Author: Deer Me

Is This Why People Doom-Scroll? I’m Here For It!

Deer Me

The popular rise of artificial intelligence, which I feel we should all just admit is not “AI”, has given rise to something awesome: widespread, boarder-line irrational anger. I can appreciate this because I both do not care, and find it hugely entertaining. I guess there’s AI out there where you tell it something like “creepy Victorian child who is frail but also a Dyson vacuum cleaner in the style of Harry Clarke” and it goes out to whatever image collection and language interpretation database it has been trained on and a machine learning language engine algorithm spits out a drawing for you. Let it be known I do not know any of the proper terms, I skip those paragraphs, they’re boring.

Some people do the prompt crafting and enter the result in art competitions, and win. A that causes internet fights.

The argument is usually between a side that says “you didn’t produce this art, it’s not your work, you should not have been allowed into our competition” and the other which says “I had to come up with an idea, and then I had to carefully craft my instructions to the AI to get this image, I made it, it’s art.” Maybe they say they tweaked it some in photoshop. This opposition is great ‘cause someone, eventually, always mentions assistants.

Is this really a Rembrandt or did van Rijn just sign the work of one of his apprentices? Is this really a Koons or did he and the gallerist just get to cash the check? And it gets to be so wild because the fine art market and it’s participants made their choice centuries before Warhol’s factory made it acceptable to talk about, and now all the paint-spattered, charcoal-smeared, my-hand-feels-like-numb-claw, lower-caste artists are solidly rejecting that position. And it’s like, it’s not your fault, but you’re the reason big names in the fine art community even exist. Withhold your artistic labor, your technical skill, and the big names will collapse.

The proletariat doesn’t just own the means of production, they are the means of production.

And people know, but it doesn’t matter because even if 99.99% of the anonymous working artists out there went on strike, a couple hundred people are sure to be willing to bet that this is their chance to transition from nameless assistant to name on the shingle. That could be true to, if they’ve been careful about swiping phone numbers. Seriously, like having the right number is a fine art fundamental. But none of that’s knew.

And not all the threads last long enough to make it to the obvious. When they do though it’s amazing cause you can practically witness both sides just silently mouthing “well… fuck.” See, my position is just make it. Produce. That’s the opposite of consumer culture, producer culture. Like the good stuff that the world is better as a result of, the secret stuff that is created under compulsion because you have to, the terrible stuff that you gotta get out of the way before you get to the real stuff.

Support Can Be Literally a Few Crumpled Bills

Deer Me

You should support the arts. You should support artists. You should support people who aspire to be but are too meek to claim to be artists. No I don’t mean me. I mean the homemakers at the local arts council. The teens and no-bodies on Etsy. You should go to the craft-sale day of the annual carrot harvest festival two towns over and buy that 5×7″ watercolor of the old mill. You should shell out for a caricature from that lady way down at the empty end of the street fair, the one who looks like she’s trying to disappear between her own shoulders. And by you, I mean all of us.

I have never regretted buying something from the person responsible for its existence. I have regretted being the person who is responsible for somethings existence.

This is the story of that regret. It’s been a long enough time and I’ve moved around enough that I’m sure this wont identify anyone unless they somehow come upon it and out themselves. A gig I had a long time ago was working as a photographers assistant. Film was still more common than digital then so I mostly ran and kept film backs loaded during weddings then stayed up all night processing film so it’d be ready to go for the real photographer in the morning.

Every now and then the photographer would get a call from someone with next to no budget or a couple hundred dollars and a city-hall ceremony. Some of those calls would lead to me shooting a roll or two and eventually providing some very school-picture-day quality prints. I’d get some “practice”, a few dollars, and a bunch of admonitions of the “what you should have done…” type. If that’s an apprenticeship, it’s a wonder anyone ever becomes a professional.

I got called off once for a job that was on the calendar Friday, and canceled the Saturday before the Sunday ceremony. That never happened. Cancellations happened, sure, but with weeks or more of notice and even then security deposits being non-refundable made them rare. With nothing to do Sunday, I tried doing some shot-from-the-waist street photography Saturday with the understanding that I could use the darkroom to proof and print the next day because the place was always closed Sundays.

Sunday morning and I’m mixing up some D76 when I hear a pounding. The place was a camera shop, when those were still not such a rare thing. The photographer sold cameras, ran a lab, and shot weddings and portraits all out of a narrow storefront that barely had a window big enough for a cap and gown draped on a chair. I went in the back door from the alley, because I didn’t have a key for the front and was told to keep the lights off and “look closed” whenever I was there alone. Banging turned to screaming, like bloody murder screaming and I peeked through the curtain to the front, half expecting the place to be on fire. A tiny woman who looked about a hundred and twenty years old and dead for the last two was beating on the door. And that’s how I got roped into shooting the canceled wedding.

Grandma drove me to a big white farmhouse at a speed that I think was probably faster than any ambulance I’ve ever been in. There was a field full of cars, a crowd of people in front of the house, and just like a very tasteful arrangement in the back. All classic white chairs and a rose covered arbor that put commercial wedding venues to shame. It was perfect, if you could tune out the farm smell. Everyone there seemed either on the edge of violence or sincerely relieved when we pulled in. Grandma gave some of the angry young men orders and disappeared into the house. People were seated, some kind of vaguely martial operatic organ music started blasting, and I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing.

I really felt good for a while, like I was accomplishing something. Then I learned why this had been canceled so suddenly. The officiant said a lot of stuff, the only bit I remember, and I’m paraphrasing, was about the couple’s sacred duty to secure the existence of our people and a future for their white children. So yeah. Did Nazi that coming. I should have found a way to leave, even if it meant just walking until I was out of there. I should have opened the camera and pulled out all the exposures I had made to un-make them. I should have done anything other than what I did do which was to just carry on. When I don’t know how to react, I just don’t, react.

I shot the ceremony. I shot the wedding party. The couple, the bridesmaids and groomsmen, and families. I stayed and shot the cake, the first dances, all of it. Then three different people gave me envelopes of cash and an absolutely jacked teenager in work boots and red suspenders drove me back to the shop. I dropped the film at a drugstore and went back afterwards to order enlargements and additional prints to be mailed to the address on the thank you note that I found in one of the envelopes. I couldn’t not do that, I had every reason to literally take the money and run under the “it’s okay to punch Nazi’s” law. I however, am completely spine-free.

Two of the envelopes I was passed had $2000 each and the other had another $1000 but all in odd bills, as if it was filled by a passing hat. The thank you note was in one of the big envelopes and it was very normal. Their money paid for their processing and prints. Everything that was left, I should have donated or something, but I didn’t know how to do that. I should say I couldn’t spend it, that it was tainted. The truth is if I had needed the money right then, I would have spent it. I carried it around for a few weeks and then I had an incident and lost it, or spent it, or had it stolen. I don’t remember what happened to it. It would have been very useful when I got back out of the hospital.

When I was stable again, and in another new town, I decided I’d spend double that money creating something good to cancel out the karmic debt. Some thing awful existed because of me, so now, something beautiful needed to as well. I bought folksy watercolors tentatively daubed on the worst paper ever. I commissioned portraits from people who didn’t know what to charge, and paid them too much. I know it doesn’t undo anything I made that Sunday. I know it’s nothing to those hateful people.

Abandon Fine Art Photography, Be a Photo Operator!

Deer Me

I’m thinking about photography more than normal lately, an upcoming post should explain why, and when I think about things I have to read about them. It’s a coping mechanism to help keep loud things quiet. Now, I’m reading Photography After Capitalism, and you should too, it’s great. Don’t get me wrong, like everything in the genera parts of it read like randomly generated postmodern nonsense. Fortunately, most of it is just very dynamic and original.

One section early on talks about Francis Hodgson and a distinction he draws between photographers and what he’s termed photo operators. It’s a method of addressing the photograph as art debate. I love it. The thing is though, I think there are only photo operators. Photographers are a popular delusion of the fine art market, everything making photographs is a photo operator and it’s simple and beautiful.

Like, Earthrise, is an amazing photograph. Is it art? Is William Anders a photographer because of it? Terry Richardson was an anointed photographer, now he’s just another Harvey Weinstein with a shorter (for now) list and literally indistinguishable from any amateur pornographer on the web. How about that random lady Vivian Maier? Well, how badly do you want to see some arty people fight? Ask them! Ever see one of those one-in-a-million shots where a bird blocks the number plate on a speed-trap or red-light camera? Is something like that a great photo, or would it be if a person took it?

The answer to all those questions, is simple, it doesn’t matter. All those photos exist because of photo operators.

Found Audio Three

Deer Me

Panasonic released microcassets four to a set in a plastic case that was nominally the size of a standard cassette case, though thinner. The four here appear to be recordings of the proceedings of the board of the Yuma Venture RV Park, Yuma Arizona in the Southwest United States. For a place with RV in their name, their lone photo on Google maps shows only trailer homes. The first three tapes date to November 11th 1998 and are recorded on side A only. The final tape is marked in faded pencil with the date March 10th 1999. It’s a strange window into the goings on in a particular type of community just before the turn of the century. There’s something to be read into a man relaying the same anecdote about a pavement seal-coater in two meetings almost four months apart; something about the pace of life perhaps or what it takes for something to rise to the status of a 3.

11 November 1998 #1
11 November 1998 #2
11 November 1998 #3
10 March 1999 Side A
10 March 1999 Side B

I wonder how much of this sort of thing exists out there in the world, sitting in boxes slowly shedding magnetic oxides. The digital dark age has probably put more of this sort of thing out there, everyone has a voice recorder in their pocket these days. Sadly, no one’s selling access to used Google Drives, iClouds, or OneDrives that I know of.

Found Audio Two

Deer Me

Another microcassette recording. For some reason the creator of this audio recorded it at half speed, 1.2 centimeters per second instead of the usual 2.4 cm/s speed. This provided two hours or recording time on the 60 minute Sony tape. Having listened to the whole thing, there’s only five minutes of audio. Presented here with no post processing, it feels unkind to make this sort of thing clearer or otherwise easier to decipher.

Survivor Instructions

Slow or Stuck Shutter Repair for Amateurs

Deer Me

So you got yourself an old camera, old like from the mechanical camera age, not old like from the battery-powered point-and-shoot era. It’s made of metal, not plastic and if the wrap’s intact it looks like leather ‘cause it is. You probably have a lever that cocks the shutter and something that orbits the lens to change the aperture. More than likely you’ll find the camera isn’t operating at full capacity. I put such cameras into one of three groups (always three).

Group One: it basically works. You can focus, set the aperture, cock the fire the shutter, and wind the film on for the next shoot. If you got low standards and can put up with some unpredictable behavior you could go out and have a great time.

Group Two: something doesn’t work. Maybe the focus is so stiff you just always shoot things from 15 feet out. Could be the shutter fires but is like seriously slow, or doesn’t manage to close unless you take your finger off the release even when it’s on 1/50th instead of B. It might have been a whizz-bang tack sharp beauty, but these days it’s got that Lomography aesthetic in spades.

Group Three: it’s a camera shaped paperweight. Someone sold this as a décor item but you were feeling lucky. It may be haunted by the ghost of George Eastman.

A professional could put in the time with their specialist tools and rarefied skills to get any of the above restored. You, like me, do not have those tools or skills and are not willing to leave the trail of bodies in your wake that it’ll take to try and acquire them. Stripped screws, lost springs, gouged metal, and a box of “parts” is all that’s in the cards for any camera with the misfortune to become an attempted aspirational repair. Good news, we’re not doing that. We don’t need any special tools and even if we fail we’re not ending up with a pile of parts that’ll never be a camera again. So what do you need? Patience and heat.

Camera people talk about getting a camera CLA’d. Cleaned, Lubricated, and Adjusted. The important word there is lubricated. Cameras have metal moving parts. Metal on metal is pretty much always lubricated. As with mechanical watches, mechanical cameras tend to use very thin and light lubricant. Thin and light lubricant tends to get thick and tacky after fifty or more years collecting dust. So let’s open it up and spray on the contact cleaner, right? Oh goodness no, that sounds hard. Let’s watch a movie instead.

We Are Now Camera Technicians

If you have a group one camera, put on a movie, or sit down for a couple episodes of some soon-to-be-canceled Netflix series or ultra-niche podcast. Set a speed, cock the shutter and fire. Then do it again, repeatedly, for every speed, again and again until you run out of media to consume or the will to sit still. Slide the aperture ring back and forth again and again. Focus from one extreme to the other. Get a rhythm going and keep at it. Friction turns to heat that slowly but surely leads to a softening of old lubricant and often it’s enough to clean out the cobwebs so to say and you end up with a reliable camera.

If you have a group two or three camera you’ll be doing the mindless zombie cock-and-fire, twist-and-turn, television session as well. Before you give that a try though, you’ll be baking your camera. If you’re camera’s a folder, open it up. Open the film door too. Now apply heat. If you have a sunny window, push the sleepy cat aside (but apologize with some treats and a dime bag of catnip) and stick your camera in that sunbeam. Hopefully for at least an hour. If it’s overcast, if there’s a draft, or a sunny window is otherwise not an option try putting it in a pot on a radiator. Or preheat your oven at its lowest setting for a good twenty minutes, turn it off, and then pop the camera in for a half hour or more like you’re waiting for bread dough to rise. Like with the radiator though, don’t just sit it on the rack, stick it on a baking sheet or something. With the radiator you want something heavy to help diffuse the heat. In the oven it’s more about keeping it stable on a wire rack.

Remove your camera from whatever heat source you used while it’s still warm. It should be warm, not uncomfortable to hold but more than body temperature. Now go through the motions, adjust the focus and aperture, cock and fire the shutter on all the speeds. You’ll probably find things that were frozen in place before move at least a little now. If you made noticeable improvements, repeat the heating cycle and have another go. If you don’t see any change, well, that’s unfortunate. More heat is not the answer.

Violence. Violence is the answer. Gentle violence. Yes really. If the cameras a folder close it all up and give it a few hammers into your open palm. Don’t do it so hard that you’ll hurt your hand and you can be sure it won’t be so hard as to hurt the camera. Now try that stuck shutter again. If you made a little progress, try a heat cycle again. Then try working all the movements again.

There’s a limit to how much good you can do without taking things apart or spending the money on a professional. If something is genuinely mechanically busted you won’t fix it with a touch of heat, but you won’t turn a mostly working camera into a pile of unusable parts either. I can tell you though, that first time you start with a seized up shutter and come away with a working camera it’s a great feeling.

Acufine Diafine Divided Developer Lifespan

Deer Me

The internet says Diafine lasts forever. Search, it’s out there all over the place. No one talks time though. They just comment things like “It ran until I contaminated the B solution with A”, or “The volume of A got so low I just mixed up another batch”. That’s great, but I don’t want to know that. This isn’t going to be that, this is going to be dates.

My Diafine was mixed up July 2018. In the following several months I ran thirteen rolls of 120 and fifteen rolls of 135 (I know because I make hash marks on a masking-tape label on the bottle). A couple of the rolls of 135 were twenty four exposure, but the rest were all thirty six. Then, in December, some shit went down and the bottles sat on a shelf in a friends basement until, well, today. Solution A was in a white PTFE bottle and solution B was in a plastic coated amber glass bottle. That wasn’t a conscious choice beyond my wanting different bottles so I could tell them apart, and it was what I had. It also helped that solution B could go in a Brown bottle.

Just ran a roll of Arista EDU Ultra 400. Came out fine. With chemistry that was mixed up four years and nine months ago.

I can’t comment on how long it lasts in terms of rolls processed, I’m sure there are folks who have gone way over thirty rolls and I’m a roll short of that even now. I do feel it’s useful to say after almost five years, it’s still working as well as when I mixed it. Let it be said, the working shelf-life if Diafine developer is at least five years.

One tip I’d like to add though. Solution A will decrease in volume faster than solution B. This is because, in general, solution A is hitting a dry film and absorbing into the emulsion. When you pour solution A back into your stock bottle whatever absorbed into the emulsion stays behind. That can be avoided by adding a minute or two of a plain water soak at the front end of your processing. The water doesn’t noticeably affect the action of solution A and it cuts down on how much of solution A is “wasted” just wetting the emulsion.

The Best 6×6 Camera

Deer Me

Holga 120S & Welmy-Six

Nobody asked but today I’m going to tell you what the very best 6×6 camera is. To do that I’m going to bring out two cameras. One is world famous, popular, frequently stupid expensive, and is used by a great many working and fine art photographers. The other is commonly available, often a fantastic bargain, and if it’s used by anybody who is anybody—nobodies admitting it. I’m talking of course about the, did I say famous, I meant infamous Holga 120S and the Welmy-Six.

First the one you’ve heard of. The old Holga 120S is a shelter dog if ever there was one. It’s a dog, but a mutt for sure, and if you put in the time it’s a great companion. Just don’t count on waltzing into the AKC show with it unless they already know you there, and your name is a draw.

So forget the metaphor. You’re not going to break into the world of fine art with a Holga, you’re just not. You want to do that you better be some kind of salesman ’cause let me tell you now honey, it doesn’t matter how good a photographer you are. There’s more terrible shooters with big names and well known images on the wall than you’d believe. Wanna get in there too you better know a guy, have a hook, and line up a buyer before you let anyone bother to decide you’re any good or not! Hell, I’m terrible and that’s never kept me from making money at this.

Why the Holga 120S then? Three reasons (ALWAYS 3! THERE’S ONLY EVER 3) it’s light as a feather, dead simple, and nothing special. Which means you won’t think twice about shoving it in your bag or hanging it around your neck. It’s an easy camera to have with you. 33.3% of everything is being there with a camera. Want another truth? Give someone more than one shutter speed, more than one aperture, they’re gonna get some shit frames. A new photographer with a manual SLR without a TTL meter is going to have more impossible to print frames out of 12 than a new photographer with a Holga. A digital workflow can cover up a lot of sins; it’s easier to just shoot better. One aperture, one speed, if you got enough wits to be breathing on your own you’re gonna get 12 frames out of 12 on a Holga. Maybe over a few stops, maybe under, but short of shooting with filters and flash oh-fucking-well you gotta live with it and make it work in the darkroom.

Then there’s the Welmy-Six. It’s nothing special. What it is is a fully mechanical 6×6 folder with just enough features. Cold shoe? Check. Flash sync? Check. On-body shutter release? Horizontal view finder? Vertical view finder? Check check check. Alright, so the lens only opens up to three.5, the shutter only hits 200, 100, 50, 25, 10, 5, two, one & Bulb, and you gotta eyeball your focus. Who cares, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than an Olympus Chrome 6 or any of the big name 6×6 folders. I got mine from the original home of the overpriced camera, eBay, and it was still under $20 including shipping.

So why buy a Welmy if I already had a $16 Holga? Pockets. The Welmy is a folder so never mind a lens cap and a case, just close it up and it fits in a jacket pocket. Maybe don’t go pocketing it if you live in a bad neighborhood though. It’s heavy and cops will claim it looks like you’re carrying and hassle you. But anyway, yeah, it’s not folding as flat as a Kodak Autographic, but it’s giving me 12 frames of 6×6 instead of 8 frames of 6×9. Oh, and it focuses down to around a foot (the last marked distance on the lens is thee) so table top studio work is very much an option, an option the vertical viewfinder, really does make easy.

The best though? I claimed to know the best 6×6 camera.

The Welmy-Six is basically a Kodak Retina for 120 film, it has that feel. I wrote it above but I’ll do so again, it’s less expensive and easier to get a hold of than any comparable camera in that format. The Lomography crowd isn’t interested because it’s not a Holga or a Diana. The gear heads are after the “serious” brands and they’re all looking for rangefinders and SLRs anyway.

The Holga 120S (forget the other variants) is chunky but weighs nothing. Every time you wind and hit the shutter you’ll end up with something you’ll consider usable; even if the reason you do so is the lowered expectations that automatically activate when you know it was shot with a Holga. There’s so many out there that unless you’re buying new from one of those stores you’ll be able to find one for cheap.

The best then, it’s one of those two. Which, depends on where you are in your film photography journey. One of these cameras speaks with your voice.

Stereo Discomfort

Deer Me

For things of a certain age the word stereo is redundant. By this it is not meant that simply having a multi-physical-format media player is now limited to the same cohort which has a landline phone. The electronics section and the media center sub-set pages of the J.C. Penny catalog were once aspirational window shopping. Printed catalogs died along with shopping malls and window shopping. If it’s audio, chances are it’s stereophonic.

Today music is often played through headphones and automobiles. The source is a digital file, owned, or stolen, or streamed. The closest thing to a media center is a television with 5.1 Dolby surround and an automobile with an AUX cord. Music is as popular as ever it’s just not a thing to be owned any more. The average home doesn’t have a pilfered milk crate of vinyl, and the average car doesn’t have a Case-Logic binder of compact disks. Maybe there’s a list of purchases or followed artists from one digital media purveyor or another. No one’s lending out their favorite album, they’re sharing a playlist; not handing over a mixtape.

More often than ever sound is coming in through headphones. This is nice because there’s apt to be a variety of tastes on train. It’s also awful because hearing things that aren’t externally verifiable is made worse by sound that makes me feel like I’m inhabiting space. The soundstage of a pair of headphones has the power to be a terrible thing. Headphones on and sound flowing everything is coming from all over. Not reacting to things so no one can tell I think there’s something there is hard enough; I don’t want to hear the vocals coming in from the left. Hey Alexa, you sound very nice today, it doesn’t bother me one bit that you’re mono, I actually prefer it.

A lot of things have two of everything. This is both for redundancy and for location tracking. It takes two eyes to estimate a distance. It takes two ears to place the source of a sound. Having one mouth is very common, and in the beginning audio playback devices had one mouth as well. Everything spoke monaural audio from a point source. Then recordings and playback devices went stereophonic. Sound is now three dimensional. Properly mixed, stereo sound can be made to move around the listener. Tiny changes in phase, time, and balance, all can produce a dynamic soundstage, and it’s hard to ignore. In certain genres of music practically every sound is moving from one side to the other or falling down from above.

The things that do the mixing show off. This isn’t a living room, or an airplane, or an office, this is a concert hall; it’s a space you’re being forced into. No one could possibly want that. The solution is obvious, play your audio of choice through an Amazon Echo, or find something, anything, portable, that puts out mono. Thank you to the companies behind the Tanashin clone cassette mechanisms. Yes, cassettes are the simplest way to go portable with mono audio.

Digital files you “physically” own can be mixed down to mono and is probably worth the effort. If the device has a headphone jack a stereo to mono adapter can be put in-line, if you don’t mind a three inch inflexible extension at the start of the headphone cable. With a cassette tape, you just need to buy a (probably cheaper) Walkman that has a mono tape head. Cassette recorded in stereo? Put it in the IT’S OK Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player and it’s mono whether going wired or wireless! Hurry though, they made a stereo version, the IT’S OK TOO Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player, and it seems they’re just selling off the remaining stock of the beautiful mono version.

Never mind the people who say it’s crap, that no one makes a good cassette mechanism anymore. This is not about that. I’m all about popping in Peace For Animals and finally managing to read without feeling like I need to turn my head and make sure there’s nothing over there. Stereo is around you, someplace. Mono is inside you, perfect, like the light in your lungs. Listen in mono, IT’S OK!

Found Audio One

Deer Me

For as long as it’s been possible people have been keeping records. That’s what letters and journals were, what photographs were, what tapes (video or audio) were. Then we went to digital and the keeping part changed a little. Disks and CDs and CF cards kind of keep. And then the clouds pixelated and the keeping was all done by far away by businesses on media of unknown type.

I can buy a box of old photographs, or a carton of tapes of many types. I’ve never stumbled upon a crate of old MySpace servers.

The joke is the internet is forever. Deleted tweets and compromising snaps can always be found. But not the way I can find a families vacation to Tahiti recored in magnetic polarity on a thin tape in a little plastic shell. I don’t mean the digital dark age. I mean the obscurity by propriety that exists now. Unless they were kept locally and the device wasn’t reset we’ll never get to see Courtney and Thad’s spring break decades down the line.

Tahiti
Side A
Shell
Side B

Microcassette is an odd choice. As far as I know they’re always mono and are really only meant for speech. Recording a performance put on for tourists makes sense if you’re a tourist. I picture an ocean shore at night, a dance floor on the level of the spectators who may be pulled in by the performers. The scene is torchlit and the air smells of heat and salt. The casual sexism of the male voices makes the recording seem tainted somehow. The concern over cameras and batteries, tired legs, feel so normal.

The found audio made available here was transcoded from a 60 minute Olympus microcassette. Red marker labels each side with the word “Tahiti” and in pen each side is also labeled with a circled number one. Side A is also marked “Schultz” and “Blib??”. Side B is has only the still indecipherable “Blib??”