Letter 124 - Paint what you DON'T see

LAST MINUTE ADDITION! - I was about to hit publish when I saw Jefferson Graham’s latest post on iPhones, photography and pricey photo gear from Leica. The main thrust of his excellent post being the capabilities of Leica’s $$ photo app. And what absolutely forced me to poke around with it was the inclusion of “here’s the original” and “here’s Leica’s app treatment” pics. Because, faced with a “here’s what the automatic app does for you” I’m usually compelled to ask myself “Can’t I just do that myself without the app?”

So - before getting into what was going to be my sole Letter content, let’s see what a hooman can do. And just so you know where to go for the entire post and to subscribe to Jeff’s substack - it’s right here.

The two pics I futzed with are these - a floral pic for which the Leica app did a portrait mode and a shop pic for which the Leica app applied what it calls a “brass” filter:

And next up, a side by side of the Leica (on the left) and the Satz (on the right) manipulation. Leica’s using their proprietary software and mine using a lasso and Gaussian filter for the flowers and a color balance and curves for the Graeter’s shop brass effect:

TA DA! I’ll point out that the unfurled blossom above the main blossom is more blurred in my quick and dirty pic than in the Leicas’s. Could I have remedied that with an additional minute of manipudoodling? Sure. And could I have more precisely matched the Leica’s color balance for the Graeter’s shot? Again, sure. But for both cases I didn’t really care because that wasn’t the point. The POINT was just that, as they say in one of those old Saturday morning cartoons - “The Power is in YOUR hands!”

It’s not really that difficult to pound the pixels around if you get yourself familiar with how color and light works and acquire some sort of pixel manipulation software. Adobe Photoshop ($$$) being the big dog on a computer, Procreate ($) being the main monster on an iPad and a whole bunch of others for between zero and a bunch of dollars in between.

Just like it’s easy to do it yourself in the kitchen and not let yourself be in awe of those white jacketed chefs in the kitchen, so too is it easy, and fun!, to take the pixel playing into your own hands.

And now, back to the start of the original Letter. Which rather coincidentally ALSO looks at imagery (among other things):

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So THAT’S why! You know how “they” say that Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime, right? (Note: This is about as true and accurate as Georgie Washington saying “I cannot tell a lie; I cut down that cherry tree” or him having wooden teeth. Or the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock or them wearing belt buckles on their black hats. Or Cleopatra dying from a snake bite on the ass. Asp me how I know.)

HOWEVER he didn’t sell many. And you know what? I can tell you why! During last week’s visit to Eataly in Boston (an Italian market that’s both expansive AND expensive) I noticed an advert for a Van Gogh exhibit and it showed some of the work you can see there.

So - here’s my question. Can you imagine ANY mother commissioning a portrait of her kid and upon being shown THIS:

saying “Sure, I’ll pay for that”. Because I’m here to tell you that I sure can’t and I’ve got a great imagination. Sorry but no matter how ugly that baby really was, I’m sure he looked like a Hollywood A-lister in comparison to that painting.

Note, because this is the added value you get with my Letters, I’ve included the added bonus of a guy holding up his wife’s arm to combat her serious case of “phone liftage syndrome”. Let that be a warning to you - limit your phone holding to an hour at a time lest your arms fall victim to this scourge as well.

Moving on from stuffing your face at Eataly and back to my favorite hunting grounds of language, there’s a phrase long used in car reviews that tells you what it feels like to shift a “good” manual transmission. A phrase that has continually caught my eye whenever I came across it in print. And apparently it caught the eye of this writer as well:

Automotive journalists long ago exhausted the list of Porsche similes (and exactly how many have handled an actual gun to make the ‘rifle-bolt gearchange’ comparison?) but from the linearity of steering to modulation of brakes, from the control of the body to the tuning of the throttle, it’s all absolutely spot on.

Yup, that’s the comparison phrase. “The shifts slot into gear like a rifle-bolt”. And although it used to be that most every male (at least) knew what that meant, that ‘used to be’ refers to the WW1 era and earlier. One in which this was the weapon awarded to every man in uniform:

A rifle bolt is a terribly simple mechanism. The handle with the knob is what you grasp and you can rotate it in and out of the page (rotating about the long axis of the rifle) and move it forward and back. Basically you pull it back so a cartridge can be loaded, move it forward so the cartridge is in the firing chamber, and then rotate to lock it down. And finally pull the trigger for making the boom.

You can see how it might resemble a shifter’s action since shifters also move up and down and rotate side to side. However, so do the joystick controllers on a drone rig and they certainly don’t resemble a rifle bolt’s action in the slightest.

And as one who has manipulated a rifle bolt AND has shifted a sufficiently racy Porsche transmission, I can concur that there can be points of similarity. A bit of mechanical resistance and a firm push forward needed to make it all work.

However, that’s me. Since those olden days of yore (and mine as well), the number of bolt action rifles in common usage has taken a big nosedive. Certainly you won’t find any in the military anymore. They just lurk around for specialized use cases: