Science Fiction nostaglia - part 1

  On the first of January, 1964 Bantam paperbacks published Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye.  I was 13 going on 14 then. Sometime later, I don't know exactly, but it was certainly before 1966 I picked up a used copy of the paperback exactly as shown on the Wikipedia entry.  It's one of a few books I read in my formative years that I remember vividly.  The story was about marketing research being done by powerful AI computers.  These computers create a simulated world of people to receive product marketing messages being tested.  The extent to which marketing based on scientific (mainly psychological) research manifested itself in the 50's in the US was the subject of a book published in 1957 by Vance Packard called The Hidden Persuaders.  Galouye, like Packard got his start in the newspaper business.  I also read the Hidden Persuaders, but probably after I had read Simulacron-3.

   The extent to which this book remained in my memory was largely unknown to me until the release in 1999 of The Thirteenth Floor, a movie by Josef Rusnak produced by the Emmerichs and executive produced by Michael Ballhaus.   Ballhaus was Rainer Werner Fassbinder's cinematographer for 16 films in the 70's and in 1973 they made an adaption of Simulacron-3 for German Television called Welt Am Draht (World on a Wire).  I think this was the only science fiction that Fassbinder made. I tried for many years after I learned of the Ballhaus link between The Thirteenth Floor and Welt am Draht in 1999 to see it.  Several years ago I finally watched it from a PAL DVD on a cheap chinese DVD player that could transcode in real time to NTSC. Now, you don't have to go to such lengths as a Ballhaus supervised digital transfer is available on the Criterion Collection.  If you have Hulu+ you can even stream that version.  I intend to do that soon.

  The topic of virtual reality seems closely related to the nature of reality in the first place.  Psychological exploration of reality is a meme in science fiction and the imagery used, especially in television science fiction is fascinating.  The use of mirror's is one such technique.  Another motif is the presence in the frame of video monitor's, which can serve to show another version of reality, make references to other times and places or impute the presence of a 'watcher'.

  Fassbinder's use of mirrors and monitors is discussed by Ed Halter in World on a Wire:  The Hall of Mirrors .  My first recollection of the use a monitor in a scifi movie came from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.  I also want to mention, as Halter does that using monitor's these day's is a low budget option (not sure about the 30's) and was used quite effectively in television's Space 1999 series.

Retirement update, 1.5 years in.

I am in a good place, with Kathie, in Georgia near her extended family.  We have a fairly rich life with family, new friends and the classes we have taken with the Brenau University Learning and Leisure Institute and the trips with it's hiking club every month.

I had an amazing backlog of books to read and several tech projects before retirement but I have not found the time yet for them.  I think my book backlog is actually bigger now.

Vacations still seem like vacations and are just as infrequent as when we worked.  When I am at home, I don't feel like I am on vacation even though I am not working.

We are still trying to maintain the budget we created at retirement, it's not happened yet, but I don't feel stressed by money.  Through out the day I have occasions when I feel like I am supposed to get back to work, but then I can't figure out what that might be.  I don't follow IT technology as much as I used to and things are advancing away from me there.  I am still keeping up with digital photography, technically at least, and am trying to bring some art into my work.

I have done some PC work for my Brother-in-Law, Joe, so I still know some computer troubleshooting and repair.  I built a faster PC with a motherboard/processor swap and added a GPU to the mix.  (Yes, I do have several photo software packages that can use the GPU)  I have set up a home server and debugged it and just to prove that you can't be paranoid enough I purchased a CrashPlan family license and set that up.  I discovered the author's of CrashPlan, code42 when I worked for the Medical School.   We set up an in house system behind the firewall of the Health Systems network to offer workstation backup (PC, Mac and Linux) to our faculty and staff.  Our sysadmins liked it too and used it as a second backup for some of our Linux servers.  CrashPlan does do encryption before it sends data out so really no HIPPA worries there.

 The personal client is quite nice, it has a scheduler and the ability to do multiple backups either to any attached drive or anyone else's computer running the client via a security  token that you share, this is on top of code42's cloud servers.  For no money then, as the client is free, one could set up a peer to peer backup system.

Well, that's the summary and I am sure I neglected to talk about something much more important than backup systems, but right now, I can't think of it.

Camera nostaglia

I have just come back from a walk with our dog.  It's fairly cold and very quiet this morning and my mind starts composing commentary.  Yesterday it was about the sensory impressions during the walk and that one, like most of them, never made it out of my head.  Today, it was about my personal camera history.  Not very interesting to most.  However, it's at one end of the spectrum of being a camera geek and I don't mean that in a flattering way.  There is a current dialog among the photographic blogs that I follow which is filled with angst over camera equipment and what it means to photography.  This is really another formulation of the impact of technology on western civilization.   I have long realized that I am fascinated with technology.  It started at a fairly young age, in the final two years of grade school.  Some signal events that remain with me, some 50 years later.  Making a slide rule with log graph paper, scissors, cardboard and glue in Math class.  Making a metal detector with my genius friend in his room, he designed the circuit, I used scotch tape to secure twisted wires around  a transistor, resistors and capacitors.  It worked!

Some eight years later I purchased my first camera, a Canon Tlb and 50MM lens.  I believe I purchased it at Woodward camera in Michigan.  I am not sure why, except to say it was a technology.  My dad had always had a 35MM camera, he preferred to buy used Kodak Retina fixed lens cameras.  I never used one until much later.  I remember one of the first 'technical' age gaps.  Believing that SLR's were 'real' cameras, and those Kodak fixed lens cameras not up to date, I bought my Dad a Rolleiflex SL35M.  He tried to use it, it broke once and needed repair under warranty (these were made in Singapore and had poor quality) and he never did get the hang of match needle metering.  He went back to the Kodak's where it was all manual and one just looked at the Sun conditions and set shutter and aperture, one combination for bright Sun, another for cloudy and you winged it in-between.

I must have learned something about being too geeky, as I bought a Canonet QL17 for my future wife.  Man, I wish we still had that camera, but it got passed on to a dear friend.

I must have learned something about the downsides of the inevitable march of technology when I purchased an 'upgrade' for my trustly Tlb, a Canon AE-1.  That didn't last long, I really could not adapt to the automation.  I sold that one on and went back to the mainly manual Tlb.  That lasted until the 2nd or 3rd generation of autofocus camera's came on the scene.  By then, I had built a darkroom, with an Omega enlarger, Componon lens, trays with working plumbing and a digital light timer.  It is notable, in my mind at least, that I built the digital timer myself.  It was one of the first solid state circuits that I ever understood, a simple 555 timer and digital logic which I understood.  Analog transistors had somehow eluded me, but digital seemed perfectly clear.

Still, I was convinced that following the Ansel Adams Zone system in my darkroom, an extensive series of test exposures and development variants carefully recorded in a notebook, to calibrate my camera to zones, would make me a better photographer.  This is not so much different to this day, but magnified by the endless supply of digital source..  How many raw processors have I tried?  I am embarrassed to say.  How many test exposures have I taken?  And, this despite knowing that after all my technical hard work with the Zone system, I still did not take better photo's.  That was the lesson that I had ignored in Adam's writings, focused instead upon the mastery of technological artifacts and processes, I had missed the actual ability to 'see' a photograph before the shot!

Hey, a new post ! Camera hardware again

The weather has been gray and drizzly since the great Polar Vortex headed north of us.  In other words, not much inclination to go out and take photo's.  I am really happy with the family photo's I took over the Christmas holiday (Pre-Vortex), which you can find here:  Christmas 2013 .  Since then I have been staying indoors and scanning lot's of old family photo's ranging from the early to late twentieth century.

Just today, I read  a post over at the SoundImagePlus blog that pretty much explained the reasons why David Taylor-Hughes no longer uses his micro 4/3 gear.  My reason's for switching to the Fuji X-System are similar.  The reason I switched to micro 4/3 from my Nikon D300, which I was very happy with both operationally and image quality wise, was the weight and size.  Carrying the D300 plus lens kit around all day when on vacation was painful.   By using the photographic pixel peeping section of the internet I was able to convince myself that four-thirds and then micro four-thirds had the image quality to complete with the D300.  I was wrong about that as it turns out, but I had made the commitment and believed that sensor's would improve over time plus lens quality could be exceptional.  By the time the OM-D E-M5 was released, I had sold off the Nikon D300 and lenses and then the panasonic G1 and G3 and Olympus E-PL1 to switch to it.  It was to be the last camera I bought since I was retiring soon and would no longer have the income to afford this hardware obsessed hobby that digital cameras are.  I was pretty happy with the E-M5 results and had acquired over the years some good lenses for it, in particular, the PanaLeica 25MM F1.4 and the Olympus 9-18MM zoom.  My gamble on the constant improvement in camera + sensor coupled with the excellent lens selection seemed to pay off.  Then I had my E-M5 and it's kit zoom along with a bag and accessories stolen.  Just then the E-M1 was a near term future and I decided to wait a bit to replace the E-M5 as I had a cheap E-PM2 with the same sensor in it and still had my high quality lenses.

I then started reading about the Fuji X-System and it's high ISO abilities coupled with a superb line of (affordable) lenses.  That got me to thinking about what micro four-thirds still hadn't accomplished compared to the now ancient D300.  That was high ISO shooting.  As it turns out, I quite like taking available light photo's both for family occasions as well as travel. I am not a strobist.   Even with  F1.4 the E-M5 shot's at indoor museums and sights needed the ISO cranked up quite high.  I had learned that going much beyond ISO 800 was going to yield too much noise for my tastes.  That had led to lower shutter speeds and despite excellent image stabilization I had a lot of unusable shots.  So that got me to thinking, how much size and weight would I have to sacrifice to move on to the Fuji X-System, and would it's high ISO actually work in practice as well as it did on the Internet pixel peeping comparisons.   I did a physical comparison with the E-M5 with the PanaLeica 25MM F1.4 and the Panasonic 14MM F2.5 that I owned. For the Fuji, I used the XE-1 along with the 35MM F1.4 and 18MM F2 as these are basically equivalent (except for depth of field).

	Width	Height	Depth with Lens	Weight with Lens
E-M5 + 25mm	4.8	3.5	3.9	21.1
X-E1 + 35mm	5.1	2.9	3.5	18.9
E-M5 + 14MM	4.8	3.5	2.5	16.1
X-E1 + 18MM	5.1	2.9	2.8	16.4
E-M5 + 75-300	4.8	3.5	6.3	29.1
X-E1 + 50-230	5.1	2.9	5.9	25.5

Suprised?  So was I.  The situation at the very long end and the very wide end was still going to favor micro four thirds but in the middle where 80% of my shots are taken, well, no sacrifice at all!  Being cautious I came up with the idea of buying a Fuji X-M1 plus kit lens that I found at a great price.  It would be my high ISO camera if the image quality was good.  Not only was the image quality good, it was the equal or better to the E-M5 (at least for my uses) and the high ISO while not quite as noise free as Internet would have you believe, was very good up to ISO 3200 and 6400 in a pinch.  Then the X-E2 was released.  I pre-ordered it and proceeded to sell everything I could on e-Bay including some legacy Zeiss full frame len's that I was hoping to use on adapters eventually.  The X-E2 handling was good enough to compete with the OM-D series and I saw no point in continuing on with micro four-thirds.

Another point that David made was the micro four-thirds gear lost it's value rapidly.  That's true for the camera bodies and the kit lens, but not true for the high quality lens line up.  I lost a little money on lens sales but between micro four-thirds and Zeiss Contax I was able to buy the X-E2 and the 14MM F2.8 wide angle along with the 18MM F2  to augment the kit zoom.  I did not buy any of this new, I got them at demo and used prices, about 80% of new.

It was true that the going price for my E-PM2 and the 14MM F2.5  was so low that it was not worth the effort to put them on e-bay.  The E-PM2 and 14MM are actually pocketable, though I find myself using the Fuji's anyway.  The X-M1 is almost the same size and 2 Oz heavier than the E-PM2......and there is a nice 27MM Fuji pancake out there that is slightly larger and heavier than the 14MM F2.5 panasonic!  Now, what else can I sell on e-bay :)