Even though the styling changed, the layout of controls and their behavior appears to be the same as the curvy 1950s and boxy 1960s variations.
Showing posts with label how to. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how to. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Hermes 3000/Hermes Media Manual Scan
Ephemera-heads gotta stick together! The manual for the Skyriter that I have posted still gets pretty frequent hits, so here's a greyscale scan of the manual that came with my wide-carriage, French made Hermes 3000. Based on the cover of the booklet, this also applies to the Hermes Media model.
Even though the styling changed, the layout of controls and their behavior appears to be the same as the curvy 1950s and boxy 1960s variations.
Even though the styling changed, the layout of controls and their behavior appears to be the same as the curvy 1950s and boxy 1960s variations.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Dear Mr. Remington: AYFKM?
Woe to the collector who acquires their first Remington portable! Woe, I say!
My first Remington... but not my last. A 1950s Remington Quiet-Riter
For reasons unknown to me (but probably known to others in the Typosphere), Remington eschewed using anything resembling a spool for most (or all?) of their portable machines. Sure, there were variations among other makers, too: Olivetti has spools are almost-but-not-quite like Smith-Corona, and even S-C went a different direction for their Skyriter-line ultra-portables. But, oh! Remington! You thought Betamax vs. VHS and PC vs. Mac was bad, but ain't seen nothin' till you find one of these banging around the inside of your new portable:
WTF?
Seriously, Remington? Seriously? Even in their heyday, I can't see how this system was a good idea. Remington ribbons came wound around these rings ("cores," I've seen them called) and I guess the unlucky typist just ruined her manicure by trying to drop the whole thing neatly onto the waiting platform in the machine. The core fits over the middle of the spool, and Remington machines have a permanently-attached surface that the wound ribbon rests upon, like a Lazy Susan in the middle of the table at your favorite family-style restaurant. Removing the spent ribbon must have been equally pernicious, as the poor typist would then need to pick the whole thing up and chuck it into the garbage, core and all.
What's even more shocking to me is that Remington stuck with the design, whether out of pride, or consistency, or because there was a good business case to be made by having exclusive ribbons. For the modern user/collector, though, it's a huge pain. Usually most people will start amassing a selection of spools salvaged from old machines or new plastic ones used to wind on ribbons to other machines. These are the Smith-Corona style, I think -- the 2" diameter spool with the little holes cut out near the hub which are turned by a rotating peg. I have several pairs of these, but only a few cores, despite the half-dozen or so Remingtons that have passed through my hands.
You can always wind a ribbon on to the core, of course. Slip the core over the center of the rotating platform so that the little prong points in the direction of travel, spear the end of a ribbon on that prong, and turn the platform... slowly... slowly... slowly... until it's all wound. I've done this using a pencil eraser to turn the platform like I'm punting up an inky river. The results are not pretty.
Cover that up! Shown in a 1940s Remington Noiseless 7
Even the smallest bump or irregularity will cause the ribbon to bulge out around it. No wonder Remington put covers on top of the spools. It's just embarrassing.
Happily, there is another way. Underwood standard machines take a spool that looks a bit like a donut: the center of the spool must slip over a central hub instead of a simple peg. Whether by accident or design, this it a perfect fit in the Remington spool area. You may not be able to fit the covers over the spool afterward, but then, you may not need to.
So tidy. My OCD is sated. Shown in a 1960s Remington Monarch
The bad news is that I see these spools even less often than Remington cores: I have exactly one pair from my Underwood, and that ribbon hops around from machine to machine as needed. But at least I have the option to do this.
I have seen modern plastic "universal" ribbons for sale online that appear to have a removable central hub. The spool is black plastic, and the central hub is white. Those of you old enough to remember the adapter that fit inside 45rpm records can picture this most clearly, I think. I have yet to see one of these spools -- my local stores only carry the Smith-Corona style. If you can find some of the universal ones, though, and that center does knock out, then you won't be needlessly bitten by the Remington Curse.
Update: What brought this post on was a comment by Judith at Dante's Wardrobe on el Twitter as she's trying to get a ribbon onto her own Quiet Riter. She posted a photo of the innards of her machine, with something circled:
I'd forgotten about this. This is a later-style ribbon cover from Remington: it pressure fits on the central hub of the spool and can be removed with a firm pull upwards to access the ribbon and the ring/core. If you have one of these, then your spooling won't be quite as awful, since you can spin the top of the cover with your finger to wind the ribbon on. I didn't get a pair of these until I purchased the Monarch last year, though, long after I'd acquired and sold a number of other Remingtons. If you must wind directly on, at least this can help keep your fingers from coming out totally inky. It won't make removing a dead ribbon any easier, though.
My first Remington... but not my last. A 1950s Remington Quiet-Riter
For reasons unknown to me (but probably known to others in the Typosphere), Remington eschewed using anything resembling a spool for most (or all?) of their portable machines. Sure, there were variations among other makers, too: Olivetti has spools are almost-but-not-quite like Smith-Corona, and even S-C went a different direction for their Skyriter-line ultra-portables. But, oh! Remington! You thought Betamax vs. VHS and PC vs. Mac was bad, but ain't seen nothin' till you find one of these banging around the inside of your new portable:
WTF?
Seriously, Remington? Seriously? Even in their heyday, I can't see how this system was a good idea. Remington ribbons came wound around these rings ("cores," I've seen them called) and I guess the unlucky typist just ruined her manicure by trying to drop the whole thing neatly onto the waiting platform in the machine. The core fits over the middle of the spool, and Remington machines have a permanently-attached surface that the wound ribbon rests upon, like a Lazy Susan in the middle of the table at your favorite family-style restaurant. Removing the spent ribbon must have been equally pernicious, as the poor typist would then need to pick the whole thing up and chuck it into the garbage, core and all.
What's even more shocking to me is that Remington stuck with the design, whether out of pride, or consistency, or because there was a good business case to be made by having exclusive ribbons. For the modern user/collector, though, it's a huge pain. Usually most people will start amassing a selection of spools salvaged from old machines or new plastic ones used to wind on ribbons to other machines. These are the Smith-Corona style, I think -- the 2" diameter spool with the little holes cut out near the hub which are turned by a rotating peg. I have several pairs of these, but only a few cores, despite the half-dozen or so Remingtons that have passed through my hands.
You can always wind a ribbon on to the core, of course. Slip the core over the center of the rotating platform so that the little prong points in the direction of travel, spear the end of a ribbon on that prong, and turn the platform... slowly... slowly... slowly... until it's all wound. I've done this using a pencil eraser to turn the platform like I'm punting up an inky river. The results are not pretty.
Cover that up! Shown in a 1940s Remington Noiseless 7
Even the smallest bump or irregularity will cause the ribbon to bulge out around it. No wonder Remington put covers on top of the spools. It's just embarrassing.
Happily, there is another way. Underwood standard machines take a spool that looks a bit like a donut: the center of the spool must slip over a central hub instead of a simple peg. Whether by accident or design, this it a perfect fit in the Remington spool area. You may not be able to fit the covers over the spool afterward, but then, you may not need to.
So tidy. My OCD is sated. Shown in a 1960s Remington Monarch
The bad news is that I see these spools even less often than Remington cores: I have exactly one pair from my Underwood, and that ribbon hops around from machine to machine as needed. But at least I have the option to do this.
I have seen modern plastic "universal" ribbons for sale online that appear to have a removable central hub. The spool is black plastic, and the central hub is white. Those of you old enough to remember the adapter that fit inside 45rpm records can picture this most clearly, I think. I have yet to see one of these spools -- my local stores only carry the Smith-Corona style. If you can find some of the universal ones, though, and that center does knock out, then you won't be needlessly bitten by the Remington Curse.
Update: What brought this post on was a comment by Judith at Dante's Wardrobe on el Twitter as she's trying to get a ribbon onto her own Quiet Riter. She posted a photo of the innards of her machine, with something circled:
I'd forgotten about this. This is a later-style ribbon cover from Remington: it pressure fits on the central hub of the spool and can be removed with a firm pull upwards to access the ribbon and the ring/core. If you have one of these, then your spooling won't be quite as awful, since you can spin the top of the cover with your finger to wind the ribbon on. I didn't get a pair of these until I purchased the Monarch last year, though, long after I'd acquired and sold a number of other Remingtons. If you must wind directly on, at least this can help keep your fingers from coming out totally inky. It won't make removing a dead ribbon any easier, though.
Friday, April 13, 2012
WIP It Good
Bob and Mike and I were having a discussion1 on the Twitter yesterday, kibitzing about editing, and hating it, and avoiding it, and how each of us does manage to do it in those rare times when we're inclined2. We pledged to swap photos of our works-in-progress, so here goes...
THUD
All hail the mighty tome. This hunk of dead tree3 is my 2011 manuscript from NaNoWriMo, currently entitled The Balled of Congo Willy, a sort-of-lighthearted romp through middle age, ennui, death, and video games. Doesn't it look tidy? That's because I have children, and I learned the hard way that a large stack of loose paper sitting around is an invitation to unstack it by whatever means necessary.
I use the Rollabind system4 to keep all the sheets together, though I could just as easily use a 3-ring-binder system. This is a bit more compact, since you can fold the page back like a spiral-bound book. Cover material is salvage from old reports at work, and the first page is my page-and-word count checklist. Looks like I have around 240 pages to edit. Whoo boy. Better get started.
Start at the beginning, and when you get to the end: stop
Because I have all this paper sitting around over the course of November, I had to come up with A System, because I enjoy that sort of thing, and because I know I need to hit six to eight pages a day during NaNo. These are my page numbers: day.page As you flick through the draft, you'll see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc., and then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc.. I know that normal people would just use normal page numbers, but I'm. Not. Normal.
Bring out the pens
Oh yeah, baby, that's what I'm talking about. Bring that nib over here.
Drawing right on the draft. Why else would you double-space? This year I might even use the triple-space option to give me more room. I tend to move a lot of stuff around, referencing earlier parts of the draft or leaving notes for the rewrite. Grammar gets cleared up here, but spelling waits until it goes digital.
No one will be seated during the dramatic cow-pooping scene
Despite all my pre-planning and card-making and muse-baiting, there's always a scene or section that takes me by surprise. This year it involved a game of "Bessie Bingo" that goes horribly, horribly wrong. This scene is pretty crappy right now5, but even the "good" scenes look like this in the MS: ink everywhere, passages excised or moved, but nothing obliterated in case I want to go back and mine it later.
So, that's the WIP so far. I've actually broken my own system to read the last third of the draft without edits, as things resolved themselves differently than I expected, and the plot took a couple of turns that impact earlier stuff. I wanted to reacquaint myself with those changes and see how they stand, now that there's a couple of months of distance between me and this draft.
Mr. Speegle? Mr. Skrezyna? Whatchoo got?
1 A Twitter "discussion" being mostly poo jokes and lame "that's what she said" innuendo
2 That's what she said
3 Sugarcane, actually, which I wrote about pre-Nano
4 Available cheaply at Staples as their "ARC" system now
5 Hur hur hur poo joke hur hur
6 This is not a footnote
THUD
All hail the mighty tome. This hunk of dead tree3 is my 2011 manuscript from NaNoWriMo, currently entitled The Balled of Congo Willy, a sort-of-lighthearted romp through middle age, ennui, death, and video games. Doesn't it look tidy? That's because I have children, and I learned the hard way that a large stack of loose paper sitting around is an invitation to unstack it by whatever means necessary.
I use the Rollabind system4 to keep all the sheets together, though I could just as easily use a 3-ring-binder system. This is a bit more compact, since you can fold the page back like a spiral-bound book. Cover material is salvage from old reports at work, and the first page is my page-and-word count checklist. Looks like I have around 240 pages to edit. Whoo boy. Better get started.
Start at the beginning, and when you get to the end: stop
Because I have all this paper sitting around over the course of November, I had to come up with A System, because I enjoy that sort of thing, and because I know I need to hit six to eight pages a day during NaNo. These are my page numbers: day.page As you flick through the draft, you'll see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc., and then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc.. I know that normal people would just use normal page numbers, but I'm. Not. Normal.
Bring out the pens
Oh yeah, baby, that's what I'm talking about. Bring that nib over here.
Drawing right on the draft. Why else would you double-space? This year I might even use the triple-space option to give me more room. I tend to move a lot of stuff around, referencing earlier parts of the draft or leaving notes for the rewrite. Grammar gets cleared up here, but spelling waits until it goes digital.
No one will be seated during the dramatic cow-pooping scene
Despite all my pre-planning and card-making and muse-baiting, there's always a scene or section that takes me by surprise. This year it involved a game of "Bessie Bingo" that goes horribly, horribly wrong. This scene is pretty crappy right now5, but even the "good" scenes look like this in the MS: ink everywhere, passages excised or moved, but nothing obliterated in case I want to go back and mine it later.
So, that's the WIP so far. I've actually broken my own system to read the last third of the draft without edits, as things resolved themselves differently than I expected, and the plot took a couple of turns that impact earlier stuff. I wanted to reacquaint myself with those changes and see how they stand, now that there's a couple of months of distance between me and this draft.
Mr. Speegle? Mr. Skrezyna? Whatchoo got?
1 A Twitter "discussion" being mostly poo jokes and lame "that's what she said" innuendo
2 That's what she said
3 Sugarcane, actually, which I wrote about pre-Nano
4 Available cheaply at Staples as their "ARC" system now
5 Hur hur hur poo joke hur hur
6 This is not a footnote
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Lordy Lordy
Clearly, free is everyone's favorite four letter word. Smashwords sends me an email every time someone buys a copy of One Last Quest, and I've been watching with great glee as a new message pops into the mailbox about every hour over the last few days, ever since that freebie coupon code took effect. Right now, the magic "copies sold" number is 40 -- three copies actually sold-for-money sold, and another thirty seven downloaded since the coupon took effect.
Does this mean my readership is a bunch of cheap bastards? YES. And I love you all for it.
So to celebrate the midpoint of the week of freeness, here's the promised "lessons learned" post.
Picking a Distributor
Smashwords
I was already familiar with Smashwords, and I liked how their aptly-named "meatgrinder" software churns out multiple electronic files from a single, carefully-formatted upload. Their royalties are generous, even on a cheap book like mine, and frankly, I kind of like the "everybody in all together" attitude of the site. Yes, there's a lot of pr0n-ish vampire novels about, and it's easy to get swallowed up in the noise. Direct-linking to the book is way more effective than trying to chance across it on their site.
Pros:
Free, all the way through. Multiple file formats and distribution channels, including one just-announced channel that can feed into libraries. Once a customer buys a book, they have access to all revisions of that book, so you don't need to feel guilty about fixing up typos (ahem.) ISBN assignment is free and easily done, and you use the same electronic ISBN in all the other places you might want to upload your book.
Cons:
Approval for the distribution process to other retailers like Apple and Sony is slow -- I've been waiting two weeks, which seems to be the minimum, and I'm about to update the file with a new corrected copy. Does this restart the approval process? I don't know. Very little hand-holding in the process: this is a DIY operation, and formatting your manuscript according to their rules is fiddly.
Bonus Pro:
The Smashwords style guide is so particular that the resulting document can serve as the foundation for other distributors with just a few changes to the styles.
Amazon
The 800-pound gorilla in the room: ignore it at your own risk. Amazon's attitude towards traditional book publishing houses seems to always be making news, and I can certainly see how a huge operation with no brick-and-mortar presence wants to shift the world to electronic downloads: it makes great business sense.
It's rather hard to track down, but Amazon has the Kindle Direct Publishing system, which is very Smashwords-esque. You upload a formatted Word document and a cover image, there's a vetting process, you set the price and rights, and after a waiting period, your book shows up as a Kindle download, and is available through Amazon's various international incarnations as well (they handle the currency conversion.)
Amazon is making a big push for their "KDP Select" program, which sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is. The most glaring issue I have with this program is that you sign over exclusive distribution rights to Amazon for your work for 90 days. No selling it anywhere else, at all. This felt like a Bad Deal to me, so I opted out (though it's presented to you each time you log in to check reports.) Mr. Speegle opted to go this route with Pen & Platen and I'm sure that his recent rise to the top of the Anthology chart was helped by the Amazonian marketing muscle that accompanies this program.
Anyhow, the Amazon upload format is practically the same as Smashwords: add page breaks before your chapters, replace "Smashwords edition" with "Amazon edition" and you're about done. Prepping a file for upload is easy.
Amazon has two royalty levels, 35% and 70%. What right-thinking individual wouldn't choose 70%? Me, of course. It's a very confusing page -- possibly by design -- and my natural skepticism tells me that Amazon isn't giving you 70% of the book price without you giving up something else in turn. It seems to hinge around "delivery costs," which baffles me for an ebook in this era of unlimited-bandwidth cell phone plans. Short version: seems scary, and I don't like the scary.
Pros:
Very organized. Upload is a snap after Smashwords. Who hasn't heard of Amazon? "Kindle" is becoming synonymous with "e-reader" (even though the Nook is better!)
Cons:
KDP Select narrows your distribution options, and may involve signing over firstborn or selling soul.
Barnes & Noble
If the KDP program was hard to find, B&N's PubIt! program was nigh impossible. It's referenced in numerous places in their discussion boards, but I had a hard time tracking it down short of a web search to find the signup page. I have a Nook reader from B&N and certainly feel brand loyalty in distributing through them. Also, I'd still be waiting on Smashwords to distribute to B&N, so uploading my own file made the most sense to me.
Sales here are on par with Amazon, honestly. I'm going to experiment with the coupon systems on each and see what happens. There are a number of price-harvesting services that scan the major sellers and look for price drops/coupons: I wouldn't be sad to be picked up by those.
Pros:
Equally organized. Upload is also trivial after Smashwords. Maybe the only domestic competition left for Amazon.
Cons:
Is not Amazon.
A Word About DRM
That's "digital rights management" to you, or "the reason you can't share an ebook with a buddy, or read that file you already bought for your Kindle/Nook/Kobo on your computer." In other words: the way your file is encrypted to ensure that it is read only by the paying customer. All distributors will ask you what approach to DRM you want to take, and once you've chosen it for a book, there's no going back short of scrapping the old one and uploading a new one.
To soapbox for a moment, I think DRM is a very, very, very bad idea. It's as secure as any encryption scheme meant to protect paying customers from their own base instincts, which is to say, not at all. DRM makes no distinction between sharing a copy with yourself on another reader and sharing a thousand copies with your friends. I think DRM primarily serves the companies that make the reading devices and the encryption software. Why assume your customers are thieves?
I just started reading Twain's Roughing It on el Nook the other day, and am enjoying it immensely. I can do this because 1) the title is in the public domain, and is thus available from Project Gutenberg and 2) it's available in a variety of DRM-free formats, including one that my Nook reads (the common .epub format.) If my descendents 100 years from now are reading -- and they damn well better be -- I'd like them to be able to look up great-great-great-great grandpa's silly little adventure book and not suffer the same puzzlement that my kids do when I show them an 8-track tape at the thrift store. "Dead format kids, sorry. Your introduction to Herb Alpert will have to wait for another day."
As an writer -- and I think I can call myself that now -- I'm sure that I'm robbing myself of... something. Money? Eh, I'm not going to get rich on a $1.49 piece of amateur fiction. Credibility? Any hope I had of that was gone a long time ago. Honestly, I don't see how anyone's needs are met by DRM here. I want a broad audience, and I want them to read, dammit. If one of them happens to pass my book along to 150 friends, that would be 150 more potential readers.
DRM BAAAAD. READERS GOOOOD.
OK, off the soapbox.
Getting In Print
Thanks to their affiliation with NaNoWriMo, I'm pretty solidly in the CreateSpace camp for making a print-on-demand copy of my book. They usually offer a coupon or special code to NaNo winners which, being cheap, I'm happy to exploit. (Last year was a free proof copy. This year is five free "real" copies.) CreateSpace is also an Amazon company, so you get to leverage that connection or feel icky about it, depending again on your opinion of Amazon. If you're overcome by the ickies, I'd check out Lulu, which seems to be the other big player in this arena within the United States. Both seem to be free, until you start ordering things (proof copies, a copy for mom) or want to take advantage of their professional services (cover design, editing, interior layout, etc..)
One Last Quest is very much a labor of love as well as a grand DIY learning experience: it's a "firsts" book for me. First book worth reading (IMHO.) First book transcribed and edited. First book I let other people read. First book sold. Might as well get another "first" under my belt, right? Besides, there is nothing, nothing so electrifying as holding a physical copy of a book with your name on the outside and your words on the inside. (OK, maybe holding your newborn children wins out there. But they don't come with your own ISBN number, either.)
Print is a different beast, but again I started with my Smashwords digital file, and tweaked a copy for Createspace. Intra-document links went away, obviously, and I added some art to the interior that I omitted from the digital editions. Measurements are critical here, and it took a while to get my word processing program to format the PDF exactly right; wide margins on the inside, and narrow ones elsewhere; page numbers in the outside corners; and getting the front- and back-matter (title page, copyright, about the author) to look correct.
Still: oh, that electrifying proof copy. And oh! The typos. Lesson for next time: don't be so cheap, and get a pre-proof version run off at the copy center. I'm finding far more mistakes on the printed page than I am on-screen.
Preparing for print is a lot more fiddly than ebook preparation. Upload the file, and then wait 24-48 hours for approval (and reports of issues.) Upload or design a cover, and then wait another 24-48 hours for approval. Order a proof (recommended), wait for delivery. If there are fixes, start over. It's a game for the patient, and I'm not a patient person.
One last tidbit: hyphenation and justification. You'd think that a typewriter person would have been aware of this, but no. This is something I honestly don't pay attention to in books that I own, but the right edge of my proof copy seems very ragged to me. I need to review some of my commercial print books at home and see if they are set in a justified width, and have hyphenation. I suspect that they do.
Pros:
If you come in prepared, it's easy, but it's still like air travel: lots of hurry-up-and-wait. The "cover calculator" tool gives you a handy template that shows exactly where to place your art -- and where not to -- based on the page count and size of your book. I tried to do this by hand: never again.
Cons:
What-you-see isn't necessarily what-you-get. I cycled through about four cover designs, with layers and textures and so on, and after approval, discovered that the layers didn't, and the textures weren't, and so forth. Simple, flattened designs like the one Rob Bowker made for Pen & Platen are going to give you the fewest surprises. The default covers look default, like PowerPoint slides. Lulu's defaults appear no different.
Pay extra attention to options in your PDF-generating software that talk about "true registration." I spent a couple of days wondering how my text could bleed into margins that I'd clearly set up. This is buried in the paragraph style section in LibreOffice, and it magically fixed the problem.
Shameless Promotion
Ah, I bet you think this section is going to be chock-a-block full of self-deprecating wisdom, don't you?
Bad news.
Honestly, this is the part I'm struggling with the most. Within minutes of getting the "all clear" email from Smashwords, my first inclination was "I need to tell everyone about this" followed immediately by "I wonder if it would be a bad thing to send this everyone on my contact list?" It's a dark day when you suddenly find yourself sympathizing with pill spammers and secret-shopper fraud mailers.
The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. The bad thing about self-publishing is it appears that everyone is doing it, and except for a few wild outliers (who we hate in public and envy in private) there's not a lot of immediate gratification for the indie author. Forty sales! Well, forty downloads, in the guise of a sale. So what do you do?
I'm blogging about it here, obviously, and I set up a new "books" page here on the blog just to point to the available work, and to start teasing about the next one in the pipeline. I've been known to drop non-subtle hints on the various social media outlets (free book! free book!), and would encourage any readers to pop in to the site where they got the book and leave a review.
In the meantime I keep reloading my "dashboard" page and checking email for that magic message...
*doink*
41 copies! I could get used to this feeling.
Does this mean my readership is a bunch of cheap bastards? YES. And I love you all for it.
So to celebrate the midpoint of the week of freeness, here's the promised "lessons learned" post.
Picking a Distributor
Smashwords
I was already familiar with Smashwords, and I liked how their aptly-named "meatgrinder" software churns out multiple electronic files from a single, carefully-formatted upload. Their royalties are generous, even on a cheap book like mine, and frankly, I kind of like the "everybody in all together" attitude of the site. Yes, there's a lot of pr0n-ish vampire novels about, and it's easy to get swallowed up in the noise. Direct-linking to the book is way more effective than trying to chance across it on their site.
Pros:
Free, all the way through. Multiple file formats and distribution channels, including one just-announced channel that can feed into libraries. Once a customer buys a book, they have access to all revisions of that book, so you don't need to feel guilty about fixing up typos (ahem.) ISBN assignment is free and easily done, and you use the same electronic ISBN in all the other places you might want to upload your book.
Cons:
Approval for the distribution process to other retailers like Apple and Sony is slow -- I've been waiting two weeks, which seems to be the minimum, and I'm about to update the file with a new corrected copy. Does this restart the approval process? I don't know. Very little hand-holding in the process: this is a DIY operation, and formatting your manuscript according to their rules is fiddly.
Bonus Pro:
The Smashwords style guide is so particular that the resulting document can serve as the foundation for other distributors with just a few changes to the styles.
Amazon
The 800-pound gorilla in the room: ignore it at your own risk. Amazon's attitude towards traditional book publishing houses seems to always be making news, and I can certainly see how a huge operation with no brick-and-mortar presence wants to shift the world to electronic downloads: it makes great business sense.
It's rather hard to track down, but Amazon has the Kindle Direct Publishing system, which is very Smashwords-esque. You upload a formatted Word document and a cover image, there's a vetting process, you set the price and rights, and after a waiting period, your book shows up as a Kindle download, and is available through Amazon's various international incarnations as well (they handle the currency conversion.)
Amazon is making a big push for their "KDP Select" program, which sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is. The most glaring issue I have with this program is that you sign over exclusive distribution rights to Amazon for your work for 90 days. No selling it anywhere else, at all. This felt like a Bad Deal to me, so I opted out (though it's presented to you each time you log in to check reports.) Mr. Speegle opted to go this route with Pen & Platen and I'm sure that his recent rise to the top of the Anthology chart was helped by the Amazonian marketing muscle that accompanies this program.
Anyhow, the Amazon upload format is practically the same as Smashwords: add page breaks before your chapters, replace "Smashwords edition" with "Amazon edition" and you're about done. Prepping a file for upload is easy.
Amazon has two royalty levels, 35% and 70%. What right-thinking individual wouldn't choose 70%? Me, of course. It's a very confusing page -- possibly by design -- and my natural skepticism tells me that Amazon isn't giving you 70% of the book price without you giving up something else in turn. It seems to hinge around "delivery costs," which baffles me for an ebook in this era of unlimited-bandwidth cell phone plans. Short version: seems scary, and I don't like the scary.
Pros:
Very organized. Upload is a snap after Smashwords. Who hasn't heard of Amazon? "Kindle" is becoming synonymous with "e-reader" (even though the Nook is better!)
Cons:
KDP Select narrows your distribution options, and may involve signing over firstborn or selling soul.
Barnes & Noble
If the KDP program was hard to find, B&N's PubIt! program was nigh impossible. It's referenced in numerous places in their discussion boards, but I had a hard time tracking it down short of a web search to find the signup page. I have a Nook reader from B&N and certainly feel brand loyalty in distributing through them. Also, I'd still be waiting on Smashwords to distribute to B&N, so uploading my own file made the most sense to me.
Sales here are on par with Amazon, honestly. I'm going to experiment with the coupon systems on each and see what happens. There are a number of price-harvesting services that scan the major sellers and look for price drops/coupons: I wouldn't be sad to be picked up by those.
Pros:
Equally organized. Upload is also trivial after Smashwords. Maybe the only domestic competition left for Amazon.
Cons:
Is not Amazon.
A Word About DRM
That's "digital rights management" to you, or "the reason you can't share an ebook with a buddy, or read that file you already bought for your Kindle/Nook/Kobo on your computer." In other words: the way your file is encrypted to ensure that it is read only by the paying customer. All distributors will ask you what approach to DRM you want to take, and once you've chosen it for a book, there's no going back short of scrapping the old one and uploading a new one.
To soapbox for a moment, I think DRM is a very, very, very bad idea. It's as secure as any encryption scheme meant to protect paying customers from their own base instincts, which is to say, not at all. DRM makes no distinction between sharing a copy with yourself on another reader and sharing a thousand copies with your friends. I think DRM primarily serves the companies that make the reading devices and the encryption software. Why assume your customers are thieves?
I just started reading Twain's Roughing It on el Nook the other day, and am enjoying it immensely. I can do this because 1) the title is in the public domain, and is thus available from Project Gutenberg and 2) it's available in a variety of DRM-free formats, including one that my Nook reads (the common .epub format.) If my descendents 100 years from now are reading -- and they damn well better be -- I'd like them to be able to look up great-great-great-great grandpa's silly little adventure book and not suffer the same puzzlement that my kids do when I show them an 8-track tape at the thrift store. "Dead format kids, sorry. Your introduction to Herb Alpert will have to wait for another day."
As an writer -- and I think I can call myself that now -- I'm sure that I'm robbing myself of... something. Money? Eh, I'm not going to get rich on a $1.49 piece of amateur fiction. Credibility? Any hope I had of that was gone a long time ago. Honestly, I don't see how anyone's needs are met by DRM here. I want a broad audience, and I want them to read, dammit. If one of them happens to pass my book along to 150 friends, that would be 150 more potential readers.
DRM BAAAAD. READERS GOOOOD.
OK, off the soapbox.
Getting In Print
Thanks to their affiliation with NaNoWriMo, I'm pretty solidly in the CreateSpace camp for making a print-on-demand copy of my book. They usually offer a coupon or special code to NaNo winners which, being cheap, I'm happy to exploit. (Last year was a free proof copy. This year is five free "real" copies.) CreateSpace is also an Amazon company, so you get to leverage that connection or feel icky about it, depending again on your opinion of Amazon. If you're overcome by the ickies, I'd check out Lulu, which seems to be the other big player in this arena within the United States. Both seem to be free, until you start ordering things (proof copies, a copy for mom) or want to take advantage of their professional services (cover design, editing, interior layout, etc..)
One Last Quest is very much a labor of love as well as a grand DIY learning experience: it's a "firsts" book for me. First book worth reading (IMHO.) First book transcribed and edited. First book I let other people read. First book sold. Might as well get another "first" under my belt, right? Besides, there is nothing, nothing so electrifying as holding a physical copy of a book with your name on the outside and your words on the inside. (OK, maybe holding your newborn children wins out there. But they don't come with your own ISBN number, either.)
Print is a different beast, but again I started with my Smashwords digital file, and tweaked a copy for Createspace. Intra-document links went away, obviously, and I added some art to the interior that I omitted from the digital editions. Measurements are critical here, and it took a while to get my word processing program to format the PDF exactly right; wide margins on the inside, and narrow ones elsewhere; page numbers in the outside corners; and getting the front- and back-matter (title page, copyright, about the author) to look correct.
Still: oh, that electrifying proof copy. And oh! The typos. Lesson for next time: don't be so cheap, and get a pre-proof version run off at the copy center. I'm finding far more mistakes on the printed page than I am on-screen.
Preparing for print is a lot more fiddly than ebook preparation. Upload the file, and then wait 24-48 hours for approval (and reports of issues.) Upload or design a cover, and then wait another 24-48 hours for approval. Order a proof (recommended), wait for delivery. If there are fixes, start over. It's a game for the patient, and I'm not a patient person.
One last tidbit: hyphenation and justification. You'd think that a typewriter person would have been aware of this, but no. This is something I honestly don't pay attention to in books that I own, but the right edge of my proof copy seems very ragged to me. I need to review some of my commercial print books at home and see if they are set in a justified width, and have hyphenation. I suspect that they do.
Pros:
If you come in prepared, it's easy, but it's still like air travel: lots of hurry-up-and-wait. The "cover calculator" tool gives you a handy template that shows exactly where to place your art -- and where not to -- based on the page count and size of your book. I tried to do this by hand: never again.
Cons:
What-you-see isn't necessarily what-you-get. I cycled through about four cover designs, with layers and textures and so on, and after approval, discovered that the layers didn't, and the textures weren't, and so forth. Simple, flattened designs like the one Rob Bowker made for Pen & Platen are going to give you the fewest surprises. The default covers look default, like PowerPoint slides. Lulu's defaults appear no different.
Pay extra attention to options in your PDF-generating software that talk about "true registration." I spent a couple of days wondering how my text could bleed into margins that I'd clearly set up. This is buried in the paragraph style section in LibreOffice, and it magically fixed the problem.
Shameless Promotion
Ah, I bet you think this section is going to be chock-a-block full of self-deprecating wisdom, don't you?
Bad news.
Honestly, this is the part I'm struggling with the most. Within minutes of getting the "all clear" email from Smashwords, my first inclination was "I need to tell everyone about this" followed immediately by "I wonder if it would be a bad thing to send this everyone on my contact list?" It's a dark day when you suddenly find yourself sympathizing with pill spammers and secret-shopper fraud mailers.
The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. The bad thing about self-publishing is it appears that everyone is doing it, and except for a few wild outliers (who we hate in public and envy in private) there's not a lot of immediate gratification for the indie author. Forty sales! Well, forty downloads, in the guise of a sale. So what do you do?
I'm blogging about it here, obviously, and I set up a new "books" page here on the blog just to point to the available work, and to start teasing about the next one in the pipeline. I've been known to drop non-subtle hints on the various social media outlets (free book! free book!), and would encourage any readers to pop in to the site where they got the book and leave a review.
In the meantime I keep reloading my "dashboard" page and checking email for that magic message...
*doink*
41 copies! I could get used to this feeling.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Cover Me
Here's some exciting(?) in-progress shots of the cover art for One Last Quest showing my process, such as it is.
Step 1: Sketching
These erasers are pretty small, around 2 1/2 inches on the long side, and about 3/4 of an inch across the short edge. I say "around" and "about" since these came from the dollar store, and are not exactly manufactured to precision specs. The small size is an asset, though, since it forced me to think about what I could accomplish in a small space with my limited art abilities.
I trace out a bunch of rectangles on paper from the erasers, and then spent some time fiddling around with the letters shapes. Since this is a cover for an e-book, I wanted to make sure whatever I made was bold and would show up well when reduced to a thumbnail size. You can see my doodles on the blue paper behind these erasers. I was still trying to figure out what to do with the word "LAST" here, since I didn't like the big gap between the "L" and the "A" but there's not a lot of room to tinker around.
Step 2: Transfer
To transfer the image, I placed the blank eraser next to the drawing and then copied a mirror image over. This process was fraught with peril, since my brain kept helpfully "fixing" things as a drew: note the remnants of the "N" in the word "ONE" and the fact that "LAST" was actually erased because I'd done the "L" and "S" the wrong-way around. Voluntary dyslexia is difficult, people.
Only later in the day did I realize that you could press a blank eraser against a heavy pencil drawing and enough of the graphite would transfer over to give me a reference point to recreate the drawings. Duh. (LESSON #1)
Step 3: Outline Cut
With outline in place, cut away! I used a Speedball Lino Set #1 that I found in a local art store (not Blick, sadly) but these erasers are so soft that you could use anything sharp enough and controllable. If you happen to have a Speedball drawing pen holder, these blades fit inside that, too, which is handy.
Except for the knife blade, all the lino tools have a U-shaped edge, in various depths and widths. This is supposedly the best way to cut stamps, versus cutting directly perpendicular to the surface, as it gives the stamp surface more strength. I stuck almost exclusively to the smallest size since these erasers are so small. And I found it easier to turn the eraser under the tool to make corners, instead of trying to hold the eraser steady and drive the cutter around. This may be horrible technique, but it worked for me. (LESSON #2)
Step 4: First Impression
With all the outline carved out, all the handy pencil marks are theoretically gone from the surface of the eraser, and there's not enough contrast to see what's going on, at least for my middle-aged eyes. Time to break out the ink pad! Just a quick stamp to make sure everything looks OK, proportions are good, I didn't flip the "N" backwards again, etc..
Step 5: Fiddly Carving
First impression passes muster, so using the same tool ("Liner #1") I carved out the narrow spaces inside and between the letters. The leftover ink is a huge help here, since you can see what's left to do. I deliberately wanted to keep the rough-carved look for the art, so I left a lot of the excess in place. I planned to scan these and remove any problems digitally, so better to have too much "extra" stuff than not enough.
Step 6: Final Carve
With the fiddly stuff done, I swapped blades and cut away all the rest of the excess. Now repeat steps 2-6 for the other two words, and then sketch up designs for the "icons" on the cover.
I did have trouble pinning down how I wanted the word "LAST" to look. The nice thing about using super-cheap media like dollar-store supplies is there's no real pain in tossing a bad design. Now I have an eraser I can give to my kids for schoolwork once I cut off the inky part.
You can see the rejected outline impression here on the orange piece of paper, and then the stamp that became the final design, with the "A" nested snug.
Step 7: Layout and Scan, and Tweak, Tweak, Tweak
There were eight total stamps in the cover: the three words, the tower, bat, and dragon, the "X" and the source for the dotted-line path (seen just under the bat stamp above.) I did a few impressions of each stamp on a piece of plain white paper and scanned them, thinking that if I got a bad one, I could just magically copy over a good letter from another impression and drop it into place. Ha Ha! I was so naive. Here's a little tidbit I didn't think about: eraser stamps are very flexible, and they distort slightly when you press them into the page. In other words, the clean bat wings I got from impression #1 would not fit nicely over the smooth bat-body from impression #2, no matter how much I insisted that they should. Live and learn. (LESSON #3)
I brought the whole scan into Gimp and spent most of the day scooting them around a virtual page. I scaled up the words and digitally removed some of the extra print-marks and cutting goofs. The dotted-line path was made from digitally cutting up a quickie grid stamp that I made, and then laying each rectangle down individually. That felt like it took forever. I fudged the colors a bit, and with Richard Polt's permission, used his Royal Quiet Deluxe font for my name.
And the final result:
I'm so pleased with the way that this turned out that I'm considering adding to the collection and doing simple interior stamp illustrations at each chapter head. But then, I've been known to pledge projects here before...
In the meantime, if you are the keeper of an electronic reading device and about a latte's worth of spare change, you, too can marvel at how spiffy this cover art looks on the screen. Oh, and there's some funny words that accompany it, too, if you're into, you know, reading.
You can get a copy of One Last Quest from Smashwords in just about every digital format, or from Barnes & Noble or Amazon if you happen to have one of their readers. All editions are DRM-free, because I'm a tree-huggin' hippie at heart.
Step 1: Sketching
These erasers are pretty small, around 2 1/2 inches on the long side, and about 3/4 of an inch across the short edge. I say "around" and "about" since these came from the dollar store, and are not exactly manufactured to precision specs. The small size is an asset, though, since it forced me to think about what I could accomplish in a small space with my limited art abilities.
I trace out a bunch of rectangles on paper from the erasers, and then spent some time fiddling around with the letters shapes. Since this is a cover for an e-book, I wanted to make sure whatever I made was bold and would show up well when reduced to a thumbnail size. You can see my doodles on the blue paper behind these erasers. I was still trying to figure out what to do with the word "LAST" here, since I didn't like the big gap between the "L" and the "A" but there's not a lot of room to tinker around.
Step 2: Transfer
To transfer the image, I placed the blank eraser next to the drawing and then copied a mirror image over. This process was fraught with peril, since my brain kept helpfully "fixing" things as a drew: note the remnants of the "N" in the word "ONE" and the fact that "LAST" was actually erased because I'd done the "L" and "S" the wrong-way around. Voluntary dyslexia is difficult, people.
Only later in the day did I realize that you could press a blank eraser against a heavy pencil drawing and enough of the graphite would transfer over to give me a reference point to recreate the drawings. Duh. (LESSON #1)
Step 3: Outline Cut
With outline in place, cut away! I used a Speedball Lino Set #1 that I found in a local art store (not Blick, sadly) but these erasers are so soft that you could use anything sharp enough and controllable. If you happen to have a Speedball drawing pen holder, these blades fit inside that, too, which is handy.
Except for the knife blade, all the lino tools have a U-shaped edge, in various depths and widths. This is supposedly the best way to cut stamps, versus cutting directly perpendicular to the surface, as it gives the stamp surface more strength. I stuck almost exclusively to the smallest size since these erasers are so small. And I found it easier to turn the eraser under the tool to make corners, instead of trying to hold the eraser steady and drive the cutter around. This may be horrible technique, but it worked for me. (LESSON #2)
Step 4: First Impression
With all the outline carved out, all the handy pencil marks are theoretically gone from the surface of the eraser, and there's not enough contrast to see what's going on, at least for my middle-aged eyes. Time to break out the ink pad! Just a quick stamp to make sure everything looks OK, proportions are good, I didn't flip the "N" backwards again, etc..
Step 5: Fiddly Carving
First impression passes muster, so using the same tool ("Liner #1") I carved out the narrow spaces inside and between the letters. The leftover ink is a huge help here, since you can see what's left to do. I deliberately wanted to keep the rough-carved look for the art, so I left a lot of the excess in place. I planned to scan these and remove any problems digitally, so better to have too much "extra" stuff than not enough.
Step 6: Final Carve
With the fiddly stuff done, I swapped blades and cut away all the rest of the excess. Now repeat steps 2-6 for the other two words, and then sketch up designs for the "icons" on the cover.
I did have trouble pinning down how I wanted the word "LAST" to look. The nice thing about using super-cheap media like dollar-store supplies is there's no real pain in tossing a bad design. Now I have an eraser I can give to my kids for schoolwork once I cut off the inky part.
You can see the rejected outline impression here on the orange piece of paper, and then the stamp that became the final design, with the "A" nested snug.
Step 7: Layout and Scan, and Tweak, Tweak, Tweak
There were eight total stamps in the cover: the three words, the tower, bat, and dragon, the "X" and the source for the dotted-line path (seen just under the bat stamp above.) I did a few impressions of each stamp on a piece of plain white paper and scanned them, thinking that if I got a bad one, I could just magically copy over a good letter from another impression and drop it into place. Ha Ha! I was so naive. Here's a little tidbit I didn't think about: eraser stamps are very flexible, and they distort slightly when you press them into the page. In other words, the clean bat wings I got from impression #1 would not fit nicely over the smooth bat-body from impression #2, no matter how much I insisted that they should. Live and learn. (LESSON #3)
I brought the whole scan into Gimp and spent most of the day scooting them around a virtual page. I scaled up the words and digitally removed some of the extra print-marks and cutting goofs. The dotted-line path was made from digitally cutting up a quickie grid stamp that I made, and then laying each rectangle down individually. That felt like it took forever. I fudged the colors a bit, and with Richard Polt's permission, used his Royal Quiet Deluxe font for my name.
And the final result:
I'm so pleased with the way that this turned out that I'm considering adding to the collection and doing simple interior stamp illustrations at each chapter head. But then, I've been known to pledge projects here before...
In the meantime, if you are the keeper of an electronic reading device and about a latte's worth of spare change, you, too can marvel at how spiffy this cover art looks on the screen. Oh, and there's some funny words that accompany it, too, if you're into, you know, reading.
You can get a copy of One Last Quest from Smashwords in just about every digital format, or from Barnes & Noble or Amazon if you happen to have one of their readers. All editions are DRM-free, because I'm a tree-huggin' hippie at heart.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Skyriter Manual Scan
Requested by someone on an older post, here's a greyscale PDF scan of the manual from a Smith-Corona Skyriter circa mid-1950s.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
There's Something in the Water
In my last pencast, I mentioned finding a Lettera 32 at the church rummage sale. It came with the original sales receipt from 1975, plus an instruction card, and (typically) about 30 years of accumulated eraser shavings baked onto every surface.
This is the first weekend I've not had something scheduled, so I removed the ribbon and stripped off the shell and inspected the crud in detail.
Removing the shell of these machines is pretty easy. Take off the feet first to remove the bottom panel: I used a binder clip to get a better purchase on them. The panel just hinges off with the feet gone. The metal shell removes with four screws: two under the ribbon cover, another two at the rear underneath the carriage (you'll have to move it to the sides to get at them.) The shell comes off in one piece -- start on the left side so you don't get caught up in the carriage lock lever.
We have a rectangular bucket that has the good fortune to fit our sink and a portable typewriter with ease. Fill with warm water and a squirt of mild dish soap, and ease the typewriter inside.
Lift and lower the machine a few times to get the water to run through. I turned it so each of the four sides was "up" and repeated this for a while, then rinsed it off with the sprayer hose on our sink.
Now place outside in a sunny spot to dry!
I see a few areas that the dip-n-dunk missed, but they're reachable with a cotton swab. But now the cracks and crevices are crudless. I also scrubbed off the shell and the bottom panel with soap and a plastic scouring pad and placed them outside to dry.
Final step is to add a dab of sewing machine oil to the rails and at the joints of the type-bar linkages, and then wrestle the shell back on (they always seem to come off easier than they go on.) Maybe I'll put a little caranuba wax on some of the surfaces too, just to shine it up. After 30 years, this little gal deserves it.
This is the first weekend I've not had something scheduled, so I removed the ribbon and stripped off the shell and inspected the crud in detail.
Removing the shell of these machines is pretty easy. Take off the feet first to remove the bottom panel: I used a binder clip to get a better purchase on them. The panel just hinges off with the feet gone. The metal shell removes with four screws: two under the ribbon cover, another two at the rear underneath the carriage (you'll have to move it to the sides to get at them.) The shell comes off in one piece -- start on the left side so you don't get caught up in the carriage lock lever.
We have a rectangular bucket that has the good fortune to fit our sink and a portable typewriter with ease. Fill with warm water and a squirt of mild dish soap, and ease the typewriter inside.
Lift and lower the machine a few times to get the water to run through. I turned it so each of the four sides was "up" and repeated this for a while, then rinsed it off with the sprayer hose on our sink.
Now place outside in a sunny spot to dry!
I see a few areas that the dip-n-dunk missed, but they're reachable with a cotton swab. But now the cracks and crevices are crudless. I also scrubbed off the shell and the bottom panel with soap and a plastic scouring pad and placed them outside to dry.
Final step is to add a dab of sewing machine oil to the rails and at the joints of the type-bar linkages, and then wrestle the shell back on (they always seem to come off easier than they go on.) Maybe I'll put a little caranuba wax on some of the surfaces too, just to shine it up. After 30 years, this little gal deserves it.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Drive-Thru Book Review: Self-Editing for the Fiction Writer
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How To Edit Yourself Into Print
by Renni Browne and Dave King
ISBN: 0-06-270061-8
I'm nearing the end of the digitization/first rewrite stage of my 2009 NaNovel. I'm pleased with myself, as this is the first of my three NaNo entries I've read completely and bothered to type into digital form. (I bottomed out in the first third of 2008's novel, and 2007's shall not be Spoken Of Here.) Revisiting a draft done in such a hurry is wince-inducing: beyond the obvious like fluctuating character names and all the "do in rewrite" footnotes, I find myself struggling with mixing dialog and action, wanting to spell out every character's motions in every scene, and trying to understand just what exactly is meant in writing books by "show, not tell." Self-Editing has come to my rescue.
I happened on this book two weeks ago when I was at the bookstore, flicked through the pages, and though it looked like a worthwhile read. My library had a copy, and I just finished reading through it last night. Chapters are (with my comments):
1) Show and Tell [examples of exactly that]
2) Characterization and Exposition [avoid the latter via the former]
3) Point of View [first person, third person, omniscient]
4) Dialogue Mechanics [just what it sounds like]
5) See How It Sounds [read your prose aloud]
6) Interior Monologue [how to do it]
7) Easy Beats [handling excessive "stage business" in your scenes]
8) Breaking Up Is Easy To Do [using whitespace for pacing]
9) Once Is Usually Enough [don't repeat]
10) Proportion [focus on what's important]
11) Sophistication [don't write like a novice]
12) Voice [your characters need distinction]
Each chapter presents before-and-after samples of prose, typically pulled from contemporary works (this edition dates from 1993), though peppered with illustrative text from classics. I thrive on examples, and this book did not disappoint, except for the nagging feeling that my own draft neatly illustrates almost all the "before" problems. Sigh. Exercises are presented at the end of each chapter, with an answer key in the back -- more examples, really, as they illustrate how the authors (both editors) would have refined the passages. I skimmed over these after reading the chapters in my eagerness to get to the next one.
The tone in the book is light and instructive, not scolding, and at least the first edition comes with the occasional cartoon from George Booth -- if you've flicked through a New Yorker magazine in the past decade, you've seen his work. They're not necessary, but fun (and often featuring typewriters, so hey, on-topic for the blog.) This is a very approachable work for novice and amateur writers, and I can see how applying the lessons from the chapters can make my own work tighter and more readable. Once I finish retyping it, that is.
by Renni Browne and Dave King
ISBN: 0-06-270061-8
I'm nearing the end of the digitization/first rewrite stage of my 2009 NaNovel. I'm pleased with myself, as this is the first of my three NaNo entries I've read completely and bothered to type into digital form. (I bottomed out in the first third of 2008's novel, and 2007's shall not be Spoken Of Here.) Revisiting a draft done in such a hurry is wince-inducing: beyond the obvious like fluctuating character names and all the "do in rewrite" footnotes, I find myself struggling with mixing dialog and action, wanting to spell out every character's motions in every scene, and trying to understand just what exactly is meant in writing books by "show, not tell." Self-Editing has come to my rescue.
I happened on this book two weeks ago when I was at the bookstore, flicked through the pages, and though it looked like a worthwhile read. My library had a copy, and I just finished reading through it last night. Chapters are (with my comments):
1) Show and Tell [examples of exactly that]
2) Characterization and Exposition [avoid the latter via the former]
3) Point of View [first person, third person, omniscient]
4) Dialogue Mechanics [just what it sounds like]
5) See How It Sounds [read your prose aloud]
6) Interior Monologue [how to do it]
7) Easy Beats [handling excessive "stage business" in your scenes]
8) Breaking Up Is Easy To Do [using whitespace for pacing]
9) Once Is Usually Enough [don't repeat]
10) Proportion [focus on what's important]
11) Sophistication [don't write like a novice]
12) Voice [your characters need distinction]
Each chapter presents before-and-after samples of prose, typically pulled from contemporary works (this edition dates from 1993), though peppered with illustrative text from classics. I thrive on examples, and this book did not disappoint, except for the nagging feeling that my own draft neatly illustrates almost all the "before" problems. Sigh. Exercises are presented at the end of each chapter, with an answer key in the back -- more examples, really, as they illustrate how the authors (both editors) would have refined the passages. I skimmed over these after reading the chapters in my eagerness to get to the next one.
The tone in the book is light and instructive, not scolding, and at least the first edition comes with the occasional cartoon from George Booth -- if you've flicked through a New Yorker magazine in the past decade, you've seen his work. They're not necessary, but fun (and often featuring typewriters, so hey, on-topic for the blog.) This is a very approachable work for novice and amateur writers, and I can see how applying the lessons from the chapters can make my own work tighter and more readable. Once I finish retyping it, that is.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Eye Exercises, Part 2 - Black and White
Some more experiments from the crapcam: this time, I took some shots from my walk and stripped out the colors with the Gimp photo editing software, adjusting the white and black levels slightly to match what I'd look for in a black and white print. Shooting b&w is great fun, first, because it's easy and inexpensive to do yourself at home and is a process tolerant of failure. Second, because it's an excellent way to re-train yourself to look at shape and light as you'll lose all the color "information" along the way.
Digital experimentation is a good way to get your feet wet. Try shooting something with your digital camera of choice, then open it up in an image editor and convert it to a greyscale photo. Which of these pictures do you like better in color, and which do you prefer in black and white? My thoughts follow the thumbnails...
1) Arrows
2) Wet Shirt
3) Leaves
4) Palms
5) Landscaping
My favorites:
Digital experimentation is a good way to get your feet wet. Try shooting something with your digital camera of choice, then open it up in an image editor and convert it to a greyscale photo. Which of these pictures do you like better in color, and which do you prefer in black and white? My thoughts follow the thumbnails...
1) Arrows
2) Wet Shirt
3) Leaves
4) Palms
5) Landscaping
My favorites:
- I prefer the color version of the street arrows. The red curb is completely lost in the black and white version, and I like the way the red grabs at my eye in the color shot.
- It's close for the shirt photo. The color shot emphasizes the distortion effects of the cheap lens more, I think, but I like the texture of the black and white photo. I'm slightly in the B&W camp on this one.
- For the leaves, black and white is the clear winner to me here. The washed-out colors muddy the photo in my opinion. Black and white is great for pointing out edge detail, in part because our eyes are so sensitive to shades and levels of light. It's not just that the color information is gone from the second picture, but other information is subtly boosted.
- Black and white for sure. Although it's one of my favorite subjects -- a cluster of palm trees -- I think the black and white is far more dreamlike and makes you work harder to guess what you're seeing. I like pictures that make me wonder a little. The original was shot in portrait orientation which is more obivous if you live around palm trees and their unmistakable bark. Showing it in landscape adds more "what is that" to the final photo.
- This is a cheat, since I deliberately chose this to illustrate how black and white can change a scene. The yellowing fronds in the color picture distract me, and make my eye hop around looking at them, instead of the pile o' stripes that I (the photographer) was hoping for.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Eye Exercises
Heading out into the weather with a camera in hand? Here's five practical tips to keep in mind...
Tip #1: Remember the "Rule of Thirds"
This is a classic guideline for composition. Imagine that your frame/viewfinder/LCD screen is divided into thirds horizontally and vertically, and try to put the focus of your picture in one of the intersections, or place a line (of objects, a horizon, a tree) along one of the imaginary lines.
Most modern cameras put their focus mechanism right in the center of the picture, which might encourage you to take all center-framed shots of your beloved, badly-drawn cat Fluffy. Resist the temptation! It's usually possible to lock the focus on a subject by pressing the button halfway down, then re-frame the shot as you hold down the button and then fire the shutter.
Tip #2: Survey the Frame
As you're setting up the shot, look all the way around the frame. Sure, Fluffy is adorable, but that garbage can behind him is decidedly less so. Best scoot over a bit and take the shot from a different angle. How many times have you see tree-branch antlers growing out of someone's head in a photograph? Just say "no" to turning your relatives into jackalopes with this simple step.
Tip #3: Count your Subjects
Humans are natural sorters and pattern-recognizers. Taking a photo of two subjects (especially similar ones) automatically invites comparisons between the two, and tends to make the picture "stable" to look at. With three subjects, though, the eye and brain hop around among them. Odd numbers of subjects in a photo generally make it more dynamic to look at.
Tip #4: Film is Cheap!
If you're on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, don't squander the film. The cost of having a second, third, or fifth shot developed is far less than the cost of trying to recreate that moment in time. Take your "postcard shot" of landmarks, and then move around and get a few more angles. And when you're taking portraits, always get "one for luck" in there. (More if you're photographing kids.) Afterwards: edit, edit, edit. I shot something like seven rolls of film in a week at Disneyland, just to get about 30 "good" shots.
Tip #5: Break the Rules!
Anyone who tells you there's only one way to shoot, or one brand of camera to use, or is zealously in the film-is-dead or digital-is-evil camp and can see nothing else is not worth your time. Photography is about keeping your eyes open, getting a perspective on the world, and documenting it for yourself or others to enjoy. Anyone that's making it less enjoyable for you is a bum. None of these tips or any of the hundreds of other bits of advice out there are must-dos, so do what you like, discover what works for you, and go shoot something.
Tip #1: Remember the "Rule of Thirds"
This is a classic guideline for composition. Imagine that your frame/viewfinder/LCD screen is divided into thirds horizontally and vertically, and try to put the focus of your picture in one of the intersections, or place a line (of objects, a horizon, a tree) along one of the imaginary lines.
Most modern cameras put their focus mechanism right in the center of the picture, which might encourage you to take all center-framed shots of your beloved, badly-drawn cat Fluffy. Resist the temptation! It's usually possible to lock the focus on a subject by pressing the button halfway down, then re-frame the shot as you hold down the button and then fire the shutter.
Tip #2: Survey the Frame
As you're setting up the shot, look all the way around the frame. Sure, Fluffy is adorable, but that garbage can behind him is decidedly less so. Best scoot over a bit and take the shot from a different angle. How many times have you see tree-branch antlers growing out of someone's head in a photograph? Just say "no" to turning your relatives into jackalopes with this simple step.
Tip #3: Count your Subjects
Humans are natural sorters and pattern-recognizers. Taking a photo of two subjects (especially similar ones) automatically invites comparisons between the two, and tends to make the picture "stable" to look at. With three subjects, though, the eye and brain hop around among them. Odd numbers of subjects in a photo generally make it more dynamic to look at.
Tip #4: Film is Cheap!
If you're on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, don't squander the film. The cost of having a second, third, or fifth shot developed is far less than the cost of trying to recreate that moment in time. Take your "postcard shot" of landmarks, and then move around and get a few more angles. And when you're taking portraits, always get "one for luck" in there. (More if you're photographing kids.) Afterwards: edit, edit, edit. I shot something like seven rolls of film in a week at Disneyland, just to get about 30 "good" shots.
Tip #5: Break the Rules!
Anyone who tells you there's only one way to shoot, or one brand of camera to use, or is zealously in the film-is-dead or digital-is-evil camp and can see nothing else is not worth your time. Photography is about keeping your eyes open, getting a perspective on the world, and documenting it for yourself or others to enjoy. Anyone that's making it less enjoyable for you is a bum. None of these tips or any of the hundreds of other bits of advice out there are must-dos, so do what you like, discover what works for you, and go shoot something.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Fumbling Around in the Dark
Mr. Speegle officially Threw Down and called me out by name, and so I shall punish his effrontery with a post I like to call...
First, let me start at the end by recommending what I think is probably the best book for up-and-coming shutterbugs. It's simply titled Photography by Barbara London and John Upton and is the book that my dad got for me when he handed over his old Minolta. The illustrations are excellent, and drive home concepts like "depth of field" and how aperture and shutter speed work together to get a certain type of image on film. There are tons of books out there, but this is the one I always turn to, in no small part because of the clear illustrations and step-by-step photos. The edition I have is now hopelessly out of date with regard to modern camera technology, but the science hasn't changed. As such, I have cribbed mercilessly from them. Hey! I bet your library has a copy. Mine's the fourth edition, looks like they're up to the ninth edition now.
Also, a disclaimer. I have not tried -- nor desire to start -- at-home color film processing. Color is a more persnickety mistress than black-and-white: the chemicals are a bit more involved, the temperatures are higher, and the timing is far more exact. If you like sorting your sock drawer by style then size then color then fiber, color processing is for you, and this post is not. Sorry. I think the best place to get color done is at your local mega-mart, where a pimply teenager will be happy to give you a strip of machine-processed negatives in an hour for under $3, and maybe even scan them onto a CD for about $5 more. You can't beat that kind of a deal, folks.
Let's Begin!
To develop your own film, you need:
The instructor of the adult-ed classes that I took was pretty much the example of your wild-eyed greybeard photographer, and could charitably be called particular in his preferences. One thing he did stress is you'll get a lot more mileage out of stainless steel than plastic reels and tanks, aka, "the thing that holds the film" and "the thing that the film and chemistry slosh around in." Plastic reels are supposedly easier to load, though he swore that they also made it easier to mangle film if you did it wrong. Stainless requires a bit more effort, but clean-up is a breeze. I inherited stainless from my grandfather, that's what I learned on, and that's what I use. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
Back now? OK, here's what you need to do:
(1) Igor, prepare the lab! If you're using anything that's going to be shared between chemicals (like a measuring cup) be sure to clean it out well between chemicals.
According to the directions that came with your chemicals, you're going to mix up a batch of developer, usually diluting a liquid or a powder by some ratio of developer:water.
"Stop bath" is generally not necessary, it's just the stuff you dump in after developing to make the developer stop doing its thing. Running water from the tap is fine here, and pretty common. If you're made of money, though, hey... stop bath away, my friend. I've read that acetic acid can be used here in a dilution, and have heard of some people using a vinegar bath here.
"Fixer" is the last real step. This is the stuff that gives the light-sensitive side of the film (the "emulsion") one final scrub before it goes out into the world and gets all fingerprinty. You may be diluting this to use once and then toss out ("one-shot") or just pouring from the bottle into your tank, and then pouring back later. Depends on what you bought, and I don't think one is any better than the other.
Crucial thing with the chemistry is that all your chemicals and waters should be about 68 degrees Fahrenheit/20 Celsius. This is an "about" temperature, and you can go over or under without much trouble. Wild temperature swings between steps will do funky things with your emulsion, as will very high temps. Your developer should have a recommended temperature printed on the bottle or the instruction sheet, follow that.
(2) In the dark, wind up your film. Open your film canister with the bottle opener. If you hold the film in your hand with the little knob bit pointing upwards, you should be able to get the opener on the lip of the bottom piece and pry it off. The film is loosely wrapped on a spool inside the canister, which will now evade your grasp and bounce all over the effing bathroom floor, unwinding as it goes. And now you know why I use a changing bag. This is just pair of black nylon bags, one inside the other, with a pair of elastic-cuffed sleeves sticking out. Imagine a windbreaker without a neck opening and you've got it. The idea is that you put all your "dark stuff" in the bag (spool, canister, film, bottle opener) and zip the bag shut, then pop your hands in the sleeves, and set to work. (Note: after opening the film and effectively locking your arms in the bag, it is required that your nose itch maddeningly for the duration.)
The film will be taped on to the little spool right at the end. You're strong enough to pull this off, the film will be fine (that end isn't exposed anyway.) Some directions have you trim off the tape, or the leader at the start of the roll. I say: they aren't hurting anything, and if you're using stainless steel (ahem) you can load the whole thing, tape, leader and all on the reel. Put the tape end in first, and finish with the leader. Besides, playing with scissors in the dark? Honestly. Doing this little trick does mean that you're going to unwind the whole roll of film to get to the taped end, but film is very curly, and will want to wind back up as it's coming off the spool. Go ahead and let it make a little neat roll in your other hand.
Winding film on a spool is the absolute hardest part of this process. If you can do that, you can do all the rest of this, and that's why I think people gravitate towards plastic. The best way to learn how to wind is to sacrifice some film -- any kind -- and practice loading, loading, loading in broad daylight until you get it. Then try it in daylight, but with your eyes shut. Then under a coat so you can't peek, etc.. You have to be able to do this step totally by feel, ideally by only holding the edges of the film. Once you have this step down pat, you're good to go. And you can do it. With practice.
(3) Place spool in tank, cover, and soak. If you're using a daylight tank, get your spool in there, place the lid on the tank, and turn on the lights or open the bag. Removing only the little light-trap cap, pour some water into the tank, enough that you're covering the film inside. I wait until it starts to splurt back out. Pre-soaking the film isn't required, but again, it's how I learned, so...
When you think about it, film is magical stuff. Teeny tiny little particles of light-sensitive stuff, hanging out in essentially dried Jell-O, waiting for the right chemicals to embiggen them into crystals visible by the naked eye. Pause for a moment here to be dazzled by the coolness of what you're doing. Digital weenies don't get to ponder this sort of thing.
(4) Bath time. Removing only the little light-trap cap, dump out the water from your tank. Pour in your carefully measured and temperature correct developer, noting the time when you do this, replace the cap, and gently agitate the tank. "Agitate" here means "hold the lid and cap on with your fingers as you slowly turn the tank over" not "shake the living hell out of the tank like you're mixing cocktails at your brother's wedding." A few easy inversions back and forth will do it. Some folks like to throw in a lucky tap or two on the counter to knock bubbles off the film at the end of a cycle: go crazy. Just don't make a frothy umbrella drink in your tank.
You'll be doing this agitation dance for a while, for a minute or so straight at the beginning, then a couple of inversions every 30 seconds for anywhere from about 15-20 minutes. Follow your developer's instructions. When I first started processing my own film, I would always panic at this step, since I'd be concentrating so hard on the agitating that I'd forget when I poured in the developer. I've since learned to wait until the minute hand was somewhere easy, and then repeat to myself the time it comes out on every inversion. "The film is done at 1:17... *swish*... the film is done at 1:17... *swish*..." I call it "photography Tourette's."
Not using a spool and tank? What, are you a masochist or something? OK, you can do this in the dark, though you'll have to have all your chemicals mixed up and ready in advance, and in open-air containers like old mixing bowls You can hold both ends of the film, and kind of rock it through the developer, working your way down the length of the film in a "U" shape and then back again. I don't know what you're doing for time, though -- maybe counting? Do the same thing for your bowl of fixer. As soon as you get out of the bathroom, though, get online and order a daylight tank and some reels.
Your developer package will tell you how long you need to soak your film: there's usually a table printed that shows major film brands vs. temperature, and you look up the number of minutes from that. Warmer developer means less time, but often results in grainier negatives. Too cold and the chemistry won't "take" as well. Follow the directions here, but don't panic if you're off by a degree or a minute or two. Black and white film is pretty forgiving.
Agitate every 30 seconds or so, with the last agitation ending in you dumping out the developer, either down the drain, or back into the bottle. If you did any sort of mixing to prepare your developer, then it's done, but if you're using pre-mixed stuff, you can be thrifty and mix it back in to your bottle. This recycling will eventually exhaust the developer and you'll need to get new stuff. (Caffenol is one-shot.)
(5) Stop, Dog, Stop! Development time all done? OK, time for the stop bath. You can use another chemical mix for this, or running water. I place my tank under the tap in the sink with only the little light-trap cap removed, and let water pour in and wash the film, periodically dumping it out to flush out any goodness floating near the bottom.
(6) Get fixed. The last real chemistry-ish step is to pour in the fixer. This takes less time than the developer, directions should be printed on the box/bottle/package about the amount of time, but it's typically on the order of a couple of minutes of occasional agitation. Fixer can generally be saved and reused. The fixer helps to harden the emulsion layer so it's tough enough to handle storage and scanning and the like.
(7) Wash up. If you've done everything in order, you should be able to safely expose your film to light now, and naught but the ravages of time and your own klutziness will harm it. Let your film spools sit under running water for a while now, just to flush any other little bits of fixer or whatever off of it. After it's been flushed for a few minutes, you can add a drop of a "washing agent" to the water, which will help keep spots from forming on your negatives. There is, of course, a commercial product that does this, though you can just as easily use a tiny drop of dishwashing soap or a rinse agent like Jet-Dry. If you buy the commercial stuff, it comes in a wee little bottle. Since you are only using a tiny drop at a time, that bottle will probably last longer than you will.
(8) Hanging out. Now dry those negatives! Fancy dryers and such may have been all the rage back in the heydey of film, but hanging in your shower will work, too. Clip one of your clothespins or binder clips to the end of your film and gently ease it off the spool. Attach the other clip to the other end, and hang it up from one clip to dry. The bottom clip acts as a weight and pulls the film straight while it dries.
I happen to have one of those ceiling hooks in my shower at home (a gift from the previous owners) which works perfectly for hanging film. If you can suspend a plastic coat hanger or run a line, you can use laundry hooks to hold the film while it drips dry. A shower is not required, since all you're after is a place where film can drip undisturbed for a while without being coated in dust and curious hands. Basements, an empty closet with an old tub on the floor, etc..
When they're dry, you can cut between every fifth frame or so and slip them into protective sleeves. Admire the magic! Those tiny little images! You made that.
Celebrate! You're done!
OK, did that seem long? It is, and it isn't. Once you get going, it's a surprisingly fast operation, and most tanks will accommodate multiple reels of 35mm film, so you can get double the results for your time (just be sure to make a big enough batch of chemicals!) The longest part is the standing around agitating the tank and watching the clock, but it's worth the wait.
But now where, you ask, should the budget-minded retro-consumer go to indulge in this whim known as DIY developing?
Shopping Tips
Fumbling Around in the Dark
a contemporary guide to DIY film development for the chronically clumsy
a contemporary guide to DIY film development for the chronically clumsy
First, let me start at the end by recommending what I think is probably the best book for up-and-coming shutterbugs. It's simply titled Photography by Barbara London and John Upton and is the book that my dad got for me when he handed over his old Minolta. The illustrations are excellent, and drive home concepts like "depth of field" and how aperture and shutter speed work together to get a certain type of image on film. There are tons of books out there, but this is the one I always turn to, in no small part because of the clear illustrations and step-by-step photos. The edition I have is now hopelessly out of date with regard to modern camera technology, but the science hasn't changed. As such, I have cribbed mercilessly from them. Hey! I bet your library has a copy. Mine's the fourth edition, looks like they're up to the ninth edition now.
Also, a disclaimer. I have not tried -- nor desire to start -- at-home color film processing. Color is a more persnickety mistress than black-and-white: the chemicals are a bit more involved, the temperatures are higher, and the timing is far more exact. If you like sorting your sock drawer by style then size then color then fiber, color processing is for you, and this post is not. Sorry. I think the best place to get color done is at your local mega-mart, where a pimply teenager will be happy to give you a strip of machine-processed negatives in an hour for under $3, and maybe even scan them onto a CD for about $5 more. You can't beat that kind of a deal, folks.
Let's Begin!
To develop your own film, you need:
- A roll of exposed black and white film. And already, we have our first "gotcha." True black and white film is almost unobtanium these days. Those places that still sell film may offer a "faux" black and white, which is called "chromogenic"film. It says black and white on the box, it prints in black and white, but it's not actual-factual black-and-white film. It's actually just color film with no color layers. How do you know? If it says Process C-41 on the film canister or box, then this is color film, so prepare to hand this to our pimply teen friend. Kodak Tri-X and T-MAX, Ilford HP4 and HP5 are all "true" b/w films, and are what you should be looking for. See below for "shopping advice" when you realize you can't find it locally.
- Chemistry. There's surprisingly little involved here: a "developer" and a "fixer"are all you need, though there are other optional chemicals you can involve to make the process faster or easier. More on those when we get there.
- Total darkness (for a little while). This one is crucial, and I mean complete, can't-see-my-fingers-in-front-of-my-face darkness. You'll be handling film in the dark for the first bit of development, and any light at all will "fog" the film (aka, leave blotches on it or dim the image.) Blocking up the window and cracks around the door in a bathroom is typical, or stepping into a similarly blocked up closet. Personally, I use something called a changing bag for this step, since I have no easy access to a light-free room these days.
- Other stuff. No matter how low-tech you go, I think these are essential:
- Old clothes and an old towel or two, because nothing stains like film chemistry. Wear anything that will be enhanced by nasty brown splatters.
- Bottle opener: the old "church key" kind, not a cork remover. You need this to open the film canister in the dark.
- Clean jars to hold your chemistry (Mason jars are good and sturdy) and a liquid measuring cup, or some fancy graduated cylinders like you used in chem class all those years ago.
- A thermometer clearly readable around the 68 degree F/20 degree C mark.
- Something to hold your film in as it gets blended with the chemicals. If you're a real purist, you can do this in a plastic tub or old bowl, but why? Get yourself a decent daylight processing tank and a spool to hold the film. These are brilliantly simple: once you have wrangled the film onto the spool (in the dark!) put the spool in the tank, pop on the cover, and then pour the chemicals in through a special light-proof hole. See the shopping section below again for tips.
- A pair of binder clips or clothespins and a place to hang wet film overnight (showers are great for this.)
- A clock with a second hand that's readable from where you're developing.
The instructor of the adult-ed classes that I took was pretty much the example of your wild-eyed greybeard photographer, and could charitably be called particular in his preferences. One thing he did stress is you'll get a lot more mileage out of stainless steel than plastic reels and tanks, aka, "the thing that holds the film" and "the thing that the film and chemistry slosh around in." Plastic reels are supposedly easier to load, though he swore that they also made it easier to mangle film if you did it wrong. Stainless requires a bit more effort, but clean-up is a breeze. I inherited stainless from my grandfather, that's what I learned on, and that's what I use. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
Back now? OK, here's what you need to do:
(1) Igor, prepare the lab! If you're using anything that's going to be shared between chemicals (like a measuring cup) be sure to clean it out well between chemicals.
According to the directions that came with your chemicals, you're going to mix up a batch of developer, usually diluting a liquid or a powder by some ratio of developer:water.
"Stop bath" is generally not necessary, it's just the stuff you dump in after developing to make the developer stop doing its thing. Running water from the tap is fine here, and pretty common. If you're made of money, though, hey... stop bath away, my friend. I've read that acetic acid can be used here in a dilution, and have heard of some people using a vinegar bath here.
"Fixer" is the last real step. This is the stuff that gives the light-sensitive side of the film (the "emulsion") one final scrub before it goes out into the world and gets all fingerprinty. You may be diluting this to use once and then toss out ("one-shot") or just pouring from the bottle into your tank, and then pouring back later. Depends on what you bought, and I don't think one is any better than the other.
Crucial thing with the chemistry is that all your chemicals and waters should be about 68 degrees Fahrenheit/20 Celsius. This is an "about" temperature, and you can go over or under without much trouble. Wild temperature swings between steps will do funky things with your emulsion, as will very high temps. Your developer should have a recommended temperature printed on the bottle or the instruction sheet, follow that.
(2) In the dark, wind up your film. Open your film canister with the bottle opener. If you hold the film in your hand with the little knob bit pointing upwards, you should be able to get the opener on the lip of the bottom piece and pry it off. The film is loosely wrapped on a spool inside the canister, which will now evade your grasp and bounce all over the effing bathroom floor, unwinding as it goes. And now you know why I use a changing bag. This is just pair of black nylon bags, one inside the other, with a pair of elastic-cuffed sleeves sticking out. Imagine a windbreaker without a neck opening and you've got it. The idea is that you put all your "dark stuff" in the bag (spool, canister, film, bottle opener) and zip the bag shut, then pop your hands in the sleeves, and set to work. (Note: after opening the film and effectively locking your arms in the bag, it is required that your nose itch maddeningly for the duration.)
The film will be taped on to the little spool right at the end. You're strong enough to pull this off, the film will be fine (that end isn't exposed anyway.) Some directions have you trim off the tape, or the leader at the start of the roll. I say: they aren't hurting anything, and if you're using stainless steel (ahem) you can load the whole thing, tape, leader and all on the reel. Put the tape end in first, and finish with the leader. Besides, playing with scissors in the dark? Honestly. Doing this little trick does mean that you're going to unwind the whole roll of film to get to the taped end, but film is very curly, and will want to wind back up as it's coming off the spool. Go ahead and let it make a little neat roll in your other hand.
Winding film on a spool is the absolute hardest part of this process. If you can do that, you can do all the rest of this, and that's why I think people gravitate towards plastic. The best way to learn how to wind is to sacrifice some film -- any kind -- and practice loading, loading, loading in broad daylight until you get it. Then try it in daylight, but with your eyes shut. Then under a coat so you can't peek, etc.. You have to be able to do this step totally by feel, ideally by only holding the edges of the film. Once you have this step down pat, you're good to go. And you can do it. With practice.
(3) Place spool in tank, cover, and soak. If you're using a daylight tank, get your spool in there, place the lid on the tank, and turn on the lights or open the bag. Removing only the little light-trap cap, pour some water into the tank, enough that you're covering the film inside. I wait until it starts to splurt back out. Pre-soaking the film isn't required, but again, it's how I learned, so...
When you think about it, film is magical stuff. Teeny tiny little particles of light-sensitive stuff, hanging out in essentially dried Jell-O, waiting for the right chemicals to embiggen them into crystals visible by the naked eye. Pause for a moment here to be dazzled by the coolness of what you're doing. Digital weenies don't get to ponder this sort of thing.
(4) Bath time. Removing only the little light-trap cap, dump out the water from your tank. Pour in your carefully measured and temperature correct developer, noting the time when you do this, replace the cap, and gently agitate the tank. "Agitate" here means "hold the lid and cap on with your fingers as you slowly turn the tank over" not "shake the living hell out of the tank like you're mixing cocktails at your brother's wedding." A few easy inversions back and forth will do it. Some folks like to throw in a lucky tap or two on the counter to knock bubbles off the film at the end of a cycle: go crazy. Just don't make a frothy umbrella drink in your tank.
You'll be doing this agitation dance for a while, for a minute or so straight at the beginning, then a couple of inversions every 30 seconds for anywhere from about 15-20 minutes. Follow your developer's instructions. When I first started processing my own film, I would always panic at this step, since I'd be concentrating so hard on the agitating that I'd forget when I poured in the developer. I've since learned to wait until the minute hand was somewhere easy, and then repeat to myself the time it comes out on every inversion. "The film is done at 1:17... *swish*... the film is done at 1:17... *swish*..." I call it "photography Tourette's."
Not using a spool and tank? What, are you a masochist or something? OK, you can do this in the dark, though you'll have to have all your chemicals mixed up and ready in advance, and in open-air containers like old mixing bowls You can hold both ends of the film, and kind of rock it through the developer, working your way down the length of the film in a "U" shape and then back again. I don't know what you're doing for time, though -- maybe counting? Do the same thing for your bowl of fixer. As soon as you get out of the bathroom, though, get online and order a daylight tank and some reels.
Your developer package will tell you how long you need to soak your film: there's usually a table printed that shows major film brands vs. temperature, and you look up the number of minutes from that. Warmer developer means less time, but often results in grainier negatives. Too cold and the chemistry won't "take" as well. Follow the directions here, but don't panic if you're off by a degree or a minute or two. Black and white film is pretty forgiving.
Agitate every 30 seconds or so, with the last agitation ending in you dumping out the developer, either down the drain, or back into the bottle. If you did any sort of mixing to prepare your developer, then it's done, but if you're using pre-mixed stuff, you can be thrifty and mix it back in to your bottle. This recycling will eventually exhaust the developer and you'll need to get new stuff. (Caffenol is one-shot.)
(5) Stop, Dog, Stop! Development time all done? OK, time for the stop bath. You can use another chemical mix for this, or running water. I place my tank under the tap in the sink with only the little light-trap cap removed, and let water pour in and wash the film, periodically dumping it out to flush out any goodness floating near the bottom.
(6) Get fixed. The last real chemistry-ish step is to pour in the fixer. This takes less time than the developer, directions should be printed on the box/bottle/package about the amount of time, but it's typically on the order of a couple of minutes of occasional agitation. Fixer can generally be saved and reused. The fixer helps to harden the emulsion layer so it's tough enough to handle storage and scanning and the like.
(7) Wash up. If you've done everything in order, you should be able to safely expose your film to light now, and naught but the ravages of time and your own klutziness will harm it. Let your film spools sit under running water for a while now, just to flush any other little bits of fixer or whatever off of it. After it's been flushed for a few minutes, you can add a drop of a "washing agent" to the water, which will help keep spots from forming on your negatives. There is, of course, a commercial product that does this, though you can just as easily use a tiny drop of dishwashing soap or a rinse agent like Jet-Dry. If you buy the commercial stuff, it comes in a wee little bottle. Since you are only using a tiny drop at a time, that bottle will probably last longer than you will.
(8) Hanging out. Now dry those negatives! Fancy dryers and such may have been all the rage back in the heydey of film, but hanging in your shower will work, too. Clip one of your clothespins or binder clips to the end of your film and gently ease it off the spool. Attach the other clip to the other end, and hang it up from one clip to dry. The bottom clip acts as a weight and pulls the film straight while it dries.
I happen to have one of those ceiling hooks in my shower at home (a gift from the previous owners) which works perfectly for hanging film. If you can suspend a plastic coat hanger or run a line, you can use laundry hooks to hold the film while it drips dry. A shower is not required, since all you're after is a place where film can drip undisturbed for a while without being coated in dust and curious hands. Basements, an empty closet with an old tub on the floor, etc..
When they're dry, you can cut between every fifth frame or so and slip them into protective sleeves. Admire the magic! Those tiny little images! You made that.
Celebrate! You're done!
OK, did that seem long? It is, and it isn't. Once you get going, it's a surprisingly fast operation, and most tanks will accommodate multiple reels of 35mm film, so you can get double the results for your time (just be sure to make a big enough batch of chemicals!) The longest part is the standing around agitating the tank and watching the clock, but it's worth the wait.
But now where, you ask, should the budget-minded retro-consumer go to indulge in this whim known as DIY developing?
Shopping Tips
- Post on Craigslist and Freecycle for developing stuff. Seems like everyone's getting rid of their film stuff these days, and surely there's someone in your area who has "made the switch to digital" (the fools!) and would hand over their stuff on the cheap.
- Scour eBay, for the same reasons as above.
- Web merchants include B&H and Adorama in New York and Freestyle out here on the left coast. At first glance, doing your own black and white may look a bit... spendy. Film isn't cheap, nor chemicals, nor *sigh* shipping, but figure this: to have blank and white done here, it cost me about $15 per roll (develop + print) at the fancy pro lab near my office, and that's the only game in town. Otherwise, it would be sent out... somewhere? And how long will it be away? And how satisfying is that, truly?
- You can always get better equipment later. Mason jars and thrift-store pitchers work fine to hold chemicals. No changing bag? Use two black plastic garbage bags (one inside the other) under a heavy coat. Again, you don't need much, just film, darkness, and chemicals. Everything else is there to make it more convenient. There's all sorts of devices for rotating tanks and drying negatives and the like, but you don't need it right away. Start small.
- Ilford's pamphlet (PDF) biased towards their own products, of course, but with nifty illustrations
- Kodak pamphlet (PDF) showing charts of film vs. developer, and laying out the steps
- flickr user On_Sidewalks' topic about budget b&w developing (nice photos!)
- The flickr group I Shoot Film is a great resource, too. Folks there seem genuinely helpful, and it's not a braggy look-at-my-pics group.
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