images...or designing tires (another classic compute-bound problem)."

psu: "With the M processors most of the heat issues just go away. The spookiest thing about my MacBook Pro is how cold it is in normal use. And even in heavy duty photo editing mode. Very few things normal people do with computers will make the computer get warm at all."

Mike replies: Thanks for that. Overheating has been a real problem with my current computer, probably my fault for asking it to do too much at once, keeping tons of stuff open. It's something I've been conditioned to worry about.

Fujifilm X100 VI Gets IBIS! Woo-Hoo!

Surely one of the landmark cameras of the whole digital era is the Fujifilm X100 series, which started in 2010 and just now reached its sixth, count 'em, sixth, iteration. It was a surprise smash hit, and propelled Fuji into its current role as a multifaceted camera manufacturer. The Fujifilm X100VI (Mark VI, that is) was just announced, and is available for pre-order. It's the king of compacts, the apotheosis of the point-and-shoot, the modern-day Barnack camera.

I'll assume you're passingly familiar with the X100 series. What's so different about the VI?

It's a major update, for two reasons. Starting with the most important new feature, the VI get IBIS (in-body image stabilization) for the first time in the model's now 131/2-year history. Fuji was late to the party with image stabilization, but now that they have it they're obviously spreading it around their lineup generously. The new IBIS claims six stops of improvement at the cost of only 1.5 ounces of extra weight—the camera can actually stand that, and it might actually make an improvement in hand-feel—and nothing in terms of added size.

If you want to modify the opposite extreme and make the lens slower in bright light, there's a built-in 4-stop ND filter for shooting wide apertures for better bokeh in bright light. I don't know when that arrived. Word on the street is that you can use both IBIS and the ND filter together, which might be especially useful for video.

You remember the tagline of Bill Hader's "Stefon" character on SNL, who reviewed the latest, hottest clubs? "This club has everything"?  Well, after five go-rounds of refining the original, the Mark VI has everything. Ghosts, banjos, Carl Paladino, a stuck-up kitten who won't sign autographs, furkels*. No, seriously: all the goodies of previous versions, including its Leica-inspired good looks, flip-up screen (the 3.0", 1.62m-dot LCD is a touchscreen), knob-and-dial controls including an aperture ring, a way to increase the weather resistance by adding two mysterious rings to the lens (I can't quite sort that out), and of course the famous and exclusive hybrid viewfinder that switches on demand from optical to electronic. Using the front switch that pays homage to the frameline lever on ancient Leicas. (Modern ones too, Jeff reminds us. But ancient ones too.)

X-Processor 5
The second big new thing is the sensor/processor. The Mark VI inherits Fuji's latest 40-megapixel sensor and processor from the X-H2. The plethora of pixels makes possible 1.4X and 2X digital crop settings at lower but still usable resolutions, resulting in equivalent focal lengths of ~50mm and 70mm. That's separate from the attachable optical converter lenses, available as accessories, that change the native 35mm-e lens to 50mm-e and 28mm-e.

AF is said to be "improved," and it probably is. In car magazines, every new model of virtually any sporty car claims to have a chassis that is "X% stiffer" than the last model. Some wag of a writer once factored in all the claimed improvements over time and noted that the latest car had to have a chassis that was something like 2,371% stiffer than the original—which might have been possible if the chassis originally had the stiffness of spaghetti or silly putty, or the new one was as stiff as a Formula One racecar. "Improved AF" is a bit like that. On the other hand, the original X100 did have pretty slow AF, and by the Mark V it had become significantly better and, moreover, no longer an annoyance, so it's good that they're continuing to improve it. The processor, like the 40-mp sensor, is Fuji's current best.

The X100VI also sports a new film simulation called Reala Ace. This kind of thing would normally not be of interest, mimicking, as it does, a gimmick, but the X100VI has twenty film simulations, and finding your favorites among them is actually a real part of the appeal of the little camera. Some the film simulations are very good, and, if my own experience is any guide, they can actually be surprisingly difficult to reproduce "manually" in Photoshop. No reason to scorn them. Fuji knows color.

The X100-series is a remarkable camera. It's been popular for going on 14 years, and with successive generations of humans, too—it's gotten an significant injection of popularity from attention on contemporary social media. Granted, it's not cheap at all at $1,600, but maybe it's actually creeping into Veblen-good territory, in which people prefer to pay more because of what the camera says about them and their values and their sense of style (and their wallets). It's a premium price; but it's a premium product.

Simplicity
It's not exactly the pathway I personally would have liked to see with the camera. I'd be in favor of lower price and not so much of everything. I mean, if I wanted a do-everything general-purpose camera with multiple focal lengths, I'd just get a Fuji X-T5 for pretty much the same price as this, along with a dessert-cart choice of Fujicrons starting with the 23mm. Granted, the conversion lenses for the X100VI are cheaper, but they're also not usable on any other camera.

The X100 series would be the perfect package in which to reach for a little Apple-like simplicity. (Although I sat in on a lecture at the Apple Store recently about how to use the iPhone 15 camera, and that has lost its Jobsian simplicity too. I can't even remember half the arcane things I learned how to do.) I've opined in the past that I'd like to see simplified, streamlined, easy-to-grok versions of existing full-featured cameras come on to the market, and if Fuji had a different vision for this camera it would be interesting to see what could be done with it. But that isn't the fashion, so, never mind. I guess Gen Z'ers need their video. But to add a note of gratitude to my tune here, videography functionality is probably why this little varmint got its IBIS, so, okay. Thanks for that.

Verdict
This looks to be easily the best and most capable iteration of this perennially popular little camera yet. If I were in the market, I'd get it just for the IBIS and let everything else fall where it may. If you have and love any of the five older versions, even the V, now would be the time to move up.

Mike

*That was the club called "Push," where club owner Gay Dunaway built a fantasy world that answers the question, "Nooow?"

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Stephan Cowdery: "It's hard to believe that there were camera lines without IBIS in 2024. Of all the improvements in cameras in the last 20 years, IBIS has to be, in terms of improving image quality (in non-tripod situations) the most significant."

Michael: "I have the X100V (Apparently I'm one of the lucky few), and it is such a joy to use. I love the tactile feedback of the controls, the wonderful film simulations, the OVF/EVF option, and the ability to accessorize it to your liking (I added a soft shutter release and thumb grip). The fixed focal length makes you think a lot more about composition and being a part of the process, which reignited my enjoyment of going out to take photos. You would be surprised how differently you look at the world and the hidden treasures you find to photograph when you are restricted to one focal length. When people talk about the camera you just always want to use, this is the camera they are talking about."

William Cook: "After reading your excellent post on the X100V in September [Wasn't it February? —Ed.] 2020, I wrote this comment: 'I have always throughly believed in this type camera and Fuji’s interpretation is near perfect...except for one thing (for me). And obviously, that ‘one thing,’ is only important to me and maybe a few others. Certainly not important to enough people for Fuji to entertain the idea of including it—image stabilization. Because of my older, less than steady hands, I need stabilization. My current larger camera doesn’t have it but my lenses do. As much as I would love to have the X100, I would need a tripod. Kinda defeats the carry everywhere ethos. But I still admire it.'

"I can’t believe they’ve included the one thing I’ve always wanted in this camera! I put my money where my mouth is and at five minutes after the embargo ended the other night, I had mine on order at B&H (through TOP’s link, of course!). Normally, whichever camera feature I truly desire, the universe conspires to ensure it’s NEVER offered. For once, providence has smiled upon me!"

Dogman: "Lovely camera, the X100. I'm still happy with my X100S. I'm sure the VI is 'better' in many ways but I love the 'S' too much to part with it. Or upgrade from it. But, yeah, the VI is a really lovely camera."

Arg: "If the X100 is, as you say, the king of compacts, then the Ricoh GR is the Lord Tyrion Lannister of compacts: no doubt flawed, but devilishly small, incomparably clever, and able to make one smile uncontrollably in its presence."

Charlie E: "The X100S pulled me into the Fuji X system back in 2014. It was a great camera aside from the very slow autofocus. £699 felt a lot at the time for a fixed lens camera, even if it did look pretty. I don't think I could justify £900 more on that sort of camera, even if it's pretty, has the great Fuji simulations, IBIS, etc. (inflation hasn't been 228% in the last 10 years, though it feels like it sometimes).

"The X100S did pull me into the X system though, and I traded up to an X-Pro2 which I still carry with me every day and I won't swap it until it breaks. Hopefully there will be a new version with IBIS at that point!"

House For Sale

Augh. This is very sad.

It's a house for sale.

It's right in the center of East Hampton, a village way out near the Eastern tip of Long Island. As you might know, the farther out you go on Long Island, the more exclusive and the more expensive the real estate gets. It must be beautiful out there—I've never been—but it's still accessible from New York City. My brother, who lived in NYC when he was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, said New York City was only really livable if you had a way to regularly get out of it.

Have you ever had an art-crush? Some artist/art combination you just kinda love without actually knowing knowing the artist or what kind of person he/she is? I think I kinda had an art-crush on Elliott Erwitt. I love the guy. To me he was both a master photographer and a great artist and a hero, but also a down-to-earth iconoclast who disliked BS and brooked no fools and took a dim view of puttin' on airs. He called photographs "snaps." He was a ninja as a snapper. Very talented eye. And fearless. He manifestly followed David Vestal's terse advice to photographers: "Do your work." I love paging through his books.

It's his house. An estate sale. Elliott died last November.

There was an open house at 1:00 p.m. yesterday. If you look through the real estate photos, you'll see the inside of his home studio, which is a treat...but sad. I guess I was affected by his death because I always wanted to meet him. Although I was kinda scared of that, too—it's a perilous business, meeting your heroes. You never know if they'll be jerks, or maybe just a jerk to you, and that can be hard if it's someone you admire. From what I hear, Elliott was gruff but personable, and funny, and relatable, but I don't know. Anyway, I always carried the idea around in my mind that I was going to meet him one day. Then it was too late for that. Now a stranger gets his house. It's the normal state of affairs; he was 95, and nobody can complain about that. And I have art-crushes on other people who are gone, like Guy de Maupassant and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Sorry. I'm maundering. The art is still there. Leaving a rich posterity is one advantage of success in the arts. Guess I'm sad about his passing because of that art-crush all those years. I'll go page through some of his snaps in my copy of Snaps. There is always something there to see with new eyes.

Mike
(Hat tip to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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John: "He probably bought it way before the Hamptons were the place to network for NYC’s power brokers. It’s sad to read that the listing basically suggests to tear the house down and built something new, but that’s the way to go in those areas. Sickening really."

Jeff Hartge: "Long Island...I grew up on the east end of Long Island (1970s and '80s). I left in the early '90s. During most of the time I lived on Long Island, the expensive parts were the parts closest to the ocean (southern shore of LI). Long Island is split in two (North Fork and South Fork) out at the east end by the Great Peconic Bay. The South Fork was basically 'The Hamptons.' That is where everyone with money lived. I lived on the North Fork. It was actually relatively cheap. It was potato farms and 'Long Island Duckling' farms. At the end of the time I was there, the vineyards started taking over the land on the North Fork. Further, the exurban living concept started really taking flight in the late '90s and people started to move out there and commute to the more urbanized west end of the island (Long Island is 120 miles long—long commutes if they worked in NYC!).

"Today, I can barely afford to visit. There exists no possibility of living there. My parents sold their Long Island home for $240k in 1999 (they bought the home for about $60k in 1973). A few years later (mid-2000s), that same home was $750k. It has since been rebuilt (not much larger though) and is well over $1 million!"

Steve Rosenblum: "From his obituary in The New York Times: 'In the 1970s, Mr. Erwitt was among the first to benefit from the art market’s interest in contemporary photographs as an investment. Brokers bought prints in bulk for tax shelters. "That windfall bought my house in East Hampton," he said.'"

Kirk: "My photographer friend Will Van Overbeek and I played host to Elliott Erwitt when he came in to town to give a presentation to the Austin Photo Society about ten years ago. We picked him up at his downtown hotel, the historic Driskill Hotel, and drove him to the Humanities Research Center on the UT campus, where we all ran into photographer Arthur Meyerson. The curators at the HRC were negotiating with Mr. Erwitt to acquire his archive. They eventually did. Then, since no one had made other plans, Will and I took him to our favorite 'dive' Mexican Restaurant over on the east side of town, El Azteca. He enjoyed the atmosphere and bought a handful of the classic Mexican calendars featuring half-naked female Aztec princess warriors. He thought they were nicely campy. We stopped at Progress Coffee to chill and people watch for a while. Then we all decided to go to the LBJ museum, where Mr. Erwitt delighted in photographing an LBJ animatronic. He also made some wry remarks about the replica of the Oval Office...having been to the real one more than a few times on assignment.

"I helped him set up his Mac laptop for his speech at the Blanton Museum auditorium, and then Will and I sat back in the packed audience and enjoyed the evening. Mr. Erwitt was 84 at the time and still very spry and totally brilliant. Quiet but brilliant. For the entire time we were with him, right up until his lecture, he wore his personalized (by Leica) Leica M7 rangefinder equipped with a 50mm Summicron over his shoulder. His signature engraved on the top plate. A wonderful, old-world-style gentleman who seemed to enjoy every second of his trip to Austin. And I became a permanent Elliott Erwitt fanboy. It was such an unexpected privilege to spend a day with one of my all-time photographic heroes. I'd love to buy his house but I'd hate to live in New York. Too cold too often.

"At 84 he never stopped moving. He was a 'high energy' photographer. And he was completely attentive to everything around him; always looking for the next photo."

Open Mike: Demystification and the Six Stages of Acquisition

In 2021 (probably as a COVID distraction) I decided to start wearing a watch again. But I needed a watch. Just one. I bought, um, eight.

Last year, I decided I could make myself happier if I learned to enjoy all the everyday things I dislike doing. High on the list was to learn how to enjoy shaving. (I had always disliked shaving.) I looked into all kinds of shaving methods and decided to try "wet" shaving, the term of art for shaving with single old-fashioned double- and single-edged razor blades. Once I settled on that, I needed a razor. Again, just one. Instead, I bought a drawer full of supplies and...well, seven razors, eventually.

Sensing a trend?

Well, now I've bought three new computer keyboards. Please don't throw popcorn at me. I feel bad enough.

But it's not a new hobby, and, although I am currently mimicking an obsessed person, I'm not obsessed. I've been obs...preoccupied with keyboards of late only because I have to be. Because—speaking of late—my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard also lately became late, as in late of this world. I've owned 12–15 of them over the past 30 years, meaning I've worn out 11–14. I'm on my last one. My old warhorse got discontinued in 2019, Amazon tells me I bought this one in 2021 for $59, and the replacement is much cheaper in every way except price. New old stock old ones go for $400 and will run out soon. I was never all that attached to the 4000, but I like the replacement less. So I decided to jump ship. A weighty decision when you consider that tapping on a keyboard all day is pretty much what I do.

Here are the stages I go through when I get on one of these jags:

1. Investigate
2. Choose
3. Challenge
4. Settle
5. Optimize...
6. ...And then put it all in the rearview mirror!

Unfortunately, when you acquire something that's going to be part of your life going forward, you usually have to spend some money. The reason is that it costs money to demystify the topic. And the best way to demystify the topic is to try different things firsthand as you learn about the subject. You read stuff, research, you ask your friends for advice, diddle about at stores, and try things out, doing your best to get a handle on things. They begin to sort out in your mind. Along the way, mysterious preferences emerge that seem to make sense but are actually based on some mysterious combination of sunshine, endorphins, and how much sleep you got. (That's another way of saying, sometimes the brain just gloms on to things for no good reason except that something appeals to us. Or we think it's going to.)

To really decide, you need experience. Hands-on. Sometimes you need to own the dang thing a while.

Here's a rundown of those stages:

Investigate: I write, so I've gotten very good at quickly getting the gist of things. When I get interested in something, I don't just dive in, I dive in like an Ama pearl diver off the coast of Japan. Deep, and fast, and unburdened. I can get the general lay of the land in a new hobby or pursuit remarkably quickly. It was only a couple of weeks before I knew all I needed to about watches; a few weeks before I could write a detailed primer article about the wet shaving world (I wrote it, but I spared you, you're welcome); and I'm getting there with the mechanical keyboard hobby. I already know what POM, ABS, PBT, WoB, 40–60–75–80–100, red–green-brown–white, MX, layers, superkeys, VIA, Gateron, Kailh, Topre, Das Alpha Zulu, Gamakay, Filco, WASD, Colemak-DH, Workman, Carpalx, Capewell, buckling switch, KAM, XDA, DSA, group buy, shine-through, double-shot, and barebones all mean, among much else. (It's a complicated little hobby, I'll just say that. My own Wiki is on little scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes all over my desk.) 

I once asked my friend O.G. the OG* why he has 45 view cameras in his house. He said he felt like he wanted to demystify view cameras; he wanted to know the whole territory for himself, see them, use them, know them. It's become an important concept for me. When we're choosing an implement/accessory of any sort (camera, DE razor, keyboard, bicycle, telescope, pool table, you name yours) it's no use being a virgin. You can't shop and choose just from reading reviews and hearing advice. You don't really know how you're going to feel about something until you try it.

Choose: You can get lost in the investigation stage. Some people never come back from it; they decide to become ongoing experts in their little corner of the Universe of Schtuff, and before you know it you know everything there is to know about Dwarf Fortress or vacuum tubes for amplifiers or carbon-fiber bicycle frames, or whatever. However, if your concentration is on the doing rather than the equipment, then the investigation stage needs to come to an end (or at least enter long pauses) and a choice must needs be made. For example, after trying five DE razors I alighted on a revamped 1940s razor called a Tech that Gillette used to sell to the working class for a few pennies, the better to sell blades. I didn't really "decide"; I just kept coming back to it over and over again. I liked it.

Challenge: Next, you decide if there is anything else out there that vies with your choice, something that is along the same lines but might be better, and you get one of those and compare it to your choice and see if it is better. So once I realized that I liked the Tech, I put it up against a few other mild nonadjustable razors, a modern Tech-type copy, and also investigated the history of the Tech and tried different vintages of them. I also had to put an expensive razor up against it to see if I was missing something by choosing something so inherently cheap. In some cases a challenger will replace the early choice, in other cases the choice will withstand the challenges. We're still being rational at this stage, by the way.

Settle: This step is important. Nothing's perfect. If you chase perfection in every parameter you'll get lost in La-La Land and put yourself in a perpetual state of wistful wanting. Like, in keyboards, people who leave QWERTY behind for an alternative layout (Colemak-DH appeals to me, see above about sunshine endorphins and sleep) but then can't quit futzing with further key position changes and modifiers, alert for every bigram that has a hint of awkwardness to it. (A downside of on-the-fly re-mappable keyboards.) I've used so many cameras over the years that there is always something that I can say "but I wish it had..." about. Remember a principle I talked about long ago: the closer two alternatives are to each other, the more fanatically humans will argue about which is best and the more minutely they will compare them, but the less it matters which choice you actually make. I once wrote the following on the now-ancient CompuServe Photography Forum:

OP: "Should I use a Nikon or a Canon?"
Me: "Yes."

There comes a point when you "let the tail go with the hide" as the old buffalo hunters used to say, and just deal with your choice as it exists.

Optimize: Once you've chosen and settled, optimize. Makes sure you got a good sample, that everything's set up as you want it, all the little accessories it needs are with it, that it's been customized and decorated or kitted out. In this phase you're putting the finishing touches on. Not too important, except it makes it feel like it's yours.

Put it in the rearview mirror: I once opined that the most important thing about choosing a camera is "stopping shopping." I had a long discussion with friends the other night about obsessions, and we decided that an "obsession" in the non-pathological sense is something self-destructive that you can't help doing. With photography, the situation is particularly dire, because I have witnessed many people over the years become permanently lost to the process of shopping; they never stop, and the shopping itself becomes their hobby. As long as you are also out using the equipment on a regular basis, I see nothing wrong with that, but shopping for cameras and lenses and related gear, if you never stop, is not photography—it's a parallel hobby related to photography. For years, I had a parallel hobby investigating lenses. It's only when it becomes excessively unbalanced that it segues into obsession: the audiophile with the $4,000 (or $40,000) turntable who only owns a few test records, the collector who has 40 (or 400) film Leicas but has never really gotten to grips with learning how to handle one.

I'm not obsessed with keyboards. I don't intended to get into it as a hobby. I just need one, is all. For the record, I bought eight watches, but I have two favorites and those are the only ones I wear. Or need. I doubt I'll ever buy any more watches. I like those two, and I alternate between them, and I'm good with that. And I bought seven DE razors and tried many of the various aspects of that hobby (because that's what it is), but I've settled on my razor, my blade, my way of lubricating my face—everything I personally need from beginning to end. It took me only a matter of two or three months to go through the six stages of acquisition, from (admittedly intense) investigation to putting behind me everything except what I personally needed. Heck, I had to buy four(!) pool tables before I got that business over and done with. I'm a Gold Crown I guy for life, now.

My new/used Dygma Raise, tented

And I'll do the same thing with keyboards. A keyboard called the Dygma Raise arrived yesterday, and oh, my God—it is the most comfortable keystroking device of any kind I have ever laid my hands on. Over the top ergonomic. In my mind I have already jumped to the Optimization stage, although I still have one more challenger, the Kinesis Edge RGB, to compare it to. The Keychron Q11, seductive as it was, is all packed up and ready to go back to Amazon.

I would love to write reviews of a few of these keyboards. Just the ergonomics, though. I forgot to mention that my six stages of acquisition are based on what a reviewer naturally does: you have to come up to speed quickly, learn enough so that you can write a report, and then resign yourself to moving on to the next thing. But I'll spare you the keyboard reviews, too.

There's a handicap that keeps me from expertise in this case: I can't type. A guy who can't ski can't review skis. Which brings up the other wrinkle in the keyboard journey: it involves a long training stage. What do they call it? Oh yeah, "long learning curve." Even people who are already fast touch-typists on standard keyboards can need at least a short acclimation period to split keyboards, new layouts, and keyboards with minimal keysets that work with layers and superkeys. (A layer is just what it sounds like: when you hold a regular key down, the functions of all the other keys automatically remap to different characters. A superkey is a key that types different characters according to the code you use when tapping the key: hold the hyphen key down and it types an m-dash, which is usually option+shift+hyphen. When you rapidly type two spaces on your phone when texting and a period appears, that's basically a superkey.) This, for instance, is a complete keyboard: 

This Corne LP is a complete keyboard, on which you type any character available on a 101-key keyboard and more. But it takes a little getting used to.

For example, those nine keys at the right could remap to numbers for a numpad, with the right-most thumb key as the zero/zed.

So it could be that the journey is just beginning. I have some training to go through. If I fail, my fallback will be to simply go find another Microsoft-style "ergo" keyboard similar to my old 4000. Since the 4000 was the OG, there are lots and lots of clones out there, from the Mac-centric Macally (can you see the flaw in that one? I see it right away) to the Logitech K860. That won't get me any further along than I am now, but the transition period will be short. 

I dig this Dygma, though. The Leica of keyboards.

Hope you enjoy this day, the first football-free Sunday of the Winter!

Mike

*"original gangster," if you don't know the term. Example of an OG: in the masterful TV series "The Wire" (which I have argued elsewhere is the Great American Novel come 'round at last), Melvin Williams, the guy who played the community activist "The Deacon," was himself a reformed drug dealer on whose earlier life the character of Avon Barksdale, the boss of the drug dealers early in the series, played by Wood Harris, was partly based. Literally the OG.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Richard G.: "Mike, now that you've gone down the rabbit hole and settled on a shaving razor, have you settled on a blade? I looked at one website and there appear to be several dozen for sale. This could keep you occupied for the rest of your life. LOL"

Mike replies: You laugh, but...there are guys who review blades, and guys who compile charts on blades, and lists of where blades are manufactured, and guys who have stockpiled thousands of blades—easy to do since they're sold by the hundred.

I use Kai blades from Japan. The reason is that there was a fascinating study with an electron microscope at the Engineering School at MIT which showed that the way that blades "dull" is that little tiny pieces break off at the edges of striations caused by the grinding tool. If you imagine the cross-section, the edges of most blades are very pointed; the edge of a Kai blade has a more blunted profile. So they're not quite as sharp at first, but they last longer and are more consistent presumably because they don't chip. Also, the Kai blades are just a tiny bit wider than standard (give me time and I could get you the numbers), which makes them a little more aggressive in the Tech, which is a mild razor, and gives it a little more blade feel. A good match, to my taste. "YMMV," an initialism very widely used on the shaving fora.

Albert Smith: "Re '...and we decided that an obsession is something self-destructive that you can't help doing.' Yep. The COVID lockdown caused me to break my frugal way of life and click 'add to cart' repeatedly and redundantly in the world of watches, partially inspired by the thread on this forum that discussed why watches were still valid in this day and age. I just ordered a new field watch this morning after receiving two Fleiger pilot watches last week that I haven't worn for more than a hour. Life was simpler when I was broke."

Speed: "My rule for cameras is to always have one that is better than I—so that any defects in my photographs are the result of my ignorance and/or incompetence. As I approach competence and my favorite camera manufacturer releases a new model, I buy a new camera. Usually untouched and unseen. A little adventure is good. And cars...I can't remember ever driving a new model before buying one. Sometimes I'm surprised but so far, never disappointed."

John Krumm: "I have a mild case of what you have, the sniffles, perhaps, not the chills and cough and fever dreams. I settle quickly. My incentive to do so comes from really hating to sell stuff, and feeling guilty wasting family money on too many watches or razors to try out. So I have an expensive (for me) iWatch I only use for a bedside alarm now, the wonderful Casio Oceanus you wrote about (my wife reads your site for gift ideas and surprised me with it) and a less expensive solar Citizen that sits ignored now. I dislike the process of selling individual camera items so much that I happily lose about 50% of their value by boxing everything up I don't want and sending it to KEH."

Mike replies: I wish I could do that with my whole house. Actually that is the part of the whole process that I am by far the worst at. The extra six watches and six razors are of course still hanging around. I need to sell them but....

Melanie: "Your post is freakishly relatable, right down to shaving devices—at least, until the reality of cut legs quickly set me straight. (However, I'm happy to have never fallen down the rabbit hole to keyboard Wonderland.) The information collection Investigate stage is really the funnest part, and presumably replaces earlier hunter/gatherer functions for humans living in the 21st century.

"In any given week, if I don't have something to obsessively research, then I'm not as well armed with tools to hold off a mental health crisis. Hitting on a new obsession is (I expect) like winning at pokies. Sometimes I even walk away from it without losing any money!"

Mike replies:  :-)  Made me smile.

However sometimes I wonder whether having something to obsessively research is the mental health crisis in my case. I get like a dachshund chasing a badger. I have to keep telling myself, no, if it's something you need and you stop shopping once you settle, you're still okay, if tenuously so. So as soon as I start obsessively researching guitars (I can't play a lick) and climbing equipment (I'm scared of heights) and private jets (I'm lower middle class in a good year) then you can lock me up in Ward No.6. (Chekhov reference, in return for your Alice reference.)

The Intrepid Compact: Taking 1979 By Storm

Speaking of enlargers, as we were when last we spoke, take a look at this fantastic little thing:

The Intrepid Compact enlarger head, control unit, and carriers

What is it? It's the Intrepid Compact LED 35mm and medium-format enlarger head and timer/controller, available in B&W multigrade and color (sorry, colour, that should be, as it's made in Great Britain (sorry, the UK)). It bolts to any standard copy stand (or any enlarger base and column that can be converted to a copy stand, I assume). You can even use a tripod if you have a good level*. You have to provide those bits, and your own M39 screwmount enlarger lens. For a little bonus, the timer actually has a B&W safelight built right into it.

Light emitting diodes
LEDs have proven to be a highly useful technology, replacing filament lamps in everything from vehicle headlights to keychain flashlights. But one thing for which they are absolutely perfect is enlarger heads. They're light as can be, consistent, adjustable in brightness and color (perfect!), feature instant-on and -off (perfecter!) and they hardly generate any heat at all and thus don't need to be ventilated (ideal). 

I could go on and on and on about all the ways enlarger makers contrived to address the inherent problems and supply these qualities in their products over the span of many decades, from using cold-cathode sources to Durst's innovation of putting the light bulb away from the negative stage and using an angled mirror to shine light down on the negative. (Some very early enlargers used the sun as a light source, and I kid you not. And you thought it was frustrating waiting for the clouds when your camera's on the tripod, the scene composed and ready to go?) As already mentioned, for B&W as well as for color, the dichroic-style light-mixing box was the best solution that evolved.

Two of the team members in the Intrepid workshop

...But LEDs are even better. Over-the-top better. Solutions through history just coped with all the difficulties; LEDs remove all the difficulties. Blitz 'em. Blow 'em away.

In the 1950s and '60s, although it's not often thought of in these terms, having one's own basement darkroom was a status symbol among other things. Cameras were clever and beautiful little mechanisms in a world where such things were not so common as they are now, and—think about it—having space in one's abode for what Nick Hartmann called "the room-sized accessory" meant that you had a basement at your disposal, which meant that you owned your own home, which in those days not everyone did and yet everyone aspired to do. The darkroom was a pleasant diversion in an era when video games were still only found in arcades (Pong, a very primitive one, debuted in the arcades in 1972). The darkroom hobby gained steam throughout the post-WWII years and peaked in 1979, when, by very rough industry estimate, there were 500,000 darkrooms across America and, ever so briefly, the circulation of the most popular darkroom magazine in America, Paul Sheptoe's Darkroom Photography, of which I am an ex-Contributing Editor, crested above 100,000, the first and only time that ever happened.

Let me just tell ya somethin': if the Intrepid Compact had come out in 1979, it would have taken the photography hobby by storm. It would have been the Mazda Miata of enlargers. It would have been as futuristic as the 3D printers the team at Intrepid use to make parts.

But the end was nigh
Unfortunately for the hobby, the handwriting on the wall was already beginning to appear by 1979. Steve Sasson was already tinkering with the self-contained digital cameras he had invented four years earlier at Eastman Kodak. By the 'aughts and the early 2010s, most of those basement darkrooms had been dismantled or transformed little by little into storage rooms; most of the manufacturers had ceased production (Beseler and DeVere soldier on); and the darkroom magazines had all shuttered their operations. So in 1979 the hobby had only <30 years left. Despite a few holdouts!

Intrepid amongst 'em. You go, guys. Analog is a niche now, but it will always mean fun for a few. Reader Josh R. (thanks, Josh) told me about the Intrepid Compact, and even offered to send me his so I could review it. Alas, I had to tell him that I lack the rest of the room-sized accessory, which would of course be necessary for the test.

My time in the darkroom (1980–2000) is done, much as I loved it. I do own a house, but I'd have to share the fieldstone-walled basement with the mice, the spiders, the damp, the odor (odour), and all the little radons whizzing about. But if any film-camera aficionados amongst you Millennials and Gen Z'ers want to print your own B&W (there's no reason to develop and print your own color IMO, except of course if you want to), this might very well be the killer app for a neat and efficient little darkroom** c. 2024.

And it's not even expensive. Check it out...just for fun.

Mike

P.S. And this concludes "enlarger week." Fortnight?

*Although I'm going to suggest that unless you have a very good tripod, and access to a machinist's level, I think this might frustrate you. Darkroom setup has a frustration threshold—you can cope with a certain amount of difficulties and seat-o'-the-pants solutions to problems, but once you surpass the threshold, you'll just defeat yourself. No need to be overly careful about this. But the frustration threshold is a pretty distinct line, so, if things aren't going well, be alert to the fact that you might have crossed it.

**Be sure to pay attention to ventilation. Often an afterthought, but essential, not optional.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Jack Mac: "I love this posting. My peak darkroom moment was 1993 when I bought a house just because it had a fantastic darkroom. Sadly, I only found time to use it a few times. But like a classic car or classic camera, I didn’t need to use it, it was just pleasurable that I finally had one. I endorse your comment that amateur darkrooms are for B&W not color. And I strongly advise not to drink and develop. After a few beers, I once tried to develop B&W 120 film accidentally using color development chemicals. As you know, the bleach used in color development eliminates the silver in B&W film, so it’s the equivalent of mistakenly formatting your SD card before you download the photos."

Kodachromeguy: "Re 'The darkroom was a pleasant diversion': That was also the era when the 'man of the house' built electronic kits, such as the excellent ones from Heathkit. Audio fans still covet the Dynaco tube amplifiers. This economic model depended on one member of the family being able to support the family with one paycheck. The lady did the June Cleaver thing with running the house and cooking. The guy came home from his job, had a martini, ate supper, and disappeared into his darkroom or electronics shop. Another time; another America."

Mike replies: True dat. June works too now. And I saw on the news the other night that Americans work 10% longer each day than they did in 1979...you know, back when they were talking about the 7-hour workday and the 4-day work week.

REMEDIAL TUESDAY: Comments I Missed!

After a few months of being good—I was making a real effort—I got behind on Comments again in recent weeks. The problem with getting behind is that when I finally do get the Featured Comments up, people don't go back to revisit those posts, and so the comments get lost.

I'm not going to stop trying to stay current, but, to remedy this predicament, below are quite a few comments that I missed during this last SNAFU. My apologies to all the comment writers for depriving them of the opportunity to have their comment appear in a timely fashion.

Please note that these are just the comments I would have featured. There are also more new comments under the respective posts as of today. Especially under "What Is the Best Enlarger?"

I think all the past comments are now posted. Not saying the grooming of the blog is as good as it would have been if I had done it properly, as we went along, but it's good enough now that at least I can move on. It all but paralyzes me when I get too far behind; I can't work on the comments because I have to write a new post, and I can't write a new post because I have to work on the comments. I find it overwhelming.

And I really do apologize for getting behind and interrupting the conversations you all contributed. I will continue to try to do better.

#  =  #  =  #

On "Aptitude (Old-Dog-New-Trick)":

Sean: "Mike said, 'Why do something for which you have little aptitude?' For the sheer enjoyment of it? Dancing is a prime example; singing is another. I’ve only ever had fun playing tennis, but I'm rubbish, and I'm OK with that."

Joseph Reid: "Interesting aptitude test experience. In ninth grade (I'm only a few years younger than you), I faced something similar. No recollection of the results except—also 'forester.' Which made zero sense to me then and now. Typing is another matter—parental insistence on taking typing in ninth grade. The most useful class I took in high school."

Calvin Amari: "How about providing some insight on things you do miraculously well? I always wanted to ask you how come I’ve never seen a single typo on TOP. The question is not one about technical typing, of course, it’s about precision-tooled self-editing and actually seeing what is on the page (or, more difficult, on the screen) as opposed to what’s in your head about what you intended."

Alan Whiting: "Mike, I remember what must be the same set of aptitude tests. It seemed like almost everyone got the 'forester' recommendation. I lived in Washington State at the time, which might be relevant. I also recall tests of clerical ability, just copying things accurately. Even in today's cut-and-paste world, that skill has some use. I tutor kids for the standardized college entrance tests, and far more often than I would have expected, they do the problem right but mark the wrong answer."

Richard G: "I don’t necessarily believe in lack of manual dexterity. Certainly the owner of the hands shouldn’t. You can master typing, and of course you are right about looking, already an advance over dogmatic theory. Think of that M4 you mastered. And the pool table.

"And forget being too old. The brain retains remarkable plasticity to any age. Practise slowly, like the piano teachers insist: that allows the achievement of correct execution and the removal of the affective component of fear of a mistake, disappointment and finally disaffection. Slow deliberate execution will gradually imprint the feeling of the correct positions in your brain, with the efferent—motor—execution inevitably following. So no luck needed."

ASW: "When I was 13 or 14, my school got a computer program that purported to assess your skills and talents, plug that information into proprietary algorithms, and suggest careers you would might enjoy or be good at. Although I enjoyed school and rarely made trouble, I didn't understand how early teenage me could possibly know what I wanted to do (aside: several 13-year intervals later I still don't know), so I treated the entire process like a joke and picked answers that seemed funny to me. Other students were getting output like doctor, engineer, carpenter, farmer...my result was wastewater treatment plant operator. Somewhat embarrassed, I asked if I could try again, only this time I thought carefully and deeply about each response. My result was...wastewater treatment plant operator. I am not, nor do I want to be, a wastewater treatment plant operator. "

Mel: "Mike, Everyone I know with my kind of aptitude got the 'forester' as a result as well. I think it's a default answer for those of us who don't fit the accountant criteria..."

On "The Secret Darkroom of Walter Mitty":

Bob Johnston (no relation, and the person whose comment I was responding to): "Wow, I was surprised by that Mike. Your idea of printing from a good neg first is brilliant. So that is exactly what I will do for my grandchildren. I am going to clear out the darkroom ASAP."

Gary Nylander: "I have enjoyed reading your posts about darkrooms and this one in particular is very good. I think that's a great idea to show people how a darkroom works. I have always had a darkroom of sorts for decades, mostly to process film which I scan. But now I'm setting up my darkroom to make contact prints from my large format negatives. I don't need any enlarger, just a few 8x10 trays. So thank you, Mike!"

Luke: "Rereading Walter Mitty, it occured to me what the mandated low-speed noise my electric car makes should sound like: pocketa-pocketa-pocketa...."

Stefan Kassel: "First comment ever: I have been wondering for years why on earth you are so reluctant to do B&W darkroom printing again! You are among the most experienced and knowledgeable people in this field, don't dare argue against that. I got to know and cherish your column in Black and White Photography magazine before today's analog explorer kids were even born.

"Only recently I managed to gather a group of people from sixteen to sixty here in my town of Tübingen, Germany, and we found a place to gather and do all things darkroom together—it's become my cherished evening of the week. And I got to learn quite some new tricks as well! Analog darkroom used to be a lonely place for me and the people that shared this hobby were always older than me and just as self-indulged; this has changed in a most pleasant way!"

Jordi P: "I am one of those Millennials, and after a few years hanging out at the camera club darkroom have been given the keys and became the person of contact for onboarding. Once a month, there is a show the darkroom session open to the public. My time printing comes and goes as I feel, but it's a pivotal reason of why doing B&W film. The 'Film is slower and conscious' might be a cliché but I do shoot film for print, and thus a few 120 rolls are already a body of work, and I assigned the thought and planned shooting to film. Second, your word about having good negatives. Despite being a born in the '90s as a Millennial, I just have always shot film alongside digital. Never did sensitomentry, but I found good negs following the manufacturers' datasheets does wonders. Other people at the photo club want to do a lot of experimental processes; I stick to the basics. However, I see more of the young ones just scanning, and few stick to the darkroom...I should schedule a session."

On "Open Mike: My Dumb Young Self":

Keith Cartmell: "I tell people that the best class I took in high school was typing. (Actually best class period.) My mom made me do it, and what she told me was, 'It will be full of girls.' I've always been grateful to her for that, even if there was one other guy was in the class, and I ended up sitting next to him. Sigh. Not her fault. There was a time when companies sent people out for training on XL and Word. Those courses went on their resumes. What a waste. About then I was doing lots of software training. I would hand out papers that gave their user name and password, and watching my students type their names would tell me everything I needed to know about how my day would go. Sending them to typing school would have been a far better investment. People say that teaching 'reading, riting, and rithamtic' was good enough for them, and should be good enough for kids now. Bah! Typing (or keyboarding) should be taught in about grade 3 or 4, maybe sooner. Plus logical fallacy recognition."

Speed: "A million years ago my father told me that I should take typing in high school...which I did. I was the only boy (that's what we were called back then) in the class, which subjected me to ridicule from some members of the male gender. I can't remember the Krebs Citric Acid Cycle (and don't need to), but I type a lot. Every day. Thanks, Dad."

Nigli: "This is timely, as I just bought a new keyboard, and my old one is no longer made. I have an anecdote and a comment. Firstly, a former employer, who was an actual princess and was CEO of her and a family business, told me her father told her to learn to type, 'because sometimes you will need to write things you don't want your secretary to see.' Secondly, I feel your pain. Please feel mine: I write regularly in three languages, and every one has a different keyboard layout."

Rick Popham: "My senior year in high school I had space for a couple of elective courses. I thought 'Business Typing' might be fun. I’d been hunting and pecking on my father's old (even then) Royal portable that he got from some other Marine during the war. For the class we used IBM Selectrics, which I thought were amazing, and the teacher was first rate. It was one of the most useful courses from high school and it saved my ass in college. That Royal portable is still stashed around here somewhere, silently challenging me to hit the key hard enough to make an impression, but not too useful for emails these days."

Kye Wood: "WHY I LEARNED TO TOUCH TYPE: I was in Grade 9 (I was 14) and I learned to touch type for one reason—because I knew the typing class was full of girls. I was shy. But I was also smart  :-) . THE LATER BENEFITS: As a software developer, all else being equal, the faster you type, the more $ you're worth. It's literally that direct a correlation. THE UNINTENDED BENEFITS: Flow. Touch typing removes the process of conversion from thought—to characters on a page. You just think it—and it magically appears in front of you. LEARN IT MIKE. Imagine having your fingers be like magical stenographers who can read your mind? You'll be showing a great kindness to future Mike. Who'll benefit from this until his last day."

Chris Kern: "When I was 14, my mother handed me a cardboard cutout with a life-size image of a typewriter keyboard, and told me that if I would use it to learn to touch-type she would buy me a new typewriter. Until that, I had been using two fingers to punch the keys on the rickety Underwood portable typewriter she had used in college during the 1930s, and prying the strikers apart when, inevitably and quite frequently, two of them jammed together. Practicing typing on a flat, unmoving surface seemed like a rather goofy idea to me at first, but after a while I realized it was an excellent technique for learning to rapidly find the position of each of the letters because, unlike on the Underwood, I could simply tap one and move on to the next. Short story short, it actually only took a few weeks for me to demonstrate to my parents that I could touch the keys with high accuracy without looking down at them. I selected what in the 1960s seemed like a sleek, modernistic typewriter—a considerable upgrade for my attic bedroom—and got many years (and thousands of pages) of use out of it before I ultimately moved on to a computer keyboard."

On "What Was the Best Enlarger?":

Tony Bennett: "Durst Laborator L138s."

Gary Mortensen: "Mike, I enjoyed your article about the 'Best Enlarger Ever Made' and am in general agreement with you. My LPL 4550 XL was a joy to use and still resides in its box in my garage, waiting (in vain) to be set up once again. My experience is a little different than yours, however. For me the 4x5 LPL was the finest 35mm enlarger I ever used (second place was a Focomat 1C). Initially, I wasn’t getting absolute film flatness with the regular sandwich type negative carrier, and tried the 4x5 glass carrier, expecting a dusty mess. To my surprise, dust really wasn’t a particular problem and the negative flatness was absolute. I could easily print out to the very edges of the negative (and beyond) and, once I laser aligned the planes of the negative, lens, and easel, film grain was rendered crisply out to the corners, always! My lens of choice for 35mm was the EL-Nikkor 63mm ƒ/2.8, an oddball focal length that I thought was superb for my purpose. I used it at ƒ/5.6 almost exclusively. Also, my enlarger was wall mounted: nothing wiggled. We differ on the preferred light source, also. I had the VCCE module for a while, but never really liked working with it; mainly because the exposure times were quite lengthy for 35mm. So, I went back to using the Dichroic Color Module for my VC papers, and found that process of using it to be simple and straightforward. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll do darkroom work again, but it’s pleasurable to reminisce about working with that beautiful machine!"

Mike replies: That was another reason to use the 670 model: it had a brighter light. The 4x5 models were perfect for 4x5 and pretty good for 6x6, but not enough light got to the little 35mm rectangle.

Jon Porter: "I agree with your assessment. The best of the three enlargers I had between 1971 and 2013 was the Saunders/LPL 670 VCCE. I traded in my Beseler 6x7 enlarger for it in 1998. Having built-in variable printing filters made printing easier and more consistent. I lost my darkroom when I moved, but the sale of the enlarger, easels and enlarging lenses helped to recoup a good percentage of the money I invested in my darkroom over the years."

Jim Wolf: "I still have one of the LPL 4x5 enlargers in my darkroom, this one equipped with a split grade head. I use it occasionally, but my regular enlarger for 35mm is a V35 Leitz, also with a split grade head. Just got back into a regular darkroom schedule, developing a backlog of HP5+. Once that's done, the enlargers will be fired up and the printing will begin."

Steve Renwick: "Mike, just so's you know.... Back in 2019, you bird-dogged a few LPL enlargers, complete with magic Rodenstock lens, at some overstock company in Brooklyn. There were nine available. I put down my credit card number immediately and one of them graces my darkroom. Delightful piece of machinery. Thank you."

Mike replies: That's what I have, one of those!

Mike Kukulski: "Spent four hours today in the darkroom on my Saunders 4500II working on prints from two 4x5 negatives. I got the enlarger after probably reading your stuff on it in the past. I bought it with the color module, and initially printed B&W with that, but have since obtained the VCCE module. We won’t discuss costs….

"It is a great enlarger, and is always teaching me more about this dying craft. My only concern is the long term availability of the bulbs for the thing, may have to eventually spend too much money for a LED cold head for it. I justify the expense, time, and effort as the pursuit of a hobby—I enjoy the process and its standing apart from the ubiquity of the digital photographic world. Cheers!"

Mike replies: The bulbs are just standard slide-projector bulbs, also used for many other purposes. I can't give you the exact details offhand, but if you look at the one you have and get a model or type number, you should be able to find some spares relatively easily. The weak point on your enlarger is actually the styrofoam in the light-mixing chamber. It has ideal qualities for its purpose, but I've been told it might yellow over time. If you notice you are starting to have to use more magenta filtration in prints you think should require less, that might be the cause.

Mark B: "As you said, I’m in a minority here, and I love this series on enlargers. My humble Omega B-22 does the job for me, but I can at least drool over the fancier enlargers here."

Rob de Loe: "I built a full blast darkroom in my basement in the late 1990s. On the wet side, I had a huge professional sink rescued from a university lab, and an archival print washer built from a pattern I found somewhere. On the dry side I had an Omega D5 XL that was so tall I had to leave a hole in the ceiling tiles for the column. [Be thankful that's all you had to do. I knew several people who cut holes in the floor of the next story up to accommodate the enlarger column! —MJ] I had an Ilford cold light head—both purchased from a camera store in Ottawa that got them in a junk sale from the National Film Board of Canada. I also had an enormous Seal drymount press, and all the trimmings. Hand processing 4x5 sheet film in a tray was almost Zen-like....

"I had a lot of fun and did a lot of work there, but then a daughter came along and disappearing into the basement for half a day was no longer a thing I could easily do. Eventually I stopped using it and started storing junk in it. And eventually that made me so sad that I ripped it out some time around 2008. At that point, I was almost unable to even give everything away. All the gear was heading for the landfill, when at the last minute a kid from the university said he'd take it. I hope it's still in use.

"I came back to film a couple times since then, but never with a full darkroom. It was changing bags and the laundry sink—plus scanning the film. Now I'm fully digital and will never go back, but I still remember the smell of the chemistry, and the rhythms of the work, with fondness."

On "Open Mike: Surprising Facts":

David Lee: "Nice fact about Buzz Aldrin’s mother. We had him in the cockpit with us in a short trip when I was flying 727’s. His wife came to the cockpit on the stopover and asked the captain if he would invite her husband to join us for the next sector. Captain said yes, and when Buzz showed up we almost peed our pants! We had bad weather and were hit by lightning during the approach. He just took a quick look at my approach chart and at the instruments and was totally cool. He signed my logbook and also gave us all a signed card with his photo. "

#  =  #  =  #

It took me eight solid hours of work today to untangle all the messed-up comment moderation from the past two weeks. The more behind I get, the more complicated that work is. I didn't do it perfectly, either. With all that hanging over my head, I just couldn't work on new posts. The way I have this blog set up, I really, truly need to keep current. The punishment for getting  behind and letting things get messed up is severe.

As I said above, please note that there are also more new comments under the respective posts as of today. Especially the "What Is the Best Enlarger?" post, which probably now has close to 50 new comments under it, in addition to those above.

And I really do apologize for getting behind and interrupting the conversations you contributed. I will continue to do my best to do better.

Cheers on Remedial Tuesday,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Luke: "Here's proof of my darkroom experience: I misread Mr. Bennett's comment about the Durst Laborator, and saw 'Dust Laboratory.' I thought, 'that must be what I had.'"

Mike's on Vacation (Blog Note)

Pardon the interruption! Since I haven't been keeping up very well for several days, I'm just going to do like I've done eight or ten times before when one of these FONKU* kernel panics happens, and give in and take a vacation. I'm feeling fine, in fact never better, but all the same I need a little R&R. It's been a hard Fall, followed by big changes. I plan to do a little reading, cook some soup, get on the treadmill, continue practicing touch-typing, and take the TOP jalopy in to be repaired. On Thursday I get my first cardiac checkup since I started running on battery power. I can't wait. The news has all been good, except when it's been great.

TOP will return on Friday morning. That'll give me a nice break, and I'll come back rejuvenated and refreshed. Again, pardon the CLOSED sign! One thing I'm going to do is take the camera for a walk and scout some new pictures. Spring is right around the corner.

All is well, and I hope it is with you too.

Mike, Head Dogsbody of Creative, Editorial, and Secretarial Services

*Fear of not keeping up. The more behind I get, the more it interferes with work. That usually means it's time for a hard reset.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Two Interesting Keyboard Videos (OT)

No post today. (Well, except this one, and it doesn't count.) It's Super Bowl Sunday in the USA.

I am waist deep in keyboard shopping anyway. You think shopping for photo gear is hard? It's dead simple and straightforward compared to keyboard-land. Good Lard, as the Irish say. I think I have almost decided on the Kinesis Freestyle Pro, but not quite to the point of pulling that proverbial trigger.

I almost bought a Keychron Q10 or V10 Alice, because the layout is very close to my old Microsoft, but at the last second I realized I was only looking at it in two dimensions! The Microsoft has very slight tenting—only ~5°, but that little bit appears to be crucial. ("Tenting," as you might guess from the word, is raising the middle of the keyboard so your palms aren't flat, but angle a little bit towards vertical.) The Keychron is dead flat. Oops. Back to shopping.

Here are two of the most interesting videos I've found yet. The first one explains QWERTY and how it got that way:

The story of QWERTY is fascinating and a little horrifying! To think the whole world has been following that thoughtless plan for more than a century. I can't believe I've never heard of a Hill Climbing Algorithm before. Explains the U.S. Constitution, too!James's history of keyboards is a very satisfying.

Here's an interesting thing I learned in video about computer optimization of keys: you could make the QWERTY keyboard a whopping 13% more efficient just by exchanging the "J" and the "T." [UPDATE: actually he said J and E. —Ed.]

And the second one is brief tour of what are coming to be called "Next Gen keyboards":

If you haven't been keeping up, this one will seem futuristic. Change is certainly afoot.

That's enough of this. Something different mañana. Go Brock!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Bryan William Jones: "A good friend of mine just published Shift Happens, a two-volume love letter to the history of keyboards. Here's the book's site."

Mike replies: Completely sold out, which is perfect for that topic. Seems like most things in the keyboard world are sold out as a usual condition, only occasionally and intermittently becoming available again.

Grant: "Hey Mike Tohnsjon. You are righj. I Jyped jhis commenj jhirjeen percenj fasjer!"

Mike replies: Showing how ridiculously fastidious I am, I actually corrected your comment. You misspelled "jhirjeen" as "jirjeen."

John Camp: "I think the extra efficiency you'd get with the Dvorak keyboard or any of the others is mostly illusory, and would most apply to people who are typists—that is, professional typers of words. I estimate that I type roughly 400,000 words a year. But the thing is, I'm not trying to type 80 or 60 or 40 words per minute, or any other number, because I frequently pause to think, and reconfigure what I'm about to type, or to rework something I already typed, and I don't know how that would fit into an efficiency calculation. I think I'm efficient enough, and wouldn't get any better with any of the other keyboard styles, but what I really need is something that would keep my fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work. For example, if a Dvorak board made my typing 27% more efficient (a dubious claim; read the Wikipedia article,) that doesn't mean that if I type 1,000 words averaging 5.5 letters each, I'd have to type fewer letters. I still have to type 5,500 letters on either keyboard. That's why I mess around with different keyboards—not to reduce the amount of word done, but to reduce the repetitive stress, which some of these other styles might do. I hope."

Mike replies: Fascinating points, and apropos. The task of writing ≠ the task of typing. I note that Next Gen (layered, minimal key count, ortholinear, etc.) keyboards are mostly reviewed by coders (and a few gamers), who have very different needs than writers do. Coders' income, as I understand it, is directly tied to how fast they can type; also, they type all day long, and they seem to be mental ninjas on keyboards, such that they can readily learn alternative layouts (Colemak, Workman, Dvorak) and moveable keystrokes and on and on. I think if I switched to a keyboard on which seldom-used characters were relegated to an invisible (non-legended) function layer, the rest of my life wouldn't be long enough for me to get comfortable with it. A ninja I am not.

I wonder the same thing about the pacing of the work. I used to say that I sound very articulate when I write but that's because no one sees me staring at the ceiling for ten seconds trying to think of the right word. Or going over what I already wrote obsessively to polish every little phrase, hunting for those elusive little ambiguities that scurry around like mice. (A book which might interest you: William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, a favorite of a mercurial English professor I had at Reed College.) I also remember something I read once, which is that H&P typing methods tend to be less susceptible to RSI than touch-typing. However, my brain is getting worse as I get older, and my coordination is suffering incrementally more as time goes by. I would say that what I'm looking for is the ability to type reliably and thoughtlessly. (At present it looks like it's going to be a long road.) Kye Wood put it best:

"THE UNINTENDED BENEFITS: Flow. Touch typing removes the process of conversion from thought—to characters on a page. You just think it—and it magically appears in front of you."

That's what I'd like.

As far as your goal of reducing repetitive stress, you might look into the Glove80, which is the current darling of the keyboard community and appears to be the Kinesis Advantage 2 that we both have, but done better. But personally I think the key for me, pardon the pun, will be a split keyboard that offers tenting. Moving the halves apart and angling them for optimum comfort, and then un-pronating the wrist at least a little, seems like it will do the trick for RSI. And it can be done without changing the standard layout or stagger. You do need to get your arms at the right angle, which might require adjusting chair or desk.

The keyboard I'm most interested in is the Dygma Raise. But unfortunately Dygma is currently in a nine-month desert in which they can't deliver product (the last-gen v. 1.2 is sold out and the v. 2 doesn't ship till October). Such an egregious business blunder doesn't portend well for the survival of the company in the long term, but the keyboard itself looks great. It's mostly a standard horizontally-staggered QWERTY with additional thumb keys added, built-in wrist rests that are cleanable and replaceable, and robust tenting (an add-on to the v. 1.2 and built in on the v. 2). It also has the other features I personally want for no good reason, like shine-through legends, hot-swappable switches, and PBT keycaps.

In the meantime I've ordered a Keychron Q11 (gets here tomorrow) and a set of the brand-new Gamakay Mercury switches (check out that bokeh! I helped create a monster). I'll experiment with that and see if I can figure out what a true split keyboard will do for me.

nivivar: "If you haven't purchased a keyboard yet, I highly recommend one of the Kinesis split keyboards. You can adjust the angles to your liking, making them as extreme or gentle as you would like. This would allow you to slowly adjust to using a split keyboard. There are the Freestyle2 for PC or Mac, Freestyle2 Pro, and Freestyle Edge RGB. I have the Edge RGB. I don't really use the RGB part or the customizable programming, but I do like to have a white backlight sometimes like a laptop keyboard. Lastly, you also get an option with the keyboards of selecting the key mechanisms, so if you like quieter keys or the clicky keys, you get to choose which."

Mike replies: The Edge RGB was a finalist for me, and I wonder if I might have made a mistake in not choosing it. Two turnoffs for me are that the switches are not swappable—I'm sensitive to noise and I'm usually listening to music as I work, so if I get stuck with noise I don't care for I need a way out—and I was turned off by the way Kinesis overcharges so blatantly for the tenting kits, which should really be included in the price. I mean, the Freestyle2 Pro already costs $169, and then they want an extra $53 for the few bits of plastic in the tenting kit. Feels...predatory.

As I say, though, these might not have been very good reasons for passing over the Edge RGB, which I probably would like.

Aptitude (Old-Dog-New-Trick Update)

Briefly: I've been practicing touch-typing for the past two days. I am rediscovering that I am amazingly clumsy. I actually was tested for aptitudes when I was 16, and one of the things I scored lowest in was "manual dexterity." I had been a model-builder before that (1920s and '30s cars were my favorite, but tanks and airplanes too—my best friend Mark and I used to build models together in his basement, complaining about the music his little sister was playing in the next room over), and that made the light go on—ah, so that's why I have so much trouble with so many things when I was modeling. I promptly gave up model making. Why do something for which you have little aptitude? It makes more sense to do things you're good at.

It probably explains why the model N-gauge train layout I was making had one little tiny area that was beautifully finished with scenery and buildings, and the rest was plain plywood for the next four years, till we moved.

Plus, I have a weird brain. I learn visually. When I just have touch to go on, I'm pretty lost. In a way that feels disconcertingly permanent. Two days of typing seven letters and I apparently still don't know where the confounded "R" is. It's very stressful. If I just look down, my speed all but doubles. It actually might make more sense to me to look while learning and then gradually allow myself to stop looking. That goes against that standard advice. But it's what I did with my current method, and I barely look at all.

Anyway, I'll update you in a few months. But wish me luck; I need it. You'll know when I switch over to touch-typing all the time because the posts will get super-short for a while.

(By the way, the three-day program of aptitude tests, which cost a lot of money at the time, ended with three recommendations for me as far as a future career was concerned: writer, photographer, or forester. Two out of three ain't bad, eh?)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Nick: "I have never taken such an in-depth aptitude test, but I'm sure that my manual dexterity score would cause the person scoring the test to look on the back of the rubric sheet to see if it included negative numbers. Every single career test I ever took, though, pointed me toward 'scientist' or 'mathematician,' though they would occasionally drop in the odd 'auto mechanic' and the like (indicating the absence of the manual dexterity test...). As little credit as I give such tests, I've been a professional scientist for a quarter of a century and I have a degree in math as well. Of course, I knew I wanted to be a scientist since I was three years old (scientist parent + 'space and dinosaurs are cool!' —> adult chemist who still kinda wishes he had studied paleontology or astronomy), so I definitely cannot promise that my thumb wasn't on the scale when I was taking them."

Mike replies: I always wondered about that "thumb on the scale." I was very into the outdoors as a kid, camping, hiking, Boy Scouts, horseback riding, pack trips, wilderness Summer camp, etc., and I wonder if I skewed the results of the test to allow them to come up with "forester." Curiously, I chose Dartmouth partially because of all the outdoors activities, went on a fantastic week-long initiation trip as a freshman, loved it, then never went camping again. I never have been able to explain that, to myself or anyone else.

By the way I took Paleontology in eighth grade and also loved that. One of the best courses I ever took at any level, from one of the best teachers, Elizabeth (Beth) Sieckman. (I hope I spelled that right.) Mrs. Sieckman also taught me how to write, by assigning a paper every single day, grading them on a 1–10 scale, and being famously resistant to giving out 10s.

The Secret Darkroom of Walter Mitty

I really want to thank reader Bob Johnston, no relation. His suggestion in a comment the other day was a EUREKA! moment for me. He said of his moribund darkroom, "But I do want to show it to my grandchildren one day."

Bright lightbulb went off above my pumpkin head.

That is what I would do if I were to set up a darkroom in the future! Not just print old pictures—hold demonstrations for school classes and any other groups that cared to schedule a visit. Don't just do darkroom; show darkroom. That makes the most sense for the future. I would love it, and I'll bet it would be popular. I've been happily creating imaginary plans in my head the past two days. I bet I could make it a highly entertaining hour.

The two best days
The two most exciting and popular days when I taught photography to high school kids were 1.) the day I brought my view camera to school and let the kids get under the dark cloth and look at each other through it, and 2.) the first day in the darkroom when they made their first print and got to watch it come up in the developer. My view camera had a fresnel lens on the ground glass, so the view was bright and beautiful. On view camera day, there were always a lot of ooohs and aaahs, lots of "that's so cool!" and "me next! Me next!" and "why is it upside down?" The students loved it. And it let me explain a lot of things while their interest was piqued and the experience was new and fresh.

When it came to getting into the darkroom, most teachers tended to start with, well, drudgery. Of which there was a lot. Exposing film, then developing it, then drying and cutting and sleeving, then contact sheets, and finally, at long last, after everything else, printing. Even then, test strips first. And how can they judge a test strip if they don't even know what to look for yet?

I turned it around. I figured I would get the kids interested before anything else happened to get in the way—you know, first impressions and all that. So I made a bunch of "perfect" negatives. An attractive landscape scene, full range, well exposed for a Grade 2 contrast, with one negative in the middle of an otherwise clear eight-inch strip. The very first day of class, first we looked at the negative on the light box. Then we went right into the darkroom. I had them load those negatives in the carrier, adjust the enlarger for size, put the paper in the easel, expose for a predetermined time, and then run the paper through the chemicals on their own (ooohs and aaahs again, and "that's so cool!"). I figured we could get to all the little details (developing the film, test strips, contrast adjustment, etc., etc.) later. The first thing I wanted to hit them with was the magic of bringing up the latent image in the developer, and seeing a little negative turn into a big positive! "Big positive" figuratively as well as literally.  :-)  The print itself made a great little souvenir of the day for them.

Many of them lost interest in darkroom work later in the semester, because for a lot of people it's as exciting as doing laundry or cleaning out the hall closet. But there were always a couple of kids who caught fire and advanced from there.

I also had a later didactic purpose in mind—to demonstrate how easy it is to make a great-looking print when you have a well-exposed and properly developed negative. This came from my observation, teaching Summer and adult education classes, that certain people get very obsessive about making "the perfect print" when they don't have anything within a hundred miles of a perfect negative. I remember one guy in particular. The obvious advice for those people was to just learn to make better negatives; but a few of them wouldn't accept that. They had read too many accounts of "hero" photographers like W. Eugene Smith laboring exhaustively over prints, making print after print after print and trying all sorts of techniques until a masterpiece was born. They thought that's what good printing was.

However, as my father used to say, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t.

The guy who made the light go on for me, and who I'm thankful to have encountered, was the worst printer I ever had in any class ever. An adult man in a continuing ed class. No instinct for craft whatsoever. He had an absolutely miserable negative which for some unfathomable reason he was attached to like a mother bear loves her cubs. It was a terrible picture, technically an abject failure, and he worked on that damn thing day after day. The print evolved from bad to worse as he lost all objectivity. But he thought he was imitating Gene Smith. I soon gave up on giving him advice—it was like trying to penetrate a sheet of quarter-inch steel with a BB gun. Presently I all but ordered him to move on, but that he would not do. A veritable photo-101 Bartleby. Days after I had abandoned him for lost, he came to me with a little problem—how do you apply bleach to the print? He'd gotten hold of some kind of bleach intended for lightening areas of a print, but it came in granular form, and he had neglected to dissolve it into a solution before he began. Using a damp paintbrush, he was attempting to apply the grains of bleach to his print, and was making even more of a mess than the print had been previously, if such a thing were possible.

He was a gift, that guy! He was the father of my nice idea of having the high school kids make prints from prepared "perfect" negatives on the first trip into the darkroom. I owe him a debt of gratitude.

What's old is new to the young
So that's what I'd do with a darkroom in the future if I ever set one up again. How many Millennials, let alone younger generations, have ever looked through a view camera or watched an image magically emerge in the developer tray? I would bet anybody who has never seen it would probably be interested in how it used to work, even if they never set foot in a darkroom again in their lives. Nine-tenths of the things we do for the experience are things we'll never do again. I mean, I hooked a sailfish in the Tongue of the Ocean once.

This is no doubt just a fantasy, but hey, fantasies are important to me. Some of my greatest achievements were accomplished in fantasy! I've been the best tennis player in the world, and you should hear me play air guitar. Don't knock it. (Everyone should just read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." It's only a few paragraphs long, and unfortunately the basic concept has been distorted up by stage adaptations and a succession of films. Just read the original.)

So that's going to be my darkroom fantasy from now on. Thank you, Bob!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Open Mike: My Dumb Young Self (OT)

I have a tiny little first-world problem, but one that I still have yet to solve. And one that I have to solve.

I had better solve it. I feel like a veteran photographer whose favorite material has just been discontinued. I could tell you stories about that. (I was going to, but this post got too long.)

Very brief background: I made the decision to hunt-and-peck on my then-brand-new typewriter, a gift from my grandmother, when I was 14. I remember it clearly. Bad decision. Very bad. I told myself back then that I was never going to need to know how to type. Nobody told me computers were a-comin'.

Apple Extended II keyboard, 1987–1994

When computers did arrive, I didn't think they had too much to do with me. But big honky mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M seemed fine. They typed more or less like my father's IBM Selectric electric typewriter. Didn't confront me either way. Then I started using the Macintosh in 1984, the year it came out. It came with a keyboard, so, once more, I never thought about keyboards. Although I never even saw one that I'm aware of, Apple's last big mechanical keyboard, the Extended / Extended II, came out in 1987 and was discontinued in 1994. Was that about when the tiny, flat, "chiclet key" keyboards for the Macs, a smart and stylish design accessory as well as a petite but pestilent pox upon persons, began to show up? Whenever they arrived, I never got along with them even a little bit. Even my early Powerbook 190 (picture), one of my top-three all-time favorite Macs, had better keys. By the time chiclet keyboards proceeded upon their plaguey proliferation, I was already having problems with RSI (repetitive strain injury). They made it kick in even worse. My hands, wrists and arms seemed to always hurt somewhere. The more I typed the more it hurt.

I still have this taped to my monitor. Thirty years is not long
enough to ease my Windows vs. Mac confusions.

One of the first "ergonomic" keyboards, Microsoft's then-radical Natural Ergonomic keyboard, came out in 1994. Microsoft's very first keyboard. I got one; my hands felt better. It was made for PC's, and half the features didn't work on my Macs, but I got used to it. It eventually morphed into the physically identical Natural Ergonomic 4000, which I'll abbreviate NE4k. I've now been using them for 30 years.

Malicious obsolescence
I've gone through more than a dozen. Usually the first point of failure is that the legends wear off the keys, which is ridiculous—simply poor manufacturing, never corrected. They fail in a variety of different ways. Annoying little problems crop up; on my current one, the Shift key is slow to release, so capitalized words not infrequently look like THis. Eventually they get dirty; I even tried cleaning one in the dishwasher, following instructions I found online! It worked, but it was a project. It was easier to just buy a new one when the old one got grody, or lost its feel, or started sticking, or wore out.

When you use something every day for 30 years, you get used to it. I can now "hunt and peck" on a NE4k without much, well, hunting. (I do have to look down from time to time for specific keys, or to re-orient myself.) I basically type with three fingers, plus one thumb for the spacebar—sometimes a fourth and fifth finger for specific reaches—but I can do it while barely looking at the keyboard. Unfortunately, I can do that only on my keyboard. My exact keyboard, the NE4k. With other keyboards—even (perhaps especially) with those that look similar to the NE4k but are just that little skosh different—my effed-up muscle memory is just wrong enough that I can barely type at all.

Confession: Actually, if I'm honest, my typing is so idiosyncratic and wrong that I have good typing days and bad. This sounds absurd, but it's true—sometimes I make so many mistakes that I give up for the day. Other days my fingers fly. My typing speed goes from about 25 WPM + frustration on bad days to as high as 55–60 WPM on the best days. I don't know what makes the difference. Brain farts? The phase of the moon? Leprechauns in charge?

Here's the rub, alas: the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 went the way of all things in 2019. Discontinued. I wasn't aware, or I would have bought a dozen and salted them away*. I'm on my last one now, and the usual signs of decay and failure are starting to appear.

I have to do something about this. And the sooner I start the better, I'm guessing. Unless it's already too late for that.

You might think that the replacement for the NE4k would be the natural choice, but not so. The NE4k is far from well-built—a creaky plasticky slab—inexplicably with dog hairs under the keys!—but the confusingly named 2019 Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard (MEK), which Microsoft just handed off to a company called Incase to make and sell, is much worse. I have two. Cheap and flimsy. The NE4k itself was hardly known for having great feel, but the MEK doesn't rise to the NE4k's modest standard. Made to sell, not to use. Bleh, and yech. It's also not an exact duplicate of the NE4k, so it almost fits my muscle memory but not quite. I type on it like I've suffered a TBI, no offense. I dislike it.

Voyage to the unknown
When I first tried to deal with this problem a few years back, it seemed to me that the solution would be to learn something entirely new and completely different. My old habits are just going to frustrate me if I tried to duplicate the keyboard I'm used to, I figured. The NE4k is not coming back.

I feel like I'm a good candidate to learn touch typing at this point, although maybe this old dog can't learn new tricks. A few years ago I did some research and got a regular straight, flat mechanical tenkeyless keyboard, but within mere days it became clear that that's never going to work for me—my hands started hurting almost immediately. I then splurged on what seemed to be the most ergonomic of all ergonomic keyboards, the Kinesis Advantage 2. Since I intended to learn an all-new keyboard anyway, I also tried to learn the Dvorak layout and touch-typing all at the same time. Three radically new things all at once was probably, ah, overly ambitious (my most realistic friend, Ken Tanaka, probably could have predicted that!), but at the time I felt like I was mostly doing it as a mental exercise. I ended up getting up to 20 WPM with that setup. I worked on it every day for months. But only 15 to 30 minutes a day. Muscle memory never kicked in. Eventually I stopped tilting at that particular windmill.

Back to the drawing board, down to brass tacks
A few days ago I hauled the Kinesis Advantage 2 out of the closet again, wiped the dust off, switched the keyset back to a QWERTY layout from Dvorak, and started in again at keybr.com. Sigh.

(As an aside, here's a great explanation of why keybr. might be the best "learn how to type" site. As Popeye would say, faskinatin'.) 

I'm not sure the Advantage 2 is for me. I've used it a lot, and although it's easy on my hands, I can't seem to get the hang of it. So I've started poking about the wilds of the unknown 'Net for other alternatives. All I know is that I'm going to have to learn something new. And that I'd better get to it.

Keychron Alice V10, with a Keychron Pro K Blue switch

I don't think there's any answer to this problem other than to pick a keyboard, set goals, and get down to work.

Looking at the Keychron Alice right now. Looks nice. No idea if I'd like it better or worse. How would I know? I've been with one keyboard for three decades, and that's longer than all but 26.2% of marriages last.

This is just a very old bad decision circling back around to bite me. Ever made a casual decision you came to regret later? We all have, so no use complaining. I am just a bit peeved at 14-year-old me right now, though! Jeez, young Mike, just take a typing class** and do it right. Why did you always have to be different?!

Mike

*Actually I just discovered this morning that there are still a few available new on Amazon, but for $399. They used to be $59. I could buy one of those, I guess, but it would only delay the inevitable.

**Available for free at my high school just for signing up, and, as a bonus, full of girls. Dumb, Mike. I probably thought I'd be the most awkward and slowest typist in the class, and I didn't want to look bad in front of all those girls. That's important when you're 14.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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What Was the Best Enlarger Ever Made?

Wait, what? What is this, 1989? 

Well, Tracy Chapman did just perform "Fast Car" at the Grammys.

It's a silly question now, and if you do not care about the answer, well, few do. Keep in mind, though, please, that not every post here is for everyone. A minority of TOP readers still shoot film or remember it fondly, and a smaller minority like, or liked, working in the darkroom. Don't begrudge those folks a few posts in their area of interest, even if it doesn't fall in yours.

/lecture mode, and sorry for lecturing!

But, to proceed. In my opinion, the best enlarger ever made was the 4x5 model (which was actually a family of slightly different models) made by LPL of Japan, now located in Tokorozawa City, Saitama Prefecture. They used to give the location as "Tokyo," so maybe they have moved, or maybe they were always in Tokorozawa City, which is sort of a satellite city of Tokyo. Mine was a 4500II, with the VCCE (variable contrast, constant exposure) module.

Saunders/LPL 4x5" enlargers in the darkroom of the Photography BFA program at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire

My opinion is—how shall I put this modestly?—well-informed. I didn't use every enlarger there was (most enlargers, like most pool tables and most home treadmills, were junk), but I used a lot, from a ridiculous tiny toy with a decentered triplet lens to a massive floorstanding 8x10 Durst with a lens that cost a number of months' worth of my rent at the time. I never owned an Omega D-series, but I maintained them when I was a lab manager. I tested a whole bunch of enlarger lenses. I printed pictures professionally for every conceivable purpose—a display at the Monterey Jazz Festival, museum exhibitions, annual reports, headshots for actors, copy photographs of peoples' ancestors, news photos, the historical archives of deceased photographers for galleries, fine-art prints for photographers, portraits and pictures of pets and kids and houses and weddings, architectural interiors, PR photos and grip 'n' grins for schools and companies—on and on. The largest print I ever made was four feet by four feet—I used window planters lined with plastic for the solutions and washed the print out on the sidewalk, with a hose—and the most prints I ever made by hand from one negative was 500, which took all weekend including an all-nighter. Of course I printed my own negatives, too, sometimes. I worked in a lot of darkrooms.

I have to give John Sexton some credit for my top choice. It was what he used (Jerry Uelsmann too—Jerry had six), a powerful endorsement. John, who was Ansel's last assistant (of many) and helped Ansel with the last lifetime revision of his technical book series, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print (he even appears in the books here and there), is a revered nature and landscape photographer in his own right, known for his prized books and superb craftsmanship.

The 4x5" VCCE LPL was the end of a long quest for the "right" enlarger for me (the Focomat IIc being but one small step along the way). It remains the most ergonomic enlarger I ever used, and the most precise, and it had the most elegant light system, adapted from color dichroic-style light heads. A color-correct slide projector bulb was aimed into an aperture in a carefully engineered light-mixing box, past a sliding system of three adjustable glass filters with highly colorfast dyes: two in the colors to which VC papers are most sensitive, and the other an ND (neutral density) filter to keep the exposure time constant. All the operator had to do was turn a dial to input a continuous range of contrast on VC papers. The light is as bright and more even than that from a condenser head, and cooler in temperature at the negative stage than even a "cold" light head*.

To change filtration effects on the big enlarger you simply slid one filter module out of the head and inserted another one. So a VCCE model could be turned into a color enlarger simply and easily. Of course, the convenience is now gone, because the modules now cost far more than the whole enlarger used to, even adjusted for inflation. The smaller 670 didn't have the modules; it required dedicated heads for each kind of light source. But usually darkroom workers only needed one, the one of their preference.

Not quite gone
Only last July (2023), LPL announced "the discontinuation of production of photography and darkroom supplies," and, the company says, "the new name of DDL (Digital Data Laboratory) was adopted to renew the digital data related product group."

The enlargers weren't always branded LPL outside the Japanese home market. They were imported by various companies into a variety of markets and typically known by the importers' names. I always knew them under the name of Saunders, after the famous easels, another brand belonging to importer Berkey Marketing; later, Omega was the American importer, but Omega now lists all LPL enlargers as discontinued. I believe KHB Photografix, a repair shop in Ontario and the longtime Canadian importer, is the last outlet that has new-old stock (NOS). Prices, understandably, are rather high; an enlarger I last purchased for ~$700 (original 1983 price for the base condenser model: $289!) currently lists for CA$3,295 (US$2,445).

The contraption in the attic...er, basement
The Saunders/LPL 4500II, the model I had, was not ideal for 35mm negatives. The smaller medium-format 670 series (called 7700 in Canada) handled 35mm negatives better, although those models had an obvious and unnecessary weakness, which was that the negative carriers cropped 6x7cm negatives slightly. (You can see Ctein's original magazine review from way back in the day—March 1983—here. He reviewed it as a color enlarger.) So the 4500 and 4550 were best for 6x7cm, 6x9cm, and 4x5", and the smaller enlarger was best for 35mm. Both enlargers coped well enough with 6x6cm and 645.

There was one really neat trick you could do with the bigger enlarger and 35mm, though. I discovered that the glass 4x5" carrier would exactly fit nine 35mm frames if you overlapped the sprocket-holed edges. So you could make enlarged proof sheets with ease, nine negatives at a time, as long as you cut your negatives in strips of six. Four of those equaled one 36-exposure roll. Nine frames on an 11x14" or 16x20" sheet is the world's most elegant way of proofing 35mm, and, exposed at a consistent time and contrast, gives you all the information you need to skip the test strip and go right to a full first print.

Unfortunately, by the time I discovered that trick, I had moved to Chicago and left all my custom printing clients behind in D.C., so I never offered enlarged proofs to clients. Some of them would have gotten hooked, for sure.

There are worse fates; it could be in a landfill.
I also have not one but three Apo-Rodagon-N's.

The enlarger I have in my basement is an Omega/LPL 670 XL plain condenser model (the "XL" means that it has an extra long, or rather tall, column). I also have a separate VCCE head that is in not quite new condition.

I've never been much of a "keeper"; mostly, stuff shuffles into and out of my sweaty little grasp. Such is the lot of a reviewer. And I mentioned the other day that I should sell it. Looking into all this again over the weekend, however, I've decided that I should die with that LPL still in my possession. I might never use it again, even if I live to be 102, but I realized yesterday that not only do I never want to deal with having to acquire an enlarger at any time in the future, I also don't even want to have to think about dealing with it. So I'll just keep what I have as a talisman against my angst. I do aspire to pare my belongings down before my beloved son has to shovel through it all, but that's one old artifact he'll just have to deal with. Sorry, Xander!

So I guess I am a little sentimental about enlargers after all. I earned it, though, after the thousands of hours I spent in darkrooms in my time.

Mike

*Heat from light bulbs was a longstanding problem in enlargers generally. Many instructional books cautioned you not to leave a negative in an enlarger with the light on, as the heat could damage or even destroy the negative. I tried to buy a certain print from Frank DiPerna once, but he had left the negative cooking while he went to answer a phone call. He got distracted and accidentally burned a big hole right through the negative. Hence one appeal of the cooler so-called "cold light" sources. They still got warm—in fact they did not perform consistently until they warmed up—but not enough to damage negatives.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Picture of the Leitz Focomat IIc

I looked in vain the other day for a good photograph of the Leitz Focomat IIc that I could use. Reader Guenther Roth found a great one—it's at the top of Austrian photographer Thomas Eisl's review. I didn't find that in my own search. Here's the link, if you want to see what the big beast really looked like all polished and shiny. It's a nice and informative article, too.

Many thanks, Guenther!

Since I said that the Focomat IIc was not the best enlarger I ever used, several people have asked what was. That's up next, just for fun, but I doubt we will be staying on the topic of enlargers much longer. I was going to say they have gone the way of the buggy whip. But then I realized that I live in an area where horse-drawn buggies are actually very common! They're out in force on a sunny Sunday. The day of rest is apparently also a day for churchgoing, weddings, and visiting friends; I notice more buggies on the roads on Sundays than any other day of the week. But I digress.

Today is also my son Xander's 31st birthday! Happy Birthday Xander.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Open Mike: Surprising Facts (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Sundays, allegedly and theoretically.]

Photo by Douwe C. van der Zee

—>The first thing made by humans that was taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza was the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in Lincoln, England, completed in 1311. That meant that the Great Pyramid held the record as the tallest structure built by humans for some 3,800 years. Lincoln Cathedral held the title until 1548, when the spire collapsed and was not rebuilt.

—>Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon.

—>The Slovenian basketball player Luka Dončić, 24, who plays for the Dallas Mavericks and has been in the NBA for six years, currently holds the third-highest lifetime scoring average of all time in the NBA, 28.3 points per game (PPG). The only two players ahead of him are Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan. In playoffs, Dončić has a career PPG of 32.5, second only to Michael Jordan. A week ago last Friday, he scored 73 points in a game, a tie for fourth-highest in League history. The two players who have scored more than 73 points in one game are Wilt Chamberlain, who did it twice, and Kobe Bryant.

—>Humans are the only animals that cry tears in response to emotions, and the only animals that have chins.

—>The worst business move in history might not have been such a bad move. You probably know that there was a third founder of Apple Computer, Ronald G. Wayne, who immediately sold his 10% interest in the company back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800. A year later he was paid an additional $1,500 to forfeit any future claims to the then newly-incorporated business. Today, his share would be worth approximately $95 billion. Wayne has stated on numerous occasions that he does not regret his decision. The reason is that he was intended to be the tiebreaker in disagreements between the two intense and headstrong Steves, the stress of which, he believes, would have made him "the richest man in the cemetery."

—>Human beings have been recognizably human for somewhere between 90,000 and 300,000 years, depending on how you look at it. Even if we survive as a species for that many more years, no human being will ever again experience the climate that existed in 1970.

—>Australia is wider than the moon.

—>The economy of the State of California is larger than that of all but four countries on Earth: China, Germany, Japan, and the United States itself (although India is close and the U.K. not too far behind India). Vermont's economy, the smallest in the U.S., is higher than that of 108 countries.

—>In 2018, there were more immigrants to the U.S. from both China and India than from Mexico. In addition, Mexico in recent years has seen an undetermined but large flow of former immigrants returning to Mexico. The same was true of Irish immigrants in the 1800s, many of whom eventually returned to Ireland.

—>The number of bacteria in our bodies outnumbers our human cells; we are about 56% bacteria. However, bacteria are very light, so we are still approximately 99.7% human by weight.

—>In photography's first seventy years or so, it was considered childish to smile while having one's picture taken, and adults said "prunes" before the picture was taken to remind them to remain appropriately serious*. Eastman Kodak eventually changed this with its ad campaigns by encouraging people to smile and say "cheese." Now, the custom among Americans of grinning all the time is considered an oddity by some Europeans.

Mike

*I've requested a copy of the scholarly paper that purports to document this, but haven't received it yet. If I am sent a copy I'll let you know.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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