Knuckledragger

The Bobby Parable.

I own one of the red ones. I have never successfully taken a photo with it.

I dug out and fired up my 30D for the first time in 6? 7? 8? years today. There were a number of false starts. I had to set the time (it had only lost half an hour, which is amazing) and it didn't like the first three CF cards I fed it. Finally, it stopped complaining and I tried some shots with 50/1.4. Confirming things worked, I immediately reached for my ancient Meyer-Optik Orestor 135mm F/2.8 "bokeh monster." My purpose was to photograph to old old widgets that belonged to my grandfather. I had the benighted notion to post the images to reddit's /r/whatisthisthing, but that subreddit has a slew of poorly defined rules and an aggressive AutoMod bot so they can individually and collectively go F themselves. With that said, I took a whole bunch of artistically questionable shots of two 19th century objects while making egregious and unnecessary use of a shallow depth of field: Old East German glass is a hoot. See more here and more broadly my use of manual focus lenses here.

As the zoomers say, that last one hits just right. Serious purists would grouse about "nisen bokeh" but as most photographers eventually figure out, faults can make a lens interesting. I haven't taken too many photos since moving to MV, which is silly as when I lived off-island I took photos like mad when I visited here. I mentioned a while back I bought the Moment and Hipstamatic apps for iOS: Hipstamatic is never not silly, but I actually really like the framing of this image. The faux vintage effects add nothing, TBH. This one actually works pretty well as a photograph, hipster or not. Not hipster at all. The Edgartown docks. IR 5D, 17-40L at the wide end, F/4, 1/60th, ISO50. Straight out of the camera with no edits at all. This happens remarkably never. There are two types of photographers: those who have no idea about metering for infrared and liars. My street. IR 5D, 50mm F/1.4 @ F/8, 1/200, ISO100. I ambled around the neighborhood with the 5D and faster 50mm. The latter is actually a terrible match for the former, for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that the 50/1.4 has a huge bright spot dead center in infrared that doesn't appear at all in the visible color spectrum. Curiously, my older 1987 50mm F/1.8 doesn't have this problem at all. Of all the photos I took this afternoon, this was a last minute one as I was crossing the road. At the time I remember thinking "well, there was no effort in that one so it will suck." It was the best of the bunch, by a huge margin. South Beach, EDG. Moment app on iPhone 13. I adjusted the EV down a bit. I do not get along with touchscreen controls. Some days I wish I'd sprung for a 13 Pro, but the price difference could get me a Canon 35mm F/2 IS. The gateway to South Beach. Also Moment on the i13. I got the sea horizon reasonably straight but that didn't stop be from loading the image into Photoshop, pixel peeping and getting that MFer as level as I could. I do like the framing on this one. About 5 feet ahead of the previous photo. I adjusted the horizon and fussed over the levels of this shot quite a bit. It looks remarkably non-pseudo-HDR, and I consider that to be a success at this point. Missing from this image: the cold AF breeze coming off the Atlantic. EDG harbor again. Taken right after the IR photo at the top. The late afternoon sun was gorgeous and the iPhone was the best (visible spectrum) camera I had on hand. I did correct the horizon but didn't make many adjustments otherwise. I like it. Throwback Thursday: ("Knuckles, it's Wednesday.") Truly a monstrous edit. I started with a not very good photo I took and had previously edited in 2005 and rand it through Topaz Gigapixel AI, upscaling it 6x. Then I loaded it into Luminar 4, where I made dozens of tweaks and applied a lookup table. Next I used Topaz DeNoise AI to clean the image up and remove some of the posterizing effects brought on by Luminar. Lastly I dragged into Photoshop, used QuickMask to select the sky and denoised and otherwise cleaned it up (it needed a lot of work.) Then I straightened out the horizon and adjusted the levels. This was a project I worked on and off again for a week. Was it worth it? Probably not. I find the end result kind of amusing.

Oof. So I've spent ...entirely too long today working on getting a temporary (or "temporary" if one prefers) setup going. It has been an uphill battle. Long time listeners will remember I made use of a Native Instruments Traktor Audio 6 USB audio interface for years. It served as both the dual stereo outputs for my DJ software as well as the analogue inputs for Mixlr. It died a slow and awkward death. I have been trying to diagnose its issues today. What I've learned so far: The device is called an "Audio 6" because it has 6 stereo pairs: 3 in and 3 out. They are grouped into "Main" "A" and "B. The "Main" pair is completely shot. I have not tested the Main inputs today, but given that they were the point of failure when I stopped using this unit, I suspect they have not magically un-fucked themselves. In addition to that knowledge, I have also figured out that the Main ouputs are just as dead. Both the Main RCA outs and the headphone jack (which is permanently routed to Main out) produce nothing but horrid, headphone destroying static. The good news is that output A and output B appear to be working. This is a plus as I need a good 4channel USB DAC for this "temporary" setup, preferably one with RCA outs. I haven't done a proper test with a DJ mixer yet, but so far the Audio 6 looks promising. Unfortunately, that is the only good news. I still have to find a space in a tiny room to set up my large-ish 19" DJ mixer, laptop and necessary USB audio widgets. I also need at least one USB audio device with a working stereo pair of inputs. In the past I have used an Onkyo MSE-U33HB which dates from the turn of the millennium and was primarily sold outside of the US: Right before I moved, and again recently I confirmed that the output stage of my unit is dead. It's probably something as simple as bad capacitors, but it's beyond my ability to fix them. I need to rest the input stage and see if it's similarly dead. If it isn't, I'm going to once again press the Onkyo into service as my Mixlr Box. If it fails that test, I'm going to have to get creative.

This is a photo of a group of boomers in a record store, taken in 1973. I have no idea what is the album that the woman in the middle is holding. I've asked several people and gotten either "I don't know" or wrong answers (CCR's Mardi Gras, which game out in '72 but didn't look like that.)

(!) Look who's back: It's like 2007 all over again.

This sketch aired 30 years ago today.

This is an obscure one. Today I learned that Mario Rosa AKA Dr Mario died, before his 50th birthday. Dr. Mario gained some fame in the Los Angeles drum n bass scene in the late 90s and early 00s, as well as on mp3.com around the same time. I discovered him on that site, during an era when I'd make regular dives into their electronic music section. I actually contacted Dr. M once, asking him about a track that was only released in shitty, 128k mp3 format (a phenomenon regular listeners to my show will remember be talking about often.) He said he'd look for the originals of that track, but he never got back to me. I have one of his IRL friends on my FB friends list because many years ago, I went look for Dr. Mario and found his friend instead. I saw a post from said friend saying Mario had passed. At his best, Dr. Mario made frenetic DNB even by the standards of the genre. He crossed over into full on IDM territory, echoing the sounds of 90s Aphex Twin and Autechre, but with a deceptively deep sense of melody. Two of his best tracks are this one: This one was briefly popular on mp3.com around the year 2000. This one wasn't as well known, but I actually prefer it. It sums up everything that I like about his music. (Not even) 50 is entirely too young for anyone to pass, especially a talent like Mario's.

Adam Yauch died 11 years ago today.

From the sound of things, Topping ate Monopoly and has proceeded to shit out Connect Four.

Gordon was a complex one for me. I grew up during the age of angry punks and metalheads who were reacting against "boomer rock." His style of music was the least hip thing imaginable around the time I got my first Walkman. In spite of that environment, I always liked his songwriting and his incredibly distinctive singing voice. As is often the case, Gordon Lightfoot wasn't actually a boomer (1938, Silent Generation.) I remember hearing "Sundown" on the radio when I was quite young and finding it captivating. It was many years (which are big ones when one is so small) before I had an artist song title I could attach to it. It's apocryphal/not proven, but the lyrics to the song are often described as referring to the woman who indirectly killed John Belushi. That adds a whole additional weight to an already quite dark song. Also I've noticed that younger generations (later Millennials and Zoomers) seem to unironically (as they say) like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I remember a few years ago someone posted a graphic illustrating how lake Superior had its own weather systems to reddit and a bunch of users there wrote out the entire lyrics to the song, one comment at a time. That's some lasting impact right there.

Someone on the MV FB group I'm in got their account hacked and posted this obvious scam: So I posted my own version: