Fleetwood Mac, Peoria June 26, 1976

I found an old 35mm negative, a single strip of six poorly exposed pictures of Fleetwood Mac playing the Peoria outdoor amphitheater. I recovered the underexposed images (mostly) but I like the poor quality, it makes the pictures look grittier, like they were taken in a club, rather than outdoors in the blazing sun. And I was really close to the stage. I have pics of everyone except Mick Fleetwood behind the drums. You can barely see Mick in the background of one picture. Somewhere, I have color slides of this concert, including the warmup act, Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer group. I only went to this concert to see Jeff Beck.

fleetwood-mac-0

fleetwood-mac-2fleetwood-mac-3

fleetwood-mac-4fleetwood-mac-5

Edit: I found the rest of this roll of film, there are much better pics in there. I managed to get Mick Fleetwood in a pic. Oops, looks like the previous 6 pics are flipped left to right, I’ll have to fix that.

fleetwood-mac-6

Record Caucus Turnout in Coralville Precinct 4

CV04Count

276 voters turned out at my precinct for the Iowa Democratic Caucus. Previous record attendance was 175 at the 2008 caucus. I helped with voter registration so I was the last person into the room, that #276 card was mine. Here is a panorama from the Caucus room at the time we started.

CV04 Caucus

2 voters left before voting so the final headcount was 274. O’Malley had 14 voters and was declared unviable, their voters moved to Sanders and Clinton in roughly equal amounts. During realignment, 2 voters switched from Sanders to Clinton, but this did not affect results because 12 voters were required to gain another delegate. The final count was Sanders 186, Hilary 88. More people voted for Sanders than the previous record turnout for all candidates in 2008.

Final results: Sanders 5, Clinton 2.

The press will spin this as a victory for one candidate or the other. The reality is that both Sanders and Clinton will win delegates, so both candidates will win in Iowa. As I write this, 80% of Democratic precincts have reported and the delegate count is almost exactly even. It will essentially be a tie, which will be a huge defeat for Hilary as the “presumptive nominee.” Obviously the Hilary campaign is having difficulty with this concept, she just declared victory with these results:

Screen Shot 2016-02-01 at 9.26.21 PM

Iowa is a bellwether state and Johnson County precinct CV04 is a belwether for Iowa. In 2008, early results from CV04 showed an overwhelming preference for Obama. This upset was the first sign that Obama would trounce Hilary and win the nomination.

1991: Apple’s Blueprint for Disaster

Today I am releasing another historic Apple document from my archives, “Blueprint for the Decade, An overview of Apple technology and strategies.” Download it here as a 19Mb PDF.

This strategic briefing was published in October 1991, six years after John Sculley ousted Steve Jobs. This is the business plan that brought Apple to the brink of disaster, only to be saved by Steve Jobs returning in 2001. It certainly was the Blueprint for the Decade, it just wasn’t the kind of decade Sculley wanted.

BlueprintCover

Eicher – Myers Family Cookbook

Everyone in my family, even my aunts and cousins, wants this Eicher – Myers Family Cookbook. I inherited it from my Mother, I think it is her handwriting. It appears to be from around 1955, so it could be her mother’s cookbook. This does not appear to be The Family Cookbook, it is a family cookbook. It’s mostly dessert recipes.

Pumpkin Pie Recipe

Since everyone wants a copy, I photographed the entire book and I am presenting it here as a huge 144Mb PDF file. I took these photos with my iPhone 6s 12-megapixel camera, using studio grade lighting and photography equipment.

The recipes are handwritten in cursive, in an address book with tabs from A to Z. There are gaps of dozens of blank pages, which I have not digitized. Recipes are scattered throughout the book, some seem placed at random. But there is a vague scheme here: B for bread; C for corn, cakes and cookies; D for dumplings and oops we need more pages for cakes and cookies; M for meat and muffins; P for Pie and pudding; S for salad, sauce, and shortcakes; and W for walnuts. You can easily see which are the favorite recipes, by the stained pages.

Tucked in between some pages are recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines, brochures, etc. I have tried to preserve this ephemera as I found it, in the order I found it. I carefully unfolded the clippings and put them under glass to keep them flat. You can hardly tell they have been folded for 60 years. I photographed the back sides of these items too. Some were fascinating, like this crudely printed color advertisement for quilt patterns.

quilt

I was particularly amused by a lard pamphlet. Apron-clad women are marching in the streets carrying signs declaring their love for lard.

Lard

I am considering donating the original manuscript cookbook to the University of Iowa Libraries’ Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts collection. The Library is digitizing dozens of historic cookbooks. I contacted them and they expressed interest in acquiring this and other cookbooks from my Mother’s collection. Perhaps it would be fairest to all my family that everyone has digitized copies of the book but none of us possess it, the original is in a library. But I didn’t want to let this cookbook out of my hands without making a copy for myself and my family first.

The Last Stat Cam

In the late 1980s, the digital graphics studio where I worked in LA did an incredible thing: they bought a stat cam. I thought it was the last thing we needed, we were an all-digital studio, we had high end drum scanners and Agfa imagesetters. Stat cams were such a pain to use, that’s why everyone was switching to digital. So I wondered why the boss wanted such an expensive but obsolete device like this. Our company never bought anything but the high end machines. Even today, a used top-end Agfa Repromaster stat camera can cost thousands of dollars. I found this picture on a University surplus auction site, starting bid $50. What a deal.

Agfa Repromaster

Static Cameras were the standard for graphic arts production for decades. Designers would paste their graphics and type onto a white paper sheet; the stat cam would photograph it and convert it to a film used to make printing plates. The films could be as large as two newspaper sheets, the typical paper size of high speed printing presses. I’ve done some amazing things on stat cams, even back in the early 1970s.

The boss said he bought the camera for the old-school printing guys we hired. They assured him they had clients with enough stat cam work to pay for it in mere months. I didn’t see how that was possible. Studios that ran stat cams were going out of business because they were losing their customers (and employees) to digital production companies like us. There were thousands of graphics studios with stat cams that were desperate for work. The Repromaster reached the pinnacle of analog film production just as the analog process became obsolete. The lenses were superb, the quality of the films it produced were perfect. Faster and more elaborate electronic controls would be useless. This was the last stat camera anyone would ever need. We didn’t even need one. We never had one single customer for the stat cam. Agfa stopped making the Repromaster years ago. They are antiques, today you can find them in the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.

Stat cams were designed for only one job, to make perfect film reproductions of flat artwork. If you wanted to do this job today, you would use a digital camera on a copy stand. I just built one, almost by accident. But I will write about that in my next post.

iPhone 6s Shoots Beautiful Panoramas

The iPhone 6s takes wonderful panoramic photographs even under challenging light conditions. The files are huge, suitable for high res inkjet printing at very large sizes. The bottom panorama could be printed 45×12 inches at maximum quality and would probably look pretty good at double that size. It has good dynamic range, even shooting into the sun at sunset. I particularly like the camera’s sensitivity to subtle gradients, like the murky, translucent water giving way to reflections of the sky. These photos are completely unretouched other than cropping. I tried hard to improve the brightness of these scenes and I decided the original images could not be improved.

 

Fog,1500x500

Sunset.1500.500

Shore.1500x400

Click an image to see a higher resolution. Original photos and content © 2015 Charles Eicher

Snowstorm JavaScript Considered Harmful

Every winter, some websites run snowstorm.js as decoration. Yes, it is a festive and cheery thing. It used to be fun back when we all had tiny 1024×780 screens. But now I have a huge, high rez screen, and my computer will try to render all the snowflakes. Some people set the snowstorm to high intensity, it makes my computer overheat and the cooling fans run at high speed. Some people run the white snow over a white background with black text. The only way you can tell snowstorm.js is running is to watch random pixels of the text wink on and off, as the snowflakes drift past. It makes the text illegible.

Please stop using snowstorm.js.

© Copyright 2016 Charles Eicher