Jack

Enjoys making film photographs and tinkering on the web. Owned a digital studio for 25 years. Now what?

Journal posts are back on daily.baty.net

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Meta

I’m sorry, but as much as I like the idea of maintaining only one blog, I just don’t enjoy composing my daily journal entries in WordPress. I’m once again writing them in Emacs and posting them on daily.baty.net using Eleventy.

I took the opportunity to use a simpler layout using less CSS and I think it reads better but let me know if you disagree. I’ll surely continue to tweak things.

The RSS feed is daily.baty.net/feed/feed.xml or daily.baty.net/feed/feed.json depending on which flavor you prefer. Consider the daily-notes-at-baty.net experiment closed.

Nick Brandt on using Digital – I hated it

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Photography

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy.

And I hated it. … In fact, had I photographed using a digital camera from the beginning, I’m not sure that I would have liked a single photograph that I had ever taken.

Nick Brandt, I am the Walrus

His animal photographs are astonishing. And he uses short (50-100mm equiv. on 35mm film) lenses on film cameras. Amazing.

NICK BRANDT. LION BEFORE STORM SITTING PROFILE, MASAI MARA 2006

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Photography

This Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 is by far the worst lens I own.

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 lens mounted on Leica SL2

And yet, I’m drawn to it for that very reason. I’m feeling a pull toward low-fi digital. Or at least imperfect digital. I’m not tempted to go buy a 2003 digicam like the kids are doing, but I’m also not drawn toward the APO-Summicron-SL that I used to shoot with.

This Elmar is quite soft and has such low contrast that it seems like there’s something wrong with it. As an example, here’s a mirror self-portrait straight out of camera:

Self-portrait using the Elmar 9cm

Awful, right? Gloriously, satisfyingly awful!

This lens has been sitting on a shelf for years because I didn’t see the point, when so many better lenses are readily available. But now I’m thinking that maybe I’ll find a few “shitty” lenses to shoot with and see how it goes.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Journal

I need to try something different. To be something different. I have no idea what or whom that might be, but what I’ve been doing isn’t working.

Mastodon has become noticeably more negative recently. I’m still following basically the same people I followed a month or two ago, but suddenly it feels like Twitter all over again with so much pointing and yelling, “THAT’S BAD!”. I can’t explain it, but I don’t like it.

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Posted on March 21, 2023 by Journal

I remain torn between keeping all of my posts in one place (e.g. here) and splitting off the journal posts into something more fun, like Tinderbox or Eleventy.

All I want is a way to do micro posts here and have them collected under a daily header on the Journal page. Don’t make me do this myself, WordPress!

I just received outstanding support from Daniel at RedSweater. Way over and above expectations. Just terrific.

And to demonstrate, I’m posting this to today’s journal entry using MarsEdit, because thanks to Daniel I can now see posts that are hidden on the home page.

Photography is no longer a repository of images plucked from the real but a combinatory and endlessly fluid medium of self-serving half-truths i.e. lies.

Leicaphilia

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Journal

Looking at all the new AI-centric startups such as Copy.ai, I’m starting to realize how vacuous many jobs must be. And how that is just going to get worse.

I'd like to see things from your point of view, but I can't seem to get my head that far up my ass. The Snark Handbook Lawrence Dorfman

It seems I’ve been “quitting” Twitter since 2008: I love you Twitter but I have to leave you.

I’m not like everyone else, and I don’t want to behave like everyone else.

I wish I could just go to Blockbuster, rent a couple of DVDs, and watch them tonight. Because that’s what I’d selected. Then, tomorrow, I’d return them.