-N- – Page 710 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Hit Man for the Nikon Mafia

Ok, there really is no hit man. More of a pitch man. “This is why you need a Nikon. Look at what you can do with a Nikon. You really should get a Nikon. Nikon is always ahead of everyone with their technology.”

I am giving myself several months to choose a DSLR with interchangeable lenses. Right now there are so many new offerings just out, or out soon (just in time for the winter holidays), that it doesn’t make sense to buy one now. Later, the reviews will be in, and the prices should drop. Of course, there will be newer things as well later on.

My thoughts on cameras run in all directions. Buy good glass, and not be too nutso over the body. Buy small cameras which are easy to hold, and have good lenses. Buy something that feels good in the hand with both large and small lenses. In other words, try the camera on for size.

Nikons are what my friend who lent me his keeps telling me to get. I think he has been using them for forty years! Or, as a second choice, he says, get a Canon.

All well and good, but part of me just doesn’t want what everyone else has. I’m rather ornery that way. I was drawn to the micro 4/3 system when it first came out, but to date it does not seem as if any of them are really having superb lenses to go with them. Nikon does have excellent lenses, as does Canon; not too sure about Sony or Olympus or Panasonic in their smaller cameras, though I do believe Leica lenses can work on the Panasonic. There is argument, though, for and against the Japanese-made Leica glass versus the German-made Leica glass. Eek!

One which has caught my eye very seriously is the Pentax K-5. I like its really, really solid construction. I drop things and spill things all over the place, so it sure does have appeal that way. Another especially attractive element is the fact that the K-5 is backward compatible with all K-mount lenses.

An attractive smaller camera is the Panasonic Lumix GH2. I really love my little ZS5 – it takes some really great pictures, and it is what has gotten me really interested in the DSLR world more seriously, especially using manual exposure factors. For a point-and-shoot camera that fits in your pocket, it is phenomenal as far as I am concerned.

Sony is also interesting. The Alpha 55 looks like it has a lot going for it, especially in size. Good reviews are coming out about it, although opinions of its lenses vary.

Price is also a factor. A good, used Nikon may be had, but there is always part of me which likes to buy something new. However, that seems sort of silly at times – people are always selling off perfectly good techie toys because another model is out. And, seriously, this may be the route I take, but I think I need to make a choice of camera itself (brand) before I buy lenses. And that is where Sigma is interesting – it makes third-party lenses for most major camera manufacturers!

I’m willing to spend on good equipment – things made to last, that work well, that don’t become unfashionable in a few weeks time – all appeal to me. I’m doing my research! In the meantime, I am very lucky to have a Nikon D70 to play with.

Weathering the Season

These past weeks here in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have seen odd weather – not seasonally odd – but overall odd. Thunder and lightning seldom occur here – but they did, in abundance. Cold weather, and a week of rain. Now, up into the 70s and 80s, the east winds are blowing dust and pollen everywhere. Everyone is congested and feeling as if hayfever has descended like a plague. The winds are drying up people and plants. Tomorrow, we can expect more rain.

Despite my whining, it has been really lovely to get a week or so of rain. The problem is the sudden shift from high humidity to low, and the winds just add to the mix by drying everything up more so than just higher temperatures might. The skies have been beautifully clear and blue, and the clouds are more than usual – the usual is no clouds around here!

After work, a friend and I took our cameras and headed out to a local park in Thousand Oaks, Wildwood Park, which is part of the land dedicated to open space around the city. This park has meadows and scrub, rocky paths, vistas. In the early evening, with a week of rain behind us, the winter vegetation is beginning to green up. Underfoot, the earth gives a little, which feels strange when one is used to a dry, dusty crunch.

The cacti are rather fat and full of water. The prickly pear have ripening fruit.

Sagebrush flowers are dried, hollow shells, but the leaves erupt in an acrid spiciness when crushed. While the hills still look burnt from the dryness of the summer, a hint of green may be seen.

The sunset was bright and clear, with a majestic descent of the sun into the western mountains, turning clouds pink and the valley gold, orange, purple, and gone.

Patina, Provenance, Keshiki, and the Velveteen Rabbit

Patina: a surface appearance of something grown beautiful, especially with age or use.

Provenance: origin, source. the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature.

Keshiki: . . . (Japanese) after you use [something] and make some stain, it is natural thing and we call it “keshiki” (“a scenery naturally made”) that makes the item valuable.

The Veleveteen Rabbit: a children’s novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner.

* * *

We buy things to use, to admire, to give pleasure to our lives, to make our lives more efficient, to wear, to eat, to provide shelter, to take us from one place to another. Sometimes we hoard, from fear, necessity, greed. There are things we all have hiding in a cupboard or drawer or under the bed, saved for the rainy day that never comes, for that yet-to-be-determined special occasion.

And then we die. All that was valuable to us, as individuals, is gone. Now it is junk for others to cart away.

I have decided to ink my only un-used suzuri, using a highly prized ink stick. The experience will be mine alone.

A Walk in the Dark

Tonight I took a walk with Josh over to the campus where he goes to school, just a few blocks from our house. As it has been raining the past few days, it was really nice to be outside and smell all the damp night scents – earth, leaf mould, cement. The sky is foggy, with the moon appearing and disappearing. I took the Lumix ZS5 with me, and did everything on manual settings, just to see what I would get. Altogether, I was amazingly pleased with the results!

The above exposures are what I think I did – I could look at the EXIF if I wanted to, but it is a bit late in the evening for me! So, I’ll finish with a couple of shots I took as I walked back home.

This last one is looking over the fence into the back yard of my house. As I was setting this one up, a car drove by . . . I wonder what they thought if they saw me skulking along the fence in the dark!

Anyway, all the photos from tonight are on Flickr if you want to see them. Some I converted to black and white, and others I putzed with using Photoscape and Elements 9.

Saturday Dyeing

I spent all day Saturday dyeing yarn with indigo, cochineal, and quercitron (yellow oak bark). Judy came out from Ventura with three skeins of white yarn, one of which was 100% washable merino, another was merino and nylon, and another of merino and silk. Mine were all 100% wool, specifically the Crazy Eight yarn from Wool2Dye4. I gave Judy a skein of the Crazy Eight, so all told, we had 8 skeins of pure white wool for our projects. I also had two skeins of Sea Wool I had dyed using cochineal, one lighter than the other, and a skein of moorit Shetland which I had earlier dyed with quercitron.

Friday evening, I set out 15 g. of quercitron bark to soak overnight, as well as 10 g. of cochineal mixed 10 g. of tartaric acid. Saturday morning, once we got the first dye bath heating, we set up the indigo. After my earlier disaster with indigo, I decided to order a dye kit from Dharma Trading Company, in Berkeley, California. This is a very tidy little kit, well worth the small price – kind of like frozen vegetables in midwinter – a definitely good thing to have! The only thing I needed to buy was a container with a lid – this little kit produces 4 gallons of intensely blue dye, and we certainly did not make a dent in it. Putting the container – a commercial food storage unit – on a furniture dolly was a good thing to do, too, as that is a lot of weight to carry around.

Cochineal Skeins with Overdyed Skeins on Outside

We found out, very early, that the indigo in this vat is very strong. I dipped my two cochineal Sea Wool skeins in the vat once it was ready – and they turned deep blue violet after only a minute in the vat. Oops! I was aiming for lavender! You can see how dark the two cochineal skeins became, as well as the original shades of pink. We used this knowledge to good advantage later on, and diluted the strength of the indigo by taking a couple of cups and pouring it into water in another container. Much nicer! The lavender and greens Judy got were all done with a diluted indigo bath.

Judy's Lavender (Indigo Over Cochineal) and Green (Indigo Over Quercitron)

To get her lavenders and greens, Judy did two dye baths. The first was a purely yellow skein in the quercitron, and a purely pink skein in the cochineal. As her skeins had different fiber content in them, as well as had been treated to be washable, her colors were not as intense as the Crazy Eight yarn, which is a washable merino, but is made up of 4 2-ply strands plied together. Because of the silk in her yarn, all temperatures were carefully controlled not to exceed 180 F. – important to keep the luster of the silk, as well as to keep the yellow from drifting into drabber shades.

If you are unfamiliar with indigo dyeing, you might like to know that before you get the blue, it is green in the dye vat; the oxygen in the air creates the blue color. You can see that the large vat is green in color, with a bluish rim at the top. As a result, it is difficult to gauge how dark your indigo will become once exposed to the air. So, as I said, we diluted the indigo with more water. Then, to get the gradated yellow-into-green, and pink-into-lavender, Judy dipped only a part of her skein into the indigo, and slowly squeezed the dye into other areas of the skein once it was removed from the weaker solution. Doing this three or four times, she made some very nice space-dyed yarn.

For myself, I wanted to preserve most of my skeins as solid colors, and so chose to do one skein in pure quercitron, one in pure cochineal, and one in a medium indigo. My last white skein was tied off in the traditional flammegarn method. and dipped first in the cochineal, tied up some more, and then dipped in the indigo. The results were quite pleasing altogether. I was also quite pleased with the indigo-dyed moorit yarn – it took on a pleasantly greenish cast.

Left to Right: Tie-Dyed, Quercitron, Cochineal, Diluted Indigo

Saturday flew by! By and large, Judy and I were happy with our results. Judy had done a flammegarn in quercitron, cochineal, and indigo, but it was too pastel for her tastes. Rather frustrated, she dumped it into the undiluted indigo – and lost all here cochineal. However, the yarn came out really nice, despite that. In place of the yarn she didn’t like, she got one which is mulberry and teal, two of her favorite colors. The picture here is a bit too intense – the graduation between the purple and teal was far more subtle, with the teal being darker.

Our working concept was to use the lightest colors first, and then move to the darker ones. This meant yellow, then pink, then blue. I was not really pleased with the green we got using this method. Looking around, I see some people dye with indigo first, and then with a yellow overdye. I expect that the initial indigo has to be relatively pale to achieve middle greens. This is something I plan to do at a later date, and while greens are often readily available in other dye plants, the ones done with a combination of blue and yellow seem to be more vibrant. Color mixing is an art, and not knowing how something works best is frustrating, but at the same time so much fun. Since I am not a professional dyer, I am not too concerned about creating repeatable products, but I do like having control over my results a bit more. This is where a sense of adventure is important, as well as a willingness to try something. Theories often do not work with realities!

That said, here are the skeins, all hung up to dry a bit before getting dinner ready for the men.