Comments for LarryEiss.com

Comment on Food Safe Wood for Cutting Boards by Larry

Larry — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:09:13 +0000

Cocobolo is a wonderful wood and very beautiful. It is relatively dense and finishes to a wonderful shine with fine abrasives such as 0000 steel wool. Cocobolo is similar to teak in some respects and tends to be a little oily. Exposed to the open air for a time it does dry to the point where its initial oily nature is no longer an issue. As it dries, the wonderful red/orange color you first see when machining it darkens and becomes more brown; so be prepared for some color change over time. In general, I have found Cocobolo quite stable. I once made a lazy-susan from a piece that I had re-sawed a quarter-inch thick, and it stayed flat. Cocobolo is considered an exotic, and it isn’t one I have used for cutting boards. I do have a kind of spatula made from Cocobolo. This implement is designed to be used in contact with food and was carved by a craftsman in Nova Scotia Canada. Other than this empirical evidence I do not know if it is food-safe. Being who I am, I’d use it anyway. But that’s me. So I’d say that Cocobolo should make a beautiful cutting board, and the idea of leaving a natural edge should make it a very interesting conversation piece of which you can be proud.

Comment on Food Safe Wood for Cutting Boards by Randy

Randy — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:56:07 +0000

I have a local connection to coco bolo. I would like to make solid one piece natural edge cutting boards.What are the pros and cons to using coco bolo and will they warp if there one solid piece.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 4 by Larry Eiss

Larry Eiss — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:07:26 +0000

Yes, in this case it was optically slaved to the the small on-camera pop-up flash. That same flash also triggered the studio strobes that lit the subject. I placed the speed-light on the floor about 3 feet from the wall and angled the head upward at approximately 45 degrees.

Sorry to hear that your copy of that great book is hiding. Hopefully it will show itself soon.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 4 by H.Curtiss Leung

H.Curtiss Leung — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:21:02 +0000

Larry: was the flash w/the gel set as a slave to an on-camera or direct strobe? Also, what was the angle of the gel’d flash w/r/t the wall?

Now that I have the urge to read Light, Science, and Magic, can’t find the darn thing. I’m being punished for not having read it when I first got it!

Comment on A Very Short and Important Read by Larry

Larry — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:42:53 +0000

A very interesting perspective, Curtiss. I am ill equipped to respond to much of it. We agree that the U.S. is in a state of perilous decay.

Comment on A Very Short and Important Read by H.Curtiss Leung

H.Curtiss Leung — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:36:49 +0000

I’m perplexed. I don’t see the US as moving towards anything resembling socialism, either in its claimed ideals, actual practices, rhetoric or what-have-you. It seems to me more that we are reverting to something like the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. The corporate sector was incredibly powerful, and the financial sub-sector especially so, and responsible for a great deal of economic turmoil. Then, as now, there were enormous changes and innovations in commerce: I imagine one could see the web and e-commerce now as bringing about changes in business as broad and deep as the railroads did then (and if memory serves, investing in railroads could be fraught with peril as investing in tech) The possibility for mischief—or worse—exists at the intersections of commerce and government. It can be as above board as generous, but completely legal contributions to a particular candidate, or it can descend to continuous bribery.

Last, I want to say I am no fan of the current administration. The President’s economic advisers are all people with deep ties to banking, finance, and academic neo-laissez faire economics; it seems the only thing he’s gotten done at all so far is to give the banking and finance sectors a huge present. Meanwhile, US citizens below the top 5% income/net worth are, if anything, worse off than when the man who turned the word HOPE into a mere branding phrase took office. If the Ukrainian gentleman quoted in the linked article meant by “socialism” that the United States is in a state of perilous decay, I agree with him there. Compared to that, everything else is quibbling.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 1 by Larry

Larry — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:06:21 +0000

I’m very glad you stopped by, Curtiss. Thanks for the excellent comments! I took care of the second copy of this one. I do have moderation on, but now that I’ve approved you once, any future comments will post immediately.

Thanks for the kind words about those photos. I, too, hope cameras always treat light this way.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 3 by Larry

Larry — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:05:05 +0000

It’s a very helpful book, for sure.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 3 by H.Curtiss Leung

H.Curtiss Leung — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:55:06 +0000

I’m bad. I have Light, Science and Magic, but I haven’t even cracked the spine on it. Guess I don’t have an excuse now.

Comment on Photographic Lighting Lesson 2 by H.Curtiss Leung

H.Curtiss Leung — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:52:26 +0000

I remember two exposure rules from when I was first doing photography (and digital didn’t even exist yet):
—With negative film, expose for the shadows and print for the highlights
—With positive film (aka slides or chromes or transparencies), expose for the highlights, and let the shadows fall where they may.

If you understand the why behind these rules, they’re still helpful, I think. Slides have (had?) a very limited contrast range. If you got the exposure for the darkest parts of the image right, the brightest parts might have no image on them whatsoever—your transparency would be literally transparent! OTOH, negatives have/had a greater contrast range, and unless your image had a huge contrast range, you could just burn in the highlights in the darkroom. And if you decided to take the leap into the Zone System (Yikes!), the contrast of the final print was—pardon the expression—your bitch. You’d need a spot meter (unless your name was Ansel Adams and you could judge the contrast and do the math in your head) and a view camera, but once you knew the contrast range of the image, you’d decide where the tonalities would fall, and expose and develop accordingly….

Sorry for the trip down memory lane. It’s a round-about way of explaining why if I fell asleep back in the film age, and, like Rip Van Winkle, slept for years, only waking up now and you showed me your landscape, I’d say, “Oh, he must have shot that with a chrome film,” because you exposed for the highlights, in this case, the sky, and let the shadows fall where they may.

One great thing about digital is that we don’t have to reload with different films to get a chrome image (narrow contrast, dramatic differences between light and dark) or a negative image (detail down deep into the shadows)—we just have to know how to expose, and that in many cases, there is no one correct exposure, but different ones that lead to different images with differing impact.