Lunch in Texaz

JWise Food, Photo of the Day

Texaz Grill in Phoenix, Arizona

No, I didn’t drive to Texas for lunch, I had lunch at the Texaz Grill at Bethany Home Rd and 16th St. in Phoenix, Arizona. It was after the lunch crowds had departed that I sat down for my meal. There were some folks at the bar laughing it up and a couple of other tables occupied, but Mondays through Fridays by 3:00 p.m. things are pretty quiet at most restaurants around the valley. The Texaz Grill is the place you want to go for Chicken Fried Steak. On the other hand, Texaz Grill is not the place to go if you are trying to eat healthy, hence I come here alone as I have not rebelled yet against my obesity, while everyone else I know seems to have found dietary enlightenment.

Daniel

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Daniel Billotte out for lunch, but not quite so out for lunch as had happened some years ago

Had lunch with Daniel Billotte today. Not the lunch we had planned, the Pho joint wasn’t open so we scrambled to find something nearby. We ended up at a small urban bistro. The story here is that Daniel and I from time to time make an effort to stay in contact. He and I met some 15 years ago while working at the Marion Foundation. During the intervening years, Daniel has often gone nomad finding himself living in New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji for close to half a year, working at an apple orchard to support his scuba adventures on the Great Barrier Reef. For a time he lived in Santa Cruz where I was never sure if he was a programmer, a graphic designer, or a surfer. A year or more goes by and I get an email from the guy, he’s in India, still haven’t found out the specifics about that trip. Then about a year ago, he announces that he’s getting married in Sedona, Arizona. I’m not big on weddings, no matter how good a friend someone is, so I cannot offer details about that event either. Today we got together to talk about travels, discuss some technology threads, touch on politics, evolution, taxes, and just shoot the poop.

Patou

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Patou Cheval at Starbucks in Phoenix, Arizona

Meet Patou Cheval, I did at Starbucks today. But this wasn’t simply meeting someone for the first time, I have known Patou for about 8 years. Not that you could call us friends, our meetings have all been in the realm of chance encounters. Today though, this became downright strange. You see, I first met Patou with her husband, she was pregnant. I was watching my friend Sonal’s Indian grocery when this couple came in and the 3 of us spent some time talking. It is on the rare occasions that Sonal asks me to step in to watch the store for a few hours, or maybe a day. It was again on one of those days that Patou came in with her mom with her newborn daughter.

Some years would pass before on some random day when I was picking up lunch for Caroline that I see Patou in the vitamin shop, where she was working. I stopped to say hi and was quickly off. Again a year or 2 passes and I’m in Whole Foods shopping and guess who is working in the non-foods section? Yep, Patou. I saw here again another couple of times and then a couple of years of nothing. A little more than a year or thereabouts, Caroline and I were leaving Paradise Valley Mall, and guess who should be walking into the mall at the same entry/exit we are using? Right, it was Patou, but this time with her two daughters. We talked a while and said goodbye.

Now here we are a year later and maybe 8 miles from our last chance encounter. I had just sat down to work on my book and over my shoulder, I think I am recognizing someone’s voice – sure enough, it is Patou. We were both astounded and agreed there was something peculiar about how this has now happened nearly half-a-dozen times since our first hello of 8 years ago. Caroline, Patou, and I have sent tentative plans to meet for dinner, how much you want to bet the best-made plans never come to fruition, and 2 years down the road, we’ll run into each other while on vacation in another state?

Omissions and Corrections

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My typical writing environment while working on Stay In The Magic

My blog has been greatly neglected over the previous nine or so months, the reason being, I have been writing a book. I thought I would have been done by now, but here on my third draft, I start to wonder if I’ll ever finish. Well, I will, and it should now be sooner rather than later. After this reworking I will hand the manuscript over to one person and from her suggestions and corrections, I will take one more “final” pass, and then it is out of my hands.

Today’s photo shows what I stared at the first seven months of 2011, papers spread out before me with passages yet to be written, or a page getting a rewrite. Now I am trying to bring closure so I can move on to new projects. When this process does come to an end, I will miss more than a few baristas from my local Starbucks. As an aside between crafting words, I would eavesdrop on customers. If only I was a fiction writer, these folks can break the worst case of writer’s block with their nutty characters and dramatic issues.

I don’t know if I’ll ever attempt to write a book for the general public again, this is time-consuming and often frustrating. On the other hand, it is with amazement that from time to time I come back upon a passage that delights me and I am in near disbelief that the words captured on the paper fell out of my head and into my hand.

Food For Thought

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A table full of fresh veggies from Tonopah Rob's Vegetable Farm in Tonopah, Arizona

Take a good look at these locally grown fruits and veggies, they may soon be one of the last looks you’ll be able to take – outside of marketing materials that will recall a different age. Unless you are into that old-fashioned stuff.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: as recently as 1955 a majority of households had a woman or girl who could sew. Back then, 63% of women and girls knew how to sew, many still knew how to darn socks, spin fiber into yarn, quilt, and weave. By 2006, only 22% of American women and girls knew how to sew. Now I don’t mean to imply this is necessarily a negative, but the fact is, a family is less independent when they are dependent upon larger systems where the local skills for taking care of one’s self are long gone. We humans have a very long history of making textiles, around 20,000 years worth according to some evidence.

Farming is in a similar situation, 140 years ago between 70 and 80 percent of our population was employed in agriculture. Today only 2 to 3 percent of the population is employed in agriculture and less than 1 percent of the population claim farming as an occupation. The point being, individuals are now far removed from growing their own food. True, they have greater access to a wider variety of foods, but they are dependent upon the viability of industrial farms, the price of fuel to distribute food across great distances, and if the corporate model decides that a type of produce is no longer a worthy seller, it can simply disappear those items. The good thing is that we no longer have to toil in the back-breaking labor of working the earth. Then again, we don’t know how anymore either.

This brings me to today’s thought. A couple of hundred years ago, people would not have believed that within a relatively short number of generations, humans in Kansas would be buying fresh kiwis that were flown in from New Zealand. A hundred years ago, I doubt many people would have accepted that the majority of their clothes should be disposable, made in India or China, and would wear out in a year with nobody complaining. Modernization has taken much of the drudgery and responsibility for the mundane out of our lives.

The next step is to remove cooking from our lives. Why do we need to cook our own meals? Wouldn’t life be yet another degree better if we could get rid of food that might spoil, be contaminated with e. coli or salmonella, or require all the time of buying cookbooks, finding ingredients, preparing lengthy recipes, with all of the uncertainty of not knowing if our preparation is as good as the chow mein we had in New York City?

So here’s the next big internet idea, the next Amazon, or NetFlix. We’ll call our company, International Frozen Food Incorporated – IFFI for short. Our line of frozen meals will feature recipes from around the globe, made in kitchens from Mumbai to Hong Kong, from Senegal to the Philippines. The customers set their likes and dislikes in a preference file, choose if they are vegetarian, vegan, lactose intolerant, non-pork eater, groundnut allergic, reduced-calorie, diabetic, etc. Then they choose what country’s meals they want to try and as with Netflix, they build a queue of ethnic delights they want to sample and in what order. As with Amazon, meals will feature reviews and ratings. Every week, a new box arrives with the post containing your frozen meals for the week.

Just imagine, IFFI Dim Sum or maybe you’d prefer our IFFI Fish from Malaysia, and what could be better than IFFI Jambalaya direct from New Orleans? Every meal is standardized with a caloric count related to your weight, height, and age. Prices are $3.99 per meal – across the globe!

Some people reading this might think, Wow, sounds great. Personally, I don’t think this sounds like a great idea. We humans are more and more dependent upon monolithic corporate structures that take care of most of our needs in exchange for our brand loyalty. We in turn give up our independence. We have become helpless and would prove useless to ourselves if we needed to grow our own food, make our own clothes, or find clean water. Soon, we will no longer know how to cook for ourselves as we won’t need to.

And what do we get for our reliance on forces and services outside of ourselves? More time to toil at work, play video games, watch TV, and shop as we entertain ourselves to death within the climate-controlled walls of a safe place. Do we really no longer need reality?

Magic Lantern

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Audio tools for Magic Lantern

Today’s entry should feature much larger images. While they are as wide as I can fit in the frame, this is one entry in which visitors should click the images to see the larger captures.

The image on display above, one of eight, is the first screen one sees when starting up the menu system of the Magic Lantern software for a number of Canon HDSLR cameras. After the release of the first DSLR that was able to record HD 1080p video, there was a rush to see just what the camera was capable of. Trammell Hudson was the first to throw his programming skills at writing “enhancement” software on top of Canon’s firmware. The capabilities that were uncovered and offered to professionals and amateurs alike, were nothing less than astounding.

Back to the Audio screen above. We are no longer saddled with the limitations of the Canon software regarding audio. There are audio meters for monitoring what is being recorded in the camera. Many people have now started recording a secondary audio on something like the Zoom H1 microphone/recorder or they bypass the internal microphone entirely and instead are using the Rode VideoMic. Should one decide to record an external audio track, there is a piece of software called Plural Eyes that allows the audio to be synced to the internal audio track – great for shooting music videos where lip-syncing is required.

The Live View settings from Magic Lantern

Live View settings are the settings that affect the Live View monitor when a Canon HDSLR is in Movie record mode. Magic Lantern adds a Histogram or Waveform view of the video signal for measuring exposure values. Zebras are also a useful tool for evaluating exposure, and a personal favorite. False Color is one more method for checking exposure.

Cropmarks are another of my favorite additions to my camera. With them, I’m able to have an overlay on my video screen that identifies the title safe frame and the action safe frame. Stay within those boundaries and your video framing should capture all of the details you require. Ghost Image creates a transparent layer of a photo just taken, I believe this aids in creating panoramas but I could see it also being helpful in shooting stop-motion animation.

Magic Zoom is another tool I love from ML (Magic Lantern). Using the Magic Zoom when you are in manual zoom, preferred when shooting video, a center pop-up image is displayed on your Live View screen that magnifies an area of the video. This area can be moved to focus on a particular item, say a face that you are recording, using the arrow keys. Split Screen and Focus Peak are tools that aid in focusing.

Movie preferences from the Magic Lantern software for Canon HDSLR's

The Movie preferences screen. The most amazing part of the capability represented here is the Bit Rate selection. Users are able to select a higher bit rate for recording video. The standard bit rate from Canon is about 45mbit per second. Setting the Constant Bit Rate to a factor as high as 2.0x (recently limited to this speed as it has proven the safest in pushing the bandwidth higher) and disabling audio while using a fast memory card, I have read of some users achieving an almost 50% improvement with recording bandwidth. This increase in bit rate affects the spatial quality of the image you are recording which, if the shot is a green screen clip destined for compositing in post-production, can give the filmmaker much greater quality in his or her workflow.

The only other function I utilize under this menu is the Movie REC Key. There is an option to use the shutter as the record trigger with a half-press. This is great if you have mounted your camera on a shoulder rig and your hand is holding the grip of the rig. Simply plug in Canon’s cheap wired remote, attach it within easy reach, give the shutter button a half-press and you are recording.

One other thing, if you are using Zebras to verify exposure, it is nice to “Hide” the Zebras when recording so they don’t disturb your view while following the action.

The one menu specific to shooting regular old photographs with Magic Lantern enhancements

If you are serious about photography, there are a few things on the Shoot menu that are of super value. The first is HDR Bracketing. The photographer is now able to choose to shoot between 2 and 9 shots using between 0.5 and 5 exposure values (EV).

Built-in Intervalometer, yeah, we can shoot timelapse. LCD Remote shot allows the camera to be set up and with a wave of the hand near the back of the camera, we can trigger the shutter. Audio RemoteShot allows for the triggering of the shutter using a loud sound, say a hand clap. Motion Detect, try using this on a stormy night while trying to shoot lightning! Bulb Timer is what every night sky star photographer needs.

* Added August 24: There has been a recent update that allows timelapse photographers to shoot from day into night, with ML software calculating the change in light to adjust shutter speed and aperture – for those of you who understand this, it is AMAZING!

Exposure settings for the Magic Lantern software

Greater control of ISO settings, especially important with video where it has been shown that multiples of 160 ISO are the sweet spots for capturing video with fewer noise artifacts. Being able to use a shutter speed of 1/48 is also one of the techniques that give videos, that filmy look we people enjoy when watching movies. Recently Alex, one of the Magic Lantern programmers, added the ability to press the “Flash” button on the front of the camera while in Movie mode, which brings up an overlay on the Live View screen allowing for the easy changing of ISO and White Balance. It is a wow feature for convenience.

The Picture Style selection is not unique to ML, but it is still very important. My User Defined style is the Technicolor flat profile. This profile removes much contrast and deeply saturated colors, for the average consumer, this ability might only be frustrating. But for the aspiring filmmaker, this allows for the recording of details that are lost in consumer color profiles. This also requires that the artist understand that they will have to learn a little something about color correction in their editing software or in their workflow while working in Adobe After Effects.

* Added August 24: Another fantastic update, there is a new menu item that has been added to the above screen. This new function allows you to shoot in one picture style, but while setting up your shot you can preview using a different style so you can best judge what final colors you will be color correcting to should you be shooting in a flat style, such as the Technicolor picture style.

The Focus menu screen from Magic Lantern

Much attention is paid to focus. How can one make a good movie if the shots are out of focus? With the HDSLR filmmaking environment taking off, there are accessories helping with focus such as attachable viewfinders that magnify your LCD and shade it for easier viewing. There are those who opt for external HDMI-enabled monitors that are two or three times larger than the screen on the back of our cameras. But these are not necessary to get right to work. Using the magnification tools already on the camera and the assistance of ML enhancements, I am able to find perfect focus using the screen just as it is.

Trap Focus will snap a photo when an object in a scene comes into focus, say a tiger in the wild passing your camera while you have Motion Detect enabled!

Follow Focus uses the arrow keys to move the lens in and out of focus.

The big but still under development feature here is Rack Focus. Using a combination of selections including Follow Focus, Focus Speed, Focus Delay, Focus Direction, and Focus A Point, the filmmaker is able to shoot a scene with two objects or people, starting with a focus on the person in the foreground and then bring the focus on to the other person who is in the background, or the other way around. Rack Focus allows you to set the focal points and with the push of a button, the focus moves between the two points. Press it again, and you return to the starting focus point.

Hey you macro photographers, need to take a bunch of photos of an object but want a long depth of field with everything in focus? Try using Stack Focus. A series of photographs will be taken that you can stack into a single photograph – with everything in focus.

The Tweak menu for Magic Lantern

The Tweak menu. Not much to change here, it has been set up by the programmers to be the most functional right after install. Good idea to read the User Guide and learn about this stuff, especially before asking busy programmers who are donating their time for this project, about things probably answered in the User Guide.

The Debug menu in Magic Lantern

Not a lot here in the Debug menu for the casual user, but there are two new functions that are very helpful. The first is the Dim Display item. If it is not important for you to monitor what you are recording on the LCD monitor of your camera, this will allow the display to dim and thus saves your battery. You can also decide to turn the display clean off using the Turn Off Display function – selectable with times of 5 seconds to 15 minutes before the display turns off.

The second to last screen is the Config screen, which I’m obviously not including. With that minor screen with but a few selections, one controls the config files. We are offered up to four different configurations. You may decide to have a configuration with menu items that only pertain to filming using tools that help you when shooting on a tripod or dolly, while another config file is best suited to handheld shots. A third config can be created for night shots and a fourth for regular photography.

The final screen is the Information menu. Here you will find helpful hints, an FAQ, and other stuff. Another very useful recent addition to ML was the inclusion of onboard help files. When in the ML menus, if you press DISP while hovering over a function item, a help file will be displayed for those times you forgot how something works.

There is much more to this software than I have written about. I cannot truly convey the convenience and opportunity offered to an aspiring or even professional filmmaker that ML is giving us. When you consider that 1920×1080 HD video is effectively 2k video that can easily be scaled for broadcast in a movie theater, you start to realize that amazing things are happening in the film and storytelling industries.

Why use an HDSLR and Magic Lantern? Because a Canon T2i, also known as the 550d only costs about $700 without a lens. Combine this with the great depth-of-field that can be had with SLR lenses and you have a powerful tool that in many instances can compete with cameras costing more than $10,000.

If you find yourself intrigued and own a Canon T1i, T2i, T3i, 50D, 60D, 7D, or 5D, there is a good chance you will fall in love with the capability given to you for free to explore more of the art you are learning and practicing.

If you own a 5D, check this LINK to find Magic Lantern for your camera. If you own one of the other cameras, check out this LINK to find a new Unified Branch of the Magic Lantern.