I'm Not a Spy

I had a dream last night in which I was asking a French railway ticket agent for a round-trip ticket to — where? unclear, though somewhere in France — but that I didn’t know the date of my return. I was asking this in French, which was apparently good enough for the guy to look at me, hard, then sit back and smile. Disconcerted, I assured him that I wasn’t a spy.

This dream is interesting to me because I haven’t been reading, watching, or speaking French at all, though not for want of trying. Taking advantage of VPN, I’m watching the Tour de France either in Spanish or German because the French coverage has changed and in order to watch it in French — which would be my strong preference — I’d have to disable the ad blocker on my browser, which I’m not willing to do. There are also the women’s Euros, which again, I’m watching either in German or Spanish. (I’d watch next Friday’s match in Italian only Italy are playing Spain and, well, I’m rooting for Spain as always.)

The anachronisms in my dream aside — that you’d buy a ticket from a PERSON, that the walls surrounding this person would be dingy cream and the office cluttered with filing cabinets and loose papers, and obviously that a spy might also be a person instead of AI — I think this dream means a) I need to pay more attention to my French, b) I ought to be joining the Resistance. Not a coincidence that the ICE tracker is now the most popular app in the US…

Palettes For Photography

My main point-and-shoot camera these days is a Sony ZV-1, which I’ve had since 2021. It is compact, easy to carry about, has a wonderful sharp and fast lens, but I have not been happy with the jpegs I’ve gotten out of the camera. Recently I used it to take a reference photo of a tree I had been sketching, but was quite dismayed that the skies in the photograph had turned cyan, even though the camera was on standard settings. I usually shoot jpeg plus raw, wanting to keep a raw file around in case I need its latitude for additional processing. Looking at the raw file, it was clear what happened in the jpeg in the camera: the image was not overexposed, but the blues were clipping when the sensor data were transformed into the jpeg. This got me to start researching ways to get better jpegs out of Sony cameras.

All of which lead me down the rabbithole of Sony film simulations. It turns out there’s a deeply-buried feature in the Sony interface called “picture profiles”. As designed by Sony, these are set up mainly to help videographers film in consistent low contrast for subsequent color grading in production. But they provide a quite powerful way to change the look of stills or video imagery. A photographer and cinematographer named Veres Deni Alex figured out that picture profiles provide a route to introduce film simulations into Sony cameras. Film simulations are a well-appreciated feature of Fujifilm digital cameras — the company drawing upon their long experience with analog film — but Sony cameras don’t have anything comparable. Alex put in the trial-and-error work to adjust the 25 or so parameters in a picture profile so as to get it to render like a particular film stock. Over the past several years he has built up a library of about 85 different film simulation profiles. I was intrigued and bought a copy of his recipe book.

The above straight-out-of-camera photo of a dog sculpture downtown in Davis on G Street is an example of the output of one of these profiles. The name of the profile is Classic Chrome, and Alex based it on the Fujifilm simulation of the same name. Fujifilm in turn designed their simulation to allude to documentary-style photos printed in magazines often shot with Kodachrome or Ektachrome. After one outing with it, I like the profile a good bit, and it seems well-suited for urban landscapes.

I would use a different profile if I were going on a photo walk through the local arboretum. I’d first look for one that is good at rendering greens and responds well to bright flower colors. (I’m not sure which one yet — I have lots of experimentation ahead of me). Essentially, loading profiles into one’s camera and working this way is akin to choosing a palette in plein air painting. The question to ask while setting out is what is the mood, sense of light, and story one is trying to capture in the photo outing? The choice of the photographic palette will vary accordingly.

It also seems important that this workflow emphasizes getting the look of the photo right in camera, rather than much later in post-processing. This again resembles sketching or painting in the field — the immediacy of the moment lets one emphasize the elements of light and form that are important in the scene. Otherwise one risks forgetting in the studio what the photo was about.

Cats and High Places

We have two gray cats that were littermates but that have very different personalities. Esmerelda, pictured here, aka Esme aka Missy Cow-Cow, has a favorite perch on this cherry rocking chair, from which she likes to leap with some commotion onto the book press and bookcase in the background. She also likes to take a running leap up a stepped series of drawers and onto the top of a different bookcase (where we keep fiction and board games).

Winston prefers, at least for now, the high bookcase in Numenius’ office, which he sprawls himself over the top of, white paws every which way.

Artificial Intelligence and Language Learning Part Two

Pica a few days ago mentioned how she just took a German class on the theme of artificial intelligence. This seems to be a common theme nowadays among language learning groups, since the topic came up in my Spanish conversation group on Friday. It ended up being something of a debate about whether AI is a good tool in language learning. I am in the middle on this one. AI is very useful in providing translations on the fly: my favorite translation service is the one provided by Kagi, and I also like having a browser plugin that allows you to click on a word in a text and get a translation of it, such as TransOver for Chrome-based browsers (I use Vivaldi). I have never tried using a chatbot for foreign language chatting practice, and tend not to think it would work well. One person in our conversation group didn’t like using a foreign language chatbot because they didn’t seem to take the initiative in conversations. Another person in the group said that since the whole point of learning another language is to connect with others, it’s not very rewarding to be talking to a chatbot. There are other AI tools that seem useful for language students. Text-to-speech generators may be able to help with pronunciation of blocks of text. The Kagi translation tool I mentioned above has a proofreading feature which might help with correcting writing errors. As always with AI, one has to be careful since these are never perfect.

Tour de Fleece (and Football) begins

As Numenius mentioned yesterday, the Tour de France began today. Living in California makes for early mornings if you want to catch the entire race live, and I was about an hour late today, but I saw most of the action in windswept (but mercifully dry) Normandy.

I decided to do the Tour de Fleece again this year, a group challenge where you set your own goals but the idea is to spin yarn every day the riders are racing, take rest days when they do. I’m also watching the women’s Euros, so in total today I’ve spun for just under seven hours. This is not sustainable and I took a nap after England’s defeat to France.

My goal in the Tour de Fleece this year is to spin enough wool for a fine 3-ply for lacy socks. I have about 4 oz white blue-faced Leicester combed top and 4 oz chocolate brown Corriedale roving. This is not a massive amount in terms of weight for an event like this but when you’re spinning super fine it goes a long way. No guarantee I’ll finish, but I’m working on it!

Criterium On The Fourth Of July

July is generally the peak sports-watching month in our household: in international football, there is usually either the Euros or the World Cup taking place (in 2025 it is the Women’s Euros), and July is the month for the Tour de France. But there is also a bike race in our town held on the Fourth of July: the Davis Criterium. The riders in this photo are rounding a corner just four blocks from our house.

The Hated Red Pen, Revisited

I’ve been thinking about the pen that I hate and I decided to give it another try. I’ve been watching some of Marc Kompanayets’ videos about pen and ink drawing and thought I’d try with this pen, which has a slightly flexible nib. (Marc is a fanatic about super-flexible nibs, which allow for maximum line variability.)

Hatching, and especially crosshatching, is a skill that takes some time to master. I’d love to be really good at it. Marc’s 10 Essential Cross-hatching Techniques is excellent but he’s particularly adamant about keeping the gauge consistent. You can vary the line length, direction, line strength, and even whether if curved or straight, but if the width between the lines is inconsistent, the effect quickly gets messy. The idea is not to draw attention to the hatching unless this is your goal. His prime example of a brilliant hatcher (in pen and etching) is Rembrandt.

The pen is still fighting me a bit but I’m sure it’s much better for sketching/drawing than writing for me, so I’m going to persevere.

Below is a Rembrandt self-portrait. It’s messy, it’s all over the place, and it’s brilliant. If I could only ever be an eighth as good as this, I’d be so happy.

Uncommon Landscapes

On my twice-daily walks I always carry a small camera in case I spot something worth photographing. But my walks don’t vary much, and lately I feel like I’ve run out of photographic subjects. Or have I?

Not long ago I watched a You Tube video about the photography of Stephen Shore. The video was by an artist named Tatiana Hopper who produces interesting content about the history of photography and filmmaking. It was good to be reminded about the work of Stephen Shore. He was one of the participants in the influential New Topographics exhibition in 1975 which presented photographs of ordinary human-dominated landscapes across the United States, with subjects like industrial parks, gas stations, and housing developments. Shore was the only participant who photographed in color, and he is one of the pioneers of artistic color photography. The photo of his at right was taken in 1974, and was published in his major photo book from 1982, Uncommon Places. It is quite typical of his work: a muted color palette, a strong formal composition, with a sense of detachment from the landscape.

I am clearly quite attracted to this aesthetic, and wonder if it provides a template for photographing the ordinary landscape of this college town. But does an artistic movement from the 1970s still have relevance in 2025, in an age when hundreds of billions of photos have been posted to Instagram? Interestingly enough, between 2014 and 2024 Stephen Shore posted every day on Instagram before deciding after 10 years it was time to move on from the practice. As a general principle, Stephen Shore’s Instagram Photos Are Better Than Yours. There is something about spending decades arranging photos on the ground glass viewfinder of an 8” × 10” view camera that inexorably leads to a heightened sense of composition. Photography is very much a matter of looking closely.

Artificial Intelligence

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been learning German for the past three years, initially through Duolingo and more recently through Lingoda. I’ve taken 46 classes — 46 hours of instruction in group sizes of five students or fewer (and, mostly the average class size has been three). The classes are divided up into the categories of Communication, Reading, Grammar, and Speaking. The level of instruction has been high and I’m glad to say I was today awarded a certificate: I’ve progressed through the beginner level of B2. This means I’m technically now an intermediate intermediate.

This morning’s class was talking about AI, which in German is Kunstliche Intelligenz (or KI). I’m normally the oldest student in the class which I don’t mind, especially since it allows my inner curmudgeon out to howl. I’ve been avoiding taking this particular lesson for weeks because I hate what AI is doing to people’s minds, to the planet, to the political economy, and to political life in general. There were two other students today, both in their early thirties (I’d guess). They use Chat GPT every single day both in their work and in their daily lives. There’s no point in fighting this, is there.

Daily Sketch - Nightshade

This is a pen and wash sketch of some sort of shrubby nightshade that is growing on the north side of our backyard.