My 19993 Christmas story, “Easy as Pie,” is now online as part of a podcast radio show from the crew at Starship Sofa in Scotland. And here’s the permalink for the show with my story.

The show also includes a poem by Laurel Winter, and a science rap by Peter Watts. If you’re eager to get to the “good stuff” (that is, to my story!) move the audio-player’s slider about 40% of the way to the right, which is where my story starts. It’s a kind of fairy tale, along the lines of “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” but with flying saucers.

Sarah Heacox maintains a blog called “Impossible Universe,” on the topic of how people with disabilities are portrayed in popular culture. She put up a very nice post about my novel Postsingular, relating to my autistic character Chu. I was happy to see that someone thought I’d gotten it right.

Reading up on lenses, I found that people like to talk about something called bokeh, derived from the Japanese word boke, meaning “blur,” “fuzziness,” or “dizziness,” and used in English since about the year 2000 to refer to the aesthetics of photographic blur.

The idea is that if you use a wide aperature on your lens—or an extreme telephoto setting—you get a shallow depth of field, which blurs all the objects other than the one you focus on. And, depending on the lens, the blur can have various properties.

One principle of “good bokeh” is that the little blur dots around highlights should be circular, and brighter at the center than at the edges. A cheaper lens with a harsh pentagonal aperature iris will make pentagonal bokeh dots. A lens with a less than ideal aspheric correction will make dots that are brighter around the edges (like rolled up condoms) instead of brighter at the center (like little hills). My fave photo commenter Ken Rockwell explains this very well in his page on bokeh.

A less obvious quality of good bokeh is that the flat color regions in the background will have a soothing, merged kind of blur. I’m now alert for more chances to shoot bokeh, comparing my lenses that way. The shots above are with the Canon 50 mm f1.4, by the way. The dots in the first one are nicely rounded, but maybe too elliptical, also their edges are brighter than one wants for really good bokeh, but maybe, I hope, this is just because the glass highlights themselves happen to be inherently bright edged shapes. The colors behind the thistle look pretty good, though maybe there’s a twinge of harshness here and there.

My photographer nephew Embry Rucker tells me the Canon 85 mm f1.2 L is “a freight train to Bokeh Town.”

Stay tuned for more bokeh obsession… I’m starting to see an SF story in this as well…

Seems like a wonderfully Japanese concept, no?

I’ve been thinking about the art of taking pictures of, essentially, nothing. Like the bucket I used to mop the kitchen.

The drycleaner’s window.

But if I look hard, I can find subjects anywhere. Even in the white plastic tent that my neighbor uses for an extra garage. Gnarly, dude.

Cool! This week some people have been buying some prints and notecards of my paintings at rudy.imagekind.com. Thanks, you guys!

If I started posting some of my better photos on Imagekind for printing as well, would any of you be interested? Now that I’ve got the higher-res camera, this is feasible.

Back to my current obsessions, the last couple of days, I’ve been shooting with an old Leica R lens on my Canon 5D body, and it’s too much trouble.

One problem is that the Haoda adapter ring’s Superglued-on autofocus chip only works if the lens is nearly wide open, so you have to open up to focus and then turn the aperture ring back down for the photo, unless you’re shooting wide open. On the proper camera for the Leica lens, e.g., the Leica R, then camera stops down the lens automatically when you shoot. And the same happens if you use a proper Canon lens for the Canon 5D body.

Note that the “autofocus” in any case only means that the focus light blinks; you still have to turn the lens focus ring by hand. One nice thing is that the Leica manual focus is pleasant to use, while the plastic-on-plastic manual focus ring of a Canon 50mm f1.4 lens feels rattly and wonky. But of course if you’re using the Canon lens you almost never do manual focus anyway.

My glasses are poised to make a break for it once again, see the Youtube video about this.

Is this house purple, or what?

Back to camera geeking, the real dealbreakier for using the Leica lens on the Canon 5D body is that you have use an exposure correction or the pictures are over or under exposed. You can fix this in Camera Raw or in Photoshop, but it’s tedious. And you can’t just set and forget the exposure correction, as the systematic metering error varies with the f-stop; this has to do with, I believe, the fact that the light falling onto the chip during the metering phase is coming through the “prematurely” (from the camera body’s point of view” stopped down lens.

I had this fantasy that the Leica lens would add this indefinable level of glory to my pictures, but, at least according to the fantical Ken Rockwell, modern production techniques guarantee that lens sharpness doesn’t matter. For that matter, says Rockwell, your camera doesn’t matter. It’s all about your eye and your conditioned reflexes.

I’m still comparing some shots with the two lenses to see if there’s a difference or not. But the bottom line is that if I’m missing shots due to system complexity, it’s not gonna work.

This said, it’s exciting to be trying out new methods. It wakes me up. In the great Diane Arbus catalog, Revelations, one of the authors talks about Diane periodically going through periods of dissatisfaction with her camera, getting a new system, and then feeling lost during the transition.

I’m having fun.

To make the whole thing more complex, I’m editing my images in the Adobe CS3 plug-in Camera Raw now as well, which makes it easier to fix the unreliable exposure settings. It’s like an electronic darkroom. I had a darkroom when I was a boy, I remember the smells of the chemicals. By the way, Camera Raw rocks compared to Photoshop, if you’r tweaking photos. They’re both Adobe products, but probably designed by different teams.

Here’s a kind off odd odd shot to be comparing on. I stopped down the lens so far as I wanted to try to get the lamp and the shells both in focus even though it was night.

I used Automatic image processing settings. Shot at ISO 1600, f14, 1/60 second. Do note that I had to correct the exposure settings to make the two images look of about the same brightness, and that I set the white balance to match of both to match the white of the curtain.

Canon 5D with Leica Summicron 50 mm Lens.

Canon 5D with CAnon 50 mm f1.4 lens.

I guess they don’t look especially different, keeping in mind that aauugh I took the picture on two different days when there was different crap sitting on my desk, which is why you don’t get the interesting paper reflections in the Canon lens shot.

I’d almost say the Canon looks better, so all the more reason to relax and let my dinosaur lens stay in the cupboard. Of course any comparision like this is endlessly vague and debatable, and really I’d have to shoot many more pairs, being stricter about things. The true camera geeks do this and then post RAW image files so you can twiddle the settings yourself.

What are you doing, really, when you take a photograph? Trying to create a virtual reality (here we go again) … or just trying for something that’s visuall beautiful? Capturing a moment? A composition? Documenting?

May 20, 2008. A twenty minute reading from my novel POSTSINGULAR, followed by a difficult Q&A period. This was a Google Tech Talk on the Google campus, hosted by Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

I finished my painting “Montgomery Hill” today, prints and cards available at rudy.imagekind.com. The terrified humans are oddly less real than the Saucerians from the stars. Come to think of it, the Saucerians are stars!

My friend and neighbor Gunnar showed up and watched me finish. He took a couple of pictures of me, and later we went biking.

I like painting a lot, it gets the other part of my brain working. I think of writing differently now that I paint. If something’s not right, you just paint it over and do it again.

Last night I had dinner with Oliver Harris, the Burroughs scholar. It was fun hanging out with him, a civilized, knowledgeable Englishman (although he takes exception to this description). He’s in the area to root through the Ginsberg archive at Stanford, looking at manuscripts that Bill mailed Allen.

“One final box had escaped previous scrutiny. As the Scholar slid it out from under the lowest of steel shelves, he noticed that it had been sitting in a viscid pool of clear fluid. A ripple passed across the congelation and a small tentacle formed. Moving with savage speed, the tendril wrapped around the Scholar’s ankle, dragging him closer to the Last Box. Slowly the folded-over cardboard edges unfolded to reveal—” Maybe a giant eye. Or the Muse…

He’s organizing a conference in Paris next summer in honor of the 50th anniversery of the publication of Naked Lunch by the Olympia Press…I’ll post more info when it’s available.

When I got home, oh joy, my Haoda adapter ring was here, meaning that I can now attach my old green 50 mm Summicron Leica R lens to my new digital Canon—at the cost of difficult focusing and slightly flaky exposure metering—so I stayed up late tinkering and reading camera geek posts on the web.