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Black/White

// July 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography

The end of June marks the end of the first half of a year in pictures. It also signifies the end of a month-long experiment in black & white photography for my 365 project. I’ve never really appreciated working in the B&W format. If anything, I prefer to treat my images with a dialed down vibrance setting (a control available in Adobe Lightroom which applies a much smarter algorithmic approach to desaturation) in order to mute colors without removing them completely. As such, I decided to embark on this project in order to hopefully gain some appreciation for working in this format.

Molinari

Looking back over the month in review, I find the results to be somewhat mixed. By the end, I was starting to see my images in B&W and trying to compose the shots with that in mind. Some pictures certainly lend themselves towards that treatment. A low quality or high ISO image with lots of digital color noise can often be manipulated with much better results when color is removed. However, trying to pull a result out of other images sometimes just comes out severely lacking without any of the original color context.

Stacks

If anything, maybe I’m now a bit more confident with tossing colors completely to the wind and open to making use of the Black & White format when I think it might work in the future. This exercise has given me some practice in understanding when those instances might be. In the end it comes back to the heart of what the 365 project stands for – the rigors of constant practice in order to learn and grow and continuing challenging artistic creativity.

Wet Paint

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Brewcraft

// June 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Brewing

My homebrew adventure began with a trip to the local supply shop, San Francisco Brewcraft. After a few weeks of internet research I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to get started. Most of the necessary equipment is typically packaged up into custom kits sold by just about every brewing store around. I settled on a mid-range kit composed of a 6.5 gallon plastic primary fermenting bucket (with spigot), 5 gallon glass carboy secondary fermenter, stoppers, airlocks, cleaning brushes, hose, funnel, bottle caps and capper, auto-siphon, hydrometer, and the ingredients for the first batch of beer. I threw in a 5 gallon brew kettle and no-rinse sanitizer and was on my way to get started cooking.

Even as I opened with the fact that I was a first time brewer, everyone in the shop was eager to provide helpful advice. In fact, The homebrew community on the whole seems to be very open and welcoming of newbies just starting out on their first brew. Local shop owner ‘Griz’ discussed various tips and helped me with my first recipe. After a bit of conversation about what kind of beer I liked and wanted to make, Griz began scrawling a list of ingredients out on one of the shop’s special premade recipe template sheets. His shop hands then fetched the various ingredients and pieces of kit as he called them out.

Also highly recommended by the shop (and included with the price of the kit) was a free introductory class taught every Monday evening packed with useful information about proper sanitization, boiling, and bottling techniques. Among the helpful advice given during my short visit to the shop was to ignore all of the helpful advice on the internet – this information fell into either of the categories of boulderdash or that which made things much more complex than they needed to be. The parting tip was to just not turn it into an anal retentive process and just enjoy it. And if I happened to screw anything up, by all means call them up ASAP for help.

Kit

Once back home with everything from my trip unloaded in the kitchen it was time to organize and start the brewing process. With my various bits of kit and ingredients sorted out, I began poring over the included instructions. While I’m sure they aren’t the worst out there, with several sections scribbled out and margin annotations in my printed photocopied version, I’ve definitely seen better. Luckily, even with the many subtleties and nuances available to complicate things, the basic brewing process is pretty straightforward.

Ingredients

The procedure consists mainly of cleaning and sanitization followed by various cycles of boiling water and adding things to it. Without having a large enough brewing kettle to accommodate a full 5 gallon batch, either a partial boil or 2 step process must be used instead. The simplest method is the partial boil where a double strength wort is made with half of the volume of liquid and then added to the remaining half of water at the end. After the first half of water is has been boiled, cooled, and added to the sanitized primary fermenting bucket, it’s finally time to get down to making the wort.

The recipe I used was for a simple I.P.A. composed of:

• 2# Munich Malt
• 1/2# Aromatic Malt
• 1/2# Oats
• 6# Liquid Malt Extract
• 1oz. Galena Hops
• 1oz. Cascade Hops
• Safale US-05 Dry Ale Yeast
• 1 whirlfloc tab

Some of the exact ingredients are just a guess. I’m not even sure of the actual beer name. Griz’s handwriting is almost impossible to read most of the time. Fortunately, the recipe sheet is laid out well enough to get the gist of which ingredients go where. It just might be difficult to get the correct ingredients to ever repeat the recipe exactly elsewhere.

Steeping Grains

First, the specialty grains are placed in a mesh grain bag and steeped in 155° water for 45 minutes before being removed from the wort and discarded in the compost bin. Next, the liquid is brought to a full boil with the addition of the Liquid Malt Extract. The boil period lasts a full 60 minutes with this schedule of additions:

• 1 oz. Galena Hops @ 60 minutes (beginning of boil)
• 1/2 oz. Cascade Hops @ 30 minutes (halfway through)
• 1 tab whirlfloc @ 30 minutes
• 1/2 oz. Cascade Hops @ 10 minutes (almost done)

The boiled wort is then subjected to an ice & water bath in the sink to quickly cool it down below 90°. Once it has cooled, it is pitched in the primary fermenter with the yeast. While the instructions indicate that the yeast be added directly to the wort, I activated the yeast in a bit of warm water early on in my process. Since the kit only included a single yeast packet, I wanted to make sure I had good yeast before I became invested in the wort production. Finally, after everything is mixed up, a hydrometer sample is taken and the bucket is sealed up with the lid, stopper, and airlock.

Fermenting Brew

Within about 6 hours, the airlock has started to gurgle with a frequency of every 5-10 seconds, indicating that fermentation is well underway. While the recipe calls for an original specific gravity of 1.062, I landed at 1.050. I’m not sure what I did in the process to affect this, but I suspect it may have been during the grain steeping step. It should ready to rack the brew into the secondary fermenter in about a week. In another two weeks, it should be ready to bottle with another 2-3 weeks of bottle conditioning before it’s finally time to find out if I’ve successfully homebrewed my first batch of beer.

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The Mother Road

// June 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography, Travel

At the end of April, I took a bit of vacation time and spent five days driving from San Francisco, CA to my hometown of Springfield, MO. While large portions of the journey were spent mindlessly blazing down the interstate on autopilot, some sections were devoted to sightseeing along the historic Route 66. The 2300 mile adventure was a trip back through eras long past.

On The Road

Oatman, Arizona (population ~128) represents an early 20th century gold mining town turned tourist destination nestled in the Black Mountains. The wild burros descended from the gold prospectors’ original pack animals are one of the primary attractions. The main stretch of town is dedicated primarily to a number of historic buildings housing kitschy stores selling various knick-knacks, t-shirts, and other touristy souvenirs. Bags of carrots are also available for purchase for feeding to the “wild” burros.

Wild Burros of Oatman

The road beyond town is a precarious and winding path that cuts its way through the Black Mountains. There are a number of opportunities to pull off and enjoy the marvelous views of the terrain below. The route eventually leads back to the more well traveled interstate. Across the remainder of Arizona are several small towns which have in some small way managed to continue to exist without being entirely bypassed by the introduction of the modern highway system. Seligman, AZ, the inspiration for the Pixar movie Cars, is a flash back to the 1950′s with it’s themed shops and diners. Have lunch and look around before continuing on down the road to Holbrook, AZ where you can spend the night in the historic Wigwam Motel.

Wigwam Motel - Holbrook, AZ

When the unending stretch of pavement known as I-40 was laid down, it bypassed many of the less direct paths of the old road. There are still a few remnants of the original that can be found out if you’re willing to get off the beaten path a bit. One such section is located in New Mexico on the edge of the Painted Desert. It takes following an apparent dead end service road which turns into a simple dirt road a while before arriving back on some of the roughest 30′s era pavement of the true mother route that still exists in this part of the country. Leading several miles away from the interstate into the desert, one starts to get a true feeling of isolation and a sense of what it must have once felt like to travel across this expansive southwestern desert stretch.

Painted Desert Trading Post

The road eventually leads to a series of sights – the last crumbling remnants of the Painted Desert Trading Post on one side of the road and for the truly adventurous, petroglyphs carved high up in the rock walls of an adjacent mesa. Not much further down the road is the Dead Wash where the rusted out husks of cars lay against the side of a dry river bed, swallowed up by flash floods some unknown decades ago.

Whiting Brothers Station - San Fidel, NM

Traveling these historic routes, a common theme finally begins to emerge. The modernization of the national highway infrastructure slowly bypasses simple service stations, communities and eventually, seemingly entire civilizations. No longer a part of the beaten path, entire towns wither and die off. The structures that were once built to support the livelihoods of their occupants and driven by the commerce of westward movement are left abandoned. Lost in time and slowly ravaged by nature, they’ll eventually crumble back into the dirt on which they were built. For the moment they still stand – halfway between here and eternity – giving a glimpse back to days gone by. These might have been simpler eras full of hope. Now they serve as a haunting reminder of the price of progress for those willing to seek out their message.

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