Tea Leaves

This week I found the first photographic web site to pique my interest in a long time. For a while now I had been ignoring most of the photographic web because there just wasn’t any content at an appropriate level of maturity. What I mean by that is that most sites are either just a big shopping catalog or a collection of articles providing shallow tutorials on various subjects like how best to put the $5000 digital camera you just bought on a tripod.

So I am happy to share a link to The Strobist, a site that does not suffer from either of these problems. Yes, there is technical dorkitude. Yes, there is advice about things to buy. But by and large the site is dominated by photographic content and content about photography that is actually interesting to read because they cover an area of photographic work that is generally mysterious to we who only dabble. The site is about lighting.

My usual position about lighting is that I try to use the light that is there because I’m too lazy to learn how to create my own. I came to this conclusion after reading an excellent book about how to bring your light with you and deciding that it was just too much work.

The Strobist is written with the point of view that you can’t count on the light that’s there to get you a usable picture, so you better know how to create your own. The site is the creation of one David Hobby, a pro photojournalist based in Baltimore. The job of the photojournalist is to take good pictures very quickly under conditions that you cannot easily control. A large number of the articles fall into this “On Assignment” bucket where he shows you the techniques and tricks he uses to pull pictures out of these situations. These are the pieces I like, and not only because they are about clever things that you can do with a couple of small flashes. I like these articles because they illustrate a truth about photography that the general public doesn’t really understand:

You don’t get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button.

If I were to write a book that could only contain one sentence about photography, and so I had to write down the most important fact that you, the aspiring shooter had to know in order to become successful, it would be: You don’t get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button. Every excellent book that I have ever read about photography has this fact as its core message.

I bring up this point because of this guy who works in my office. Every once in a while, I’ll buy a big photo book from Amazon.com. In recent memory, I have picked up the excellent Linda Butler collection on the Yangtze River in China and more recently the phenomenal Galen Rowell retrospective. I would show these books to the guy, and he’d flip through them and say something like, “What’s the big deal, anyone with a camera who was in those places could get those pictures, what’s so great about these pictures.”

The frustrating thing is that it is hard to explain what the big deal is. You can’t tell from a reproduction in a book that Butler spent four or five years carrying a 4×5 camera around the rural river valleys of China, often evading government officials, in order to document the villages that would be flooded by the damming of the river. It is impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t had the experience how hard it is to capture a nice portait of someone in good light even when you are carrying a modern 5fps bazooka camera, much less a camera that can take one frame every two or three minutes. Finally, it’s hard to express a photographer’s appreciation of a perfectly composed frame of some out of the way detail that a regular person never would have seen, in light that a regular person never would have noticed. So instead of an impassioned defense of the integrity of my photographic heroes, I just look stupid and grunt.

Luckily, I have Galen Rowell to do my work for me. His classic Mountain Light eloquently explains the difference between a literal snapshot of what is in front of you and a real photograph. Many of Rowell’s pictures are such stunning juxtstapositions of landscape forms and once-in-a-lifetime light that even the layman can’t help but be impressed. Others appear to the untrained eye to be fairly literal snapshots of exotic far away lands. But do not be fooled. You might think that if you just happened to be standing in his shoes on top of that mountain, or in that valley at sunrise, that you’d be able to capture the pictures that he did. You won’t (unless, of course, you are a genius photographer). You won’t because you won’t know where to point the camera, how to take advantage of the light, how to tame the contrast, how to juxtapose warm colors against cool, and how to arrange the randomness of the natural world into a neat pattern that is pleasing to the eye. In other words, you won’t because you don’t know what you are doing.

You shouldn’t feel bad or insulted to find this out. After all, Galen worked on his craft and vision for decades to get as good as he was. How many awesome landscapes have you taken recently? You should not be surprised that if you stood there at the tip of some ice flow near Everest and pointed your camera at it and pushed the button that you’d get a bad snapshot. That’s why he’s a photographer and you are not.

Which brings me full circle to The Strobist. I was impressed with this site for a few reasons. First, it was apparent from the content that this guy knows what he is doing with lights, and this makes me even more aware of how little I know about taking advantage of artificial light in difficult situations. Second, this was one of the few photographic web sites that I’ve been to lately that wasn’t designed by a mental cripple who loves Flash and hates usability. You would think that photographers, who are presumably people with a keen visual sense, would know better than this, but they don’t. Every site you go to is filled with ugly and unusable Flash galleries that wrap what I would think are excellent photographs if only I could actually navigate to one before having a seizure. Third, the site has an associated photo group on flickr where readers post their strobist experiments. The amazing thing about these pictures is the extent to which they do not suck. I didn’t think it was possible to put five people in an Internet photo group without generating dozens of miscomposed out of focus disasters that lack any redeeming value whatsoever as photographs. Here is proof that I’m wrong.

Finally, the best parts of the site are a fabulous illustration of my fundamental principle of photography: You don’t get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button. I love how he tells us how much knowledge goes into getting a decent shot of some guy standing next to his computer, or a simple portrait of an athlete. Here are great examples of how it takes work to make the picture look to the untrained eye like you just pointed the camera and pushed the button. It makes me happy to read and learn. Maybe some day I’ll get good at using my flash.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, updates will be slow this week.

Coming soon: The Great Tequila Tasting. 4X: Reach for the Stars! And more. See you soon.

I have a drawer in my house. I call it my “photo junk” drawer. Eight or nine years ago, it started out as an empty hanging file drawer where I started to file away the PrintFile slide storage pages that I had been collecting since buying my first real camera. There are a few folders of slides in the drawer, but it is now mostly overrun with small piles of print envelopes and small accessories that I had no use for. So I decided to clean the drawer up.

When I first bought a “real” camera back in the 90s (a Nikon 8008s, love that camera), I spent a couple of years shooting slide film. I reasoned that this would be the quickest way to learn “good technique.” Like thousands of others before me, I shot my film, and put the cannisters into a little envelope to send to Kodak. In a week or so, I would get a yellow box back in the mail containing tiny little cardboard mounts, each with a picture in it. Then I’d spread the slides out on a light table, pick the good ones and stick them in the pages. Once in a while, I’d get the pages out and stare at them. After a trip to France, I bought a nice loupe so I could stare at a somewhat enlarged version of the slide. There were no web sites, no grandparents to instantly share the pictures with. I just had my own little archive of images sitting in those pages, in that drawer.

To me, color slide film is one of the greatest achievements of modern engineering. In many ways it is even more interesting and astounding than the more recent digital capture systems. Digital capture, in my naive layman’s view, is a fairly straightforward application of existing computer technologies. It just took some time for the performance to scale the right way.

Color slide film is magic. You coat multiple layers of silver-based chemicals, dyes, and gelatin onto a piece of plastic. When you expose this plastic to light and dunk it in the right sequence of chemicals at the right temperature, you end up with three separate silver images, one for each of the primary colors. But that’s just the start. Where the final step in the black and white process “fixes” the silver image into the film, the color process replaces the silver image in each layer with dyes of the appropriate color. Exactly how this happens varies with different film types. But in the end the same thing happens. The chemicals in the film and the processing bath figure out how to put the dyes into the parts of the picture that were exposed to light. This is what always boggled my mind. The color dyes know where to go, or maybe more accurately in the case of slides, where not to go.

The result on the light table is the same: a perfect little color frame containing a small piece of reality, as captured by the camera at some point and time in the past. Color slides have a physical immediacy that sets them apart from black and white negatives which you need to print to really see or digital pictures which, even when displayed in all their glory on a huge TV screen still do not seem real since they are made out of bits. I realize in the rational part of my brain that this is partly nostalgia and partly my jaded software engineer’s view of the computer world.

All I know is, when I cleaned out that drawer, the first thing I did was pull out some old boxes of slides. These were the last rolls of film that I shot before I started using digital cameras. I put them in the pages. I threw them on the light table and the images jumped out at me the same way slides on a light table always do. You can’t not look at them with the loupe. There were some test shots that I had taken when I bought my Nikon 24mm lens. There were some pictures of Klavon’s Ice Cream parlor and soda fountain in the strip. There were some pictures I took the last time I visited a friend of mine in San Diego more than six years ago. And there were some shots from the last couple of trips to France, which had been forgotten because I was paying more attention to black and white or digital, depending on the time period.

I spent a couple of hours sorting through them, putting them into pages and putting them back into the file drawer. Then my nostalgia got the better of me and I looked around on the net for that place that had made me some photo CDs back in the day. They were closed. My favorite lab in Pittsburgh, Suksolsky-Brunelle, was closed. Kodak also closed the last of its Kodachrome processing plants and discontinued all but one type of the classic Kodachrome film. Kodachrome’s days have been numbered for the last fifteen years or so since Fuji released Velvia, but it’s sobering to think that one of the oldest continuously available consumer products in the history of the world will soon be gone.

It is also sobering to think how fast digital has taken over. I bought my first DSLR only about four years ago. At the time there were still three or four reputable places in town to get slide film processed. At the time it would cost you about $5000 to get a digital camera that performed as well along all axes as the best 35mm film cameras. At the time, all of the major commercial photography workshops were film only. They might have had a few short courses on things like running Photoshop, but none of the workshops expected you to bring a digital camera. Now a large number of them are digital only. Pittsburgh, as far as I know, now has no reputable lab that will process your slides for you overnight. Oh you can drop the stuff off at the local Costco, but they send it all somewhere else. Even Fuji, which took over the world with Velvia, has closed its big labs and farms the work out. In a few years, I expect that anyone processing film will either be sending it to one or two large labs that can keep up the volume or they’ll be doing it on their own with a machine in the basement.

I find myself surprised by the pangs of grief and regret that I have for the quick demise of color slides. I think I am more worked up over this than my beloved black and white film because I imagine that black and white film will always be around as a specialty fine art item, whereas high quality slide film requires a large scale industrial base that will be hard to support at low volumes. In a pinch, you can almost make your own black and white film, but to make color slide film, you have to understand that magic about dye couplers.

What I plan to do, and you should too, is pull out one of my old film cameras, load it with some Velvia or Kodachrome 64 and go out and shoot a few rolls of pictures. Then I’ll mail the film away, and if it doesn’t get lost I’ll get back my yellow (or green) boxes and spread the miniature pieces of reality around on my light table again, and just sit and look at the photos. It’ll be a nice way to recall the “old days” of the mid-1990s. Maybe I can show the film to my kid and explain how things used to work.

Of course, I’ll get a Photo CD made at the same time. I’m not that nostalgic.

Links

A bit of research indicates that Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas is where all the mailer business is going for both Kodak and Fuji. It’s also the last place on earth you can get Kodachrome processed. The one other big lab I found that I remember is A&I. B&H still sells mailers. But they cost twice as much as they used to.

I wrote a review in this month’s issue of PTD magazine that I’m sure is going to garner me much hate mail. I won’t reiterate the entire thing here, but to make a long story short, I panned Crackdown, a game where your objective, as a cop, is to murder as many immigrants as possible. I panned it specifically because of the game’s absolutely vile morals, and more specifically its vile politics.

I actually felt uncomfortable panning the game. Technically brilliant, this is still a game whose idea of a good time is shooting a rocket launcher into a crowd of racial stereotypes. Why hesitate before panning it? Because game reviews are expected to be analytical, not holistic. For all the bleating about the “new games journalism,” discussing a game in political or, worse, moral terms is a risky activity. Avid gamers, and thus critics who game avidly, are too quick to credit the winking eye. “Oh, sure, Grand Theft Auto lets you beat up hookers, but they didn’t really mean it. It’s only a game. That was just a joke.” As if being a joke makes it OK. As a consequence, the games industry is beset by outside critics like Jack Thompson, with their calls for censorship and regulation.

In Crackdown you travel through a fairly unconstrained sandbox. Once you start getting the hang of things, you can deal destruction on a truly impressive scale. You’ll leap tall buildings in a single bound. You’ll drive cars up ramps and launch them hundreds of feet into the air. You’ll waste hundreds of thugs with a variety of weapons. All of this is presented with clear hints that you’re in a Robocop-like dystopia. So the defense of the game is that all of this violence is somehow ironic. That really, the designers were aware of the political implications of what they were saying. It’s all just a joke.

I played Crackdown. I got the joke. It was a crappy joke.

I think that what we fantasize about matters. I think that when you decide to tell a story like Crackdown, a product that is created, packaged, and marketed to mass audiences at a cost of millions of dollars, the type of fantasy you choose to create matters. The games you produce will require the collaboration of thousands of players, making them a part of the fantasy you conceived. And I think that when you choose to tell a corrupt story, a story that makes the player an accessory to a moral crime, then it’s important that those of us who play games stand up and tell you that you’ve done something wrong.

It is possible to create games that address ethically problematic – oh, hell, let’s just call them “evil” – situations without being reprehensible: consider Shadow of the Colossus, which makes the player just as much a collaborator in that game’s crimes as does Crackdown. The difference is in the details. Just as no one would mistake the torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the same sort of pointless brutality in American Psycho, neither can one mistake the evil acts in Shadow, with say, the “pointless murder for fun and profit” sandbox activities in Grand Theft Auto.

It’s not a matter of the game adopting a finger-wagging posture. If a game has reprehensible elements, are they in the service of some greater theme? Or are the reprehensible elements – as they are in Crackdown – the whole point of the game? Games are narratives mixed with player-driven activities. Is a given act in a game because it advances the narrative? Or because some developer whose psychosexual development was arrested at 12 said to themselves “Hey, you know what? Raping an American Indian would be fun.”

My larger point, I suspect, will be lost. I’m not wanting – or expecting – game developers and publishers to only publish videogame versions of The Book of Virtues. I don’t want them to avoid controversy, or avoid edginess. But I do want to put a stake in the ground and say that the politics of games are not only a legitimate subject of criticism, but are in fact something critics should feel obligated to address. The attitude that critics should shut up and swallow whatever swill the industry is shilling at the moment is contemptible, and anyone who makes such arguments deserves no respect.

And if your idea of “edgy” is dropping a guy into a snake’s stomach then your game probably wasn’t worth playing anyway.

You can Download the “digest” version of PTD magazine here. The digest includes my full review of Crackdown.

Update: PTDmagazine has posted the review as HTML, so you don’t have to download the PDF unless you want to. Also, if you’re so inclined, please feel free to Digg this story.

For various reasons, we hadn’t been getting to the Strip as much as we used to. Maybe it was some stress at work. Maybe it was the worse than normal patented Pittsburgh early spring freeze. Maybe it was that when we did go things weren’t really the same. But the last two Saturdays, we finally made it down there again became reacquainted with some old friends.

The main motivation for our trip last week was to check out the Penn Avenue Fish Company. I have long been of the opinion that the two reliable places to get fish in the Strip were Benkovitz and Lotus. Benkovitz has had some trouble over the last year or so, and is now apparently under new management. But fear not. A few former Benkovitz employees have set out on their own and opened the Penn Avenue Fish Company on Penn near the Firehouse, and it has everything that you used to get at Benkovitz. Or rather, it will whenever they manage to get it all set up.

The day we went we found some stupendous fresh halibut. It was just as good as the what we were getting this summer straight from Alaska. It was just as good or better than the same stuff at Whole Foods. Unlike the stuff at Whole Foods, the filets were free of any pin bones. For all the money we put into the Whole Foods fish counter, you’d think they’d learn to clean out the pin bones. Now it’s not a problem. There is no reason to go back.

In addition to the halibut, we also got a sample of one of their soups, an excellent tomato and seafood chowder. In addition, they were serving hot sandwiches and sushi. Anyone reading this from within the Pittsburgh city limits is now required to head down there and spend all of your food money in the store.

Seafood loot in hand, we strolled down Penn to Enrico’s for the first time in a long time. Previously, the newer upscale feel of the Strip cafe had put us off, but in a happy coincidence, this day Larry’s printer had broken down and they were yelling out the menu like in the old days. Roy was there with his etouffe. There was the heavy fresh bread and a big fat salad. We even paid on the way out like we used to. It was as if we were back in the spring of 2001. The only thing missing was the ubiquitous cloud of CMU graduate students being all hipper-than-thou.

Finally, and most importantly, the best news of the week was the reopening of Il Piccolo Forno next to La Prima. Carla has made a heroic effort to restore the coffee and bakery and experience that has been tragically incomplete for the last few months. We were there bright and early this past Thursday and again on Saturday. The muffins and breakfast pizza were there. The transcendent sfogliatelle were there. The mele were there, although they are a little different. She also has some new things, including a completely to-die-for lemon tart. There is no salutation that can express the appreciation that I feel for the people involved in bringing this place back. Any money you did not spend at Penn Ave. Fish earlier you are now required to hand over to Carla. They didn’t change their prices and they have never charged enough for what they do ($1.25 for a muffin! A muffin which is twice as large and incalculably better than one of those god-damned shitty frosting-drowned atrocities against the baking arts that the yuppy cupcake places have been inflicting upon an unsuspecting public).

Go. Go a lot. Then go some more.

Here are two games to play in your web browser and destroy your productivity:

Desktop Tower Defense. Action! Guns! Squirt Towers! Recommended by Jeremy Zawodny.

MathsNet Interactive Geometry. Three dimensional puzzles! Tip: Puzzle #1 is the hardest one by a mile. Recommended as retaliation for the earlier link by fpereira.

Go play them! Just don’t blame me when you get fired.

Tonight a lesson in dork shopping. I bought a new Nikon D200 digital SLR last month. We are taking our first vacation in a while, and it seemed like a good excuse to upgrade the picture taking machine since you always take a lot of pictures on trips. After a lot of angst over whether the more expensive body was worth it (the D80 is not much of a downgrade feature-wise) I finally decided to spring for it.

Make no mistake, the camera is wonderful. It basically meets my expectations in that it fixes every major complaint I have about the D70. The AF is actually useful in action situations now. The metering is good. The viewfinder is much better. High ISO performance is a lot better. The continuous shot buffer is five times larger, so I never have to worry about the camera locking up as it decides it needs to flush stuff to the card. The only way they could possibly improve it is to make it into a D2x, only half the size and a quarter the cost. The minor gripes are

1. Battery life is not nearly as good as the D70.

2. The camera is a bit heavier.

So, I haven’t had any problems with the camera itself. Well, except that some of the shiny new features are pretty complicated, and the camera’s interface is different in subtle ways. In picture review mode, you move from shot to shot with the left/right parts of the D-pad rather than up/down. The metering mode is now on a switch rather than a button and dial. I love that I can change AF modes without opening the custom setting menus, but I hate the orientation of the switch.

Some of the default camera settings are a bit different too. I think the in-camera JPEG engine pushes the colors a bit more than the D70. The result is that unless you dial back the saturation a bit, if you use Adobe Lightroom (or Apple’s Aperture, or for that matter, anything but Nikon’s software) to do RAW processing your pictures will have a color that is very different from the original preview image embedded in the RAW file. I had this horrifying experience where I imported 100 pictures into Lightroom and watched as the color was sucked out of each and every one of them as the initial RAW conversion finished. It took a while to setup the camera to perform more like my old D70, where this was not as noticeable. Still, I now have an annoyance I didn’t have before I noticed this problem. Default color balance settings are like watches, if you have one you always know where you stand, but if you have two you never know.

Even the new AF system is not without its pitfalls. There are now 57 different autofocus rules. Before I had gotten by with two:

1. Always use the center sensor.

2. Once in a while, turn on “continuous focus” because you think it will be useful for moving objects, but turn it back off again in 15 minutes when you realize it’s not really working.

The D200 now has 11 sensors scattered all over the viewfinder such that there are some in places that are really useful even for off-center shots. That, combined with the fact that the focus tracking actually appears to be able to keep up with moving children has tempted me to really learn how to use the AF system. But it’s a lot to internalize. There are different ways to group the sensors together or not, different tracking modes, and a weird wide area sensor mode that I don’t really understand. This means I’ve filled up a lot of memory cards with pictures that range from slightly off to completely out of focus.

Speaking of memory cards, the files that come out of this camera are about twice as big. I had just bought a new 2GB card for my D70. This got me used to around 300 shots per card, but then the new camera dropped that immediate back into the 150 range. Since you can never go back, I ended up buying two new 4GB cards, especially after I found out that for some reason you can buy 4GB cards of one type that seem identical to 2GB cards of another type in almost all ways, but cost half as much per GB.

The big new files bring with them added resolution. Since starting to use digital cameras I have mostly shot handheld, although in my film days I used a tripod a lot. I just haven’t had the energy to carry the thing lately. But now I got thinking, maybe this trip I’d break out the tripod again, try and work on some of my old cityscapes.

Tripods are one of those things you have to be careful about to because only you know how much tripod you need. So if you go and ask some guy what you need, and he happens to (say) shoot wildlife in Africa for a living with a collection of lenses all of which weigh 15 pounds, he’ll tell you to buy the wrong tripod. In particular, he will tend to tell you that you need a large expensive tripod and a large expensive ballhead to have any hope of taking a decently sharp picture. Further, if you buy less, you are stupid because you will just end up coming back and buying what he told you to get in the first place. But the truth is, you might know that you are never going to shoot wildlife in Africa, or sports at the Super Bowl. If you know this, then buying too much tripod because you think you might be wrong would also be stupid.

I have always tried to get away with the smallest tripod possible, because I shoot mostly with small cameras and small lenses. A few years ago, I did try out one of the fancy 2lb ballheads that cost $400. What I found was that a 2lb ballhead weighs too much. So I sold it. If, in the future, I ever find myself in need to using a 15lb telephoto lens, then won’t feel too bad because the $500 I’d spend at that point for a head would only be 1/20th the cost of the lens itself. Let that be a lesson, they may tell you that you’ll end up with that fancy 2lb ballhead, but that doesn’t make it so.

However, I did need a tripod plate for the new camera. These days, they make these awesome new L-shaped plates so you can shoot horizontals and verticals without flopping the head over. I’ve wanted one for a while, but figured since I wasn’t using the tripod much it would be stupid to buy one. No longer. So I mosied over to the Really Right Stuff web site. Really Right Stuff makes custom machined metal plates that attach your camera to their custom machined metal clamps. These pieces of metal are horrifyingly expensive, but beautifully made. I showed my new plate to my boss, who is a machining geek and he couldn’t believe how nice it was. He didn’t even care what it did. He wanted one.

RRS had a surprise for me. New ballheads. And small ones. Now I felt was truly doomed.

The only thing that saved me was that the jewel-like perfectly machined ballheads were even more expensive than the plates (and the carbon fiber tripod), so what’s left of my cheapness kept me from ordering. I’ll probably cave later. But the web site lead me further into my shopping quagmire.

Gitzo has updated the tripods. There are now smaller and lighter carbon fiber ‘pods fold up even smaller. Also, they have fixed the one long standing problem with Gitzo tripods: the new legs have locking collars that let you open the legs in any order you want, instead of the Gitzo-standard order. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say that you have to remember to always open a Gitzo tripod from the top down and shut it from the bottom up. Otherwise the you can’t loosen and tighten the collars that hold the legs together. This was always a source of pain, and they have fixed it.

Again I was saved by the fact that the damn things are too expensive. I’d pay a lot for a tripod that is just about as sturdy as the one I have but weighs a pound less and folds shorter and more quickly. But not what Gitzo wants me to pay.

So, as always, a tool purchased for the purpose of making my photography more enjoyable has inevitably turned into a springboard for neurotic Internet research and iterative shopping. I’m lucky to have escaped having just bought the fancy L-plate. This is especially true because this little episode overlapped with my recent bout with setting up my TV over again. As a result I also spent some time shopping for new audio accessories.

Why the hell is it, by the way, that you can’t buy custom lengths of custom-terminated speaker-wire without giving up your children for adoption? It’s criminal.

In all, there are three lessons to be learned here:

1. Be careful when you decide to buy that new toy.

2. Photography and home audio are more expensive than gaming. I should stick with just buying those $50 games. Much easier.

3. I shouldn’t have written this, because now I’ve followed the link to the RRS site again, and damn those ballheads look nice.

Doomed.

It’s not just the free software song, but that every interaction with the man is like playing Simon Says with a malicious 6 year old.

I remember once, many years ago, a friend of mine logged in to RMS’s account to show me some funny things (RMS used to be anti-password, and so when they forced him to use a password, he chose an easy one and told everyone about it, so I don’t think he’d view this as illicit). The thing that impressed me the most was his huge collection of emacs abbrevs.

I guess RMS got a lot of mail from people wanting to discuss things with him. So he had this gargantuan list of abbreviations to use in his email responses. So, for example — and I’m making up the exact words here, but I’m keeping the spirit true — someone might send him mail saying “But shouldn’t developers be compensated for their efforts?” and he could reply by typing “compensation” and that would insert into the email the paragraph “If we eliminate copyright as a means of encouraging people to develop software, at first less software will be developed, but that software will be more useful. It is not clear whether the overall delivered user satisfaction will be less; but if it is, or if we wish to increase it anyway, there are other ways to encourage development, just as there are ways besides toll booths to raise money for streets.”

My friend showed me an email message RMS had sent him. Sure enough, it was nearly all straight out of his abbrevs file.

I guess one could view this as a clever timesaving device by someone who received hundreds of email messages daily and who wanted to answer them all. And yet, over the years, I’ve grown to view it as somehow disrespectful, as a sign of someone for whom communication was a one way street, facing outward.

I was reminded of this topic by jvm’s recent news item about RMS’s views on console games over at Curmudgeon Gamer. Be sure to read the comments. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I used to love my receiver. It gave me a sense of dork pride to know that sure, I had suffered great pains to get everything hooked up, but my reward was a rich stereo sound experience that the other losers in the audience were missing. No TV sound for me. Like most things though, as I got older, the inconvenience of dealing with the machine started to overtake the enjoyment of the result.

When we got a new TV stand this week for the big TV we bought last year (the old cabinet had the TV at the wrong height) I realized that there was almost no activity in the universe worse than rewiring the receiver.

Receivers used to be fairly simple. There were four or five stereo inputs in the back and one or two speaker hookups. You run the wires, turn everything on, and listen to music. Video, and worse, surround sound, have made the modern receiver into a huge frankendevice that costs as much as a PC and weighs three times more.

Even the relatively primitive Sony thing I bought almost ten years go is terrifying to behold. It weights about 20 pounds and has an array of holes in the back that make it look like an old patch-board for one of those vacuum tube computers you see in the movies. My receiver only deals with the audio and video interconnects that were available at the time:

1. Normal or S-Video
2. Stereo sound
3. Digital surround (I don’t remember which one).
4. Analog 5.1

These days, you also have to deal with

1. 18 kinds of digital surround encoding, after you’ve figured out what kind of interconnect to run.
2. HDMI
3. Component video
4. Analog surround
5. Multi-room interconnect

And so on.

In addition, for all their size and terrifying nature, the average A/V receiver doesn’t come close to having a sufficient number of inputs to handle the devices that your average dork might own. Game consoles, cable boxes, Apple TV, Tivo, Airtunes, DVD players, media center TVs? All of these run video and audio. If I wanted to take “full advantage” of everything I might own, I would need a box to switch around seven video devices, all of which have component or HDMI output and surround sound capabilities.

Even the high end receivers with those huge backpanels can manage at most five HD sources with surround sound. The huge backpanels mostly hold jacks for stereo and RCA or S-Video, which in theory no one is interested in anymore. Therefore, even if I went out and bought a $1000 receiver, I still have to go out and buy a another box to switch everything, even though the main use for the receiver is, you know, switching. Then I have to figure out how to run all the wire between two boxes, and which digital surround interconnect to buy, and how to run 5 sets of speaker wire out to all the speakers. Did I forget to mention that the single worst consumer electronics user experience in the entire universe is hooking speaker wire into those retarded binding posts on the back of a receiver? Surely someone in the last fifty years could have thought up a better way to do this. This is why I’ve never bothered with surround. That, and the only time I can use the video system is at night when half the house is in bed… not a a great time to crank up the subwoofer demo.

So let’s review. The A/V receiver does two things:

1. Surround sound processing which is too complicated to set up, and which I will never use.

2. Video switching, only it sucks and you have to buy something else to do that.

All of this pain flooded into my head because the furniture people did not deliver the shelf pegs for my new cabinet. This meant that I could not really set everything up the way I had it before. So, on a lark I just connected all the video and stereo sound right into the TV. What I found was that this was infinitely easier than running audio and video into the receiver and back out again. The 4-way video switchbox that I have can sit behind the TV rather than inside the cabinet, making the wire runs easy. The back to the TV is much easier to reach than the back of the receiver. All in all it took maybe half an hour to hook everything back up instead of the normal hour or two of pain with the receiver.

My takeway from all of this is:

1. Surround sound is still not worth the pain.

2. Buy a cheap video switchbox and run everything into the TV.

3. If your TV has speakers that suck, run the stereo out from the TV into a two channel amplifier and buy some nice speakers. The two channel amp can also be used for Airtunes.

After playing around with this new hookup scheme, I decided that what the world needs is a simple and cheap surround processor/amplifier that takes a digital input or two and puts out 5.1. Let me restate this for extra clarity. The box would one thing: decode the digital signal into 5.1 surround and feed that to a multi-channel amplifer. No switching, no video scaling, no remote control, nothing. One wire in, six wires out. That’s it. I would hook this up behind my video switcher or television. Then you can get surround without a useless receiver in the chain. The auto-switcher is better at switching than the receiver anyway. Of course, no one makes such a thing. There are only expensive dedicated surround processors that are like receivers without the power stage. There are also expensive dedicated multi-channel amplifiers that don’t have the right interconnect. It’s great how you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and still get the wrong thing. Maybe sometime in the near future someone will make the right device and surround sound won’t be stupidly painful to set up anymore.

Meanwhile, it was dead easy to set up my spare Airport Express as a wireless bridge for the Xbox so I could get rid of the extra Linksys router that I had been using for nothing but the Xbox. Yet again computer networking proves easier to deal with than home video.

I’m an adult who, on occasion, enjoys drinking in moderation. Since I live in Pennsylvania I am forced to purchase liquor through what is charitably described as the very worst state-owned liquor monopoly in the entire universe.

I’ve written about this in detail before: the painfully unhelpful staff at many stores, and that the system seems more interested in punishing you for wanting to buy liquor than in trying to sell it. I’ve used some fairly immoderate language, because I think the State Stores deserve this sort of intervention: Pennsylvania clearly doesn’t want to sell wine and spirits, so they should do us all a favor and get out of the business of doing so.

But given the amounts of money involved in this gigantic government jobs program, I don’t really expect that to happen. So, in the interest of trying to help them do a better job, I’m going to explain how they can make one simple change to the system that will fix it. It will make the system easier to use and will help them sell more product, all at the same time.

It’s really simple: let me special-order wine and spirits on the web.

I was discussing this with a manager at a State Store the other day. “It’s really inconvenient to have to order things here,” I said. “It’s like going to the library or a record store: the moment I walk in to the store, I’ve forgotten what I need.”

“Well,” said the manager. “You can place orders over the phone.”

PLCB: “We Make Shopping Hard”

It’s true that you can place orders on the phone. But there are a few problems with this. First, and most importantly, any interaction with the PLCB where I have to talk to a human being is a bad interaction. Yes, I know that there are some stores where the staff is helpful, knowledgable, and friendly — the Centre Avenue store is particularly good — but on the whole talking to anyone at the PLCB is a bit like playing Russian Roulette. It’s not the sort of risk that offers good odds.

Second, even when the staff is helpful and friendly the process of making a special liquor order is super-painful, involving digging through reams of paper printed on a 1985-era dot-matrix printer until the employee can find some obscure code. The transaction cost of putting in an SLO is so high that I have, at times, put it off for weeks just to avoid the pain.

Lastly, I work for a living. Very often, I don’t even think of things like buying obscure liquors until long after everyone manning the phones at the PLCB has gone home for the night.

The PLCB does have an online store, but as near as I can tell it only stocks a small subset of their catalog - no “SLO”, or special liquor orders, at all. The PLCB’s entire product catalog, including SLO’s, is online also, but I can’t order any of the interesting stuff. Give me a web form where I can type in your SKUs, give you my credit card information, and tell you what store I want to pick the product up at, and I will be putting in orders tomorrow. I assure you I’m not the only one.

So please, PLCB. I know you hate liquor. I know you hate making money. I know you hate all of your customers in a very deep and personal way. But help me out. Let me place these orders on your web site. Make it easy, make it quick, and make it painless. Otherwise I may never get to try Cachaça Fazenda Mae De Ouro.

God of War 2 is God of War turned up to 11.

That’s pretty much all you need to know. If you liked the first game you will like the second. If, like my wife, you thought the first game was juvenile and offensive, you will not think the second game is any different. Me, I liked the first game, but I also thought it was juvenile and offensive. I bought God of War 2 anyway because I was in the mood to run around in some huge levels and beat the crap out of a lot of faceless monsters.

Here is the rundown:

1. Gratutiously brutal violence: check.

2. Even more gratuitously brutal “finishing move” mini-games: check.

3. Complete mashup of Greek Mythology distorted and pulled apart to suit the plot, such as it is: check.

4. Offscreen three-way sex minigame: check.

5. Human sacrifice puzzles: check.

The whole package is here, and if anything it’s even more refined and polished than the first time around. The combat is basically the same fluid slicing and dicing as before. The levels are enormous and interestingly designed. They have thankfully removed the jumping puzzles involving spinning blades and replaced them with jumping and rappelling puzzles where you fly through the air while structures that have stood since the beginning of time for some reason decide to crumble and fall down just as you reach them. There are the same “drag block from A to B” puzzles. There are keys to fetch, levers to pull, pools to swim through, and timed locks to beat. As I mentioned before, there is a new rappelling mechanic. There is also a new gimmick where you can slow down time. That pretty much sums up the gameplay. You run and jump from place to place and you kill anything that moves.

As the game begins, our resident bad-ass Kratos is stripped of his status as God and skewered through the belly by Zeus. With the help of Gaia and the Titans, your mission is to fight and claw and scratch your way to the Sisters of Fate so that you may take your revenge on the Gods that have beat you down. In other words, it’s basically the same script as the first game. Kratos is beat down, Kratos gets back up again and gets his revenge. It’s a reasonable narrative skeleton on which to hang the gameplay and it is certainly interesting enough to keep you playing from cut scene to cut scene. The cameos from various figures in Greek Mythology are also amusing, even if they don’t make any sense.

Unfortunately, the context of the plot is a little bit different in this game than in God of War. The Kratos character in God of War was tormented by his own earlier failure and his desire to be free of this torment was what motivated his insane rage and brutality. You could almost identify with the core motivation of the character, even if he was a complete psychopath. He almost manages to come off as a tragic figure driven by his own inner demons.

In contrast, in God of War 2 Kratos comes off more as a petulant teenager storming into his bedroom and declaring with great melodrama that his parents hate him and just don’t understand his life. He spends the first couple of hours of the game just strutting around, challenging anyone to DEFY THE GOD OF WAR. It’s tiresome and annoying. But it’s an emotional tone that the core audience of the game can probably identify with.

Luckily it’s easy to ignore the fact that the main character is an emotional and intellectual cripple and just get on with the smashing of enemies. This time through I played on Easy so I wouldn’t have to replay long stretches of tiring combat. I still had to deal with long stretches of tiring jumping puzzles. But, this strategy was invaluable in surviving all of the tedious Boss fights. The game is nice enough to throw you small amounts of health and magic powerups every few times you hit the Boss, so I never got killed trying to figure out what pattern I had to dance around in to dispatch the latest oversized enemy. I even enjoyed the ending action sequence of one of the fights. It had a pleasing rythm to it, and ended in an enjoyable wad of gore.

Aside from the decidedly juvenile tone of the game, my only other real complaints are the things I always complain about. The fixed camera was still annoying at times. The savepoints are too far apart. The final Boss ends with a soul sucking “mash the button when Simon says” action sequence that seemed very unforgiving of the most minor error in timing. Maybe my TV has a tiny bit of lag that caused this trouble but I had to hit the damned buttons a dozen times to make it to the end. Why do the game designers hate us?

My overall opinion of the first game was “good but not great”. I’ll stick with that assessment for the second game. God of War 2 game is bigger, louder and Bossier than the first, but it’s not really different or better. But that’s OK, because if nothing else, Sony has given us a version of God of War that we can enjoy without being tormented by the spinning blades of death from Hades. If that’s not something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.

Having survived this latest mash-fest, it’s time to slow down again. Maybe I’ll go get that Oblivion expansion pack.

“Keith Richards snorted his father? Who would imagine he’d be that crazy?”

The answer, of course, is “Dave Sim”, whose model of Keith was apparently too conservative (click the image to enlarge for readability):

See also here.

Those of you who have been following my reviews know of my infatuation with Telltale’s Sam and Max adventure games. The thrilling thing to me about these games is that they have been consistently funny and playable games.

The fourth episode of their “episodic series”, Abe Lincoln Must Die! has been released. It’s strongly written. It has clever writing, brilliant situations, and is funny enough that it had me, quite literally, crying tears of laughter.

But it’s a pretty bad adventure game.

It’s hard to say why this should be. The game mechanics, for example, don’t vary at all from the other episodes. Part of the problem is that the puzzles in Lincoln Must Die require a bit too much drudgery to actually solve. To take one example, at several points in the game you need to get past someone who is standing in your way. The way to do this is to travel to a completely different location to use a certain object. You can’t bring the object with you, and you end up doing this several times.

In a cleverly designed game, you can solve a puzzle the moment you figure it out. In this game, you get the “Eureka” moment but then have to spend a subjective eternity travelling to a distant location to try out your theory. That really took the wind out of my sails. I know they were trying to reward “thinking out of the box.” I just wish the box was somewhere more convenient. If this happened just once during the game, I could forgive and forget. By the third time, it was making me roll my eyes in irritation.

This is also the first time in the series that I’ve felt flummoxed by a “move the mouse around the screen to find the magic pixel” sort of puzzle. That this happened near the climax of the game didn’t make me any happier.

So, should these objections stop you from getting the game? Not at all. The humor payoff makes up for the game part of the game being less than stellar:

And all of the other episodes in the series (including the followup to this one), are of generally higher quality. But if all the games in the series played like Lincoln Must Die, I would have a hard time recommending them.

Let’s just hope that Telltale’s customers give them honest feedback, and that they listen.

Cachaça, a foul-tasting sugarcane based spirit, may be the best reason yet to go to war with Brazil. I have had homemade moonshine made from cat barf that did less damage to my psyche (and liver).

The subject of exposure in photography is filled with confusion. On the one hand, automatic exposure systems have largely freed the general public from ever thinking about the problem except under dire circumstances. On the other hand, beginning photographers who aspire to become serious workers in the medium are usually overly obsessed with the technical aspects of “correct” exposure. Even the idea of correct exposure is hard to pin down. You could argue that you can’t know the correct exposure for a picture without knowing what the subject is. And yet mostly automatic cameras mostly do a good job. How does this work out? Are they just guessing well?

The truth is, the more you understand about exposure, the less you should have to think about it. It’s as close to a zen paradox as you get in photographic technique.

Setting things up

In general terms, the exposure for a picture is how much light is allowed to hit the film or digital sensor. If you imagine that a camera is a box with a hole on one end and a light-sensitive material on the other, then three things determine the exposure for any given picture. First, there is the time, or how long you hold the film or sensor in front of the hole. Of course, a modern camera has a shutter mechanism that opens and closes in very precise intervals, so the time component of exposure is usually called the shutter speed. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light hits the film. Second, there is the aperture or the size of the hole. This size determines how much light per unit time is hitting the film plane. Aperture is generally denoted using a weird notation called an “f-stop”. You will see markings on lenses like “3.5 4 5.6 8″ and so on. These are called “f-stop” numbers and are a relative measure of how wide open the diaphragm inside the lens is. The smaller the number, the more light is reaching the film plane of the camera.

The modern fancy camera has two dials with which you set exposure, one for shutter speed and one for aperture. Any given pair of settings allows a single and unique amount of light to hit the film plane. To increase exposure, either increase the shutter speed or you open the lens wider. Similarly, to decrease exposure you either decrease the shutter speed or close the lens down. The controls have been standardized so that the shutter speeds and the apertures progress in factors of two. When you exactly double or halve the exposure, this is referred to as changing the exposure by a “stop”. Now that I think about it, the origin of this terminology is unclear to me, but it’s probably related to the f-stop numbers on the lens. Electronic cameras usually also allow you to change the exposure in intervals of 1/2 or 1/3 of a stop for finer control.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to ignore the other effects that aperture and shutter speed can have on a picture. For now, all that we are concerned about is that they are the two numbers that you set in the camera that determine how much light hits the film or the sensor.

The third factor needed to determine the exposure for a picture is a measure of the sensitivity of the film or sensor you are using. Here is where we take a bit of a technical digression.

Middle Gray

In the old days, what we would do is expose film to light and then run it through a series of chemical baths. At the end of this process, we would have little pieces of plastic with negative images on them. The parts of the film that got more light would be darker, whereas the parts of the film that got less light would be lighter. On the print, the effect would be reversed. Therefore, if you expose the film to more light, the final picture comes out lighter. This seems obvious, but it’s important.

The final piece of the exposure puzzle is this: how can you systematically express how bright the photo will be for a given exposure? It turns out that an international standards body has defined this for us. The ISO rating of the film, also referred to as the “speed” of the film is a number that essentially tells you how much light you have to give the film for it to reach a standard average density. This standard density is usually referred to as “middle gray”. It’s a pretty dull color, not really a nice light gray, not really a nice dark black. It’s just average. The higher the ISO number, the “faster”, or more sensitive, the film is. Fast film needs less light, slow film needs more light.

So here is the answer to how the camera chooses exposure for you. Assume you have told the camera the ISO rating of the film. Inside the camera body is a little chip that is sensitive to light. What the camera does is use this chip to figure out how much light is hitting the film plane. The camera now combines this information with the film speed and makes up an exposure that will result a middle gray picture. That is, it gives the film enough exposure so that if you had pointed the camera at a sea of middle gray, the resulting picture would come out middle gray.

At this point, I can hear the non-photographers objecting. You didn’t point the camera at a gray card, you pointed it at Aunt Betty or Grandma, or the new baby. How can this possibly work? It turns out that most of the scenes that we point cameras at have a distribution of tones in them that averages out at middle gray. That is, parts of the picture might be brighter and other parts of the picture might be darker, but in general you get lucky and everything averages out. There are notable exceptions, but given how well most all-auto cameras work, they are fairly rare. Luckily, there is a simple rule to compensate for this:

1. If your picture is dominated by light tones, the camera will expose the picture so these tones are gray, not white. Therefore, tell the camera to expose more. Compare these two pictures of a truck. The first one is exposed at the suggestion of the camera meter:

After telling the camera to give a couple of stops more exposure, you get this

Now the truck is a nice white like it was when I walked past it.

2. If your picture has a lot of dark stuff, then the camera will make it middle gray instead of dark. Therefore, tell the camera to expose less. Again, as an example, I took this shot of a black rug I have in my house. It’s blurry because I didn’t have a tripod. Notice that at the exposure the camera suggested, the black rug is the same tone as the white truck was above:

Tell the camera to expose a couple of stops less, and you get a nice dark tone closer to black:

So remember, to make light stuff light, expose more. To make dark stuff dark, expose less.

One final digression: One of the best things about shooting with digital cameras is that the your “film speed” is not fixed. The camera manufacturers have calibrated their sensors to follow the ISO scale, but the camera lets you set almost any speed you want whenever you want to. You usually trade off image quality at the highest speeds, but it’s usually worth it. Some cameras, like my favorite Nikons, also have a delicious auto-exposure mode that shift the ISO higher for you to maintain shutter speed or aperture. This means you can go from taking pictures outside to in your house without forgetting to reset the ISO. This is good for old forgetful people like me.

Contrast Kills

At this point, we might think that we have the exposure question licked. All you need is a calibrated film speed, a calibrated meter and some smarts about when to override the camera. This would be true, except for one more tricky problem: contrast.

As I write this, I’m looking out my window. The room is lit only by the indirect dusk light. The yard outside is in shadow, and the sky above the yard is lit by the setting sun. To my eye, the whole scene is pretty flat and it’s easy to see detail in both the darkest and lightest parts of what I am looking at.

Here is the problem: you can’t capture this contrast range on film or in a digital file. If you get the dark room light enough, everything outside will be a bright white. If you get the sky the right color, everything in the foreground will be black.

I took a picture out my window of the nice sky:

Notice how everything else in the shot is black.

In a situation like this, the photographer has to pick what part of the picture is the most important and set the exposure appropriately. So, if you want detail in the dark parts of the picture, you expose for the shadows and just live with the fact that the bright parts of the picture will be white. Conversely, if you want to capture the fabulous light in the sky, you will have to give up detail on the ground. Of course, there are ways to cheat. If you do your own black and white printing, sometimes you can balance the contrast when you make the print. Certain extremely skilled landscape photographers have also mastered the use of special filters that can balance the sky with the ground. Finally, in the digital age, you can take two pictures of the same scene, one dark and one light and then stitch them together later.

The fact that your film or digital sensor has a limited dynamic range is something that you will find yourself fighting a lot. It’s important to know where you have more leeway. For example, old style print films (and black and white) tend to forgive overexposure more than under. That is, they can hold detail in the bright parts of the photo but not the dark. Slide film and digital sensors tend to go the opposite way. They can hold detail in pictures that are too dark, but if you blow the highlights out you will just get large areas of blank white. In either case, the important thing to remember is that you expose the picture so that the subject you care most about is well within the available contrast range. If you let drift too far one way or the other, you will lose detail.

Summary

Since I am an engineer by trade, I have given you an overly complicated and technical explanation of what is going on here. There are three things you need to remember:

1. The camera exposes for middle gray.

2. If the subject is not middle gray, you need to compensate by increasing or decreasing the exposure appropriately.

3. You need to take scene contrast into account when picking your exposure.

With enough practice, you will get used to reading the light in front of you and doing the right thing by reflex. Then you can forget about all the complicated details in this article and just shoot pictures.