Radiant Comics

After writing a blog just a few weeks ago about contemplating getting a new camera I settled on one that was not even on my list. Or even on my radar. That’s because it’s not actually a camera like the others I was looking at. It’s a smartphone. Except it’s not when I don’t have any phone service with it. I ended up buying an unlocked Amazon Fire phone.

First off I only have a dumb phone. Since I work from my home studio that has an old fashioned land line I don’t have a huge need for a cell phone. So I have a pay-as-you-go dumb phone that costs me a hundred and twenty five dollars a year. That’s fine for how much I use it. I don’t want the sixty dollar a month bill that comes with a smart phone. I wasn’t even considering getting one except then Amazon put their’s on sale.

Normally an Amazon 32GB unlocked Fire phone goes for $450. Unlocked means that it comes with no phone service and you have to arrange for your own if you want the phone part to work. Otherwise it has wifi capabilities and is basically an iPod touch. Since I didn’t want the phone part I might as well have spent the $450 on an iPod touch. But then Amazon put the phone on sale for $200 and that caught my eye. Especially since I’m an Amazon Prime member which costs $100 a year and the phone comes with a free year of Amazon Prime. Since I was going to renew my Prime membership anyway early next year that meant the price of the phone would be $100 for me. Not a bad deal I thought. Then Amazon raised the price back up to $450 before I pulled the trigger and I abandoned the whole idea. Of course a few days later they lowered the price down to $230 and I decided to get it. So I missed out on the $30 less price tag. Oh well…

I wantedt the Fire phone to use as a pocket camera that works well with wifi and the cloud and to use as a music player. So far I like the camera aspects of it but not the music player. I have an iPad 2 that I use all the time to edit and share photos on. I have quite a few photo editing apps and like to post stuff to Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook from it. The only problem is that the iPad 2 has a terrible camera. It’s only two megapixels or so. The camera actually has less resolution than the screen. That’s insane. So I’m always transferring photos from my camera to my computer to the iPad. That’s a bit of a pain and doesn’t encourage the spontaneity that’s usually comes with Instagram and sharing sites in general.

I’m not sure what the exact megapixel count is on the Fire phone but I think it was around eleven. In general it’s an okay but not great camera. It’s nowhere near as good as my other pocket camera the Canon S95 but it’s leagues ahead of my iPad 2’s camera. It’s easier to carry than the Canon and fires up and is ready to take pictures faster than the Canon. But I’ve really liked it because it works well with the cloud.

I like to post photos of my art work in progress to the various social sites. I like to edit those photos and access those sites on my iPad 2. I don’t want to bother doing that on the little screen of a smart phone. But I’ll take the pictures on the smart phone. The LCD screen on a smart phone is bigger than the LCD on my Canon. Or any of my digital cameras. I grab a drawing, aim the phone’s camera at it, snap a picture, and then as long as I’m on wifi the camera automatically upload the photos to the Amazon cloud. I can then turn in my iPad 2, fire up the Amazon cloud app, and view and download the photos to my iPad 2. It’s pretty darn seamless. I’ve posted a lot more spontaneous photos of my works in progress this week than before the Fire phone. That makes me happy.

Other than the photos I’ve found the way things work on the Fire phone pretty clumsy. Though I’m an Apple guy I’ve never been a huge fan of iTunes since the app is basically a kludge that’s jury rigged to do a lot of stuff it wasn’t originally intended to do. But trying to do all that stuff without a dedicated app is a nightmare. Trying to get music on to my phone is complicated and I haven’t even got it to work properly yet.

I’m a make-your-own-playlist guy. I have about forty playlists that are all about an hour and twenty minutes each that I listen to when I’m out. I’ve programed my own music so I don’t need a radio station to do it for me. I even took all the mp3s on my playlists, copied them, and changed the metadata so that the playlist name is now the album name. If I’m ever on a new computer I can drop my copies on it and my playlists are intact even without them being actual playlists. Not with Amazon.

To get my music onto the Fire phone I first have to upload it to the cloud. There is no music manager software on the Mac for Amazon so all I can do is chose my files and upload. So thats what I did. I chose my first playlist that I have set up as an album. But then as they are uploading Amazon’s software tries to recognize the songs and matches them with their version that doesn’t have my version’s metadata. So they’re not in my order anymore. Instead they’re random songs from Amazon’s library. Even the ones that it kept my metadata on it somehow messed up. My songs that all come from the same album now come from six different albums that have the exact same name. It’s crazy. But then it gets crazier.

I finally discovered that the Amazon Cloud music interface was better on my iPad 2 than on the Fire phone. I figured I’d try to reproduce my playlist by creating a new playlist in the Amazon Cloud and dropping the songs on it. Except now all my songs weren’t there. I had a playlist with twenty one songs on it but only nineteen songs were in the cloud. Using the search function brought up no results for the songs. I went back to my Mac to re-upload the songs but it said they were already uploaded. But where where they? Who knows? I still haven’t figured that part out yet.

I’m glad I got the Fire phone overall. It wasn’t too expensive and works really well as a small cloud connected camera. Maybe with a little more work I can get it to work as a music player too. Until then my first generation iPod touch isn’t retired.

It’s all about habit. That’s what I have to say this morning. Writing habit. Or lack there of. I’ve been trying to get some more of my “Message Tee” strips written lately and have not been meeting with much success. All because of habit I’m guessing.

I haven’t even been trying to get more “Message Tee” drawings made. My original plan for the comic was to make it less about the drawings and more about they sayings on their shirts. I was already making new strips six days a week and adding a seventh day was a bit daunting. So I decided to do fifty two drawings, one for each Saturday in a year, and then recolor and reuse the drawing over for the next year. That was in 2011. But then in 2012 I decided I wanted to do fifty two more drawings and have a hundred and four of them to rotate. The same happened in 2013. I finally ran out of steam in 2014 and didn’t do any new “Message Tee” drawings. No explanation. I just didn’t have it in me to make another fifty two drawings this year. But on the bright side I ended up with a hundred and fifty six drawings rather than my originally planned fifty two.

I also had a rather different way of writing this particular comic too. I wrote it while on nice summer walks. I’d grab a small notebook, go for a walk, and then stop every ten or twenty yards to write down an idea for a message. I could knock out ten or twenty ideas in a walk and over a month or so of time have enough ideas (I write at least twice as many as I need and then pick the ones I like best) for a year’s worth of “Message Tee” strips. The system worked well. Until it didn’t. This year, for some reason, I took fewer walks and didn’t feel like writing as I took them. Before I knew it fall came around and I had nothing written. Whoops.

My solution to this problem of having not written anything on my walks was to sit down (or stand up) and write some comics. That seemed pretty darn logical to me but then a strange thing happened. Nothing come out. It wasn’t writer’s block or anything. I still found things to write about on this blog plus wrote a “Four Talking Boxes” strip every day but I had nothing for “Message Tee”. I’d set aside some time but get no closer to writing anything. It was weird and I think it was all about habit. I had a completely different habit for writing “Message Tee” and my normal writing habits wouldn’t do. My solution was to change the habit altogether.

I managed to make it down to Manhattan a few times this summer to take street photos. I take a train to get there. Two trains. One from Nanuet to Secaucus Junction and another from SJ to Penn Station in Manhattan. That’s about an hour on the train plus time spent waiting for trains. This summer I spent that time reading a magazine. I saved my monthly issue of “The Sun” magazine for those trips and reading it took up about the whole of the getting there and back time. It was a nice little habit but this time I decided to switch it up and write.

I got my same little notebook (a Moleskine “The notebook for people with more money than sense”) that I used to take with me on walks and took it on the train. It was interesting writng on the train. First off my little short “Message Tee” messages take a different sort of writing than normal. Or at least a different sort on concentration. With something like this blog or one of my “Four Talking Boxes” strips I have to concentrate for an extended period. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes of concentration and then a few minutes break and then back to concentrating. Repeat for as long as needed. With the “Message Tee” comic I stare off into space/look out the window for anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes, come up with a saying, and write it down in my notebook. Writing in the notebook usually means rewriting too in that the form it first takes in my head usually changes as I try to make the wording just so.

Sometimes the ideas come fast and furious and sometimes it takes the full five minutes for me to write down something I’m not even happy with. I found that to be one of the keys for me to write “Message Tee”. I write down an idea even if I don’t like it just to get it out of the way. And who knows? I may find a way to make it work at some later date. I finished about half of the writing I needed to get done on that train trip so now I just have to get the other half done and I’ll be golden. I’ve already recolored the fifty two comics from 2011 and they’re all good to go once I get new messages on their shirts. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even draw some new ones next year.

Here is one final observation from my train ride that I’ve always taken for granted and never thought about until writing on the train. As I wrote before my process involves staring off into space and thinking (or trying to think) and as I do that I look around or out the window. When I walked and wrote I was always looking around at the scenery on my walk. I’d, of course, nod and say hello to any stranger that happened to pass me because that’s the polite thing to do out in the suburbs. Now here I was writing on the train where it was impolite to talk to a stranger or even look at them. I had to look around without looking at anybody. In Manhattan you pass a million people on the street and everybody has to ignore one and other. That’s nothing new and probably a good thing since you can’t say hello to a million people as you walk the streets but the contrast really struck me as I was trying to write. Now I have to find time to get the other half done.

I finally stared working in video a bit this year. I’ve been meaning to for ages and finally did thanks to YouTube and comic book haul videos. I know they’re not much but they’re an intro to the form. I also made a couple of four minute videos set to music this summer but they are much more time consuming to make. Plus they get far fewer views on YouTube so I’ll have to revisit what I do with those. I’ll have to find a way to make them more interesting for me and the viewer.

Being a gadget guy I’ve been thinking lately about what cameras I have to shoot with and if I need any new ones. My general philosophy has been to “Shoot with what you got”. I’ve seen too many people never do anything because they don’t have the perfect equipment. Y’know, as soon as they get this doodad or that gizmo they’ll get started and they never get those gizmos so they never start. Just use whatever you have even if it’s inferior to your ideal.

The first thing I shoot with is my iPad. That works well for my Comic Book Haul videos. I plop it on a tripod, point it at my easel, and put the comics I want to film on my easel. Works fine. The mic is good too. Or I should say that the mic is good when I’m right on top of it. Since I’m sitting behind the iPad and handling the comics that means the microphone in very close to my mouth and it picks up my voice well rather than the sound of the room.

The other camera that I use is my Canon S95. It’s a small camera that I put on a small tripod to record my ASMR drawing videos. I’m not talking during those videos and the camera mic does a nice job at picking up the sound of the pencil or pen on paper as I’m drawing. It’s only inches away from the paper so it better do a good job.

The problem I had was when I turned the camera on myself to talk for some heads-up comic book videos. First off I tried my laptop. It has the typical built-in iSight camera and everybody else on YouTube seems to use their laptop webcams to make videos fairly easily so I thought I would too. It didn’t work out so well. First off I have bad lighting for filming in my studio. I have a couple of glaringly bright fluorescent tubes on my ceiling. Great for working under but no so great for filming under. I knew that was going to be a problem and it was. But I moved a few things around and waited for some natural light and it was okay.

I tested out the video on the laptop and it looked alright but the sound wasn’t very good. The mic picked up the room sounds and my voice sounded weak and hollow. Pretty typical stuff for a laptop mic in a room. I muddled through and filmed about ten minutes of video when I noticed the spinning beach ball cursor that means things aren’t right. The video capture program had crashed and left me without any video. That made me abandon the laptop approach and go back to my iPad.

I have an iPad 2 that is getting a bit long in the tooth these days but it’s still a nice little machine. I was able to talk for fifteen minutes on video with no crashes and no problems. With my Comic Book Haul videos I film them on my iPad in little one minute segments. I talk for about a minute for each comic and then quickly edit them together in iMovie for the iPad and upload right from the iPad to YouTube. It’s amazing how smoothly that all works. But with the heads up video I ran into the same microphone problem. It all sounds hollow when I’m not right on top of the mic.

These are typical mic problems and there are typical mic solutions to them that usually involve buying a better microphone and keeping it closer to you mouth. This line of thinking, of course, always leads me down the path of evaluating all of my equipment. I have the money right now to replace one of my things but which one? The iPad is the most expensive but would it give me the most bang for my buck? Probably not. My iPad 2 has a terrible still camera and I’d like an iPad with a better one but I’m not sure that’s worth the $800 bucks I’d spend to get it. And for video it’ll be about the same. I’m not lying. I want a new iPad. I just don’t think it’s worth the money right now.

My small Canon camera is just fine. It works well for filming my drawing videos so I don’t really need another small camera. It’s my Canon SX30IS super zoom that might need replacing. I bought that camera back in October of 2010 and it was supposed to be a sort of stop gap camera until I decided if I wanted to get a digital SLR or micro 4/3s camera. Turns out that I really didn’t need either and the Canon SX30IS suited me just fine. I shot with what I had. Though one of the things that camera is missing is a microphone jack. So if I shoot video with it I get a lot of room noise. Or wind noise if I’m outside as I shot with it this past summer.

All that lead me to check out various digital SLR or micro 4/3s cameras once again. Turns out that though those two types of cameras offer a lot of advantages they’re still too expensive for what they’ll offer me that I think I’ll actually use. I’m going to settle for another super-zoom. The latest Canon SX60 even has the mic jack that I’m looking for. I’ve noticed that those high end super-zooms often get mediocre reviews but I’ve muddled through with my Canon SX30 quite well. I have no doubt I will do the same with the SX60. Meanwhile I’ve actually bought a USB microphone this week. I caught a nice one on sale at Amazon yesterday and decided to order it. Not quite spur of the moment but almost. Since it’s USB it won’t be able to plug into a camera but it turns out than I can get a camera mic for only about $25 bucks. I don’t know how great it’ll be but we’ll see. Maybe. I still haven’t decided yet. Meanwhile I’ll continue to shoot with what I got.

Fall cleanup is no fun. You know the deal: raking leaves. On a pleasant day it’s okay though. So far during this fall pleasant days have not been around on leaf cleanup days. Instead it’s been unseasonably cold and windy. Not the ideal weather for doing yard work.

This year I added a new tool to my yard work tool kit. I bought an electric leaf blower. It’s the corded kind that you’ll need a long extension cord for but I was in no way getting a gas powered one. Those are messy with their gas and oil and eventually their little engines get hard to start. Gas ones are more powerful and easier to use but they’re also a little more expensive. The Toro leaf blower/vacuum that I bought cost me $75. Add another $25 for a gas one but it’s the mess and troublesome starting that really kept me away.

There are three areas in my yard that need leaf clean up. The big back yard, the driveway with its fences that really collect leaves, and the smaller front yard. I mulch my leaves with the John Deere riding mower. I rake them to the back yard and ride over them again and again until they turn to small pieces and dust which feeds the lawn. The mowing takes a while but is the easy part. It’s moving all those leaves that takes time.

The leaf blower I got is also a vacuum mulcher. I didn’t even know leaf blowers did that. A big plastic tube connects to the bottom of the blower that sucks the leaves up, runs them through the fan blades, and deposits them into a bag that’s connected to the air output. I decided to try and use that vacuum mulcher to clean up the leaves in the driveway rather than rake/blow them all the way to the back yard. The leaf blower box said that the mulcher made sixteen bags of leaves into one bag of leaves. I had no idea how many bags it would take me to suck up all those leaves but I knew it was going to be a lot.

The first thing I have to say about the mulcher is, “Holy crap it’s clumsy to use”. It has a big handle on top plus two knobs for holding onto but there is no graceful way to use it. You just have to hold it up a few inches above the leaves as it sucks them up the vertical column. The leaf bag is attached to the back of the thing and has a shoulder strap to help you hold it. The bag gets heavier and heavier as it fills up. Plus it’s attached by an electrical cord that seemed to always get unconnected as I was working. It was like constantly doing bicep curls and then taking a break as the cord fell off.

Now here is where the weather kicks in. When raking leaves I pretty much want them to be dry. Light and fluffy leaves are so much easier to move then wet ones. Since there has been a bit of rain lately I waited as long as I could for the leaves to dry but there were still some wet ones. Plus some frozen ones. With the extra cold temperatures it’s been around 24ºF at night going up to about 38ºF during the day. So, yes, the leaves down on the bottom of the piles were frozen. That makes them a bit harder to vacuum up. And my fingers were frozen too. At first I had on fingerless gloves but they weren’t working out so I moved to some really old-school arctic mittens. Those babies kept my hands warm.

It took about two and a half hours to clean up the driveway. I don’t know why I thought it would take less time than raking but it didn’t. I think I emptied the bag of mulched leaves a at least fifteen times. I dumped them in the back yard to be mulched up further later on. I quit for the day at that point and picked things up the next day. My arms had had enough.

The next day was a balmy 45ºF as I started to go for the leaf blower. In the back yard I wouldn’t need to move the leaves far as I just needed them off the fence so that the mover could get them. But there is quite a bit of fence. I started blowing and almost immediately had to go and add an attachment that narrowed the opening the air came out. That was to help move wet heavy leaves and I needed it.

The leaf blower wasn’t quite as clumsy as the vacuum but it was a lot clumsier than a rake. I found that I could really only hold the blower one way and it could only blow the leaves in one direction. If there was a fence, bushes, or a tree in that direction then I had to work the leaves around them somehow. With a rake you pull leaves away from obstacles but with a blower you blow the leaves at the obstacle if that’s your only direction. And the cord fell out even more than with the vacuum because I was covering more ground faster. It was not a graceful ballet.

Finally I got to the mower part and I couldn’t get the John Deere started. The battery had lost all its juice. The cold can make a battery loose its charge and if your battery goes dead on cold days then you need a new one. I really should have replaced this one last winter but I got along with a plug-in charger. Then the warm weather came and the battery worked fine. I tried to use the charger on it with no success and got more and more frustrated. Finally I made the twenty minute drive to Sears Auto and bought a new battery. They didn’t have any on the shelf but the guy found me one in the back. I was glad for that since I wasn’t in the mood for any more frustration.

I popped the new battery in the tractor and got it started. It didn’t start as smoothly as it should but only took half a minute and the new battery could easily handle that. Then I mowed and mowed and mowed. I’m not even sure how long I mulched those leaves for. Maybe it was half an hour. Maybe it was forty five minutes. Seems like forever though. And it got cold out. After I was going for about ten minutes I noticed the sun going away and the wind picking up. Gave me a chill. Not enough to make me go and get a warmer outfit, I had a hat, wool coat, and those fingerless gloves, but enough to make it take a while to warm up afterwards.

And one final note. Mulching leaves is a weird thing. At first there are so many of them that you have to be careful. They build up and get stuck in front of and under the mower. There can be so many that they stall the mower by stopping the blades. Then they get down to a more manageable level and I mow them over and over and it seems to be doing nothing. There are just so many leaves. But then they reach a point where they almost disappear. They get chopped up into such small pieces and spread out over such a wide area that they fall in-between the blades of grass. It’s like the end of a magic trick. Stupid leaves.

Sometimes things take a while. A long while. Let your mind drift back in time to the year 1999. That’s when I first started this project. Fifteen years ago. Or at least I think so. That’s the creation date I have on some scans but sometimes those dates get mixed up. I’m pretty sure this one is right. It all started because, on rare occasion, I like to work with someone else’s images rather than my own. That lead me to discover that I could buy old photo negatives on Ebay. So sometime back in 1999 I discovered and bought some black and white medium format (2-1/4) negatives of nude dancers in Paris from 1964. There were eleven negative in total all of behind the scenes type stuff. A woman showing off and dancing for the camera not on stage but backstage near the dressing room. But what to do with them?

First of all, back in 1999, I had no scanner that could handle scanning in medium format negatives. Such scanners were rare and expensive then. But at work, back in my good ol’ Marvel Comics days, I had access to a scanner that at least had a transparency adapter on it. That meant I could scan them in but the scans might not be very good since it really wasn’t meant for photo negatives. And so I scanned them in. Just as predicted the scans weren’t very good. I had eleven substandard scans of photos that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with. So they sat. The scans on my computer and the negatives in sleeves. I’d occasionally pull them out and look at them but nothing got done. No ideas leaped to the front.

Dancers in Paris 1964

Cut to nine years later in 2008. I had just gotten a bunch of old medium format negatives from my mother of family pictures. I needed something to scan them in with so I started looking at scanners again. Turns out that not only had scanners gotten cheaper but they’d also gotten much better at scanning medium format negatives. I ended up buying one for just a couple of hundred dollars that could do the job well. It took a couple of thousand dollars to buy a scanner in 1999 that could do that. So I rescanned the Paris nude dancer negatives. And then nothing. They sat.

Usually when I do one of my large photo collages I have an idea in mind before hand. And a lot of photos. For example I have made large photos of the weddings of friends of mine. I take pictures during the whole wedding and then arrange them into one large photo in such a way as to try and capture the event. In these days of digital photography I can easily take a thousand pictures at a wedding to choose from. Eleven pictures is a lot less.

The lack of color was also daunting. Often my ideas in my photos have to do with color. I’m forever using color to draw the eye around the photo and always use small bits of photos just for their color. I have all sorts of photos of odds and ends that I use for their color and texture in any given composition. A bit of blue sky here, a bit of green grass there, and some leaves of a red maple can really help pull a photo together. But none of that would be of any use with old black and white photos.

Now we’ll change time-frames again to this past summer. Once again I was looking at Ebay for stuff and found a photographer selling his negatives. They were medium format black and white negatives of alt-model Nettie Harris who I am familiar with through following her Tumblr blog. I figured I’d bid on a couple of them and ended up with two single image negatives. I decided I wasn’t going to make one of my large 20×28 inch photos out of it and would try to make one of my smaller 10×15 inch photos with the Nettie Harris negative as the main image. I would use a bunch of my own street photography to build the rest of the composition. The problem was how to integrate color and black and white photography. I’ve found that to be troublesome.

The obvious answer is to add color to the black and white photo. But that’s not as easy as it seems. With a computer and Photoshop there are lots of ways to add color to a photo but most of them are unsuitable for all sorts of esthetic reasons. I must have tried a dozen different ways until I found one I liked. And it’s simple. I used Photoshop’s “Monochrome” image mode to turn pieces of the black and white photo to black and whatever color I choose. This kept the values of the photo mostly the same for visual continuity but allowed me to drop in blocks of color. In other words it doesn’t interrupt the image as much as other ways I tried to add color. So I finished the Nettie Harris photo.

Nettie Harris Photo 1

Then my mind drifted back to those Paris dancer negatives I bought almost fifteen years ago now. I knew I wanted to use just the eleven photos and not any of my street photos and thought the monochrome blocks of color would work to tie the whole thing together. This time I used a transparent border around the color bits though. I think the small border added a cohesiveness to the whole thing. I even went back and added those borders to the first Nettie Harris photo.

The funny thing is that I scanned in the Paris negatives yet again but then after a day or two of figuring out the layout and composition of the whole thing I discovered I didn’t like the scans I just made. So I had to change some settings and scan the negative for a fourth time and then rebuild all that I had just done. The final image size is 20×28 inches on a 22×30 inch piece of paper. Yes, I really did make an actual one of a kind physical photograph out of this. I print the large photo out in pieces, cut the pieces out along their white borders, and then paste the pieces down onto a large piece of drawing paper. So the white borders are actually the paper showing through in-between the photos. I like the physical nature such a finished piece provides.

So here it is, fifteen years later, finally finished. Things don’t usually take me that long so I find it a little hard to believe that I actually finished it. It’ll sink in though.

Nettie Harris Photo 2