14 July 25
Weekend Tree Sketching - Palm
This sketch is from yesterday’s outing to Central Park in Davis. I took my Schmincke pan set of watercolors and appreciated having the cobalt blue handy.
13 July 25
Coil Spinning
I attended a beta coilspinning class yesterday at Meridian Jacobs, a sheep farm a few miles away where I’m a farm club member. Rachel, our teacher, had prepared a massive quantity of fiber and inserts for us to choose from.
I had found a kaleidoscope viewer in the bottom of a bin when I was searching for a rarely-used flyer for my Lendrum spinning wheel. My favorite place to spin is in the second fastest gear of my fastest flyer, not the slow loop-a-doop of the so-called plying flyer, but this latter has a large orifice and is excellent for art yarn, which we were attempting yesterday. This kaleidoscope allows you to look at colors and see what might work well together and in what proportion without having to commit to anything beforehand, which was especially helpful since we had such a wealth of materials to choose from.
I ended up making a batt to match the royal blue singles I’d spun on a spindle to demonstrate at the Sheepmowers event on campus last month. I threw in some complementary coral colored wool and some analogous green. Coilspinning means wrapping fiber around a central yarn (thin mohair, in this case) by means of controlling the entry angles and literally winding the fiber around until the core is covered.
I’d done this before so I took it a step further and pushed the wrapped fiber into little beehives which then get fixed in place by the tighter coils that follow.
It was a great day especially playing with the Ashford 4” Wild Drum Carder.
12 July 25
The Profile Selection Project
I am now deep into the project of figuring out which film simulation profiles to select for my little Sony ZV-1. As previously described, there are about 85 profiles in the recipe book, and the camera has slots for 10 of them at a time. I’ll need to pick and choose. Basically I want to cover a range of styles. Of the 10 slots, I will reserve one for scratch, and two of them will be monochrome styles: one low-contrast, and the other high-contrast. This leaves seven for color profiles. The way to figure which to choose is to do lots of testing. So now when I go for my morning and late-afternoon walks I load up the camera with a new profile and take some pictures using it.
At right is an example comparing four different color profiles. The photos were taken one after another.
11 July 25
Una España Sin Brillo
I’ve been watching the women’s Euros as much as possible, even though watching them live is now difficult because the final matches of the group stages are being played at the same time. I did see Spain play Italy today, and the weaknesses in this Spanish team were on full display particularly in the first 30 minutes, particularly along the right flank. Other teams, including Switzerland who as hosts enjoy a strong home field advantage and who Spain will play next Friday, will be looking to exploit these weaknesses and not be intimidated by Spain’s dangers in the box.
The score should probably have been higher than 3-1 — Spain certainly made a lot of chances and a foul in the box which looked like a certain penalty wasn’t given — but Italy are a defensive wall and may be giving other teams ideas about how to handle the favorites.
What’s clear, though, is that the depth of Spain’s bench is very much in their favor, since they are able to rest key players. There have been injuries and illnesses that seem to be resolving at the right time, too.
It’s hard work but luck also plays a part in these things. In Spain’s case, the attacking skill is formidable especially in the younger players. They all combine to make Spain a hard time to beat this year, but it wouldn’t be impossible.
10 July 25
Weekend Tree Sketching - Cypress
On weekends nowadays I head out to find a tree to draw as my daily sketch. Here is my sketch from this past Sunday of a cypress that is in front of a nearby church. When I sketched it I realized that the watercolors I wanted to paint it with were in my Schmincke pan color set back at home, so I finished it off there. The paints I used were raw umber for the trunk and perylene green and yellow ochre for the foliage.
9 July 25
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…
8 July 25
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.
7 July 25
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.
6 July 25
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.
5 July 25
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!