It’s Half The Camera It Could Be

Like your childhood 126 cartridge film camera, but with fewer Spiderman motifs.

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to procrastinate. And when I open up my draft of Luck Be A Spacelady (my latest Marlowe and the Spacewoman novel) and see just how much more work needs to be done, I need those distractions.

The most recent is my discovery of and subsequent experimenting with half frame 35mm film photography. I had no idea these things existed despite they’re been around for longer than I have.

For those of you also unfamiliar with half frame cameras (but hopefully at least know what film is), here’s a quick explanation: the size of the image exposed on the negative is half the width of a typical 35mm exposure. You get twice the exposures on a roll of film at half the size (for example, 72 pictures on a 36 exposure roll). A more detailed explanation can be found here.

I bought the (relatively) inexpensive Kodak Ektar H35 camera, which came out recently and has received generally good reviews. My other option was to pay a lot of money on eBay for an older half frame camera that may or may not require servicing before I could be confident it worked.

That seemed like a high risk-to-reward ratio for an aspect of photography I might not end up liking, so I went with the entry level approach.

The camera is easy to use. No focusing, no exposure setting, no shutter speed setting. Everything is fixed. You just point and shoot. The only control you have is the ISO rating of the film you use. The camera is set up for using ISO 100 film in a sunny outdoor setting.

This is a blessing and a curse. You don’t have to fuss over settings to get a good picture, but at the same time you can’t fuss over the settings to get a good picture. You get what you what get. If you use, for example, ISO 100 film and the lighting conditions change (going from sunny to overcast or twilight), your pictures will be underexposed and you can’t do anything to compensate.

This also makes the camera a throwback to the cheap old 126 film cameras I had as a child.

Never underestimate the appeal of the nostalgia factor, especially when you start to get as old and close to death as me. I still remember the excitement and joy of receiving a Spiderman 126 film cartridge camera for my birthday as a young boy.

The camera does come with a flash for indoor / darker situations. However, my experience is that the flash isn’t effective beyond about five feet from the camera. I discovered this at the price of a lot of dark, indoor photos that are basically a waste of celluloid.

Change the aperture? I’m sorry, Ian, I can’t do that.

The shutter speed is fixed at 1/100 sec, which generally speaking is sufficient to freeze action in a photo. However, I found that a lot of my pictures, particularly those taken from a slowly moving vehicle, exhibit a lot of camera shake. Standing still and holding the camera still generally resulted in no shake, but with this camera I really had to pay attention to how I was holding it.

This is contrary to the concept of using the camera as a no-think point and shoot. A camera that requires no thought when it comes to settings actually requires a great deal of focus (ha ha, no pun intended) when it comes to holding it. It took me a while to figure that out, so a lot of the ‘extra’ photos I exposed on the roll didn’t come out.

Not necessarily a flaw of the camera, but given how light and easy this all-plastic camera is to shake, definitely a consideration to keep in mind when using it.

Maybe I can add some fishing weights (another distraction we won’t talk about now) to the camera to help with that issue.

After shooting two rolls of film, my overall conclusion is that shooting this camera is very much like shooting other film cameras: you will take a lot of pictures and on each roll, you’ll get one or two gems and the rest of the pictures are ‘meh’ at best. Now I might be able to improve the gem-to-meh ratio with more practice, but I will never be able to eliminate all the mehs.

Sure, more complicated cameras give you more control, and an experienced, professional photographer will almost certainly be able to get more gems on a roll through expert use of those controls, but for an average Joe like me, once you get past the reality that most of the pictures on a roll will be merely OK with only a few really good ones, you can be perfectly happy with your efforts and your camera.

I also discovered that who processes your negatives can impact the quality of the scans / prints. Specifically, vendors who scan the film like full-frame 35mm exposures (that is, two exposures per print) can produce poor quality images if the two different exposures have dramatically different lighting conditions. The scanner seems to split the difference, resulting in two terrible images even though the negatives themselves look fine. But if the vendor scans each half-frame exposure independently, the images will be more representative of the negatives.

I learned this the hard way with my first roll of film and when I saw the scans, I almost gave up on the camera. But then I examined the negatives and realized what had happened.

So I’ve made my peace with this camera. It’s fun, easy to use, and if you have a steady hand and the lighting conditions are right, you can get a good, albeit somewhat lower resolution picture. I might even use it again.

That said, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not I want to invest in an older, more fully featured camera. The Ektar H35 is brand new and everything works as it should. The older cameras, while more feature rich and of a higher quality (at least when they were new), are more expensive and, being decades old, have a very real risk of not working correctly out of the box.

If I could buy, say, an Olympus Pen EF brand new and at a reasonable price, I totally would. But paying hundreds of dollars for a camera that might have mechanical problems because it is as old or older than me gives me, a man of not unlimited wealth, pause. Thinking about such a purchase, I am forced to ask myself a couple of salient questions:

How much am I willing to invest in this hobby?

More importantly, shouldn’t I be focused on writing instead?

As seems requisite with posts like this, here are some example photos taken with the Kodak Ektar H35. I’d say any deficiencies are due to my middling photography skills, but honestly, except for the camera shake, the results are all down to the camera. Even poor framing isn’t entirely my fault, as the viewfinder is not through-the-lens and doesn’t have any parallax offsets printed on it.

A functional, but not perfect and DEFINITELY cheap-looking viewfinder

 

 

 

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Clues – ‘new’ radio play and, it turns out, Bob Ross revival piece

I quit social media about nine months ago and I haven’t felt more alive and empowered since…well, since I started using social media.

So it goes without saying that I highly recommend dropping it. You’ll be much happier and think more highly of your IRL friends once you can no longer see the nonsense they post online.

But there is a drawback. At least for me.

Because I no longer check out Facebook, Twitter, and the like, I missed an important post a few weeks ago.

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Clues, a Marlowe and the Spacewoman radio play in two parts, was released by the KFJC Pandemic Players. It aired on KFJC on June 1st and June 8th, but because I missed the announcement, I also missed the opportunity to hear it live and, even more devastatingly, to plug it to you, my loyal readers, before it was broadcast.

(OF course, given I’m no longer on social media, I’m not sure how much plugging I could have done even if I had known).

That said, an archive of the broadcast is available online here (just scroll down to the entries for it and you can download Part 1 and / or Part 2, depending on how linear (and complete) you like your audio adventures to be.)

This radio play has it all – mystery, Bob Ross, murder, social media influencers, art critiques, francophone musical assassins, and, in Part 2, at least one (non-Batman) penguin gangster.

Title notwithstanding, you don’t need anything but your ears to enjoy the story.

While my first radio play for the Pandemic Players was an adaptation of a chapter from my Marlowe and the Spacewoman WNSMIPLBIL (Work Not So Much In Progress Lately Because I’m Lazy) Luck Be A Spacelady, this script is a new stand-alone story written exclusively for radio and, more specifically, for the Pandemic Players. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope you guys enjoy listening to it.

Even if you won’t see any posts from me on social media alerting you to this WordPress entry or the radio play…

 

Oh yeah? Well I heard different!

Until recently, I used to think that upon reaching a…ahem…certain age, I would see the evolution of my writing process level off and stabilize, a sort of “We’ve arrived, darling, so you can relax now!” moment where I could rest on my laurels and, at the very least, not get actively worse.

In other words, I would transition from the very rough and immature writing that is the (extremely self-evident) product of my inept youth to the more mature, polished writing that comes with life experience and practice.

Lots and lots of practice.

Ultimately, my expectation was this evolution in my writing would hit ‘peak’ maturity (or as ‘peak’ as my maturity allows) and then I’d be settled in and have very little left to learn or add to my repertoire.

And as with just about everything else I think about life, I was wrong.

Recently I was asked if I’d like to adapt some of my written work into a radio drama. I’d never written a radio drama before, the closest I’d ever come to it being writing a couple of plays in college many years ago.

Many, many years ago.

I remembered listening to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” and “The Empire Strikes Back” radio programs even many more years ago, and I had nothing but fond memories, so naturally I said yes.

I’m glad I did.

Writing for a book (or short story) is a very different process than writing for a radio program. There’s the oft-repeated old saw applied to writing that you must “show, don’t tell,” which is basically an instruction not to dump a lot of boring exposition into your prose when you can describe the events instead.

To wit:

“He was so angry with himself for eating the whole pizza in one sitting.”

vs.

“Reginald stared hard in the mirror, disgusted with the weak-spined man, if ‘man’ was the right word, staring back. Even his internal organs couldn’t hide their disdain at the selfish act of desecration his dining choice represented – his heart burned with the fire of a thousand suns and his stomach quivered and heaved with the sort of restless fury that could only portend a long, violent session on the commode. A commode that, Reginald realized with shame, he didn’t deserve. ‘What was I thinking!? A whole pizza? And with pineapple on it!?’ No, there was a special place in hell for Reginald, and he would make no effort to resist his well-deserved journey there.”

This is also good advice if you are being paid by the word.

But paradoxically, writing for the radio is literally telling, not showing. The medium precludes showing the audience anything.

OK, I know, technically the written word also imposes this same limitation, but you can have picture books and there is an accepted convention that you can describe events and people’s thoughts outside of your characters’ dialogue. So it’s easier to ‘show’ in a short story or novel without sounding all stilted and overbearing.

Yes, you can just have a narrator explain the unspoken bits in your radio drama in-between stretches of dialogue, and there are examples of radio shows that do just that. But I didn’t like it. It felt like taking the easy way out.

Well, I say I didn’t like that approach. Not entirely true. My disdain for the approach wasn’t strong enough to prevent me from trying it (I’m a big fan of the easy way out), but the feedback I got for that draft of the script was, to be blunt, that it flat out doesn’t work. No doubt this reflects more on me and my writing than on the technique itself.

Denied the easy way out, I was forced down the more arduous path of “figuring out what the hell to do to make this damned script work.”

At first, I felt limited by the different requirements for a radio script. But I slowly came to discover that the constraints of radio weren’t limitations at all. In actuality, they opened up new possibilities and pushed me to expand my understanding of storytelling.

It was a journey of self-discovery, and while an unwilling passenger at first (“Wah! I don’t wanna go! I’m already a mature writer! Wah!”), in the end I’m glad I stuck with it.

Where did this journey lead me? To a heretofore unknown-to-me tool to add to my writing arsenal, a skill not just limited to crafting radio dramas, but something which can also be applied and is essential to improving my prose in general:

How to show while telling.

What is showing while telling?

Well, it isn’t flashing your second grade teacher while tattling on a classmate about his nose-picking addiction.

It’s taking into account that a radio story is conveyed through actual sound waves moving through the air and physically striking the listener’s tympanic membranes, not photons bouncing off words on a page and being silently absorbed by the reader’s eyes.

It’s embedding narrative information in dialogue without sounding (too much) like the dreaded ‘info dump.’

(I have to admit, it’s really hard to avoid the ‘info dump’ feel, but I actually like that about some of the older radio dramas. So for me, at least, a little bit of over the top exposition adds to the charm. A little bit.)

It’s revealing needed details via the flow of action and events instead of a character saying it.

(In my case, I turned a letter read by the main character in the book into a barbershop quartet that sang the content while interacting with the main characters (by which I mean they got punched a lot). And I liked the result so much, I fully intend to back-fill that change into the book!)

It’s including audio effects in the script – like the sharp crack of a bullet striking a car windshield followed by squealing and the violent roar of the car crashing into a wall – to further convey information that just can’t be reasonably worked into the dialogue.

(Do you really want to hear, in the heat of the action, a character say, “Oh no! A bullet just hit our car’s windshield and broke it! I can’t see! Oof! We just crashed into a wall!”)? No. You don’t.

It’s also hard and I’m definitely still learning.

I discovered, in other words, that I have a lot more evolving to do.

The drama of which I write herein, a chapter from my in-progress novel, Luck Be A SpaceLady, was one of four produced this year by the KFJC Pandemic Players. Social distancing was observed at every stage, which makes the final result all the more impressive. I encourage you to check them out, but especially (because I’m a selfish attention-seeker) their production of my script, found here in MP3 format.

 

Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Moonlighting Superhero! No, It’s Just An In Over His Head Improv Student!

If you were peeking surreptitiously through my window tonight and saw me groaning in pain as I reached under the kitchen sink to grab a garbage bag, you could be forgiven for wondering:

“Is he a mild-mannered writer by day who uses Krav Maga to fight crime at night? Is that why he’s so stiff and in such obvious agony now, having over-exerted himself during the off hours in his zeal for intemperate Justice?”

Honestly, right now it feels exactly like I do go out at night, but not to pummel ne’er-do-wells. Nope, sadly I think it’s more akin to them pummeling me.

But that is not the source of my discomfort.

No.

It’s something much simpler:

Improv comedy.

That darkest and deadliest of the comic arts, requiring its oh-so-foolish practitioners to work…without a net.

Dangerous stuff. Really gets the heart a-pumpin’.

Yes, instead of finishing his latest short story or the third book in the Marlowe and the Spacewoman saga, this mild-mannered author / engineer by day is moonlighting as an adrenaline-seeking improv artist during his “down” time.

And I’m not very good at it.

You see, in Comedy Which Is Improvised, as lay people call it, the audience expects to laugh. Ideally by something you or your fellow artists are saying and performing on stage.

You know, acting out wacky and hilarious scenes based on prompts from the people sitting in the dark in front of you, fidgeting in their seats, hungry for entertainment.

Ravenous, even.

And if you aren’t wacky and hilarious?

Well, the audience still needs to feed. And if they don’t get the delicious comedy they expect, there is a substitute they will accept.

Pain.

Turns out if you can’t make with the funny using words, the audience will eat up pain.

A very specific type of pain.

Self-inflicted.

Sure, you may think it’s funny to punch a castmate in the face and break their nose. Especially if they’ve been hogging the stage all night and stepping on your lines.

But not the audience. Oh no. From them it’s nothing but shocked gasps and indignant muttering and offers to testify on your castmate’s behalf at the assault trial.

But.

But!

Fall flat on your own face?

First a silence so deep descends upon the audience they can hear your teeth crack from the impact.

And then, a beat later, laughter.

Uproarious, gleeful laughter.

The more self-inflicted and gasp-inducing your injury, the more they lap it up.

And once they’ve supped on your personal misery, they discover too late they’ve developed a taste for it.

They want more.

They need more.

They. Must. Have. MORE.

More of your saucy, delectable pain.

So this past weekend I ended up flinging myself upon the hard, unyielding boards I was trodding in a desperate attempt to find a balance between killing myself (too much pain) and angering the audience (not enough).

Oh, how they laughed at my anguished wailing, how they chortled at my plaintive whimpers, how they guffawed at the gush of my hemoglobin all over the floor of the stage, hot and sticky and metallic.

Which is why today, I don’t have the strength to lift my damp, still blood-stained costume out of the washing machine.

Or a garbage bag out from the cabinet under the sink.

Today I learned it’s a good idea to have, if not a medical degree, at least an Associate’s Degree in anatomy if you want to get into the dangerous, high-stakes life of improv comedy.

Or, if you have the knack for it, be funny.

Either way, I think I’m in over my head.

 

If H. P. Lovecraft had written for the New Yorker

Bit of a break from my writing prompt series, but don’t worry, I’ve got three more entries written and that fiendish carnival cult nurse is eager to return.

Instead, I want to write about something new: an entirely different writing prompt exercise!

After you’ve finished rolling your eyes, but before you click off to another site, let me explain. Not too long ago, a friend of mine posted a blog entry about a creative writing book written by Jeff VanderMeer called Wonderbook. She made it sound intriguing enough that I went out and bought it.

The book is about the creative process, has a lot of pictures and essays and, well, read my friend’s blog post. It’s late and I don’t feel like describing it when someone else already has. I will say that while I find the book interesting, it does require…focus, and because of that and my current circumstances¹, I have struggled a bit with it. Not to say I don’t like it, because I do, but it feels, to me at least, like a well-written textbook on an interesting subject rather than a light read that you tear through in one sitting.

Oh no, definitely not one sitting.

In keeping with this textbook feel, it has exercises. I just finished Chapter 1 and got to my first writing prompt, which I will reproduce below. This prompt is different from the WRITE THE STORY prompts in my other posts, in that WRITE THE STORY is a writing journal where each page gives me a bunch of words to integrate into a story. This exercise from Wonderbook just presents me with a picture and says go.

So, without further ado, the writing that resulted from the first prompt! Temper your expectations – this is no carnival cult nurse escapade…

Insert New Yorker caption contest entry here. Mine? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the book I’m looking for.

 

Adolfus stared with no small amount of irritation at the apparition rising before him. The Emperor would be displeased with his fallen angel if Adolfus’ failures continued along these lines. An explosion or a smaller, more colorful conflagration, while still failures, were at least entertaining. But a giant, winged singing fish, conjured from a painter’s palette? That had been done before.

The owl on Adolfus’ right shoulder clicked with consternation, while the cockatoo on his left issued forth a stream of obscenities. “That last variation should have worked,” Octavius, the owl, finally sputtered. Tersius just continued to swear until Adolfus flicked her beak sharply and she fell silent.

“If you can’t be helpful, be quiet,” Adolfus scolded. Both familiars lowered their heads, in thought, submission, and shame as Adolfus stroked his chin, going over the incantation silently, trying to see the source of the error.

The winged fish, oblivious to the trouble it had caused, burped and then broke out in a wet, throaty rendition of Fidelio.

“I’m sure it sounds better under water,” observed Octavius.

¹ Life has been a little more…chaotic and uncooperative of late, and I’ve been using these writing prompts to break out of the funk I keep finding myself in. That, along with an improv class I’m taking, have been surprisingly effective, so I will continue to use this tool until such time I either feel better or the head honcho at Simon and Schuster stumbles across these vignettes, offers me a huge, multi-million dollar contract, and I find myself catapulted into literary fame. Or once I’ve gotten through the two books I’m currently using. Whichever comes first. I’m kinda hoping for the multi-million dollar contract option, but I don’t think Simon and Schuster can really afford me these days…

 

For Whom Does the Doorbell Toll? It Tolls For Thee, Fool Using a Vintage Word Processor

This is the nice warning sign. Before the cops made me take it down, I had a rig that dumped concentrated skunk venom on you. It wasn’t the dumping on salespeople the cops objected to, it was the unavoidably omnipresent smell.

“Hello, my name is Ian and I’m a vintage-aholic. My last purchase of vintage electronics was three days ago. But on the positive side, it was an old Brother word processor with a working built-in CRT and printer!”

Now if you’re anything like my wife, you’re rolling your eyes and snickering about my tendency to lust after (and occasionally buy) electronics from the 80s and 90s. But when the apocalypse comes and the only thing that will save you is a 1987 Compaq Portable III connected via null modem to a 1989 IBM PS/2 P70 running an old DOS program that controls a weather satellite, well, we’ll see who’s laughing then.

(And enjoying the blistering hot sun, jerk. You won’t be getting rain any time soon once I control the weather!)

All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? This is my WORDSTICK! It’s a 5″ x 9″ amber CRT with a built-in spelling and grammar checker, Brother’s top-of-the-line.

But until such time, I have to prove to myself (and, to a (much) larger extent, the Missus) that the cash outlay for said type of machines is worth it. Which means, in the case of my Brother WP-95 word processor, I need to use it.

At least once.

My sponsor has asked for photographic evidence of its use. I think this is because she wants proof it works before she steals it from me. (Yes, vintage-aholic sponsors are quite cutthroat when they fall off the wagon. If it wasn’t for eBay, the streets would be awash in blood. Awash!)

So sure, modern computers can do a lot more than a single-function device like this word processor.

And yes, modern displays are brighter, crisper, and larger.

To be sure, a modern laptop weighs only a fraction of the 22 pounds this thing weighs. And can run on a battery. And can save files, do fancy formatting, get you on the internet, and allow you to email yourself a backup of your file.

But where’s the fun in that? When you lug a 22 pound dedicated word processor like this to a coffee shop, plug the electric cord into an extension cord so you can reach the wall outlet, and then write something, you feel a sense of accomplishment!

When’s the last time you felt a sense of accomplishment writing something on a mamby-pamby modern computer using software that practically writes the story for you?

(I’m looking at you, Scrivener users!)

What kind of fashion statement is this?

But not only do you get a cardio workout along with that satisfaction, you also get the added bonus of irritating all those bloody hipsters sipping espressos when you hit the PRINT button. Because when this thing prints out, you are magically transported back to a news room with a teletype in a time that predates decibel-levels-in-the-workplace regulations.

Fireworks freak out your dog? Nothing compared to this printer.

So I recommend getting your butt to the coffee shop, plugging this thing in, and if the line for coffee is too long, fire off a page to the printer. Those beatniks in line will flee in terror, convinced North Korea has finally made good on its threats, and you won’t have to wait in line for coffee.

It’s a win-win.

(If you need a vintage word processor, the Missus informs me that I would be happy to sell you mine…)

Here’s my justification for spending $40. Was it worth it? Let me know in the comments.

If you think this is tt;dr (too tiny, didn’t read), you should know I modified the word processor to print for microfiche.

 

Best Pet at Home

Being as I’m so precise when it comes to homework, I’ve been trying to find ways to make homework time more fun and less drudgery-ish for the kiddos.

So when one kiddo started getting writing assignments, I decided to sit and write with him. And not just my own thing. Oh no. We read the directions together and we follow them together.

That’s correct. I’m doing my kiddo’s homework assignment as well.

First, the instructions introduce the topic and then call for the student to state their opinion clearly. Secondly, the writer must justify that opinion with reasons. Finally, we are also reminded (admonished?) that we must include an introduction and a conclusion, all while using linking words, whatever those are.

The first time we did this was a bit rough, because I made him re-write his composition due to poor planning and profound illegibility issues. I made him re-do the assignment on a fresh piece of paper, my thinking being he’d re-write it, get his thoughts in order, and then transfer the effort neatly onto the homework sheet. Make him write it enough times and maybe, just maybe, he’d be incentivized to do it right the first time.

(Ha!)

My son is a bit lazy, and as we all know, lazy is the father of ingenuity and invention. He decided we should just tape the paper with the writing onto the homework sheet and forgo an additional round of writing.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In fact, it’s resting against the trunk, putting off a lot of body heat and making me uncomfortably warm. Which is to say, I’m lazy too, and not wanting to endure the nuclear hissy fit of wailing and gnashing of teeth that would ensue if I refused, I rolled with his suggestion.

And once done, we read our creations to each other, followed, of course, by a standing ovation (from the dog, who looked a little confused to be standing on its hind legs while I forced its front legs together and apart over and over all the while bellowing, “Bravo! Bravo!”).

No nasty note from the teacher was sent home, so we’ve decided that our approach is OK. Or at least acceptable.

(Though this is the same kiddo who forgets to bring homework, report cards, library books, backpacks, his sibling home from school on a regular basis, so I might be setting myself up for a truly horrific parent/teacher conference in the near future.)

The dog, however, may be sending a different message, as it now hides from us whenever a backpack crosses its line of vision.

Tonight’s session started on the fresh piece of paper. The kiddo entirely skipped the part where he artfully applied vaguely letter-shaped scribbles to the homework sheet. Instead he demanded a clean piece of lined paper and wrote about the Best Pet at Home. And added a drawing of his preferred pet at the bottom for extra credit.

In my opinion we should have a turtle.

Since I’m not willing to make my child suffer something I am not willing to suffer myself, I cranked out a short paragraph of my own. So here, for your reading pleasure, is my virtuoso effort to describe the best pet at home.

I did not include a picture with mine. I did enlarge the font to more accurately portray my use of large letters to make my treatise look longer. Old school habits die-hard…

Snails are fascinating creatures and well worth consideration as a family pet. First of all, their spiral shells are an excellent hypnosis aid (handy if you have rowdy kids). Secondly, they are very slow, so if they run away, they won’t get far before you find them. Finally, they don’t eat much and so are inexpensive to keep. In conclusion, snails are the perfect pet for a family of limited resources.

Suck it, Herman Melville. Whales make terrible pets, you idiot!

 

 

The real reason I don’t eat seafood

Hello. My name is Ian and I’m a mercurial.

It’s hard for me to say those words, because it’s admitting to my greatest shame, my worst failing:

I’m a mercury addict.

A heavy metal fan.

A snorter of the quicksilver. (Also known as quickie, though you have to be careful when you ask for it by that name. Can lead to misunderstandings.)

That is, I am addicted to the consumption of the element Hg, and I’ve just come off a two month bender.

Big deal, you say? Mercury isn’t a controlled substance, so how bad can it be, you ask?

Well, it’s hardly the fun-loving addiction of other drugs, like heroin or crack. This one comes with severe, real-world consequences:

• Nausea
• Tremors
• Visual, auditory, and olfactory delusions
• Death
• Semi-permanent hiccups

But there are moments, moments of non-clarity (usually while in the throes of its metallic hug), that mercury seems worth all the costs.

I can see you, having now been appraised of the dire consequences, shaking your head in judgment, tsk-tsking.

Asking yourself what could possibly make Hg worth the risks, what could lead an adult male of reasonable intellect to fall into thermometer chewing, as it is sometimes called.

Two words. The two most dreaded, hated, and libido-killing words ever uttered:

Writer’s block.

I once wrote about where my ideas came from, but that post. like the cake, is a lie.

It was mercury.

It was always mercury.

Turns out mercury does something to your brain, something that leads to more creativity, more ideas, making it the ultimate writer’s block buster.

And before you get too judgmental, did you know that all the best ideas come from us metal munchers?

It’s true. Mercury bumps our brains up to ’11’.

Einstein: strung out on mercury for the first half of his career. He’d likely have come up with the atomic bomb all by himself if he hadn’t quit.

Tesla: Lifetime addict. Upon reviewing the body of his work, most experts suspect he probably started Hg in the womb.

Henry Ford: he originally envisioned a car that ran on mercury, but switched to gasoline when he realized his original fuel plan would make ‘recreational’ mercury more expensive.

George W. Bush: Like the English language, there are always exceptions to the rule. And that defines ol’ Dubya. He got all the liabilities, none of the assets of guzzling the merc.

Hawking: well, he’s never publicly admitted to it, but there’s this guy who comes to some of our meetings in a wheel chair with a voice synthesizer and ALS who bears a strong resemblance to the man.

Yes, we have meetings.

Mercury Anonymous, or HgA (pronounced Hug-uh).

It’s where we support each other in our fight to shake off the silver dragon. Where we ask for help and understanding when we fall off the wagon and land in that bright, shimmery puddle of lustrous, luscious liquid metal.

Which is not as pleasant (or visually stunning) to fall into as you’d think.

Believe me, you don’t know rock bottom until you wake up in an alley, a bunch of broken thermometers in your mouth, and your pants soaked through with mercury.

(Yes, it does indeed stain.)

Double rock bottom these days, because modern thermometers don’t use mercury. But, mortally desperate, that doesn’t stop you, doesn’t make the wishing override the facts.

So you wake up, your mouth dripping red, still seeking to douse the unquenched crave, and you don’t know how much is blood and how much is red-tinted alcohol.

The only thing worse is the series finale to Lost.

One of the tenants of HgA is that you need to stay motivated for success if you want to stay off the silver sasquatch. Which is why we have sobriety medals as part of our meetings.

Although to be honest, they aren’t very well thought out.

They’re made of mercury.

Usually sealed in plastic disks, but sometimes frozen, which means you have to keep them cold.

Really cold. As in “No, you can’t wear that against your chest, it will melt. Here, have some liquid nitrogen, no, I can’t pour it into your hands, where is your dewar? What do you mean, you didn’t bring it? You knew you’d be getting this medal tonight!” cold.

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I forgot my dewar… But I digress.

You get a medallion when you’re sober for thirty days.

The only problem with that? The idea-boosting effects of a single hit of thermo juice lasts about a month.

You can see why this might present a dilemma.

A mad hatter can go clean for a month, get a 30 day sobriety medallion, and then thar she is, lying there, so close, not so sober as we were led to believe.

So much the better.

You break it open, snort the contents, wait for the vomiting to stop and the mood swings to settle, and write your next blog post.

You ‘fess up at the next meeting, go cold turkey while still getting all the creative benefits, and then just as the month winds down and you need another hit…

You get that next 30 day coin.

I blame this lack of farsightedness on the fact that HgA was founded by addicts, and apparently mercury poisoning can impair your ability to reason.

Also, I can’t rule out diabolical ingenuity, because knowing you get that mercury if you stay off it for a month is a powerful incentive.

I said mercury gives you crazy ideas, not that it made you smart.

 

An analog man in a digital age

This is what a contemplative life looks like.

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a new lease on life.

Specifically, a bag full of cameras (and lenses) that belonged to my grandfather.

35mm film cameras.

Now my daily camera these days is my cell phone, and it takes convenient but usually terrible photos.

On those (rare) occasions where I’m actually worried about picture quality, I lug along my digital SLR.

Which also takes bland, slightly less terrible but significantly more inconvenient pictures.

And you know what? I take a lot of pictures, but I rarely spend any time looking at them.

I point the phone at the subject and press the shutter button. The pictures are taken, and on some level my brain says, “Ah yup, that one’s captured for posterity.”

(For some reason, my brain sounds like Jon Stewart imitating a cartoon turtle while talking about Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell.)

And since that moment has been safely tucked away on digital medium, I do a quick check on the LCD screen to make sure everything’s in focus and exposed properly, and then never look at the images again.

It’s as if I’ve decided, on some level, that knowing I have the pictures is enough, and reviewing them later unnecessary.

Receiving these film cameras got me to feeling nostalgic for the early days of my youth, when I shot with an all manual Pentax K1000 with a 50mm prime lens and a bobbing needle light meter, then went into the darkroom to develop the film.

Because in those days, that’s how you checked if your pictures came out. You sat in the dark while they soaked in chemicals, and then you put them in an enlarger and made prints.

If they didn’t turn out, you couldn’t just quickly try again. The event was long over.

If was an important event, you did a lot of swearing.

And let me tell you, if you’re in a small darkroom with another person and they start shrieking expletives and slamming the counter over and over with their fist, sloshing chemicals all over the place, it’s a little unsettling.

Or so I’ve been informed when asked why I was being banned from yet another darkroom.

Which is to say, I realized that I miss film photography.

Also, one of the cameras was at least fifty years old, and I really wanted to play with it for the novelty, if nothing else.

That fifty year old camera? A Zeiss-Ikon Contina III.

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Fortunately, the manual was surprisingly clear.

(Now calm down, lens aficionados, it doesn’t use Zeiss lenses. I had thought so too, but research revealed that there were problems with manufacturing at the time, and so they went with a different lens manufacturer.)

I went to the drug store and discovered they don’t carry what some people would call ‘a lot’ of 35mm film these days.

No, all they stocked was one roll of Fuji film.

One lousy roll.

Surrounded, to add insult to injury, by several brands of LED flash attachments for use with your cell phone camera.

I bought that lonely roll. Rescued it.

Rescued it from a long and miserable existence sitting untouched and unloved under Rite-Aid’s fluorescent lighting.

(I pick up a lot of stray rolls of film that way. Damn you, Sarah McLachlan!)

Upon examining the camera, I discovered I would need to read the manual. The light meter reports in EV (Exposure Value), and then you used that to lock the lens aperture and shutter speed to the correct exposure.

Also, it was a viewfinder, which meant I couldn’t focus through the lens. Instead, you turn the focus ring to the distance setting that matched how far your subject was from the camera.

This resulted in a lot of out-of-focus pictures on that first roll.

Turns out I’m not only a terrible judge of character, but of distance too.

Still, I had a lot of fun using the camera, and while most of the images were of poor quality, I have to blame myself rather than the camera.

Oh, it has its quirks, like the light meter consistently overexposing when shooting outside on a bright day, or there being nothing to remind you to set the focus. But that’s what the first roll was for: to help me get to know the camera.

Ironically, every single picture appearing in this blog post was shot using, what else, my digital SLR.

After my photo shoot, I couldn’t find a local place to develop the film that didn’t return the negatives.

(WTF?? I don’t get the negatives back, Walgreens? What do you do with them? Send them to the NSA so they can add to their database on me and my known associates?)

So I opted for mail order processing. That took, all told, nine days.

Nine days of wondering: did any pictures come out? Does the camera even work worth a damn? Is the light meter accurate?

And in the course of that fretting, I started thinking about the type of photography I wanted, nay, yearned to experiment with twenty years ago but couldn’t afford.

Medium format photography.

Back then, a decent MF camera cost many thousands of dollars. Far more than I wanted to spend on a hobby.

Not being able to afford it didn’t help either.

Bored, and needing something to distract me from the anxiety of waiting for my film to come back, I started researching MF cameras anyway.

I told myself it was window shopping.

It wouldn’t amount to anything.

And discovered that the bottom fell out of the market for MF film cameras when digital became established.

Suddenly the MF cameras I used to dream about were affordable (in the used market).

I won’t go into the hours I spent on research, staying up far later than was advisable on a work night, plugging makes, models, configurations and prices into a spreadsheet.

In the end, it came down to this:

Even used, MF film cameras are still pretty expensive. Affordable, yes, but advisable?

Not at my current skill level.

Compare this exterior to the Contina’s. Boring! All smooth lines and a complete lack of toggles! Pah!

No film advance lever! Even THAT is automated!

I decided it made more sense to break out the ‘fancy’ 35mm film camera I bought in the 90s. Not a super high-end camera, but no all-manual K1000 either.

Which is what I was using yesterday.

I hate it.

It’s a Pentax PZ-70. I spent a lot of time-saving up for that camera, and I loved it. Took some classes, bought a bunch of lenses and gear, even photographed a wedding with it.

I marveled, back then, at the technology I was able to buy.

Here’s the problem with it now: it’s too automated.

The 35mm lens I use on it (and my digital camera) for a prime is a featureless cylinder. No f/stop setting ring. The camera chooses for you.

Sure, I can put my all manual K1000 50mm prime lens on it, and put the camera in manual mode, but I still can’t control everything. The aperture setting goes to ‘B’ and that’s it.

(‘B’ is bulb mode for those of you not familiar with cameras. The shutter stays open for as long as your finger is on the trigger.)

All the joy, learning, and exploring I was engaged in with the Contina was gone with this camera, and I found this sucked all the entertainment and interest out of using it.

I also found that, given the automation, I went straight into cell phone photography mode: point it real quick and press the trigger.

I didn’t frame the picture. I didn’t think about angles. The impact of lighting on the shot didn’t cross my mind.

I was making a Xerox of the scene rather than creating a composition.

Why?

Because I didn’t have to.

Focus? Camera does that.

Exposure setting? Camera does that.

Film advance? Hell, the camera does that too.

I was practically superfluous to the experience.

So I’m starting to think maybe that used MF camera isn’t such a bad idea after all.

But first I’m going to dig out my old K1000 with the bobbing needle light meter and shoot a roll on that.

---

 Proof the Contina can work (most, if not all, technical and artistic failings are the photographer’s, not the camera’s):

I’ve always held that animals are bastards. Here’s a bastard taking a dump in a public park. Jerk.

The easiest way to ensure a sharp image is to photograph something far away and set the focus to Infinity.

It’s rare to photograph this kid and NOT get motion blur. Metering’s a bit off, but it tends to be outdoors.

 

Portrait of the non-artist as a middle-aged putz, Part II

For those of you following, this is part two of The Chronicles of Ian Attempting To Learn To Draw Purty (part one is here).

If nothing else, it should be entertaining in a watching-a-train-wreck-can’t-look-away sort of way.

The text I chose to work with for this self-guided journey is Drawing; The Head and the Figure by Jack Hamm. That said, all sketches, attempts at sketches, and oddly disturbing squiggles I have attempted here are the sole fault / responsibility of me, and not Jack Hamm.

You can’t blame an elephant trainer for being unable to teach a saw horse to use a kitty litter tray, so Jack can’t really be considered culpable for my output.

My efforts since last week started with the eyes:

As you can see, if I keep my eye on the ball, I’ll soon have quite a following amongst the far-sighted crowd.

Once I got bored comfortable drawing eyes, it was time to move onto lips:

In nature, striped patterns often indicate something is highly poisonous. I think even a zombie would hesitate when confronted with lips like these.

Clearly this was an area where I needed a lot of work. Or a smudge function in my graphics editor:

When my model’s fever broke, the stripes on her lips faded and her mouth looked almost human again. Sadly, I don’t capture that here.

Fresh off this not-quite-a-failure ‘success’, I decided my ego needed a bruising to bring it back down to Earth.

I attempted a face again. The results were, to say the least, humbling. And not in a good way:

Beauty on the left by Jack Hamm, talented artist. Unconventional beauty on the right drawn by yours truly, untalented putz.

I am reminded of the original Star Trek pilot, The Cage, and the woman who was repaired by aliens who’d never seen a human before.

My main take-away lesson this week: the smaller my images are on the screen, the less horrible they look. I will be focusing on making my sketches much, much smaller going forward.

Next week, assuming I don’t feel honor-bound to try to improve the whole-face drawing skills, will be noses and then, possibly, if my noses pass the sniff test, ears.

Come back and see…if you dare.

—

And now, a word from our sponsor: me! My books are available!

 

The Santa Claus Gang:

Marlowe and the Spacewoman:

Kleencut (FREE, and another fine showcase for my artistic abilities!):