Tea Leaves

I picked up Lumines for the PSP and have been playing it between levels of Shadow of the Colossus. I don’t have that much to say about the game. Others have already provided much more verbiage about this title without, er, illuminating why the game is fun and interesting. I can’t possibly add many more words to that discussion. I have just noticed one interesting aspect of the gameplay: I do better when I don’t know what I am doing.

To those who might not know, Lumines is like Tetris with a dance floor. Blocks fall from the sky and music plays. These blocks are made up of four sub-blocks which are one of two colors, and you can move them side to side and turn them in 90 degree increments. The goal of the game is to match blocks of the same color. When you land blocks together so that you get a 2×2 or larger area that are the same color, those blocks disappear sometime later. There is a sweeper line that picks them up and deletes them as it goes past. You have to be aware of this timeline, as it can both help you and hurt you in various ways. There are also special mega-blocks that clear not only blocks from the initial area, but also all other blocks of the same color that are connected to the initial area. This is all cool, but it is best not to think about it.

What you should be aware of is the rest of the game. The blocks shine with color and light and your actions have subtle effects on the rhythm and content of the background tracks. From time to time, the color scheme and music change as you progress from level to level. The different levels all present distinct moods and textures. The speed and rhythm of the music provide subliminal clues about how you should be playing the level.

My best games of Lumines seem to happen when I am completely oblivious to what I am actually doing, and the game just keeps going by itself. This has happened twice so far, and each time my maximum score in the game more than tripled. In addition, for a period of weeks after each of these games, I never came close to managing a similar score again. In fact, I believe that I may never match my current high score. I’ve managed to do a bit more than half as well, but not much better than that.

While trying to regain former glory, I have discovered a lot more about various strategies in the game. There are cool ways to chain bonuses together, there are ways the timeline can completely ruin your life, and there are various strategies for using the “special” blocks in the best way possible. But, none of this really helps, because it causes me to think about the game too much while I’m playing. So when I really need to act quickly and correctly, I’m doomed.

What I don’t really understand is how to obtain that perfect insight into the game, where the rhythm of the music and the blinking of the lights automatically just automatically lead you to the right actions at just the right time. It seems like the only way to do it is to keep playing the game over and over and over and over and…

Which, I suppose, is a sign of brilliance in the game design.

Preamble

Somewhere in a distant time and place, a letter is delivered by runner:

From: Light of the World, Voice of Nur, High Priest Akh-na-Gog

To: Honored Slave Tinker and Inventor Euripaelus

Subject: Re: Industrial accidents.

Hear now the words of Holiest of Holies Great Nur, Light of the World, Peace be Upon Him, through his High Priest Akh-na-Gog, who says unto you: can we build the next colossus without any hair? The aboriginal barbarian hordelings are having a field day climbing these things by their hair and painting graffiti on them. Worse, half the time they are drunk on that disgusting fermented yak milk, and the janitorial slaves have to spend hours scrubbing to clean up their “accidents.” And if they’ve sicked on the hair, the smell lingers just about forever.

So no hair next time, Honored Slave Tinker and Inventor.

So speaks Holiest of Holies Great Nur, Light of the World, Peace be Upon Him, through his High Priest Akh-na-Gog.

Apologia

I wanted to say a few more words about Shadow of the Colossus. I’m exactly halfway through the game, and I’m enjoying it very much. If you asked me whether I liked it, so far, I’d say “yes.” Like psu, I want to finish the game before I review it in detail. But there is one thing I think I’m ready to talk about at this point, and that’s the visuals in the game.

Shadow of the Colossus looks beautiful. It has moments of stunning beauty, awesome grandeur, and perhaps most importantly makes incredible use of light.

It also looks like absolute garbage.

Despite the beauty of its design, scenery, and lighting, the game still looks like garbage. Every movement causes every texture to blur and moire. When moving, you don’t just lose fine detail, but coarse detail. Since half the game is spent on horseback, this means that half the game is spent watching moire patterns splay across your TV. I hope you don’t have epilepsy.

Why does Shadow look so bad? Because it’s on a Playstation 2, and making games on the Playstation 2 that don’t look like crap is apparently nearly impossible.

Ico looked like this too. The effects weren’t as bad, because in Ico the textured castle wasn’t generally in fast motion. In Ico, you often viewed a room with the camera in a static position. In Shadow, the camera is a chase camera. The texture problems, in other words, are exacerbated by camera motion, and there is much more camera motion in Shadow than in Ico

Best. Game. EVER.

Now, it is not a big surprise to discover that games on the PS2 have lousy low-res textures and generally look more jagged than a Houston hooker recovering from a three-day methamphetamine bender. We’ve all known it for years. Generally it’s not that big a deal, because — as Shadow demonstrates — graphics are not the most important part of most games. Atari’s venerable Combat is still one of the best player-vs-player tank battle games, 25 years later, even though it has the most primitive graphics possible. I believed that Ico looked like garbage (and, yes, looked beautiful as well) when I bought it. I purchased a Playstation 2 just to play Ico, even though I thought the quality of rendering was terrible. So please don’t think that I’m saying “texture quality is the most important thing.” I’m not bringing it up because of that.

I’m bringing it up because of history.

Thesis

When the Playstation 2 was released, Sony conducted press conferences and demos where they would show a pre-rendered movie playing on the PS2, leaving all comers with the impression that this is what the gameplay experience on the PS2 would be like: fine detail, lifelike bezier curves, all rendered in real-time. The Playstation 2 crushed the Sega Dreamcast. In part because of the already-huge Playstation back catalog, but also because of the belief, inspired by Sony, that there would be no comparison between the games on the two systems.

Five years later, we can look back and say: ancient Dreamcast games, generally, are better looking than the best PS2 games being released today, when judged by certain standards. The textures in Dreamcast games are less detailed. But they don’t shimmer. They don’t shake. And the system was capable of drawing a diagonal line without rendering it as a chunkily as a stairway in a football stadium.

Meanwhile, I ride across the desert plains in Shadow of the Colossus. Because one of the things I have been doing in the game is hunting geckos, I keep an eye open for them. About every 30 seconds, I’ll see a rendering artifact that, from a quick glance, might be a gecko. So I have to stop and look, and then realize that, once again, I’m being boned by the terrible, horrible, awful, complete inability of the Playstation 2 to render a scene in motion that doesn’t look like ass.

And now, it’s 2005, and soon we will see the Xbox 360, and we will see the Playstation 3. Prerendered movies are already being shown. The same claims about system obsolescence are being made, by both Microsoft and Sony. And so the reason I bring up the graphics in Shadow of the Colossus is simply this: it’s important that consumers stand up and say, out loud, that they notice when they are lied to. Some of us noticed that Sony lied to us about the PS2. And when we read the press releases and see the pretty prerendered videos for the PS3, I hope we remember that during the last cycle, they looked consumers straight in the eye, and lied.

Maybe both the 360 and the PS3 will be another Great Leap Forward. But if you think I’m pre-ordering based on your prerendered marketing presentations, you’ve got another thing coming.

I remember when I’m lied to. And I hold grudges.

Coda

In the words of our great President, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

How true that is.

Buying socks used to be easy. You’d go to the store, buy 6 pair of lightweight Smartwool hiking socks, and go home. Smartwool used to only make about three kinds of socks: thin, a bit thicker, and really thick. But, as with all successful companies, they have been cursed with the diversification disease, and we are all worse off for it.

For example, I bought socks at the new REI store in Pittsburgh the other weekend. My delicious thin Smartwool socks had worn out, and I was after a couple of new pair for the winter. So I picked up one pair of tan socks and one pair of black socks. To the naked eye, they appeared to be exactly the same socks, just different colors. But, after some use and closer examination, it was apparent that the tan socks worked better. After washing they did not stretch as much, and as such they stay on my feet better. The black socks are also already starting to pill and unravel after only one time through the wash.

So here is the thing. I went to try and figure out two things:

1. What kind of socks did I buy?

2. What was the difference between the tan socks and the black socks, so I know to avoid socks of the black type again.

It turned out that these two questions are nearly impossible to answer. Smartwool now makes so many different kinds of socks, and changes their names and types so frequently that there is no source of information anywhere on the planet that can tell me what I want to know. In addition, among the literally dozens of sock types that you find at the Smartwool web site, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between products of a similar type. They differ only in the most miniscule and irrelevant aspects of their design, or in the exact breakdowns of the material used to build them. Sock A has horizontal zig-zag stripes, and is 10% spandex, while sock type B is exactly the same, but sort of off-white and uses 5% spandex and 10% nylon. This brings up the obvious question: Who cares!?

Who is sitting around on their couch scanning the Smartwool catalog and thanking heaven and earth and whatever gods they worship that hallelujah Jesus above there is a pair of socks that is taupe with vertical red stripes that also happens to use just the right mix of wool, nylon, and spandex (as everyone knows, the right amount is 75% wool, 10% spandex and 15% nylon) and is also 2/3rds calf height? Meanwhile, someone else is relieved that they can get the same sock, only 10mm shorter.

Other examples of this insanity abound. Consider the Chuck Taylor basketball shoe. Back in the day, it came in white and black. Some crack-head dorks might have found blue ones in the gutter somewhere, but those people were just wrong. Today, if you go to the Converse web site you can find something like 500 different types of sneakers. There are low tops, high tops, boot length high tops, red, green, and blue ones, tiger prints, black leather ones, pink ones, Hello Kitty ones, and God Knows what else. Who decides that we need this? These are useless choices that serve nothing but the ego of the people in the marketing departments who smoke various hallucinogenic drugs and then turn over the product line on the basis of the resulting fever dreams.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with one pair of comfortable socks on my feet and no way to find out how to get a few more so that I have backups for when these are inevitably discontinued to make room for the leopard print sequin-inlaid 25% silk urban lounge hiking socks that will come out next month. This is what the world has come to. When you find something that fits or otherwise works well, you are forced to buy five copies of it now because as a matter of routine, the ludicrously short product turnarounds of the modern corporation will dictate that the item will no longer exist by the time you need a new one. This is what I call my Fundamental Theorem of the Modern Consumer Society.

Life was better, and Smartwool was a better company, when all you had to choose from was thin, thick, and thicker.

Some of you may be wondering why there haven’t been many gaming articles lately. I believe the reason is that both psu and I are playing Shadow of the Colossus, and are desperately looking for some angle from which we can claim that it does not contradict our long-held position that “Boss” battles are stupid.

We can’t dodge the topic forever, though. Look for our comments on Shadow of the Colossus soon.

In an earlier article, I advised that if you needed to use a flash, there were no good pictures to be taken anyway. I realize now that anyone who has spent time reading the wankier photo forums, especially those related to Leica cameras could have taken this the wrong way. To clarify, my statement was not meant as a dig against flash or an attempt to uphold the ideals of “available light photography”. If people want to gain a sense of nobility by shooting in crappy low light, that’s not my problem.

The point that I wanted to make was that using the flash well is hard, and you should know some things before you try. Used well, flash can provide you with that “natural light” look anywhere you can plug a light into a wall. Used poorly, artificial light will turn that $10,000 full frame 16 megapixel digital body you just bought into something that may as well be a point and shoot.

The light you want in most photographs, especially photographs of people, usually has two basic characteristics:

1. It is relatively diffuse and low contrast.

2. It usually comes from the one side of the subject.

The first characteristic is desirable because it ensures that there will not be splotches of dark shadow or blown out highlights to distract you from the details of the picture. Everything will fit into the dynamic range of your film or digital capture. The second characteristic is desirable because light at an angle provides modeling and gives the subject a 3-d look, rather than the paper flat look you get with front lighting.

If you want to get an idea of what this kind of light looks like, sit your best friend down in front of a window on a bright cloudy day and take some pictures and take note of what the light is like. That is what you are after.

Alternatively, the next time you go to a movie or watch a well produced television show, pay attention to the lighting, especially in indoor scenes. Movies and television are almost always shot completely with artificial lights. But, motion picture photographers really know their lighting, so the characters always look as if they are lit by virtual windows strewn all over the set, even if there are no windows to be found.

At this point, we should be clear about one thing. Your fancy digital camera with its single dedicated flash is generally not going to get you this look. Without a handy window, the only way to get this look is to use multiple lights (to get the directional lighting) and a large array of devices like reflectors and bed sheets (to get the diffusion). This is too much for even the most dedicated amateur to carry around.

However, there are situations where your single flash can be useful, if you are careful.

If you are only carrying one flash, your dream situation is to be taking pictures in a small room with white walls and a short white ceiling. When you see this, you should jump for joy because it means you can bounce the flash into the walls and ceiling. What this means is that you pivot the flash to point either at the ceiling or a wall, rather than straight ahead at the subject. The result is that you get a nice diffuse light source (light coming off of the ceiling) rather than a tiny little point source flash. With most modern SLR cameras, bouncing the flash is easy because the exposure system of the camera will control the light for you. You just have to pivot the flash head to point up and shoot away. The difference between bounced and direct flash is immediately evident. Instead of flat white faces and lots of hard shadows, you get a nice flat overall light with diffuse shadows that go in the right direction.

You can also buy gadgets that attach to your flash that will try and bounce and redirect light in various ways. These can be helpful for those situations where the ceiling is a bit too high, but since they are in general not much larger than the flash, things like the Omnibounce or the various Lumiquest widgets can’t really add enough diffusion to get nice lighting. So, if you walk into that stadium, or ballroom with high ceilings and all you have is your one pathetic light, don’t even bother.

With some newer cameras, you can easily bounce the flash and bring it off the camera using the new-fangled wireless flash modes. Nikon and Canon both support this mode of use. What’s nice about this is that you are gaining diffusion by using the bounce, and also getting the light at a better angle by taking it off the camera. My personal camera, the Nikon D70, has a delicious mode where the built-in flash on the camera can wirelessly control one or more compatible flashguns. So if you were ambitious, you could even do some multi-light setups. I generally use the wireless mode just to bounce my one flash all over the place at weird angles.

Finally, no discussion of working with a single flash would be complete without talking about fill flash. FIll flash refers to blending flash with ambient light to lower the contrast on the subject when you are taking pictures in harsh and contrasty lighting conditions. Basically what this means is that rather than using the flash as the main light in your picture, you can program it to throw just a bit of extra light into the scene to open up shadows that would otherwise go to black. It turns out that with modern flashes, you can tell the flash to calculate how much light it would put out to light the subject, and then put out one or two stops less than that amount. You do this by setting the flash exposure compensation on the flash to (say) -2 stops.

Flash exposure compensation works just like the normal exposure compensation dial on the camera itself. If you dial it up, the flash puts out more light and tones in the picture get lighter. If you dial it down the camera puts out less light, and the tones get darker. The difference is that modern cameras and modern flashes can meter light from the flash separately from the ambient light from the scene. It is this magical technology that allows you to effortlessly mix flash and natural light. Dialing the flash compensation to -2 tells the flash to put out 2 stops less light than whatever the ambient light exposure is. The result will be just enough light to fill in the shadows of the picture without making the use of flash obvious.

For example, suppose you are taking pictures of your girlfriend at the beach. The sun is right overhead and she has a huge hat on, so her face is in shadow. If you just take the shot, you will take a great picture of the beach and the hat and a dark splotch where her face is supposed to be. Ideally you’d like to get a bit of light into that area under the hat so you can actually see her luminous face. If you were resourceful and had a big bag, you’d be carrying a reflector that you could use for this purpose. You’d just have to grab some beer guzzling beach guy to hold it for you. Of course, all you have is your puny flash. So, you get out your flash, set the flash exposure compensation to -2 and shoot a picture. Here is what happens:

1. The camera picks an exposure for the main subject based on the ambient light. This will expose the beach and the hat in a way that is pleasing.

2. The camera fires the flash. The flash bounces off your girlfriend and back to the camera. The camera computes how long the flash must be on in order for the light bouncing off your girlfriend and her hat to be two stops less than the exposure that it picked for the rest of the scene. Again, this is what the exposure compensation setting does for you. The -2 setting is telling the flash to make all the tones in the picture darker than it would normally. This is perfect, because all you want is for the flash to light up the shadows a bit, which are dark.

3. The combined light from the scene and the flash hits the film/ccd in the camera. The effect will be that the beach and the hat are well exposed, and your girlfriend’s face has just enough light on it to bring it into the dynamic range that the film can hold. But, since we told the flash to underexpose, it won’t look look like you have put a light on her face at all. In the picture, the shadow on your girlfriend will look like a normal shadow in real life: darker than the sunlit areas, but with detail. What you’ve done is use the flash to balance the contrast in the scene. This is something your eyes do automatically for you, but which the film or CCD in your camera does not know how to do.

To sum up, the trick to using a single flash wisely is to try and manipulate the situation so that the flash will look natural. Direct flash on a large group of people in a small room is not a great situation. Bounced flash in a small room with a small subject is a good situation. You will get pleasing light and no one looking at the picture will suspect a thing. Using the flash for fill is another perfect situation. Modern cameras and flashes are particularly good at automatic fill flash. In fact, that’s all the built-in flash in most cameras is really good for.

So, next time you find yourself with no available light except your puny flash, you’ll know what to try before giving up altogether.

Certain topics come up again and again in this space. In videogames, we constantly talk about why save points are stupid. In photo we talk about equipment obsessions and how technique is more important than the camera.

And in the “food and drink” category, I always find some occasion to complain about the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (”PLCB”). This is because, like a dog who returns to his vomit, I keep trying to go into their liquor stores to do crazy, wild, unexpected things, like purchase liquor.

This week’s disappointment comes fresh on the heels of the horrific trolls at the PLCB banning direct wine shipments from Pennsylvania (and thus, out of state) wineries. This was their idiotic response to the recent Supreme Court decision. To his credit, State Senator Jim Ferlo is trying to undo their brain damage — write to the Senator and tell him “thanks”.

The last time I stepped into a State Store, it was in a nearly-vain attempt to procure some Tokaji. Today, I wanted something a lot less ambitious: a bottle of armagnac to use to inebriate some prunes (and, hopefully, myself as well). As in our previous episode, this incident occurred in one of the LCB’s “Premium Collection Stores,” which I am assured “carry an outstanding selection of premium wines and spirits.”

I didn’t see any armagnac on the brandy shelf, so I approached an associate. Hilarity ensued:

“Hi. Do you have any armagnac?”

[With something of a sneer] “Armagnac? What’s that?”

[long pause] “It’s a type of brandy. Like cognac.”

“Is that one of them flavored brandies?”

“No. It’s just brandy.”

“Sorry, I’ve never heard of it.” [turns away].

Now, let me make myself perfectly clear. I’m not upset that they didn’t have any in stock (well, I’m not that upset). Inventory management is tricky. Not every store can have every product all the time. I understand that. But that the supposedly best stores in the LCB system are staffed by people who don’t know what a not-terribly-exotic spirit is, and worse, obviously don’t care just kills me.

What drives me nuts about this is that this conversation is par for the course in one of the allegedly good stores.

A bunch of hateful bureaucrats have entrenched themselves between us and the twenty-first century. The LCB must be destroyed.

Update: In an “amusing” coda to this story, the State’s online inventory system claims there are 3 bottles of Montesquio armagnac at the store I was in.

So, PLCB, once again: screw you.

My friend Erik used to be a chef, and he also spent a lot of time in Alaska. Therefore, he has strong opinions about salmon. Chief among them is never to buy salmon in Pittsburgh. But, if you break this rule, for god’s sake don’t poach the fish. Poached salmon, to Erik, is like a boiled beef roast. You end up with a piece of fish that is certainly cooked, but is no longer really good for anything but carrying large spoonfuls of garlic mayonnaise from your plate to your mouth.

With Erik in mind, my normal way of cooking salmon is to sauté it and then roast it by throwing the sauté pan in the oven. This works very well for the fattier varieties of fish, but I always had trouble with the fancy and somewhat leaner Copper River and Coho salmon that shows up at Whole Foods every year. When roasting the leaner fish, I would always end up with a piece of fish that tasted OK, but was disappointingly dry and bland.

So, having first gone against Erik’s admonitions and bought a too-expensive piece of Coho, I decided to risk his further wrath and semi-poach the fish in the oven, to try and keep the fish moist and tasty. It worked pretty well, so for your edification, here’s what you do.

Start with:

1 filet of salmon. We had a whole side of the Coho, around two pounds. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the top. Rub olive oil all over it.

1/2 of a yellow onion cut up. You could use more.

1 handful of chopped celery.

If you are not lazy like me, you should probably also chop up a carrot really small. But I was lazy and did not do this.

Take half a lemon, slice it up.

Now heat up a sauté pan. Add olive oil and a bit of butter, toss in the vegetables. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sauté until the vegetables are soft. This will take 10 to 15 minutes.

Now get a baking dish as long as the piece of salmon you have. Pour white wine and stock into the pan. You want it to be maybe 1/4 inch high, but you don’t want it to cover the top of the fish, just a bit on the bottom. Toss the fish in, put the veggies and lemon on top, and then top the whole thing with a tablespoon chunk of cold butter.

Put the dish into a 350 degree oven. After about 5 to 10 minutes, the butter should melt. Open the oven and scrape the veggies off the fish and mix the butter into the liquid. Baste the fish once with the results. Bake until the fish is cooked to where you like it. I like it at just past medium rare, which took maybe another 10 minutes. Be careful about this, you don’t want to kill the salmon.

I’m going to claim to Erik that this is really a baked salmon, not poached. It did succeed in keeping the salmon tasting like salmon, while also keeping it moist and yummy.

Obligatory gripe

A big raspberry to Whole Foods, by the way, for the following sin. You’d think at the prices they charge for a filet of salmon, they could take out the god damned pin bones. I don’t pay for a filet to bite down on huge pin bones. Get with it.

I wanted to take a moment to put down some words about wool socks.

It is often been my experience that wool socks are maligned things. “They’re itchy,” I am told. “They look goofy,” they say. The intimation is that wearing wool socks brings with it immediate and irrevocable membership in some nebulous club that cares about recycling, saves kitchen scraps for the compost pile and is likely vegan. Plus wears socks with sandals.

Ignore all that. Here’s the thing:

Wool socks keep your feet warm.

There is more. Here in Pittsburgh, walking in the winter will, at least once, involve plunging a foot into an icy puddle. There will be traffic worth watching, and it will be dark, and that solid-looking pile of hardened snow will be but a delicate crust, through which a foot will go into several inches of remarkably cold water. I have a talent for this sort of stunt. It’s a pretty poor experience. So here’s the other thing:

Wool socks keep your feet warm even when they’re wet with icy water.

I’m not too clear on how that works, exactly, but I frankly don’t much care. Also, so help me, wool socks make sandals comfy.

Good winter!

Additional Resources

• For a sock that is both comfortable and sturdy, call upon the good folks at SmartWool. This is expensive clothing, but the things last.
  

• I’ve heard tell from those I trust that it’s easy to get good at knitting socks. I’m not very good at knitting socks. Yet.

If there is one inescapable fact of life in our dynamic technological society, it is that if enough people are interested in a given activity, the tools that enable that activity will change. I was thinking about this recently as I was presented with two press items about the film industry. One was a loving lament for and tribute to the last of the hand-drawn animation studios at Disney. The other was a review of the new Wallace and Gromit movie. Each piece drew the inevitable comparisons between hand-animated films and films animated by computer. The authors expressed their perfectly valid preference for the hand-animated style. Strangely though, each also came to the completely unjustified conclusion that computer animation is why they don’t like computer animated films. This is a stupid thing to say.

If they don’t like computer animated films, it is because the people who produced those films did work that they do not appreciate, or worked in a way that resulted in a bad film. It’s not the computer that made a bad movie.

Admittedly, I have something of an axe to grind here. I work with computers every day and am overly sensitive to claims that creative work on a computer is somehow of less value than that done “by hand”. But, I do think that the effect of the machines on art forms that until now had used more manual methods is somewhat misunderstood.

In the context of animated films, the argument went that the hand-animated films had a depth of character and individual style that was missing from the more modern work because in more modern works, there was not one artist dedicated to doing most or all of the animation associated with a given character. Because of this, the argument goes, computer animated films “can never” have the distinct stamp of that individual style. The logic, I guess, is that since the computer allows for mass production and automation of the animation to some degree, it must follow that the only animation that you can make with a computer will look mass produced and automated.

Of course, it is easy to find examples to counter this logic. In the abstract, one just has to note that it is perfectly possible to produce all the art for an animated film in a computer, but do it by hand, drawing the film frame by frame. Of course, people don’t do this for various practical and economic reasons. But these reasons exist just as much for films drawn without using a computer. I don’t really know that much about animated film production, but I will claim without proof that it is a rare and expensive film where every frame of animation for a given character is actually produced by the same artist. Even in the Wallace and Gromit short films, there were teams of people who worked on the shots in parallel. I know because I watched a documentary about it. I think.

Other examples abound, of course, in the Pixar films. I don’t even mean the new shiny Pixar films that made millions of dollars. I mean the shorts that John Lasseter used to make as demos back when Pixar was a struggling software company. One famous one in particular animates a desk lamp with more character and appeal than 99% of the hand-drawn animation ever produced at any time in our history. Sure, every frame may have ultimately been rendered by a computer, but the animation was all Lasseter.

My main point is that it is ultimately the care and vision of the individual artist that dominates the quality equation in a work of art. The best artists achieve wondrous things in spite of the tools they use. Thus, Lasseter utilizes a tool which we associate with mass production and automation to produce singularly individual visions. It’s as if he drew every frame by hand.

Another area that I know a bit more about than animated film production is the production of photographs. Here again, we are undergoing a drastic evolution of the tools and here again, these same new tools have become the whipping boy of anyone who has decided that all the new stuff is crap. The main argument that you hear is that the digital print cheapens the artistic value of the photograph since “anyone” can just “pick up Photoshop” and crank out perfect prints “automatically.” This, of course, is nonsense.

To create great work in Photoshop takes just as much work, and knowledge and sweat as creating create darkroom prints. The only thing it does not take is a tolerance for breathing fixer. Most importantly, after you know how to make the print look how you want in Photoshop (or in the darkroom) the real challenge is always knowing exactly how you should apply this knowledge to each picture. This takes a combination of visual sense and good taste that takes a long time to develop, if it ever develops at all. Not surprisingly, this knack for knowing how to pick a good look for a picture is also completely independent of the tools you then use to produce that look.

Now, I have some sympathy for the position of the old time darkroom worker since I’ve made my share of black and white prints in any number of darkrooms. In fact, I can say with confidence that there are various ways in which black and white prints made lovingly by hand in a darkroom on fiber base paper (see note below about what fiber paper is) are superior to digital prints. For example:

1. The paper feels better.

2. The print smells better.

3. It might last longer, if you know what you are doing.

4. Certain girls will be impressed that you printed it yourself while sniffing weird toxic chemicals.

One thing that will not be clearly better in a non-digital print is the quality of the print itself. As much as I’d like to be able to believe that this is not the case, I have seen no evidence that a hand printed black and white fiber print has any real visual advantage over a well produced digital black and white print. In fact, there are even outfits that will print your digital files directly to fiber black and white paper.

So, if, like me, you love the way the old stuff looks, then by all means try and keep the craft alive. I hope I’ll be able to start making prints again at some point when I have time. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that the old stuff was in some way inherently better because of the tools that the old timers used to produce it. The tools of the trade do not make someone into a master. That’s why my photos are still better than Pete’s even after he picked up that fancy new camera.

A Short Appendix About Black and White Paper

By “fiber” paper, I mean traditional black and white paper where the emulsion is coated directly on to the surface of a paper made out of cotton or other fibers. This is in contrast to more modern papers which have a coating of plastic over the paper base which keeps the base from soaking up chemicals and whatnot. Fiber paper has certain tactile and archival characteristics which RC paper does not. In fact, there has been no lack of wanking over the relative image qualities of fiber and RC paper. For most of its history, RC paper was generally spit upon as an inferior tool for students and lazy dilettantes. Happily, this doesn’t happen much anymore. People just complain about inkjet prints instead.

Tonight at the grocery store, I needed to pick up some prunes to make one of my favorite treats. It turns out you can’t buy prunes anymore — instead, the major cooperatives want to sell you “pitted dried plums.” Pitted dried plum, of course, is a longwinded way of saying “prune.”

Why this not-so-subtle shift in marketing? For a long time now prunes have had a connotation, in the US, of being something that senior citizens eat to cure their constipation. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. The same connotation hasn’t attached itself to raisins, or figs, or granola, or any other number of high-fiber foods.

My conclusion is that the reason people think this way about prunes is because they don’t understand the right way to eat them. Fortunately for you, I am here to help.

The right way to eat prunes is to eat them as pruneaux d’Agen. A literal translation of this is “prunes of Agen,” Agen being a region in France. This translation is wrong. Don’t be upset if you mistranslated it: French is a subtle, many-layered language, and it can take a lifetime to learn its complexities. The correct translation of pruneaux d’Agen is “prunes soaked in booze.”

The booze, by tradition, is armagnac, a brandy from the region of the same name. You could use cognac, or calvados, or even a nameless brandy if you don’t have any armagnac. But if you’re going to do something, you should do it right, so I recommend a decent but not stupidly expensive armagnac, such as Armagnac de Montal.

The recipe, such as it is, is fairly simple.

(1) Take a smallish jar, such as a jelly or mason jar.
(2) Fill it full of prunes. Pack them snugly, but not so tightly that there is no air.
(3) Pour your liquor over the prunes until the jar is full. Seal it.
(4) Stick the jar in a cool dark place for several months.

One drunk prune

The fruit will absorb some of the alcohol over time, so peek in periodically and top off the jar. Eat them whenever you feel like it. Periodically ask your friends if they like prunes, and when they say “no,” go get the jar, open it up, put some on a plate, spoon some of the liqueur over them, and eat the prunes in front of them. Don’t offer them any, either. Occasionally let out a cackle, for effect.

If you continually reuse the same liquid for multiple batches of prunes, it will eventually turn into an alcohol-tinged syrup, rather than a fruit-tinged alcohol. While this has its own attraction, I prefer to start with a fresh infusion of armagnac every time.

You can eat these straight, or you can serve them with tea, or brandy, or dessert. There are very few desserts that are not improved by putting a booze-infused prune on them.

Additional Resources

• Wikipedia has an interesting article about Armagnac (the drink, not the region).
• The history of the Agen prune (en franÁais).