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.

I’ve been writing some short stories, recently. The last two have to do with the Steinhardt-Turok Cyclic Universe model that I’ve been blogging about lately.

I wrote a 1,000 word short-short “Message Found in a Gravity Wave” which I sold to Nature Physics, it hinges on the idea that the Big Splat comes tomorrow, and a guy wants to preserve a token of himself by leaving a message in the form of a gravity wave—the kicker is that he creates the gravity wave by writing his missive (which is the text of the story) in a somewhat surprising form. I figure he lives in Skylight, Kentucky on a former horse farm that’s now a chicken farm — right down the road from where I grew up.

And I’m working on a (slightly) more serious story with Bruce Sterling, still underway, working title “Colliding Branes,” which is also about events during a near future end time that results when the brane collision happens very much sooner than expected.

I’m thinking of yet another take on the Cyclic Universe, although this time I’ll stay well away from the Big Splat aspect, as I don’t want to use the same thing a third time.

An angle I haven’t touched yet is that our space might have infinitely many planets right now. I want a story that somehow assuages my frustration over our seeming inability ever to see the infinitely many other planets that are right there right now. The problem is that we had this space-filling Big Flash 14 billion years ago, and we can’t “see” through that. Also everything was wiped out by the flash.

But what if there are somehow surviving signals from the more distant zones, signals from previous cycles. SF element: the signals come through the subdimensions.

I see the working title as “To See Infinity.”

I think about a Golden Age story, James Blish’s “Beep” of 1954, (later expanded into The Quincunx of Time, 1973) in which the spaceships have some kind of faster-than-light radio (called a Dirac transmitter), and messages end with this annoying beep, and they’ve found a way to edit out the beep most of the time. But then some guy fools around with the beep and realizes its a compressed version of all the messages from all future times, the scientific justification being that, in special relativity, faster-than-light messaging is logically equivalent to sending messages backwards in time. [Gregory Benford mentions the story in his article “Time and Timescape” in Science Fiction Studies #60, see abstract.]

In “To See Infinity” maybe the characters are messing with subaether radio. And the compressed message could be incoming radio telemetry from the previous cycle of the universe, call it cycle minus one, and these signals come from a spherical shell of space with inner radius one trillion light years and outer radius of a two trillion light years. And there’s a subtler overtone type beep from the two to three shell of cycle minus two, and yet another still more rarefied signal for the three to four shell of cycle minus three, ad infinitum. (Actually the shells are in some sense bigger than a trillion miles thick, now, due to the stretching of space, but they were that thick when the messages got into the subaether.)

How to narrate it? I was watching the Amadeus movie last night, and thinking what a brilliant device it is to have Mozart’s rival Salieri narrate his life. So we have this somewhat ordinary guy (who we relate to) telling us about the genius. And we don’t know enough about music to appreciate why Mozart is so great, but Salieri explains it to us, not as if he’s explaining, but as if he’s drooling over the upstarts work. By the same token, people cant appreciate math, but if we had a narrator talking about a young upstart, he could in passing give us a flavor of the upstart’s math.

Math? Well, maybe its a futuristic combination of math and music. And I’m supposing that the upstart is in some way tuning in on the messages to do his work. And maybe the big reveal is that he’s using infinity.

I have a personal fondness for the Amadeus movie as when I went to a Flatland Centennial conference on the fourth dimension at Brown University in 1981, I met Tom Banchoff and Kee Dewdney there, two other great 4D experts. I was in my old wild-man conference mode, ecstatic, gabbing, partying with Kee. Another attendee remarked to me——“Did you see Amadeus? The Mozart character reminds me of you.”

So the Salieri-type narrator could be this somewhat plodding guy describing the disappearance of a wilder, younger Mozart-type guy. And the narrator is disturbed, as he blames himself (not without some justification) for the young genius’s death.

The emanations from the higher cycles might be perceived with your subtle body. Perhaps generation to generation, each old brane migrates to a higher brane.

By the way, at first I wanted to use the title, “The Starry Crow,” for my story, as the other day I was looking at a crow, admiring how black and unreflective he is, and it struck me that it would be cool if the black was full of stars. But now I’m thinking, Arthur Clarke kind of used up the conceit, “it’s full of stars,” but maybe I could use it anyway. I really like crows.

I was going to start work on the story this week, but now my Tor editor, Dave Hartwell, has come back with some suggestions on my Hylozoic novel manuscript, so I probably should start working on those. Also I’m still working on my Montgomery Hill painting.

This is an early stage, it’ll look better tomorrow…