I had lunch with my parents recently and took a few photos with both my film and digital cameras. I shot about the same number of photos with each camera, with close to the same number of “keepers”. Which do I prefer?

Here I’m showing one of each, digital and film, of my favorite from the visit.

Film: Leica MP (HP5 Plus)

Digital: Leica M10-R (B&W conversion in Silver Efex)

I prefer the film image. I manipulated the digital shot in Silver Efex Pro and added a bit of grain to try and get the look I like, but I still prefer the film image.

The difference might be partially due to using the 50mm Summilux on the MP. It’s my favorite lens. The digital shot was with the 35mm Summilux. Also a great lens, but lacks that certain “something” of the 50.

I don’t think the lens difference explains it, though. A large part of what makes me prefer film photos is just knowing they’re film photos. That means something to me, and influences how I respond to an image. One could probably use a decent HP5 preset on that image in Lightroom and I wouldn’t be able to tell it from a film photo in a blind test, but I don’t view my images that way. I know how they were made, and it matters.

Additionally, I can make beautiful silver gelatin prints of the film photo in my darkroom. That’s important, too.

I’ll probably always shoot both film and digital, but more often than not I prefer the results I get from film.

April 7, 2022 Film Photography Reply by email

☁️ Overcast +44°F

I deleted PhotoPrism from the Synology. It was chewing up all my (4GB) of RAM and generally causing things to misbehave. I suppose Synology Photos will have to do for now.

I still don’t know the difference between my “Daybook” and “Journal”. I know what I think the difference is, but I get lost in the grey area in the middle. I suppose the Daybook is for things I want to show up in the Agenda on that day. Things for which the date is important.

My dad is back from Florida

I made some prints this morning. I am trying to make at least one or two 5x7” prints from each roll (in addition to a contact sheet). I’m not fussy about it. I guess at exposure time and print. I only re-print if my guess was horribly wrong. Otherwise, they’re good enough. Anything “special” gets the real treatment by printing an 8x10” print on fiber paper.

I added Plausible analytics to jack.micro.blog, baty.net, and daily.baty.net. I’m already generating reports using GoAccess for my self-hosted sites, but it’s hard to parse what’s a real “visit” through all that noise. Plausible is great, cheap, and doesn’t track anything other than hits, so it’s pretty privacy-safe.

Upgraded Emacs to 28.1. Here’s a nice summary of changes.

April 7, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I’m an impressionable young man, and when I notice someone on The Internet raving about something, I want to feel that way, too. I often order whatever that thing is, only to be disappointed. For example, here are a few of the pens I bought after being told how remarkable they are. They’re not that remarkable.

April 3, 2022 Analog Reply by email

☁️ Overcast +32°F

I just happened to already be in Emacs so I thought I’d write here for a spell. It’s no joke 😉. Which reminds me that today is the best day to stay off the internet.

I’ve been publishing a few of the notes from my Org-roam database over at notes.baty.net just in case they might be useful to someone somewhere. I also like to browse them as decent-looking (read-only) HTML files instead of from within Emacs all the time. I’m using a version of the same “CodeIt” theme I used to use for baty.net. Ideally I’d list the categories on the home page rather than a list of recent posts, but Hugo’s templating system is completely unfathomable to me so I’m leaving it alone for now. Another thing I’m doing “wrong” is putting the theme’s git repo right in the themes folder. No submodules, no hugo modules. I’m just editing in place. Hell, I might just stop keeping it as a separate repo :).

After I don’t even know how many years, I’ve canceled my Dropbox account

I thought I’d lost my entire archive of posts from the original baty.net but accidentally ran into it on Github yesterday. Whew!

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m thinking about selling the M10-R again. That would put me at a 4-month period of buying and selling two of them. I just can’t get over feeling guilty about having so much money tied up in a camera that I’m hardly using. It worries me that something could go wrong with it or it would get broken or stolen and I’d be out all that money. I don’t like feeling this way. Still noodling on it.

You’re you, and your pictures are yours, and what you bring to a photograph is not separate from it.

Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece | The New Yorker

Maccy - macOS clipboard manager

April 1, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I’m trying something new.

I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam  for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can easily find things right within Emacs.

A portion of these notes might be useful to other people. So I’m exporting the shareable notes from Org-roam as Hugo -compatible Markdown files. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. You can see the results at https://notes.baty.net and the details of how it works makes a good example.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to do this, but this seems to work quite well.

March 27, 2022 Emacs Orgmode Reply by email

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is.

Two minutes of searching revealed a short bit of lisp that does the job nicely:

    ;; Align comments in marked region
    ;; Via https://stackoverflow.com/a/20278032
    (defun jab/align-comments (beginning end)
      "Align comments within marked region."
      (interactive "*r")
      (let (indent-tabs-mode align-to-tab-stop)
        (align-regexp beginning end (concat "\(\s-*\)"
                                            (regexp-quote comment-start)))))

Here’s an example of what I was working on, with horribly un-aligned comments.

    (setq org-roam-capture-templates
      '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
        :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                           "#+title: ${title}n#+index: n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORTn#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
        :unnarrowed t)
        ("P" ;; Key
         "Public (published in /public)" ;; Description
         plain  ;; Type
         (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
        :target (file "public/${slug}.org") ;; Target
        :unnarrowed t)
        ("p" ;; Key
         "project"  ;; Description
         plain   ;; Type
         (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
        :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
        :unnarrowed t)))

Then, here’s that same thing after executing jab/align-comments

    (setq org-roam-capture-templates
      '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
        :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                           "#+title: ${title}n#+index: n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORTn#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
        :unnarrowed t)
        ("P"                                               ;; Key
         "Public (published in /public)"                   ;; Description
         plain                                             ;; Type
         (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
        :target (file "public/${slug}.org")                ;; Target
        :unnarrowed t)
        ("p"                                               ;; Key
         "project"                                         ;; Description
         plain                                             ;; Type
         (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
        :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
        :unnarrowed t)))

Much better. It’s cool because it uses comment-start so it works with any language’s comment syntax. There are probably 17 other ways of doing this that I haven’t discovered, but this works.

Every day is a new day in Emacs.

March 25, 2022 Emacs Reply by email

My tendency to write daily posts here vs the wiki is tied to how deep I am into Emacs at the moment. Right now… that’s very deep.

I’ve spent hours configuring my Org-roam setup so I can publish certain notes as a website. It’s so cool, but in the end I’m not sure it offers clear advantages over the wiki other than that I can make some of my roam notes public without needing to rewrite them in TiddlyWiki. WIP is here: notes.baty.net. Later: now I’ve realized that I can simply add some ox-hugo metadata to any of my Org files and have them publish to this daily notes blog. Like so…

#+hugo_base_dir: ~/sites/daily.baty.net/
#+hugo_section: ./notes/

Now what!?

Me, at least once a month

Apparently I have too much time on my hands.

I went into the darkroom to test a new safelight bulb and made a handful of 5x7 prints while I was in there. I love real photos. The decision to print a photo automatically makes that photo special.

Ordered a book: No One Is Talking about This - a book by Patricia Lockwood

“Computational Photography” can fuck right off.

March 24, 2022 Journal Reply by email

🔔 NOTE: Since this was written, I’m no longer customizing Org’s attachment or download handling. I tired of changing my mind and breaking links. Everything now goes into ugly, gross UUID folders as is the default.

When I drag and drop an image into Emacs, I want the attached file to end up in ./img/YYYY/. This is how I tried configuring org-download in my setup (I use Doom Emacs):

    (setq org-download-method 'directory
            org-download-image-dir (concat "img/"  (format-time-string "%Y") "/")
            org-download-image-org-width 600
            org-download-heading-lvl 1)

    (setq org-download-method 'directory
            org-download-image-dir (concat "img/"  (format-time-string "%Y") "/")
            org-download-image-org-width 600
            org-download-heading-lvl 1)

For some reason, org-download-method was being reset from 'directory to 'attachafter loading, and this broke things. I thought maybe I needed to set the variables _after_org-download was loaded, so I did this:

    (after! org-download
      (setq org-download-method 'directory
            org-download-image-dir (concat "img/"  (format-time-string "%Y") "/")
            org-download-image-org-width 600
            org-download-heading-lvl 1))

That didn’t work. At startup I was seeing this error:

Error (org-mode-hook): Error running hook “org-fancy-priorities-mode” because: (void-variable org-download-image-dir)

Huh. I guess not everything can be set after org-download, so I tried only setting org-download-method

    (after! org-download
      (setq org-download-method 'directory))

This worked. The other settings are done in the (after! org block.

It feels like I have to fight Doom too often, but the details and refinement of Doom is worth the trouble.

March 19, 2022 Emacs Misc Reply by email

I’m feeling twitchy about owning the Leica M10-R .

The M10-R is an astonishingly good camera. World-beating build quality, timeless design, and a fantastic 40-megapixel sensor, all in a small, beautiful package.

Still available new in 2022 for an eye-watering $8,995 (I bought mine used), the M10-R is also a ridiculously expensive camera. Buying one is a big deal and a significant investment.

I am fortunate enough to also own Leica M film cameras, and being able to share lenses between those and the M10-R is very handy. And OMG those Leica lenses! The control layout and handling are the same as well. It’s like having both a digital and film platform for using 70 years of tiny, wonderful Leica lenses. I can carry a full film and digital arsenal with 2 bodies and lenses in a tiny bag.

So, why am I feeling twitchy?

I worry about having such expensive, relatively delicate equipment swinging about around my neck. It makes me nervous. It’s hard to relax and make photographs when I’m so worried about losing or breaking the camera I’m carrying.

Unlike film Ms, digital M cameras depreciate steadily in value. Not as quickly as other digital cameras, perhaps, but still, the trend is downward.

But mostly, I feel guilty having such a fine camera because I’ve barely used it. I’ve been shooting mostly film for the past month or so, leaving the M10-R idling in the bag. I can justify the expense for something I’m using all the time but to have the M10-R sitting in the bag “just in case” is hard to stomach.

Still, I love the camera and I’m keeping it. At least for now. I know me, and I know that the digital-film pendulum will swing back the other way soon enough, and when it does I’ll be glad I have the M10-R.

March 17, 2022 Leica Photography Reply by email

My wife bought an awful, kitschy plastic lamp and set it on one of the floor speakers. I, of course, balked.

That was a week ago and somehow the lamp is still there. I hate the lamp, but I don’t mind the light that it throws against the wall, and my wife loves it and thinks “it’s adorable”. Who am I to judge?

I took a photo of it. It’s just another boring snapshot by a film photographer looking for excuses to finish the roll. It’s exposed the way I intended and it’s composed nicely, but it’s not a great photo. I love it anyway.

I love the photo because it makes me smile. It makes me smile because I love my wife and it reminds me of one of the many reasons why. That’s the best kind.

March 12, 2022 Photography Reply by email