Disinfotainment

1974: Broken Glass

2012-01-16T18:59:34Z

Polaroid SX-70 print, circa 1974.

Assorted Scissors

2011-12-05T23:20:47Z

I have a lot of scissors. I put a few of them on my scanner, here they are from top to bottom.

Long scissors. Just over 9 inches long, with a 5.5 inch cutting blade. This scissors is very hard to use.

Heavy scissors. This scissors had a hard working life. It is rusty and corroded, and is too beat up to use. The side is stamped "Richards of Sheffield."

Fiskars. Good general purpose scissors. Easy to use, I use it a lot.

Hair scissors. I don't know why I have this, I wouldn't trim my own hair.

Surgical Scissors. Very sharp and good for small, accurate cutting. I use this scissors the most.

LAN Template: 1988

2011-12-01T21:01:06Z

I found an amusing old LAN design template. Yes, we used to design computer networks on paper. This template must date to about 1988, since the laser printer icon looks like an Apple LaserWriter II.

Polaroids: 1973~75

2011-12-01T20:21:29Z

I found some dusty old SX-70 prints in my files. They're in poor condition and were photographed sometime between 1973 to 1975. The first two are photographs of the Indianapolis 500. I didn't notice until I scanned the first photo, you can see the Goodyear Blimp. That second shot has a nice pan and motion blur, that was really hard to do with the SX-70.

The next image had some cracks in the emulsion, I tried to fix it a little, but I left most of them unretouched. I'm finding out that SX-70 prints were not as indestructible as Polaroid claimed. But the subtle colors in the sky are pretty good.

I always liked the harsh look of the Polaroid Flash Bar, but they were really expensive. I liked using them at night, so the nearby objects were brightly lit, and the illumination quickly drops with distance.

Steve Jobs R.I.P.

2011-10-06T01:31:16Z

The Great Firewall of China

2011-10-01T01:14:04Z

Due to intense spam attacks on my blog, I have been forced to block access from every IP in China. In the last month, I have received over 16,000 spam comments, all of them originating from China. I don't know what these spammers think they will achieve by spamming comments. They know they're posting to a MovableType blog, which uses NoFollow, so none of the links in comments will improve their Google Pagerank. That's usually the goal, and the NoFollow was implemented to thwart this. But still, they persist in this futile effort. Spammers are stupid.

So if you are from China and you have a compelling need to access my blog's contents, too bad. Get your Chinese ISP to stop hosting spammers and maybe bloggers won't be forced to lock you out.

Upgrade?

2011-07-25T05:47:20Z

I had to perform a mandatory security upgrade, and now my blog template is broken. Everything seems to work, but it's not formatted correctly. I'll try to restore normal service as soon as possible.

Pour Over Coffee

2011-03-31T12:08:18Z

Apparently I missed the latest coffee trend, "pour over" brewing. Apparently I missed this because I have done this before, I thought it was just the proper way to drip brew coffee.

The main theory of pour over is that using a regular filter cone drip brew method, some of the grounds are over-extracted and some are under-extracted. To remedy this problem, baristas have practiced with refractometers to measure coffee extraction levels, and developed a precise brewing method. But it seems to me, the very method they have developed actually exacerbates the problem. The classic pour over leaves a ridge of grounds around the edge of the cone that never gets extracted, and the central grounds where the water is poured are over-extracted.

Some baristas recommend a filter cone with an open bottom like the Chemex carafe. That was the first coffee maker I ever owned. It makes great coffee, but the filters were not crimped, you folded them yourself. They tended to break, dumping the entire load of grounds into the brewed coffee. The use of a metal mesh filter is also recommended, but I owned one of those too. It is too porous, the water flows right through and the coffee is under-extracted.

But there is more to pour over than just a filter cone. The key is slowly adding just enough water to just wet the grounds. The slogan is, "don't drown the grounds." This is a common problem with methods like the Melita cone filters I have used for years. The best Melita method I know is just to add the water slowly and stir the grounds. I used to go to coffee shops in Japan and watch the baristas slowly pouring water, stirring, and testing it with a thermometer, I didn't think anything was special about it, they were just making a really good cup of coffee.

I tested a few "improved" methods with my Melita cone. I don't have a fancy pour over kettle with a thin spout, I just boil water in the microwave. I have a little 1/8th Cup measuring cup, I can spoon water carefully into the grounds with precision. Yes, a pour over cup tastes quite different. It is extremely strong, I do think it is over-extracted. I have reduced the amount of grounds, but it's still heavily extracted. The coffee has more flavor, but it is somewhat bitter as well. And the extraction takes so long, the coffee is cold by the time I get to drink it, I have to reheat it in the microwave. After extensive testing, I don't think a pour over is any better than just stirring the grounds as they extract.

1993: Sphere Study

2011-03-27T03:33:38Z

If you study drawing, you do a lot of basic studies. Drawing a sphere is a classic study, you must get the lighting and shadows right in order to portray the volume convincingly. But studies can be terribly boring, so you try something different. Anything different.

I did a lot of studies like this when I was doing a portraiture project, I've posted other drawings from this series and you can probably see what I was working out. This was a particularly good, rough, scribbly sketch, from early in the series. This 9 inch square drawing looks like chalk or charcoal, it's old and starting to get smeared and a little soft, but the whole drawing was soft and smeary to start with.

Rounding Error

2011-03-26T04:41:47Z

My local grocery store had a special, 3 frozen pizzas for $10. I bought 2. I was stunned when I saw the register tape.

1995: Tiny Portrait

2011-03-25T20:48:11Z

I found this tiny portrait on a page with other portrait studies, I must have drawn it around 1995. It's only about the size of a thumbprint and is greatly enlarged here. I must have used a Japanese calligraphy brush with a fine point. It's hard to control that kind of brush at this scale, but I like the coarse strokes mixed with some sweeping, fast lines,

2004: Koi

2011-02-10T08:48:22Z

Here is another experimental print in my antique photochemistry process, I think I made it around 2004. Like a lot of prints I make, I thought this one was a failure. It certainly didn't turn out the way I intended. But I decided it was not such a failure after all. This is a very large print, 11x16 inches, the largest print I ever attempted in this media.

I took this photo with a cheap Fuji disposable 35mm camera, this is the moat at Goryoukaku Fortress in Hakodate, Japan. I scanned the little 5x7 inch print and made digital color separations, that's where I made the error. I was experimenting with CMYK "undercolor removal" for this color separation. When you have a dark, neutral color, it usually has a large amount of cyan, magenta, and yellow in it, in addition to black. UCR removes those "undercolors" and replaces them with black. But it was a failed experiment, the colors all went too much towards black, which covered up a lot of the brighter colors. This process is fairly high contrast, it has trouble conveying subtle colors. But I did manage to capture some nice, smooth tonal changes that are normally beyond the range of this process. There is a subtle change of light color across the top, as the green lotus pads float in in the blue water. But the darker tones in the left corner went to almost totally black, they were actually dark blue. I think this UCR method is not the way to go for this process, most people only print CMY and don't print the black at all. This print might have done better with a lighter black layer, but it's too late to redo the films now. The colors that do appear are subtle and generally faithful to the original (even if they're a little faint).

But I decided I liked the results in this print anyway, even if it wasn't what I wanted. The darkest blacks are somewhat blue-black. And even the black seems to work with this image, just as it is. The high contrast brings out the details in the rippling patterns of the water, and the structure of the lotus pads. And there's a lot of detail in a print this big. Here's a detail from the print, slightly enlarged.

If you look closely, you can see white lotus flowers in the upper left and right corners. If you look very closely, you can see they have a faint yellow center. And the koi swimming in the foreground has an orangy salmon color. The dark blue-black water helps the fish stand out. It's hard to get subtle color for both strong colors and faint pastels. But this seems to work somewhat on both ends of the scale. Registration between layers was very good in this print, so there is good detail here (if you can believe that). This process is notorious for lack of detail, that's part of its look. Overall, there are more successes than failures in this print. But I'd sure like to print it again, with better negatives.

Update: I found another print of this image, it's small enough to fit on my scanner so I can get improved color accuracy. It has a lighter black negative and doesn't use UCR, so the midrange, bright colors are more apparent. And you can see fairly good detail in the lower left corner, that wasn't visible in the other print. But this separation is bad too, you can see too much black in the light areas in the upper right. The midrange tones are pretty good but the light end lost detail. I think this was the separation that inspired me to see if UCR would do better. This separation still isn't right, but it's closer than the other one. I can do almost any variation of color separations to get any tonal scale I want, but it can get complex. Ideally I would make 8 negatives, two for each CMYK color, one for the high tones and one for the low tones.

1977: More Color Transfers

2011-02-10T06:53:57Z

I photographed more of my old color transfer prints. These prints are larger, this one is 11x14 inches. There are at least 7 transfers on this print, but I can't tell exactly.

This next print about 11x16 inches, I'm showing it at a smaller scale than the previous picture. This print is less complex with just one primary image. It seems to be a graph of some kind. But the ragged patches of flat, pale color from other prints makes this look more like a painting.

1977: Color Transfer

2011-02-09T12:07:09Z

I found a cache of my ancient artwork from the 1970s, when I was an art student. I've been scanning and posting a few of them. I thought this was an interesting piece of collage, it's a "color transfer" Solvent is applied to magazine photos, the photo is placed against the paper, and the back of the photo is burnished to transfer the image. I think in this one, the solvent was acrylic medium. It has a beautiful texture and the colors are fairly strong. Color transfers tend to have weak, transparent colors, it's hard to transfer much of the ink.

I found several of these prints, but this is the only one small enough to fit on my scanner, it's about 8 inches square. I might post the other images later if I can get a good reproduction. These seem to be hard to capture.

I remember fiddling with color transfer a bit, sometime around '77. This is what we used to do when we didn't have photoshop. It is kind of like monoprinting, but you just have magazine photos as your source. You can manipulate the texture and depth of the transfer, but it's pretty random. I guess we thought we were all Rauschenbergs, he used color transfer, but he had a professional printmaking atelier to do them properly. This color transfer process was popular around the printmaking department at the U of Iowa, it was so cheap and easy that a lot of students worked with it. But now it's pretty much a lost art.

1976: Life Drawing 202

2011-02-06T00:20:56Z

Sometimes when people scoff at my draftsmanship and drawing ability, I need some evidence to show that I actually have some talent. Usually the person scoffing is me, artists are their own harshest critics. I recently found a nice "academic drawing" of the type I usually avoided because it was so difficult. I drew this probably sometime late in my sophomore year, near the end of two years of life drawing classes. The pencil drawing is so faint that it was nearly impossible to photograph, so be sure to click on the pic and an enlargement will pop up.