I’ve gone through many photographic workflows. Each time, I’m certain that I’ve figured out what works best for me. Finally! Then a few months later I switch back or come up with something new. I wish I would stop doing this, but I probably never will.

So, I have a new workflow ????

There is a part of me that really wants to let Adobe deal with everything. Wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to organize, store, back up, or otherwise manage tens of thousands of image files? I could just use Lightroom (desktop) and let the cloud take over the rest. Except I can’t. I have proven myself incapable of giving up control over the files. I have decades of images stored in nicely-organized, dated folders. I know where they are. I know how to back them up. It feels safe forever.

Also, I can’t stop returning to Capture One Pro. Lightroom Classic has everything I could ever need, workflow and management-wise, but I prefer actually editing in C1. And I prefer the results I get with Capture One.

I like to “burn” a finished JPEG of every image that I’ve spent any time editing. That way, if (when?) whatever processing software I’m using disappears, I’ll still have the finished image. I’ve treated these JPEGs in a couple of ways. I’d either send them to what I called a “Digital Print Archive” which was just dated folders. Or, I’d make the copy right “next to” the original. Either way, I ended up with two files to manage for each photo.

Previously, to handle all of this, I used a complex combination of Capture One and Photo Mechanic to cull, tag, and otherwise deal with my library and set of burned JPEGs. It was pretty powerful, but it was a pain to maintain.

I wanted to simplify things a bit, so I’m now using only Capture One and Apple Photos. I import, cull and edit photos in a Capture One “session”, then export the keepers directly to Apple Photos. Photos is where I make albums and such. It also gives me “faces” and syncs everywhere. Plus, all the photos I take with my phone are right there with everything else.

I’ve done something similar to this before, of course, but I’m trying it again.

My home office environment was getting out of hand, clutter-wise. They say that a messy desk is the sign of a creative mind. Maybe so, but I’m more of a tidy desk person.

I’ll sometimes notice that I’m easily provoked, frustrated, or otherwise feeling edgy. Then I’ll clean my office and I always feel better.

The worst thing for me is to set something on my desk because I don’t yet know where I’m going to put it. Then it just sits there, for weeks, nagging me out of the corner of my eye. Drives me nuts. Or, I’ll knock something over or cords will tangle or I’ll be unable to find something because it’s under something else. Aargh!

My workspace doesn’t need to be a minimalist, Instagram-worthy setup. It just needs to be organized and tidy. I cleaned my desk yesterday and have been in a better mood since. 👋

I’m not sure I’ll ever be capable of sustaining an ongoing “meditation practice”.

The idea of regular meditation is compelling, but after many attempts I’m starting to think it may never stick. This is likely because I’ve not practiced long or consistently enough, but my brain just refuses to stay quiet or focused.

Instead, I’ve been making daily drawings. Or, more precisely, “doodles”. I find that mindlessly drawing random or repeating patterns soothes me. It’s a relaxing form of perhaps, if not meditation, mental relaxation. And calling them doodles helps me to avoid the feeling that they are “bad” drawings. It doesn’t matter.

Drawing may not have the consciousness-altering effect of consistent meditation, but it helps clear my head and lets my mind breathe a little.

I’ve used many wonderful film cameras from many different systems: From Nikon F to Hasselblad V to Linhof, Olympus OM, etc.

They are all great in their own ways, but none of them comes close to making me feel the way I feel when picking up a Leica M camera.

Sure, every film camera is essentially “a box for holding a lens and some film” but calling a Leica M “just another film camera” is to me like calling Jesus Christ “just another homeless dude”.

OK, that’s probably an exaggeration, but you get my point. The way a Leica M is built and shaped fits my hand and the way it works fits my brain like no other camera. And no other camera makes me want to just pick it up and hold it, even if there’s no film in it.

The only time that “The best camera is the one you have with you” is when the one you have with you is an M ????.

I mean, just look at this MP! Tell me you don’t want to pick it up and fondle it a little.

The Leica SL series of cameras are special, but not unique. I had an original SL and then bought the SL2-S when it was released. It’s a capable, well-built, beautiful camera. But, if I’m being honest, it’s just another mirrorless camera system. And it was very expensive. Purchased today, my kit, consisting of the SL2-S and the Leica APO Summicron 35mm and 75mm lenses would run close to $16,000. Um, who do I think I am?

I thought I’d shoot more video with it but haven’t. I thought I’d do more portraits with it, but I haven’t. Hell, I thought I’d use it a lot, but I haven’t.

So, I sold it all.

Leica’s menu systems are wonderfully simple. The SL2-S feels like a tank. Its EVF is far and away the best I’ve ever looked through. The images are terrific. It feels good in my hands. On top of that, the APO-Summicron-SL 35mm lens is the greatest lens I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. I mean it. I’d often unload a card and actually say, “Wow!”.

All that great stuff is great stuff, but I still wasn’t using the camera enough, and I felt guilty having that much money in camera gear just idling in a camera bag. As I said, it’s really just a (very nice) mirrorless system. I could pick up a used Nikon Z or Canon R or Fuji kit for much less and get basically the same features and capabilities, if not the same experience.

The other factor that weighed on me was that I missed the M10-R. I know, I know, I just sold an M10-R to fund the Q2 Monochrom. Here’s what I said about that move only a month ago:

The M is a slow, manual-focus, deliberate camera. It’s not really suited for just having around taking snaps. It only focuses down to like three feet. Manual focus means that every shot requires two hands. It’s very very expensive, so letting it just dangle around my neck while not paying attention to it is a terrible idea.

The M10-R has left the building

All that is still true, but now I have the Q2M for “just dangling around my neck” when I’m out and about. What the M10-R offers is the Leica M shooting experience. It’s a beautiful, iconic, delightful rangefinder camera. The Leica M series of cameras fit perfectly in my hands and my brain, even if they’re “harder” to use.

Plus, I can now focus on one system and use the fantastic M lenses that I’ve loved for so long. And everything works exactly the same on my film Ms, which reduces a lot of mental overhead.

I’ll miss the SL, and maybe one day I’ll end up with an SL3 or whatever, but I have to admit that right now it’s good for my brain to only deal with one camera and lens system again.

Jess and I had lunch at Booyah’s in Muskegon. I had the Q2 Monochrom with me so I made a few snapshots.

I discovered, while rummaging through a drawer, that my Nikon F-100 was loaded with film; Fujifilm Superia, a color film. I’ve pretty much sworn off color, but what the hell, I threw a little Godox flash on the F-100 and burned through the rest of the roll. I still had some C-41 chemistry mixed, but it was well past its prime.

As is often the case with color film, it was a bust. For some reason the Flash, while it seemed to be firing, left most frames wildly under-exposed. There’s no getting away with underexposing color film. The results were mostly horrible. Oh well. It was fun to use the Nikon again.

This has happened before: Very expired Ektar 25

Late last year I printed a couple (black and white) photos, scanned from film negatives, on my Canon Pixma Pro-100 inkjet printer and I loved them. “There! I’ve finally figured it out!”, I said at the time.

Today, I thought I’d make a couple more prints, also from black and white film scans. The difference was that I have a new computer and never copied the ICC profiles for my paper. I spent a few minutes installing the profiles, made sure the Canon driver was up to date, fired up Photoshop, loaded the printer with Canson Platine Fibre Rag paper, and hit “Print”.

The resulting print was horrible. It was weak, low-contrast, pale, and lifeless. Sigh. Let’s see, I’d selected “Black and White” in the printer setup, so maybe I didn’t use to do that. I sent another print. This one was worse. Much worse. It was blue.

Since I normally would print from Lightroom, I fired that up and tried again. Better, but still pale and lifeless. OK, let’s try one from Lightroom set to “Black and white”. Much better. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s still not great. Doesn’t have that smooth sparkle I was getting last time. You can see all four versions here:

Anyway, it seems that getting decent prints out of my inkjet printer is a crapshoot. I’ve never been able to get consistent, pleasing results. I’ll spend a little more time trying to document what I’m doing and try a systematic approach to figuring it out, but at some point I’m just going to throw my hands up and head back into the darkroom.

The above photo is a good family photograph. Why? Because it doesn’t just capture members of the family, it captures a family moment. So many family photos are smiling selfies taken at arm’s length. Selfies say, “Here these people are.” but not much more. They’re fine, but ultimately not much more than basic record-keeping. I much prefer photos showing family simply living and interacting in their natural habitat. Here’s another from the same roll:

These were both taken with a film camera in low light, so required a slow shutter speed and wide aperture. This meant missed focus and some motion blur. I don’t care. It’s the moment that counts, not the sharpness. And being film photos, it means I’ll forever have the original negatives on my shelf. Of course that doesn’t make the photo better, but it does make me feel good.

I finished a roll in the MP today by taking a bunch of self-portraits in my basement "studio".

The shots in which you can see both my hands were triggered by stepping on the release bulb. Clever! 🙂

I really like the look of these. They were shot in my basement with a new canvas backdrop. I used two Profoto strobes. One with a softbox (octogon) to camera left, and a second with a reflector at camera right pointing at the backdrop. I'm learning.

I was tinkering with the strobes and standing there with the Leica Fotos app triggering the camera and lights, I eventually ran out of normal faces to make so started getting a little silly. So this happened (photos uncropped and unedited from the Leica Q2 Monochrom).

Once it a while, a 50mm lens on the Leica M3 is exactly the right thing. I finished the roll and had a ball doing it. Nothing great came out of it, but sometimes that happens.

I’m trying to see how the Summilux 35mm ASPH feels on the film M. Running around indoors with a moving dog and poor light is either a terrible test or a perfect test. Anyway, here’s Alice.

This is a really nice camera.

Most of the shots on this roll were taken indoors in low light, so the Summilux was at either 1.4 or 2.0, meaning I missed focus quite often.

I kept a “daybook” using Tinderbox for years. I drifted away from Tinderbox for a few years after I became infatuated with Linux or iOS or other “cross-platform” systems. Right now, I’m back with a vengeance.

While rebuilding my Daybook, I wanted to make logging my weight easier. It’s not like it was difficult, but I wanted to tweak it.

Tinderbox is an outliner, so my weight entries are collected under a “Weight Log” node. It looked like this (I obviously wasn’t consistent with tracking last year).

The weight is stored in a numeric User Attribute called, surprisingly, “Weight”. The outline shows a custom “DisplayFormat” so that it reads nicely:

$Weight + " pounds on " + format($StartDate,"MM D")

To enter a new weight, I’d select an existing item in the outline, hit Return to create a new note, type in the weight, hit Return to save the note, then use the mouse to click the “Weight” attribute and re-enter the weight there. So much clicking!  ????.

What I wanted to do was to type the weight once in the note’s Name and have the Weight attribute populated automatically. Tinderbox notes can have “Rules” which are commands that run periodically and can update a note’s attributes based on just about any criteria. I could have created a rule that set the Weight based on the Name, but that seemed like overkill since this only ever needs to happen once per note.

With some help from Michael Becker, I think I’ve got it. (You should check out his video series on Mastering Tinderbox for all sorts of great Tinderbox content.)

There’s an OnAdd action which sets the Prototype, Date, and Name of the note. (Setting the Name of the new note to “Enter Weight” is a nice touch.)

$Prototype="pWeightLogEntry";$Date|=date(today);if($Name=="untitled"){$Name="Enter Weight"};

Then, the new note gets a Rule (via the pWeightLogEntry Prototype) which sets the Weight attribute based on the value of Name:

$Weight|=$Name;
if($Weight>0){
$Name=$Date("l");
$RuleDisabled=true};

The trick here is setting $RuleDisabled=true. What this does is force the Rule to run only once, which is all I need. I wasn’t aware of the $RuleDisabled attribute, so thanks to Michael for that tip.

Now, to add a new Weight Log entry, I hit Return, type my weight, and hit Return again. Couldn’t be any easier! On my Daybooks “Dashboard” I can graph my weight over time, like so…

For those of you unfamiliar with Tinderbox, I’m sorry if I made too many assumptions here. Explaining Tinderbox can be an entire job in itself!

My dream is to maintain my writing in one place. Unfortunately, I enjoy tinkering with different publishing tools so much that I have never been able to choose a single platform and stick with it.

I’m going to try focusing my writing here at copingmechanism.com for a while and see if I can live here. This means baty.blog is on hold for the time being.

One thing I wanted here was a theme that wasn’t quite so overwrought as “Hive”. I wanted something a little more old-school. I was poking around and found that James Vornov’s great blog, On Deciding…Better, uses the Graphy WordPress theme, which I really like. I knew it seemed familiar because I had actually purchased the pro version of the theme back in April. And around we go!

The wildcard is my brand new blog at daily.baty.net. It’s managed using Tinderbox. I really enjoy using Tinderbox, but it remains to be seen if I will continue using it to generate a blog. I’m going to try copying the daily post from daily.baty.net into posts here at the end of each day. Maybe that’ll work well and I’ll switch to just using Tinderbox for writing and organizing each day, but not use it for the actual publishing process.

Still noodlin’ on it. Thanks for playing along.

Somehow, some part of their attention is directed toward the possibility that their application environment isn’t “ideal.” They have this notion there’s some perfect writing environment that will make them more productive or better writers by eliminating this thing called “distraction.” There’s some anxiety about the tool they’re using.

Dave Rogers

Dave’s right. I’ve gone through many iterations around “distraction-free” writing myself. In my case, though, I don’t do it because I feel the writing environment is holding me back. I do it because it can be fun to twiddle with tools. Same with cameras. My cameras have been better than my ability for years, but I still keep trying new cameras because I love cameras.

Oh, and about distraction-free writing in Tinderbox, I wrote Tinderbox as a Minimalist Writing Environment in 2013. (Unfortunately, all of the site’s images from 2012 were lost during one of many platform migrations.)

This week started out with the intention of building a Rails app, but ended with the creation of an entirely new Tinderbox Daybook and blogging system. You’re soaking in it. I’m still considering moving the whole enterprise to baty.blog and just living with that for a while. However, I still wonder about returning it to rudimentarylathe.org or maybe even replacing the photography domain copingmechanism.com. And who knows, I may end with all of this back in Emacs in a month. But Tinderbox is still super fun and powerful and let’s try it!

Tinderbox does this cool thing in outlines where the icon changes based on the age and size of each note. I’m working on mimicking that feature on the Archives page here. I’m a little lost when it comes to the new “functions” features in Tinderbox 9.1 so I fell back to adding some Action code as an Edict. Like this…

if ($TextLength>500) {
    	$NoteIcon="long.png";
}
if ($TextLength>50 & $TextLength<=500) {
    	$NoteIcon ="medium.png";
}
if ($TextLength<50) {
	$NoteIcon ="small.png";
}
if ($Image) {$NoteIcon = "cam.png"};

Now, we all realize that our jump-off point is agreeing to rally the troops for next quarter so we can circle back to the perfect ROI for the inevitable year-end come-to-Jesus moment. That’s evident from our low-hanging fruit research and the blue-sky white papers presented by the team in marketing, right? NO, YOU’RE WRONG ON THAT, STEVE. STEVE. STEVE. HEAR ME OUT. YOU’RE WRONG. JUST HEAR ME OUT, STEVE.

I’M GOING TO CLOSE THIS DEAL USING BUSINESS WORDS I’VE HEARD MEN YELL IN AIRPORTS

I sometimes attend an event and take deliberate photos with a serious camera. Later, I see shots other people casually snapped with their iPhones or whatever and posted them (with no editing) directly to social media. They’re often much better than mine. Am I just wasting my time?

This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

@gawker
The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive

Some days I just really need to finish a roll. The photos of Alice relaxing in the sunshine reminded me how good film is at holding onto highlights. I feel like I couldn’t blow them if I tried.