Even New PRS Guitars Need Attention From A Tech

Contrary to Paul Reed Smith's claim in numerous interviews, you cannot walk into any guitar shop, pick up any PRS SE and play it on stage that night. It will need a going-over by a tech. Maybe the American guitars are that good, but the SE's are not. The same is true of Fender, Gibson, Epiphone, Squier, or any other guitar costing less than £1,000. You may be lucky, but it would be easier to take it straight to a good guitar tech to look over and sort out the obvious issues.

Over the last not quite four years (seems much longer) I have bought five guitars - traded one - one cheap electronic amp (the Boss Katana) and one not-so-cheap valve amp (the Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Reissue). Here's the schedule of repairs.

The Boss Katana (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) didn't need any work. It's a PCB and electronic (aside from the final power amp stage), and so can be made to high standards out of the box, and quality control can be digital, and hence cheap.

The Fender Princeton '65 (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) needed the pre-amp valves replacing- after only eight months. They got it back to me in a week, and I think it sounds better than it did when I bought it.

The first guitar was the Epiphone Les Paul (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). It needed something doing to the electrics, probably the jack socket, and the tech lowered the action and polished the frets while he was at it.

The second is the PRS McCarty 594 SE (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). That needed a dry solder joint on one of the tone pots fixing, and later on a decent jack socket, a little neck relief and some work on the nut to correct the playability and intonation of the G string.

The third is the Squier Paranormal Telecaster (from Regent Sounds, Denmark St). That needed a decent jack socket and a better selector switch. Upgrading the pick-ups was my little indulgence.

The fourth is the Fender Vintera Mustang (from Sell Us Your Guitar via Reverb). That came with the tremolo system so badly set-up, the bridge was at an angle to the body and the adjustment screws were cross-threaded. My tech sorted all that out, polished the frets, relieved the neck and oiled a dry fretboard.

The last is the PRS Silver Sky SE(*) (from Wildwire Guitars via Reverb). As delivered the tremolo was locked down and there was some string buzz towards the upper frets. My tech unlocked and adjusted the trem, watered and fed the fretboard, polished the frets, adjusted the nut, and replaced the penny-pinching jacket socket with a proper Switchgear one.

This reminds me of what cars used to be in the 1960's and 70's - there would always be something that needed fixing and usually something that rattled. Automakers spent millions upon millions on robot automation assembly to get rid of those problems. Ordinary cars today are built to standards that were engineers' pipe dreams in the 1960's. Today's guitars are built to the same standards as yesterday's cars. The bodies are cut by CNC routers, and the pickups are wound by CNC winders, all the other parts are made in the same way they would have been back in 1960, and all are assembled by hand. A lot of guitars get sold each year, but not enough to justify the kind of investment that would be needed to make a robot assembler and installer for the wiring loom. If that was even possible.

A basic set-up from a tech costs around £50 - £100 depending on what needed doing. It's worth the money.

Everything you have heard about the Silver Sky SE is true. It sounds like you dreamed a Strat should sound like, plays like a dream (now) and Wildwire had one that weighed just over 7lbs. The Mustang could easily become my default guitar: the Mustang neck pickup should be right up there with the Telecaster neck pickup as something legendary. And it weighs 7lbs. Whereas the Paranormal weighs 8.5lbs, but sounds and plays like it should. The 594SE also weighs 7lbs, plays really well and has a lovely round, thick jazzy neck sound, and a snarly bridge tone - at least that's how I have it dialled in.

Props to Andy at Richmond Guitar Workshop for sorting all these things out. Support your local tech.

(*) Yes, I know I said recently that Strats were not cool and I couldn't see myself playing one. But you see, Silver Skys are not Strats. It's the headstock. Makes all the difference. Also it has three single-coil pickups and a five-way switch, whereas Strats have a five-way switch and three single-coil pickups, which is entirely different. And Guitar Tube says that Silver Skys are not Strats, so it must be true.

RAF Museum, Colidale - Part One

I will have a longer post about taking photographs at the RAF Museum, Colindale, illustrated by shots that didn't work out so well. When the weather allows my brain to run at more than 70% capacity: I have a mid-1950's brain that did not come with enough cooling for these tropical temperatures. Anyway, here are some that I think work okay.

Top down: Messerschmidt 109; Gloucester Meteor; Jet Provost; Provost, Meteor, AN Other; Fokker D VII. 
 

Centrepoint Close-Up

 

It's Centrepoint of course, and therefore at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and throughly iconic. But in this picture, you have to know the building to know that. Otherwise it's some random 1960's concrete office block with some random glass geometric gadget in front of it. It's a neat picture, but I'm not trying to exploit the iconicity? iconicness? of Centre Point. In fact, I'm hiding it. A lot of my photos do that: I don't take pictures of iconic things, partly because "everyone does" and partly because the Iconic Thing distracts from the composition and the picture. If that makes sense. 

Saffron Hill

Oh darn tootin' amma blame the weather. It's to do with Europe being off the English coast or something like that, I blame the bureaucrats in Brussels. Or the CCP. Or The Russians. Or the Democratic Party. Or maybe all of them, since they all meet secretly in Mae's Cafe, Brighton, every other month on the third Saturday for a full English and to hatch a new round of conspiracies. They speak in Really Bad International English, which Mae speaks fluently, and she passes on what she can make out of their chatter to me and the editor of the Financial Times, who ignores it and then wonders why he has the feeling he's already heard about whatever it is when it happens. She used to tell the editor of The Economist, but they wrote about what the leaders should be doing. Because The Economist can run the world so much better than anyone else except the BBC. Mae never tells the BBC because she knows the BBC is the propaganda branch of the Security Services when it isn't being the media wing of Right-Thinking-People, or perhaps Left-Thinking-People, or maybe People-With-Their-Heads-Up-Their....

Moving along...

This is looking down Saffron Hill, near Farringdon, and it took me a while to see that it's actually a good picture.

The Ironmonger Est 1835

I do like a photograph of a shop sign. Other people may like snapping celebrities, or pigeons, or cats, or passers-by scratching their ears, or other such cutsie things, but I like a shop sign. So here is one.

Central London from Parliament Hill

This year's photography condition is that I have to use the 90mm (135mm equivalent) prime lens that I splurged for second-hand in spring. It takes shots like this, and there is almost no zooming-by-cropping. I like shots of Distant Things (as opposed to things-in-the-distance) and that lens does it about the way I see the scene. So score one with this...

Cancelling My Subscription to The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has put its online subscription price up by about £10 / month. Which means I have to do a whole lot of overthinking about whether I want to carry on with it. I subscribed to it back in 2020 because it was the only paper that had a remotely sensible attitude to the Lunacy of the Lockdowns. I needed to know what idiotic measures the Government were going to impose for the next twenty minutes, and what else was going on.

It gives me something to look at over breakfast, if I'm not watching a movie or a box-set episode. If WW3 breaks out (oh wait, it has, read this https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9914/ . £21.8bn nearly all 'gifted'? We're at war, we're just not sending our unemployed young men to be killed) I'm sure the Telegraph will let me know.

Increasingly, I am less and less interested in what it is telling me. Westminster in-fighting. Which incompetent and clueless person will be the next PM. The Trans toilet thing. A few days ago it did a piece of undercover reporting about people smugglers that I hope our Intelligence Services already knew but didn't want the targets to know they knew. But who knows, maybe our Intelligence Services are too busy with "right-wing extremists" (and how I wish that was a mis-direction, but I bet it isn't). Otherwise I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: And something is happening here / But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?

So there are two questions. First, how will I know that WW3 now involves the UK being bombed? I've just put a link to Reuters Europe (translations into English available) in my web browser. That should cover the news. I've also added the ONS front page https://www.ons.gov.uk/ to assuage my endless thirst for statistics.

Second, how will I know what is going on with the culture and trends in the UK and world? Now, see, this is the controversial part. I don't actually care. If I want to see what's new in books, I will browse round Foyles. Qubuz keeps me up with music, and the Curzon website with movies. I could care less about the commercial cinema. I still haven't entirely given up You Tube yet, even though the AI slop keeps on seeping in as fast as I can click Don't Recommend Channel.

Finally, what am I going to read at breakfast?

For the last week, it's been my art books. Much better for the soul.

And I cancelled my subscription.

(Edit 24/7/26) There's no way to actually cancel the subscription from The Telegraph's end. I turned off the payment in PayPal. That got me an e-mail asking me to update my payment details. I called customer services and explained what I was doing and they confirmed that cancelling the payment was the way to do it. I got another reminder, which I ignored. Then I got a slightly snotty mail saying that because I had not updated my payment details, they were cancelling my subscription. Like I was delinquent. Way to make the customer think about going back.

Joni Mitchell's Blue

I have been converted to an artist on very few occasions. The John Peel Show in 1970 was one of them.

Oh yeah, I thought, she wrote Clouds. May as well give it a listen. Within half-an-hour I was a devoted follower of Joni Mitchell. I bought For The Roses when it came out, saw her at the Victoria Palace Theatre a couple of years later, and bought every album as it came out.

Blue is a Perfect Album. There isn't one note that could be changed, one word that could be improved, one inflection of her voice that might be different, or one note of the accompaniment that might be pepped-up. Every. Single. Song.

I was a sixteen year old OND Engineering student at the time. I was going to the local college of further education, when most of the boys I'd known at school had stayed on to the Sixth Form. Around the same time I had discovered Weather Report's first album in the a stall in the nearby market, and was grooving to Miles At The Fillmore and the subsequent albums.

Describing the mood of the 1970's is more or less impossible now. The media talked about a generation gap in attitudes between my generation and our parents: it felt real, but I have no idea what it consisted of. They could remember the war, and rationing, and really thought that nuclear war might break out as a result of the Seven Day's War. A lot of them had been in the Services. Rationing was over when we were born, and conscription was dropped before we were of age. Jobs were easy to get for school-leavers, and the best employers went round universities on what they called the Milk Round to interview and recruit graduates.

Life was simpler, but rougher, even in the cosseted streets of the south-west London suburbs. Mixed schools were pretty much for the low(er)-achievers: good grades needed single-sex schools. The girls in the posh schools were, I found out years later, actually quite wild. We had nothing like them in our boy's school. Boys pushed and shoved and formed cliques. I was one of those boys whose friends at school were all the other boys who didn't have any friends. I wasn't in the rowing team (my school had an ace rowing team, and the best rowers wound up in the Boat Race teams. Until the Americans came along and ruined it all), and I wasn't in the football team, and I couldn't make the chess club either... There were fewer divorces, but consequently more un-happy marriages and more drinking. GPs handed out Valium or speed like candy to anyone complaining that they were miserable or moody or whatever else. The well brought-up boys and girls of the suburban bourgeois started smoking and drinking when they were sixteen.

There were fewer cars, you could park almost anywhere in London any time you wanted, the trees were smaller and scraggly, shops closed at 1PM on a Wednesday and on Sunday the country was closed. It was pretty much closed by about six in the evening, except around the West End, and theatres and cinemas. Heck, the radio and TV stopped broadcasting about nine in the evening.

Joni Mitchell sung us songs from a different world. Her lyrics talked about Greek Islands and seedy bars in American towns, and made heartbreaking romance out of the mundane: but when he's gone / Me and them lonesome blues collide / the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide. It could be bathos, but he voice soars when she sings about the frying-pan and you can hear how much it hurts her to see the half-empty pan. Also, your unconscious notices that she has a fried breakfast, so you know she's one of us.

The darker days songs of For The Roses, and the grown-up disappointments of Court and Spark were yet to come. By the time she got to the mystery that is Hissing of Summer Lawns she was portraying the mood of the 1970's.

But on Blue she is still happy, still in love, travelling the world even if she wants to be back in California, which in 1970 was a paradise on earth - except for the bits in Dogtown and Z-Boys which weren't.

Keeping The Internet Safe For Children, The Easy, Free Speech, Privacy Preserving, Way

MPs don't not want to protect the children from dodgy content. They don't give a damn about children's welfare: if they did, they would make sure there were jobs for the kids to go to when they left school. Something that stopped happening in the 1980's.

The Treasury and the Cabinet want the money. Hence the focus on You Tube, TikTok and other companies with billions in the bank and business operations in the UK. If a website has no business presence in the UK, its owners can legally ignore Ofcom.

MPs, and civil servants, don't want the dodgy content, or at least, they don't want it so darn easily available. Far-left extremism literature is okay when it is only available in three specialist bookshops in the UK, but geez, when it's available by going the The Guardian's website... that's too easy. So they should like the first part of my solution.

The Children's White List. This is a list of sites where the Government deem children are allowed to go. What's on the White List? Not a lot. Wikipedia; the BBC; any .gov.uk website; You Tube for kids; online libraries; Child Helplines, that sort of thing. Like the Children's section in bookshops and libraries. Let's have an app that allows them access to their school's website and resources (left to the developers as an exercise), and university websites. Maybe it could be held on the device, maybe by ISPs. It's not permanent and can and should be updated frequently. Start small and add.

Age Verification by device. The OS by default is set to filter all internet traffic through the White List. In the OS Settings, there is an option to Age Verify. Take that, and a little app will ask for random digits from the user's NI number (in the UK), which will be sent to a Government database, which will answer YES or NO depending on how old it thinks the user is. The database will keep a record of the device IMEI, date and time of the request (to handle repeated requests that may be someone trying to guess). Nothing else. If the device gets a YES it will activate the option to remove the White List filter, which the user can select. There will also be an option to Impose White List, which will de-activate the option to remove the White List and revert to the filter. To remove the filter, use the Age Verify option again. Re-setting the device re-imposes the White List, but re-booting after an upgrade doesn't. You get the idea.

How do your kids now access You Tube? It's not on the White List, so they need a device that belongs to someone who is Age Verified. That would be the parents. The kids can't open a parental device. The parents aren't going to give away their NI numbers. Nor are they going to hand over their device to their kids.

The OS makers could sort this out in about, oh, five days or less. The Government could set up a basic White List and change it as time goes on. Free speech is for adults, not kids, and the White List does not affect kids.

So, done, modulo details.

(A prize for identifying that quote.)

No Fusion - A Couple of Sample Shots

 (Taken with NoFusion 56mm HEIF+ iPhone SE2)

I have whinged before about the iPhone's uncanny-valley computational photography. The over-sharp details, the over-defined skies. So I went looking for a camera app that avoids it, and isn't the subscription-based Leica one. After looking at some videos, NoFusion seemed to be a decent option, even with an annual subscription, so I downloaded it. You have to select the HEIF+ option to dodge the iPhone computational photography, and it adds a heartbeat to the save time, but it looks better. I know a perfectly blue sky with bright red cranes doesn't show it well, but the top photo does, and come on... who doesn't love a blue sky with bright red cranes?

Why Two Strats (Teles, Les Paul's) Sound So Different (It's NOT the Tonewood)

Why can two guitars from the same model range, allegedly with the same pickups, tuners and switches, sound just different enough so that you prefer one over the other? Shouldn't they be the same? Because modern manufacturing techniques? I watched a couple of videos on how guitar pots are constructed, and very enlightening it was.



There's a sweeper arm attached to the knob, which runs over a ring of resistive material. At both ends are bits of bare metal that the sweeper can reach. One of those ends is at 1 and the other is at 10. At those positions, there is no resistance. As soon as the sweeper gets wholly on to the resistive ring, there's resistance. (Half-on and half-off, the electricity sees the zero resistance half-off bit and goes down that path, so the sweeper is not on the ring until it's all on the ring.) This why there is the well-known leap in tone or volume change on reaching 0 or 10. Personally, I think that's bad design, but there it is masquerading as a feature.

It seems guitar manufacturers think that 10% variation on the resistance of the pots and the capacitance of the cap is acceptable. This means one guitar might have a 550k ohm pot and another a 450k ohm pot, which is more than 20% different, which you will be able to hear. A 0.022 microfarad capacitor (a popular choice for tone controls) would vary from 0.0198 to 0.0242 microfarads, and that makes a difference of e.g. 3,000 ohms (!) in the reactance to A440, which is 16%, and that will also be noticeable.

That's why one Fender or Gibson sounds better than another, because the components vary so widely. (Paul Reed Smith says we can go into any guitar store anywhere in the world, pick out the same make and model of his guitars, and it will sound the same. Which if it is true means his manufacturers are doing some wicked quality control. If so, how did they miss the dry solder joint in my 594?)

But here's the thing.

The difference between any two guitars played through the same amp with the same settings is most noticeable when playing clean, and with either wide-open or mid-point dial settings. Reverb and delay blur the details, as does modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, univibe), and once the distortion goes beyond edge-of-breakup, no-one can tell the difference between a £100 Harley Benton S-style and a £6,000 Les Paul. Add enough effects and no-one can tell if you are playing a Custom Shop Jazzmaster or a Squire 335. A few dozen kilo-ohms difference between the pot values will vanish in the noise.

So that, I think, is why guitar-makers feel they can get away with what hi-fi manufacturers would blanche at. Anyway, this is about tradition, and traditional construction was even more erratic. Manufacturing has come a very long way since 1980 and even 1990, but guitar electrics did not seem to join the ride.

If Fender is prepared to use skanky (because that's what taking kit from the 10% bin is) guitar pots, why wouldn't they do the same for their amp pots? Makes a mockery of all those settings for this and that tone (you know, "to get that so-and-so sound, use 5 on the treble, 6 on the mid-range and 3 on the bass") because the writer's 5 may well be my 6 or 4. It really amounts to no more than "keep twiddling, it's around there somewhere".

90mm Prime Photos

So I have been out and about with the 90mm prime, and liking the results. This one is an official London Street Photography shot, for which I get 50 points,

and this one demonstrates why taking photos in London when Spring has sprung is so difficult. Everywhere you turn there's a big splotch of green blocking the details. It doesn't go away until autumn.

And it is great for getting close-ups of dogs who just love going for a walk in the Thames.

How To Overthink A New Guitar

The Les Paul and Flying V are religious icons. If you want to drop a Flying V at my place, I will not turn it away. The SG looks like Batman's ears. The 3XX-series look like workmanlike hollow-bodies for session players. The Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Explorer, and others, look quirky and interesting. We will pass over those Ibanez with long curly horns, Strandbergs, Mayones, headless guitars, and other weird modern stuff. Also 7-strings. Gretsch's and the like are too big and hefty for my old shoulders. Anything with a Bigsby is just... why?

There are two basic electric guitar sounds: humbuckers (Gibson) and single-coils (Fender). There are variations of single-coils - Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster, P90 - and each has a slightly different clean tone, but sound very similar when going into distortion, as this shows...



Humbuckers are the same: a common characteristic sound with differences around the edges which fade when going into distortion. Watch this...



Can split humbuckers can get close enough to a single-coil sound? Well, watch this...



Three things from this. The Strat was always identifiable, but only just; in the final section, all of them could have been Les Pauls, because that's what distortion does; otherwise split-coil is more or less the same as single-coil (because that's what coil splits do, only take output from one of the humbucker coils).

Turns out the PRS McCarty's have coil taps, not splits. Here's the difference...



My PRS McCarty 594 SE ticks the double-humbucker and coil tap boxes. The Paranormal Tele kinda ticks the offset look and Tele / Jazzmaster pickups. In theory that leaves P90's, about which someone said...

When compared to Fender-style single-coils, P90s are noticeably fatter and warmer. They don't have quite the same sparkling top end or quack, but they compensate with a more substantial midrange and beefier low end

Okay, so given the range of tones I have recently understood I can get by making the 594 and Princeton do tone acrobatics, I'm not sure this is going to fill any gaps. P90 guitars are expensive unless it's a Yamaha Revstar, weighing around 9lb, or a Sire L7V New Gen which is a Les Paul shape and maybe heavy as well.

I would like a Jaguar or a Mustang (who wouldn't)? But. The affordable ones do not have the original toggle switches and circuitry. Guitars with the original circuitry cost over £2,000 even in the second-hand market. Without the extra switching, it is not quite the real deal. I'm not a collector.

So to fill what I'm missing in the sounds I have, I need a Strat. So, now, uh, this is where it gets awkward.

The Fender Stratocaster is the most played electric guitar in music history. Yet 1) the whammy bar is in the wrong place; 2) the tremolo goes out of tune too easily; and 3) the controls are in the wrong place; 4) Fender's quality control is erratic, on a wall of the same model Strat, no two will sound the same; 5) it does not look cool. Yes, you read that right. It's too long in the waist. Those horns are disconcertingly thick close up. Some of the headstocks can be over-large. It’s a bloke’s guitar, and I’m not a bloke.

By contrast the Telecaster is discreetly, unutterably, cool. Zippo lighter cool. Ray-Ban cool. Lou Reed played one for years. The Boss plays one. Julian Lage plays one. The Tele came in a vision from God to Leo Fender. It is the guitar that shows up and plays. Hell, Mike Bloomfield played one at that notorious Dylan Newport gig. Ralph Macchio uses one in the duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads. What more do you want?

Well, those position 2 and 4 Strat tones for one thing.

The Player II series offers chambered Strats and Teles, putting them within my weight requirement, so a visit to Epsom or Guildford is in the offing.

There's birthdays, and un-birthdays, and Christmas and un-Christmas. Plenty of occasions.

Re-Thinking Zoom Lenses (And Getting A Fuji 90mm Prime)

Buying a zoom lens for the X-E4 has been in the Pending tray over the winter, and I've taken it out now. Which means watching more YT reviews. Now play this (for about ten seconds to get the point)



and if that doesn't remind you of an extending p***s to you, I can guarantee it will to someone on a London street. Those zooms look like a neat package tucked away, but whip one out and give it a yank, and it's damn nearly fourteen inches long. That's going to make the ladies turn their heads and not in a good way. Everyone for about fifty yards around will see you waving it around, peering down the EVF and think you are going to invade their... privacy. On a tripod, with the flip-screen flipped, and operating the shutter with a cable so there's no obvious contact between you and the camera, it may just pass, but tripods mean "professional photography" for which you may need a licence from the Council - you need one from the Port of London Authority to shoot with a tripod on their river and riverbanks.

I can't, I just can't. I had zoom lenses for my OM-10 back n the day and none of them behaved like extending p***ses. Maybe in the country or by the sea with no-one watching, but in Covent Garden? You try and let me know how it works out for you.

So there went my plan to get a zoom lens for the X-E4. No-one makes discreet internal zooms for X-Mount. Yet. I would imagine it would cost a whole lot of money even by the standards of Fuji lenses. If I'm going to zoom, and a lot of the better shots I took in the past were zoomed to nearly the max on my Panasonic DMZ-TZ40, I'm going to need a smaller lens. For instance the Panasonic Lumix TZ99, with a 4/3's 20.2 MP sensor and a max 30x optical zoom. That's around £520 on Amazon, and MPB only has one at near-full price, which means a) nobody buys this, or b) having bought it, nobody wants to sell it. One is very bad and one is very good.

Another plan is to get the longest X-Mount prime I can find / afford, which turns out to be the Fujifilm XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR, which costs £949 new from Fuji and around £480 - £500 on MPB. Fuji prices, right? A while back Roman Fox (and a whole bunch other people, damn the algorithm) did a video on how much he liked this lens, so there's that. The plan would be to use it as the daily driver for the rest of the year, as I use the 27mm (40mm equivalent) pancake now. Learn to see and take 90mm (135mm equivalent) shots.

Or I could do both, but my concern is that if I did get the TZ99, I might never use the X-E4 again, which would be silly. So I did my first order with MPB for the XF 90mm, which arrived presto by DPD. Here's the first couple of decent shots with it...

No cropping, just framing. I had not realised that all those great candid people shots from other people I like were all taken with a telephoto lens.

I could still get the TZ99 later and both bits of kit would have cost no more than a new XF 90mm, so I wouldn't really be spending more. (Which is called "Hobbyist economics".)

Why I'm Stopping My MUBI Subscription

I have been subscribed to the online streaming service MUBI for a LONG TIME - since autumn 2018 according to my viewing history page. It has a contemporary art-house catalogue, occasionally runs a good retrospective (I caught up with a lot of Rossellini movies thanks to that), and sponsors new movies, in part I guess by giving them distribution. I saw some good movies through it.

But for the last couple of years when I run through the catalogue, I have not thought "oh wow, yes, must watch that". Instead I've thought "Seems okay, I could if I didn't need to wash my hair right now" or "Jesus... 165 minutes?" or "Sorry, not interested in the tribulations of a transexual in Baghdad". I'm of the age when "art movie" meant France, Germany, Sweden, American indie, Italian, Kurusawa and Ray. Simpler times.

There's something cutely undergraduate film society about MUBI's choice of films and its descriptions. Whoever writes them has definitely drunk the post-modern feminist everything-is-power-relations Kool Aid, and may go on to a job writing comments for the Tate Modern or National Gallery. Whereas all they really need to do is say "contains Adele Exarchopolos" and I'm in, now that La Reine Isabelle is no longer making movies. Let's say that the pre-occupations of today's film-makers are not mine. I'm watching the Battlestar Galactica box-set again at breakfast.

I watch new movies in the cinema, and part of that is the whole going-to-the-Curzon thing (i'm not really an Everyman Man).

Also, MUBI is a subscription service. I have access to the Curzon catalogue, because Sis very kindly for Christmas bought me a Curzon membership (which pays for itself with the free movies) through which I can watch a movie for what amounts to a nominal rental. The films it has now are more interesting to me than the MUBI films, though there is some overlap.

So I have just pressed the button on "Cancel Subscription" in my iPhone settings. Not really because I needed to save the money, but to stop there being one more thing I should be doing but am not.

Film Emulation Bracketing (on Fuji X-E4)

Bracketing on the X-E4. I kinda knew what it was - it takes three pictures of the same scene with one parameter varying - but wasn't sure what I would do with it. Until I saw it did film emulation bracketing. Suddenly I could take lots of shots with three different film emulations and compare them.

The Standard / Velvia / Astia emulations can produce a lot of shadow, which it often takes shoving the Shadow Adjustment clear over to 1.0 to reduce. Those algorithms produce way more shadow that the human eye sees, or maybe the eye does some computational photography as well, just not as egregious as Apple's. A first pass through convinced me that Monochrome was way more to my taste than ACROS, and that the Eterna was, well, wintery

 

Summer (Astia)

Winter (Eterna)

Now take a look at these, taken on the Regent's Canal

Astia - feels like now

Eterna Bypass - feels like 1975 

Monochrome - feels like a quiet day in 1930

Which conveys the majesty of St Pauls better?

Personally, I prefer the Monochrome version of these

If you have film emulation bracketing on your camera and have never tried it, give it a whirl. In the end, I think I arrived almost where I started from: Astia is fine, I've added some HDR tweaks from You Tube, and I must pay more attention to the range of brightness in the frame. Like I did when shooting film back in the day.

Somewhere in Soho

I leave this one with no comment. It doesn't need one. Eterna, Fuji X-E4 with 27mm pancake lens. 

Changing Film Simulations

If you thought guitarists were obsessed with "tone", let me introduce photographers. What do you think all that tweaking of RAWs in Lightroom is about? It's the photographic equivalent of tone-tweaking. And the reason that Lightroom lets us do it is because photo editors back in the day were doing it with black-and-white photos. Watch this short about that iconic James Dean Times Square photo with comments by the guy who did all the dark-room manipulations...



By comparison I'm a set-it-and-forget-it guy when it comes to cameras, but then, I do twiddle a bit in Photos. For the last year or so, I have been using the Astia film simulation, which is just a bit softer than the standard simulation. It over-reacts to shadows. A lot. This was taken with Astia...




and this was taken with Eterna...



(Both these were test shots and are not going to make it to any Greatest Hits folder. ) Notice how much we can see inside the cafe with Eterna, but not with Astia. The Astia feels more "summer-y" while the Eterna feels a little like "autumn". Sure I can adjust the Astia shot to bring out the details in the shade, but then it looks more like the Eterna shot, but slightly more saturated, and the adjustments involve whacking some sliders way over to the max.

I'm going to persevere with Eterna for a while - it gave me this

Anyone who says I should be selecting the film simulation, aperture, shutter speed and exposure correction for each photograph with the speed and certainty of Max Verstappen, will be reminded that the pros who do that take a freaking age to do the settings, unlike Max, who really is that fast. I want to spend time looking for pictures, and settings are a distraction. Kinda the reverse of the guitar.

Primrose Hill

Okay, it's catch-up time. 

I took my first photos for a good few months a couple of weeks ago, and as always when it's been a while since I took photos, I made a right hash of it the first time out. The check-exposure-aperture-shutter-speed-dials reflex had been forgotten (though I was relieved to hear that even one as prolific as Roman Fox has shot dozens of photos without checking he hadn't nudged the exposure. I had put in some adjustments over the winter that looked okay indoors, but outdoors produced colours that were way over-saturated. Like this...



Fortunately I have never claimed to be a pro. Anyway we can "fix in post", right? This one is the result of un-saturating the colours so that it looks like a slightly faded film photo from the 1970's.

It's also a fine example of the people-sitting-at-the-top-of-a-hill-looking-into-the-distance picture, and proves that my compositional chops were not entirely lost.

(PS: Yeah, I know, it's a big wide world out there and there's a lot happening. However, I am not going to spend any energy trying to make sense of it, because it makes no sense. I told you back in 2020 that British society had already collapsed, not that it was about to. Should you be in any doubt that the UK is now a joke, I give you the state of our Navy; a population claiming for imaginary disabilities in the millions; our borders, which are porous to anyone without a passport but with a dinghy; our politicians, who only took the job on the basis that all the real work would be done by "experts", judges and civil servants, and our civil servants, who only took their jobs on the basis that the real decisions would be made in Brussells. David Davis is much better at this stuff than I could ever be. Read him.)

James Popsys' Human Nature Photographs

James Popsys is a You Tube photographer - at least I can't remember him referring to wedding, portrait or product shoots, nor using the phrases "my gallery" or "my agent". I don't have half his camera technique, have no idea how to use Lightroom on RAW (he's a wizard), and I don't have a successful YT channel. I bought his book (Human Nature) recently, and am unlikely to publish one of my own so he can return the compliment. Just so we're establishing who the actual talent is here.

It took me a few passes through the book, and a comparison with Edgar Martins' Topologies (which I happened to have on my shelves because Foyles many years ago) to realise what my eye was baulking at.

There are often too many subjects in the photographs.

By the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes.

Let me explain.

Ever noticed how dogs are really, really interested in other dogs to the exclusion of all other animals? People are the same. Put a person anywhere in a picture and they will become the centre of our attention. People are interested in people to the exclusion of everything except "cute" - people love "cute". Put one person in a picture, and we want to know who they are and what they are doing there. Put in two, three or four and we want to know what their relationship is - even if we decide they are strangers sitting on a wall. Five or more starts to be a crowd, which is a subject in itself. What is it a crowd of? Going where? To do what? It's for this reason one has to be careful about putting people in the shot. I do not want to remember how long I have stood waiting for the people to finish walking past so I can get a people-free shot of whatever it is I was looking at.

The single person in an otherwise people-free image, especially against buildings, is a feature of a certain kind of Internet photography. Here's my take on it, just to prove I can do it...

There's a classic of the genre on page 108 (of Human Nature) of a scene in Blackpool. A woman in an orange hooded coat walks from left to right, and since she's a person, my instincts assume she's the focus of attention. I missed the weird curved, multi-pronged streetlights at first glance. Now my attention oscillates between the streetlights and the person. Then I put my finger over the person, and instantly the image became an "art photo" about the streetlights. Who designed them? Who approved them? What do the locals think? Would I want streetlights like that where I live? Do I like them?

On page 126 is a photograph of a bridge at Kylesku in Scotland. It's over a narrow inlet and is tightly curved. Not your average bridge at all. And then there's a damn boat in the water, closer to the centre of the image and because it's a human thing, it draws my attention, and once again I'm oscillating between subjects. Put my finger over that damn boat, and it becomes a satisfying "art photo" of a bridge.

When James does have a picture without a person, as of the pylons at Ghabat al Ghuzlan on page 63, it's a well-composed art photograph. That abandoned car hidden behind the shed (also on the website home page), or the container trailer in the car park (also on the home page), are neat little classics that would grace any art portfolio. He knows what he's doing - it's the You Tube genre rules that lead him astray.

The idea behind the Human Nature book is the presence of people, literally or figuratively, in nature. Bridges and weird lamp-posts are exactly such presences on their own. We don't need a warm body to represent "human".

But like I said: "by the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes". They are his photographs and his choices, and he's making a living out of them, which is more than you or I are doing. A lot of people share his judgements.

In the light of all this, I looked again at my own favourites that I printed a few years ago now. Yep, one subject, usually in the middle-ish of the frame, or spread all the way across the frame. Keep-it-simple art photography rules. Maybe I'm too old and slow multiple-subject images?

James Popsys' website is here The home page has some images from the book. I enjoy his YT channel, of which the latest episode is here

 

 

and features him talking about his photography in an honest and non-babble-y way (he never once refers to "my practice as a photographer").