Amtrak and bikes

It’s been a rough patch for those of us who travel by bike and Amtrak. Fatalities, injuries, and a lot of questions. Chief in my mind among them is: why?

The crash in Philadelphia was a monstrous tragedy. Leaving the cause of the accident aside, whether it was operator error or equipment or what, the technology is available to prevent it from happening. Positive Train Control was invented to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. Of course, it isn’t active yet because the budget isn’t there. And immediately after the accident, Amtrak’s budget was slashed. Because the best way to solve a problem caused by not having enough money is to give it less money. At least that’s the thinking on Capitol Hill.

Conservatives hate Amtrak. It’s always lumped in with the National Endowment for the Arts and PBS as things that should be cut. The combined budgets of these three agencies accounts for 0.03% of total government spending, and yet these are the ones the conservatives always want to cut first. It’s hard to not frame this as some kind of extension of a class war, taking things away just to make the have not’s lives a little more difficult.

Amtrak’s annual budget was cut to 1.1 billion dollars, give or take. Which sounds like a lot of money until you put it in perspective. That’s about half what the Department of Defense spends in a day. More is needed. Most of the rolling stock on the long distance trains out west dates from the last time there was money in the 1970s. The locomotives are newer, dating from the 1990s. There’s not going to be much expansion anytime soon, since there’s just not enough equipment to do it. Ridership is higher than it’s ever been, and trains routinely sell out. It could break even or might even turn a profit if it had money to expand.

Riding a bike gets short shrift as well. Denver has all of a mile or so of protected bike lane. There’s a three-foot law requiring drivers give a cyclist 3 feet when passing, but I’ve never seen it enforced. When I tried to report a driver for violating it, there was no interest on the part of the police in doing anything about it. Even when someone on a bike gets hurt, the driver just gets a slap on the wrist. A triathlete in Boulder wound up going through the window of a car that pulled in front of her and stopped while she was going down grade at speed, and even though the driver had a history of reckless driving, he was only fined. The triathlete will carry the scars of that accident on her face for the rest of her life and was lucky to survive. Her life is radically changed, but that was just worthy of a fine.

I guess the message is clear. If you ride a bike or take a train, you don’t count for much. It’s enough to make me want to do these things more, not just because I enjoy them, but to continue to be a thorn in the side of the powerful.

Amtrak and bikes

The Katadyn Hiker

You can skimp on any number of things. Cheap rain gear in the summertime is survivable. An inexpensive pack is probably just going to be less comfortable, heavier, and not last as long. But I don’t like skimping on water. So I bought a new Katadyn Hiker filter.

When I was young and camping in the 80s, Katadyn was the gold standard of water filtration systems. They were too expensive for a teenager in the south, so I wound up just using iodine tablets and hating how the water tasted.

When I got older, I had camping partners who did not like filtration systems. Not due to the weight, they just liked camping high and in the winter. Water filters will freeze overnight in the cold and are unusable as a result. They preferred solutions that were basically diluted bleach. You can put it in water to introduce chlorine and kill the bugs in there just like a municipal water system. Of course, you get floaties: little bits of leaves and whatnot in your water. I decided I didn’t like this either, and bought a Katadyn.

You need to filter water before you drink it, even high mountain streams. The two bugs to watch out for here are Giardia and Cryptosporidium. Getting water contaminated by these leads to nothing good. Katadyn filters them out.

This is one of Katadyn’s Backcountry series, the Hiker filter. It’s for use by up to two people, and filters pretty fast. A liter of water can be done in around a minute, and can purify up to 200 gallons of water before needing a filter change. It’s also light, at 11 ounces. It comes with all the needed tubing and adapters in a nice bag that’s easy to chuck in to a backpack or pannier. It’s simple to operate, and dependable.

Some people who bicycle tour do not carry water filtration. They argue you can find water almost anywhere on the road or on trails, so they’re not needed. If you’re doing a back country trail on a mountain bike like the Divide, then you do need something to filter, but not always on other tours. I’ve picked up the western habit of keeping water in mind, though. It’s farther apart here and not as dependable. Campgrounds in California this year may not have water available because of the drought, and the ability to filter what you can find is going to be more important.

Dehydration flat-out sucks. Carrying a Katadyn is insurance against having to deal with it. For most tours, a Hiker should suffice. If you’re touring in South America or Africa you could upgrade to the Endurance series, something like the Katadyn Pocket or the Combi. It takes months to navigate those places, so they need the capacity. Our tour this year is short, so I’ll just chuck the Katadyn Hiker in a pannier and enjoy the peace of mind having it brings.

The Katadyn Hiker

Looking forward to what's left behind

Old University of Colorado hospital, slated for demolition.

I haven’t been out among the places left behind in a while.

Stephanie has been marathon training for a race next week. We’ve both been trying to get bike rides in, and not doing as well as we should. Work has been the curse of the drinking class, as always. But I miss the places that were too hard to keep, and have been left behind.

Abandoned a short while, now expensive apartments.

The odd thing is, with the rapid gentrification of Denver, the abandoned isn’t something I have to go far and look for anymore. It’s in my neighborhood. But with the way new buildings are going up, you have to look fast. Things change rapidly. I’ve only been here a short while, and it’s already a different city than the one I moved in to.

I miss those places people have left, though. I should get out and find more of them this summer.

After the bike tour, I’m wanting to go get some shots. Big negatives, medium format at least, large format as often as I can. There’s a lot of this state and the west in general I have not seen yet.

The group Steph and I went to shoot the airplane graveyard with is toying with a zine. I suggested it, as I really want to do a zine, but I don’t think I can carry one on my own. I think having a group gives it a better result. So maybe we’ll see about some of those abandoned places that I love so much. Cover some of the change that is rampant. Small towns that are emptying out with their populations moving on are leading to more forgotten places under the big sky to explore in the future.

Soon enough I’ll be lugging gear to the 4Runner and sending it bouncing down trails. I want to spend more time in the back of the Runner, staring at a big sky before we go to sleep somewhere in the woods so we can get up early and shoot a ghost town or mine in the perfect light of dawn. I’m looking forward to falling asleep to the sound of rain on the roof of the Toyota and waking up to coffee made on a camp stove. Getting up and clambering around a place that smells of pines and decay of buildings and maybe the touch of sweetness of the ash of long gone coal fires.

There’s a great deal to be captured in the next few months. Having to wait out the rain has made me antsy, pouring over maps and websites to find new things and places to fall in love with. I’m looking forward to it all.

Looking forward to what's left behind

Further adventures of the Polaroid 95A, The Massive Misfit

When last we left the Polaroid Model 95A, the Massive Misfit, I was contemplating converting it to a new film format. There were a number of options I had found on the internet. People had used Legos to convert them to shoot 6×12 medium format. The most popular conversion for the roll film Polaroids was to use the Fuji peel-apart film. Those didn’t appeal, so I kept searching.

Some conversions to 4×5 had been done to other roll film Polaroids, and I thought about them. The idea appealed to me. The end result could be a light weight walk about field camera. It could be what the Wanderlust might be if it ever actually gets built and shipped. The idea was appealing.

One guy had basically used a wooden picture frame to fashion his own back. The other was a 3D printing approach. I tried the 3D print option.

The concept was created by Marco Lucifora in Italy. He had converted a few cameras using his design, but there wasn’t a lot of information on how well these were received. I rolled the dice and purchased the design files and hardware to see for myself. Marco has since stopped selling anything related to this project.

I ended up using Shapeways to print the back. It was convenient. I want to go ahead and join a hacker space here in Denver and learn in more detail, but my schedule has been crammed full and I haven’t been able to yet.

When I got the piece, it looked pretty good. It didn’t quite fit on the hinged end, but I created a work around. As soon as I had roughed it together, I went ahead and loaded a holder with a couple of shots and tried it out.

This camera has a couple strikes against it already. People widely hold the lens doesn’t cover a 4×5 well enough. At 130mm, it’s definitely a little small. It seems to do well enough, however. This cameras lens has a bit of fungus, but I’d cleaned that out will some Hydrogen Peroxide. The new back, however, is not what it needs to be.

The film holder mount, which I suspect leads to light leaks.

The focal plane is a little off, and what sharpness the old lens had is lost. I can fix that by recalibrating the infinity stop using wax paper to check the focus and moving it on the focus scale. But the big problem is the way the holder is mounted. It uses screws and clear plastic and flat pieces of metal and a number of odd decisions. It also leaks light, badly. I suppose the light could be leaking from somewhere else, but the mount is the first culprit to eliminate. I’ll see what I can do with some gaffer tape next go around. Ultimately, I want to redesign the mount.

This negative was dropped and scratched, but it still serves as proof of function

Which is the good thing about the 3D approach. I have a license to modify and remake this part as I wish. I have all the original files, and so I will. It will involve figuring out the software, but I’ve handled worse. This Misfit will come back to life yet!

Further adventures of the Polaroid 95A, The Massive Misfit

More is less

Less is more. More is less.

I’ve finding that shooting more is less of what I want, and shooting less gives me more of what I want.

I’m using SLRs less. I realize ease of use is a relative thing, but I seem to find a lot of them too easy to use. It’s easier to just snap off a throwaway shot with them. I still prefer to use them in situations that require speed, but aside from that, I find myself hardly using them at all anymore.

More often than not, I’m using rangefinders. I’ve heard it argued that you can use a rangefinder as fast as you can use anything else, but I don’t find that true. I could resort to zone focus or pre-focusing and stopping down for maximum depth of field, but that’s not guaranteed to give me the result I want. So I take more time, setting up shots deliberately, and slowly. It’s taking me much longer to move through rolls of film, these days.

If rangefinders are slow, medium format is snail-like with a waist level viewfinder. And it’s even more deliberate in framing a shot as a result.

And if medium format is snail-like, large format is glacial. I’ve hardly gotten though half a box of 4×5 in the last month. I’m still learning about movements, and I haven’t even thought about trying to figure out bellows and exposure compensation.

So the volume of work is down, with the number of frames I produce as low as it has been. But I’m finding less is more.

While I’m taking less frames, I’m loving the results more.

I’ve never been a spray and pray kind of guy, even when I had the misfortune to shoot sports. I surely don’t produce as many images as a digital photographer. I am finding that I just don’t put the camera to my eye as much these days. Not out of dissatisfaction with that I shoot, but more about how I think about how and what I shoot.

Frequently, I find myself asking, “does this image need to be shot” when I start to take it. A lot of the time, I’ll answer myself with a no, and lower the camera. I’ll take fewer shots, but I like the ones I take more. Some of them, I even love. They’re still rare, but they seem to occur more often.

I want to have more of those frames in my future. Shooting less is more. The way to get more is to shoot less. A bit of a paradox, but one that seems to work.

More is less

Negative Space

Negative space in a photograph serves to draw interest to the subject. I’m beginning to think that negative space on my misfit shelf is drawing attention to what I need, and what I really don’t need.

I’ve been ridding myself of cameras lately, creating negative space. I had looked at some of them and couldn’t remember the last time I’d picked them up and used them. I’d looked at others and remembered I didn’t like using them, for some reason or another. Sometimes ergonomics played a part, but mostly it was because I did not like the results I got from them. I even found a couple of lenses I hadn’t used in so long I’d forgotten I owned them.

This is the down side of G.A.S. It will promise you many things when it hits you. The thrill of the hunt. The joy of winning an Ebay auction. The promise of something new in your photography. So you buy, and then the down side sets in. The thrill passes, and you’re left with a camera you really don’t care for, and it becomes another dust catcher. So you let it sit on the shelf, and eventually, the cycle begins again.

There are some folks who collect. I am not one of them. I acknowledge cameras can be works of art, and examples of good science made real, but to me, they’re mostly tools. A tool is to be used, and kept in good repair. If it isn’t used, it’s not living up to its purpose, and it’s time to give it the chance to do so.

But the one thing that collectors do right is to look at every purchase with an eye towards curation. The closest I’ve come to this has been deciding what systems I wanted to use: Nikon F mount, M42, M39, P6, and so on. That got me to get rid of some random things a while back. But now, future purchases are going to be guided by what I need to fill in specific needs.

So no, negative space isn’t going to stop my G.A.S. It is going to channel it in to reasonable directions and away from the “oh, shiny!” type of purchases I have been guilty of in the past. While those have occasionally been fruitful, finding something unexpected, the vast majority of them have been a waste of time, space, and money.

Just as negative space in an image brings out the subject, it’s going to draw me towards what I really want, and need, to have, and in a productive direction.

Negative Space

Doing it the hard way

I was walking around shooting a camera I’m trying to modify, and finding the shortcomings in my work this past week. When I stopped to answer questions about it, the person asking was a bit astounded. “You only get one shot?” .

“Well, two. It’s a 4×5. Each film holder has two shots.”

After I said that he held up his digital p&s and went on about how many it held. Which missed the point entirely.

I’ll admit, I do a lot of things the hard way. It’s been years since I flew. I take the train when I can. I bicycle. I walk. I spend time doing things in a way that seems to most people to be the hard way. But it’s not to me.

I enjoy the process of things. I guess most people don’t.

When you’re on a train, you get to see parts of the country and meet people you wouldn’t otherwise. You eat well, and have wine while the countryside rolls past and it’s an enjoyable experience.

On a bike, you learn the contours of a place and experience it intimately. Cresting a hill under the power of your own legs is satisfying in the way that pushing harder on an accelerator doesn’t give you. Seeing a place solely from an interstate doesn’t give you a feeling of it, doesn’t allow you to meet anyone who lives there. You almost always see people at their best when you travel on a bike, they’re curious about what you’re doing and generous with their time and help.

I walk to and from work, the store and home, and the vast majority of my errands. I nod hello to people who do the same thing on most mornings. I can just nip in and get a breakfast burrito on the way if I want it, or more coffee, without the hassle of having to park. I know the people who I buy from and they call me by name and remember what I like in my orders. Personal service is more enjoyable than the alternatives.

When I shoot a film camera I enjoy every part of it. From selecting the film stock to composing and taking the shot. I enjoy mixing the chemicals and developing, listening to the comforting sound of water and never failing to be surprised and satisfied when a negative comes out. Printing is the best part of it, mixing science with craft, literally shaping light with your hands.

I always feel that people who live life other wise, hurrying around using the easy way are missing out on so much. I guess I prize experiences rather than craving checking things off of lists. The hard way is usually far better and satisfying for me. Which doesn’t make it the hard way, it makes it the way worth doing.

I just smiled at the guy with the p&s digital camera. We were standing right next to each other, having very different experiences, and living in different worlds.

Doing it the hard way