Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

19DEC2022 – Scrooge Reborn

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When Scrooge awakens and embraces his new life we feel the electric thrill he feels at everything around him.  He rediscovers life and the joy it contains.

“What’s to-day!” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.

“Eh?” returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge.

“To-day!” replied the boy. “Why, Christmas Day.”

“It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!”

“Hallo!” returned the boy.

“Do you know the Poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner?” Scrooge inquired.

“I should hope I did,” replied the lad.

“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge. “A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”

“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy.

“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge. “It’s a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!”

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.

“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it.”

“Walk-er!” exclaimed the boy.

“No, no,” said Scrooge, “I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell ’em to bring it here, that I may give them the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown!”

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

“I’ll send it to Bob Cratchit’s!” whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. “He sha’n’t know who sends it. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob’s will be!”

 

 

In Hera’s Kitchen

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,

Today is the highest of solemnities in Camera Girl’s kitchen calendar.  I, even I, am banned from encroaching on the rituals being performed.  And I’m no fool.  Interfering with the magic going on risks the spoiling of those spells and the blighting of the baked goods being produced; a horror not to be imagined.

Today Camera Girl and her daughters and now her granddaughter will gather like a coven of witches and take their magic ingredients and hover around the stove and drink coffee (or hot chocolate in the case of Princess Sack of Potatoes) and knead dough and add vanilla extract and hand shape the grandma cookies and the chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies and whichever new variants they decide on.

And wondrous aromas will waft through the house and when they’re through there will be a pile of cookies to get us through to New Year’s Day.  Splendiferous confections that turn a coffee break into a feast.  And make watching an old movie into a special event.

But even ignoring the practical results of this activity, this is a primary ritual of our domestic calendar.  The hand written recipes are coming on fifty years.  The paper is beginning to crumble and the writing is fading from exposure to ingredients and wear and tear.  I’ve warned Camera Girl that they need to be copied and digitized, printed out and distributed to her daughters to preserve them from loss.  But if it’s going to be done, I’ll have to take on the project.

I look at some of the recipes and the notes on them and see the names of friends and relatives from long ago.  Only one or two living women are represented.  Most are from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.  A few go even farther back.

And that’s a comforting legacy.  In these times when fools are trying to deconstruct the meaning of man and woman and sever the traditions that have given meaning to our lives, there still exist people and rituals that ground our lives and make them human and pleasant.  Baking cookies may seem to some people to be a trivial and possibly harmful activity in a world of obese people.  But it’s exactly opposite.  Christmas cookies are a special and specific part of the year.  Once they’re done, we don’t make more.  We move onto the winter months when we subsist on meager fare, far removed from the bounty of summer and fall.  Christmas is a celebration and an ending of the year and needs to be treated as such.

So, I will withdraw from the kitchen and keep myself busy with other things while the women commune with their flour and butter.  From time to time, I’ll find an excuse to walk by the kitchen and see how things are going.  And maybe my granddaughter will come visit with me for a game of Candy Land.  But for the most part I’ll leave them to their industry and their talk.  And before I go to bed there will be the hoard of golden and white and brown cookies in various cookie jars and containers.  And of course, there will be a big mug of coffee and one or two (or even three) cookies waiting for me to enjoy during a holiday movie.  God bless you Camera Girl and long may you bake.

17DEC2022 – Marley’s Ghost

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The 1984 version of A Christmas Carol has I think the best portrayal of Marley’s Ghost

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Mankind is the business of us all.  And today the priority is to preserve what makes us human.  Protecting the young from the lies and perversions of the nihilists must be our focus.

With Visions of Sugar Plums Dancing Over Their Heads

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Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

 

The last week before Christmas.  Now Camera Girl must marshal all her powers to coordinate the schedule of buying and cooking the feast.  Today she came home with a ham, chopped meat, escarole and some of the other ingredients of the various courses.  The roast beast won’t arrive until the end of the week.  And the pies and cakes won’t be baked or bought for a few days more.  I was explicit that there must be a good quality vanilla ice cream in copious quantity to complement the pies.  And very good coffee to wash it down.

The mashed potatoes, corn, crescent rolls and the stuffed mushrooms are all last-minute items that won’t be started until Christmas Eve but they’ll add their dimension to the meal.  And finally, I demanded chestnuts and that rope of dried figs that no one ever eats.  Camera Girl, being the frugal woman that she is, complained bitterly that chestnuts now cost $8 a pound.  But I was adamant.  I never liked them as a kid but my father-in-law always had some out at Christmas and after trying them a few times I actually developed a taste for them.  As for the dried figs, they’re so hard that they’re almost inedible but somehow it wouldn’t be Christmas without them lying around on the table so I demanded them too.

And this year I’ll show my little granddaughter the trick with the mandarin orange skin and a lighted match.  The oils in the skin are flammable and she’ll be amazed to see it ignite around the match when I squeeze the skin near it.  And this year I think I’ll try to get the kids to join in a penny ante poker game with me.  Camera Girl has an old bucket of pennies.  There must be a thousand of them and we can play for hours without any serious money changing hands.

I’ve got my favorite Christmas DVDs at the ready and several albums of Christmas music on tap.  And no one should be sick this year because everyone has already been stricken with the Chinese Bioweapon recently.  I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sugar plum but I’m pretty sure there’ll be all kinds of chocolates and mints on the table.

Sure, everything is about twice as expensive as normal and that old dimwit Biden keeps gassing off every few days about Ukraine or gay marriage or trans-something-or-other but I’m satisfied that this will be a good Christmas despite him and the rest of the grifters who run the crime family that fleeces us.

It’s still Christmas, friends, family and food and that’s a pretty good combination.  I can no longer feel any community with the degenerates that surround us and plot bigger and uglier ways to degrade the good things in the world.  But I feel kinship with the normal people that work hard and raise their kids and try to make the world go round.  With them I can hope for a Merry Christmas and we’ll worry about the New Year later.  Where’s that sweet potato pie?

5DEC2022 – OCF Update – More Focus Stacks

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography, Reclaiming the Family , ,

Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter.  In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes.  I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse.  We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds.  After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs.  And after that back to Candy Land.  Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.

Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.

So I took some focus stacks.  I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.

15DEC2022 beetle stack
15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack
15DEC2022 coin tail stack

The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack.  But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change.  I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2.  So I’ll have to go out and get one.  But still a nice exercise.

All in all a day well spent.

My Time Was Better Spent with the Gorgon

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Today I intended to do some politics.  I read a bunch of articles I checked the various dissidents to see what was ticking them off and I thought about “what this country really needs.”

And I came up with nada.

Basically, the Democrats are convinced they’ve won everything and the country backs them up 100%.  And the GOP establishment think they’ve shut down Trump so they’re pretty smug too.  Well, they’re both mostly wrong but since nothing works better than to give the people what they voted for I can’t think of a thing to say.  Let’s see how bad they screw up the country this coming year.

So instead, I decided to have some fun today.  I did a couple more of those focus stack macrophotography exercises on Nancy Pelosi’s prettier and more personable younger sister, Medusa.

So, this is kind of a bone of contention between Sony and me.  They’ve never provided their cameras with a focus stack capability so I have to use work-arounds.  There’s a Bluetooth remote “commander” that will send a signal to the camera to move the focus back or forth by a small increment and then I can trigger an exposure and then repeat the process by however many exposures needed to get everything in focus piece by piece.  It works but it’s painfully manual.  I also have a tiny software program on my laptop that automates the process but then I have to lug the laptop around in the field.

Other camera makers have added the programming to shoot focus brackets automatically in the camera.  One camera maker, Olympus even has the camera “stack” the bracket into a single composite file automatically.  Now there’s a company that loves its customers.  Sony?  Well miracle of miracles they just added bracketing to the brand new A7R V.  So now the software exists in Sony’s system.  Will they retrofit it into some of the more recent cameras through a firmware upgrade.  Don’t make me laugh!

So here is poor photog, Sony’s laughing stock with his workarounds and his decade plus of Sony tone deaf customer service.  Will he never learn?

Here are some of the bracketed files.

For the first stack I used six files.  This didn’t quite get everything in focus in the first stack.

Next time I took sixteen files and the final product was a lot better.

Dunwich Complainer – Avalanche 2022 (In Rumble-Rama)

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Yesterday as I lolled around in my lazy recuperative stupor, I was suddenly aware of a booming sound and the sensation of shaking.  At first, I assumed I was still goofy from the COVID and had imagined it but then I saw that the dogs had picked up on something too.  I thought, “Maybe a truck came down the driveway and banged into the house.  So, I got up and went to look outside.

And what I saw was a boulder sitting on the lower driveway.  I could see where it broke off from the wall.  What I had heard was it falling, bouncing and rolling to a stop.

I was still kind of lethargic yesterday so I left it as, “to be continued.”  Today I felt more myself.  So, I investigated.  It’s roughly 4’X2’X1.5’ and I estimate it weighs about 1,500 lbs.

Looking at the exposed surfaces it looks like over time the rock has been fracturing and finally the weight was too much for the remaining stone to support.  It’s these lousy New England winters.  Freezing and thawing incessantly wreaks havoc with structural integrity.  It’s why I’m the broken-down husk of a man that I am.

So, this boulder is a metaphor for how the world wears down even the best of us and then sends us crashing to earth abandoned and out of sorts like a modern day Humpty Dumpty.  Very sad.  Very abstract, so deep.

But now I have to move the darn thing and then figure out how to prevent the dirt that was being held in place by it from eroding away.  Camera Girl will see me like a modern-day Sisyphus toiling to roll this huge stone up the hill.  What’s next?  The extinction level asteroid strike?  Yeah, why not?

What Must a Good Science Fiction Story Have?

photog Book Reviews, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , ,

 

I’ve returned to the land of the living.  My eyes track.  I can walk through a doorway without colliding with a doorjamb.  I can even keep up a conversation without sliding sideways off my chair onto the floor.  Next week I climb the Matterhorn.  Bravissimo!

I looked through the news feeds.  And, so help me, I even considered watching the Georgia run-off.  But there just wasn’t anything the least bit interesting.  I even considered pulling a Jussie Smollett.  I was going to claim that a Canon camera enthusiast sent me a derogatory e-mail making fun of my many bison photos of the day.  But my hard-bitten honesty just wouldn’t let me do it.  I love those bison!

I thought, “I’ll just write about something I like.”  After all that post about nuclear war had some great comments and that stuff really interests me.  Why not do something like that?  So that’s why this is coming out of left field.  I just didn’t feel like beating a political drum that’s already been beaten to a bloody pulp.

So, for a theme I’ll select the question, “What’s the most important component of a good science fiction story?”

Is it the tech?  Is it a good plot?  Is it well written characters?  Or does it absolutely require some balance between the three?

Let’s explore this a little bit.  Start with tech.  I suppose that space opera has lost a lot of support among the modern readers of science fiction.  Stuff like the Skylark of Space, The Legion of Space or the Lensman books are probably disqualified as too naïve and hopelessly early 20th century for anyone under sixty to consider reading.  But is the inexplicable faster than light (ftl) drives of these stories any less plausible than whatever also implausible ftl drives are currently being used by modern science fiction writers?  I’ve got to say I don’t think they’re disqualifications.  I’d say the rule is it just has to be self-consistent with whatever “rules” you’ve made up for the tech.  So, it doesn’t have to be somehow scientifically accurate.  It just can’t be bone-headedly stupid.  What it does have to be is convenient.  The technology has to allow the plot to evolve the way you want.  If space travel takes centuries, then don’t kill off too many good characters by leaving them back on Earth.  Or if time travel can only go backwards then don’t leave your spare batteries for your ray gun in your other pair of pants when you head back to the neolithic.

And the tech should be a fun toy for the reader if you can manage it.  I always loved how Heinlein lovingly designed his “torchships” and made the passenger and service areas of his ships seem well thought out.  But I also know of authors whose tech is basically a black box and for all we hear we could be sitting inside the fuselage of a jet plane.

While tech is necessary (after all it is sf) it’s not the deciding factor whether a story works.

Well, how about characters?  Yes, they are important, in the sense that they must at least exist.  But I’ve read some supposedly classic science fiction where the characters are as flat as pancakes (Asimov and Clarke come to mind).  Now this may no longer be the case.  I’m not sure.  I enjoy a good amount of character development in my fiction and I’ve been able to find it.  But I could easily believe there could be a very good story where character was in short supply.

What about plot?  Well, I could imagine a story that had a strong tech component and interesting characters but the plot was almost minimal.  Maybe like some of Bradbury’s short stories like the one where the Ladies’ Sewing Circle is trying to ignore the impending nuclear holocaust by concentrating on their work.  It’s all character.  But I guess you still have to say there’s a plot or more like a scenario.

I feel like, for the most part, and except for very odd stories, the sine qua non of a good science fiction story is a good plot.  If your tech is passable and your characters are at least bearable but you have a plot that rolls along and interesting stuff happening then you have a chance.  But you can have great tech and witty, erudite, droll fellows populating your world and if not much of anything is happening except talk, then your readers will throw the book against the wall (or the digital equivalent) and go look for something better.  And that’s that!

Now I know there are many sf fans in the audience.  I’d love to hear your comments, especially if you disagree.  I’m always interested in the opinions of sf readers.  The floor is now yours.

The Decline and Fall of photog

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner

So just when I assumed I was on the brink of health, tragedy struck.  Of course, in my case it’s really tragicomedy.  Last night I was preparing for bed and I had earlier taken one of those horse pills they call a 12-hour Mucinex.  Now I remembered that this medicine dehydrates the user but I never worry about such things.  I was brushing my teeth and I felt kind of wonky.  The next thing I know I’m lying on the floor near the sink with Camera Girl shouting at me things like, “Should I call an ambulance?” And, “Are you alright?”

Now it was the funniest thing.  I could hear her perfectly well and kept saying, “Calm down.”  But it was as if she couldn’t hear me.  I think she was in a panic.  But it was enheartening to see what a decisive manner she reacted to my impending death.  In retrospect I’m very proud of her.  But in the moment, I finally broke through her fear to convince her that I had just blacked out due to my policy of “sweating it out,” probably some combination of low blood pressure and dehydration.

As I attempted to get up, I discovered I was still clutching my toothbrush.  I flung it toward the countertop but was informed later that I failed in my aim.  Once I convinced Camera Girl that I hadn’t suffered a stroke I gathered my shattered dignity and impaired equilibrium and hoisted myself up onto my feet.

Word of my collapse has spread far and wide in the family.  Relatives were calling up and questioning me on when the burial service would be performed.  Eventually it seemed easiest just to say Tuesday.

This latest manifestation of my mortality has made me think.  I might consider extending my locked bathroom door policy to include tooth brushing.  But realistically Camera Girl is a resourceful woman she’d probably get a screwdriver and pop the hinges off the door.

So, I’ve discontinued the Mucinex and today I’m feeling decidedly chirpier.  Although my balance still seems a little iffy.  I’m attributing this to my ears being clogged.

But this morning I noticed a tender red welt on my jaw line.  I accused Camera Girl of getting me with a sucker punch.  This angered her.  She brought up that she would have had to hit me on the jaw standing behind me.  I defended the possibility gamely.  I said that an upper cut snuck in under the arm I was holding my toothbrush with was highly likely to cause just such an injury.  To her credit she just walked away.  Probably speechless in the face of such blinding intellect.

The less likely possibility is that I hit the sink countertop with my jaw as I was collapsing.  The funny thing is that I never noticed it until by chance I put my hand up to my face today.

Well anyway, I’ve recalibrated my recovery schedule.  I’m hoping by tomorrow morning I’ll be at 65% capacity.  Which is still pretty good.  And I’ll take the rest of today to convalesce and recuperate.  And based on my perusal of the news today I’m not missing anything.  Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for Nurse Camera Girl to spoon feed me my mush.

photog Bound

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner

The men of my family have an endearing trait.  Whenever we’re sick, even to an almost imperceptible degree we carry on like an antique hero in his death agony and expect our wives to baby us to an unhealthy degree.  Now this week as it happened, Camera Girl is seriously under the weather.  She’s been slowly recovering since Saturday.  Today she’s at 60% and improving.  But today I woke up with muscle aches, possibly a slight fever and a headache.

Ahhh, the perfect malady.  Just bad enough to be recognizably sick but not bad enough to distract me from my act.  So, all day today I’ve been an invalid caterwauling about my aches and pains and the bravery I was demonstrating.  Like the great titan Prometheus, I was shackled to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains (or maybe my recliner in the living room).  I could feel Camera Girl going through the slow burn.  It’s a delicate balance.  If I lay it on too thick, she’s liable to poison me or smother me in my sleep.  But with just the right touch, the day is passed for both of us in a tolerable haze of delirium.

I spent the day watching YouTube videos about artificial elements in the island of stability and mockeries of string theory.  With enough aspirin and turkey soup I almost felt human by dinner time.

But later my fever returned and I descended into madness.  To go along with this mania, I put on a pretty bad prison movie from 1947 called “Brute Force.”  Burt Lancaster is a prisoner who stages a jail break to save his wife from a cancer diagnosis.  The pipsqueak, Hume Cronyn is completely absurd as the sadistic captain of the guards.  But as ridiculous as the movie was it was perfect for my delirium.

When Camera Girl addressed me I started changing my “thems” to “dems” and “these” to “deese.”  Pretty soon I told her that no “twist” was gonna tell me how to run a jail break.  I reminded her that no prison could hold me for long and I added for good measure that no one would take me alive.

Eventually I passed out from a combination of malaise and bad acting.  When I woke up a mortally wounded Lancaster tossed Cronyn from the guard tower to the mob below who tore him apart.  Ahhh, those were the days.  No transgender prisoners, no pronouns, just good old prison justice for stool pigeons and screws, see?

Now I’m wrapped up like a mummy trying to keep from getting the shakes.  I think I’m done with bad movies for the day.  I’ll put on some country music and try to sleep my way through the worst of this.  Funny thing is Camera Girl now seems genuinely concerned with my health.  There’s a word in Italian that means pity; peccato.  Of course, in the dialect that Camera Girl’s people spoke back in the old country it was pronounced like “pea-cod.”  Well, my pathetic weakness and whining have finally broken through and I’m garnering the attention and peccato I so richly deserve.  I win again!

My hope is that I’ll be almost human tomorrow.  But one never knows, do one?