Alastair M. D. Touw 🍥 @amdt@mastodon.social

Assume this is a work of fiction.

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

Another weblog (or is it a photolog?) which sparked my interest in Japan was Mori Yūji's Dacafe Diary, which thankfully is still up, and — perhaps better for ensuring I can appreciate it in the future — has been published as three hard-back books. https://dacafe.cc

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine thankfully has a snapshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20101222012827/http://www.antipixel.com:80/blog/

It's been a good 10 to 15 years but I still really miss Jeremy Hedley's weblog, Antipixel. I might never have moved here if not for the glimpes of life in Japan I could experience, third-hand, via his writing and photography. I wonder what he's up to these days.

I'm not sure there's a therapist interested enough in computers to help me figure out why I'm so fickle about text editors. One month I'll be all-in on Emacs, then the pendulum swings and I'll be using Acme.

If you like something: archive it, make a note of it, and don't forget your backups!

To be fair to Google (not that I want to), I'm not sure they even try to handle people just turning off their Web servers, or failing to redirect hundreds or thousands of URL's every time they do a redesign or change their business model.

This is probably not that interesting, but then the last time I managed to fish something out the depths of my distant memory like this it took weeks, not half an hour; and this just happens to be the easiest place to make a note of this (which is probably part of my problem).

User 'quosimosaur' wrote that 'In this article the author claims that "Using the diagonal of the [35mm] format as the standard, the true normal would be about 42mm."', linking to a no longer existing page on The Luminous Landscape; but that name rang like a bell, or more like a fire alarm. The URL suggested the column was published in May, 2005, and the Wayback Machine had it on their homepage from June.

In my experience, Google is useless at turning up mildly historical information like this, so I performed various site searches on communities which would have been actively sharing weblog posts between 2000–2010, and eventually found this Metafilter thread (via 'site:metafilter.com 40mm normal lens') about lenses and natural focal lengths, titled 'How can you see what I saw?'. https://ask.metafilter.com/137009/How-can-you-see-what-I-saw

I find the ways my memory failed me over these 15 years interesting: there are far fewer photographs accompanying the essay than I remembered, and whilst the author mentions APS-C sensors, they're mainly writing from experience shooting 35 mm film, not digital.

I found it! 'Why 40mm?' from Mike Johnston's The Sunday Morning Photographer column for The Luminous Landscape, published in May, 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20050519015259/http://www.luminous-landscape.com:80/columns/sm-may-05.shtml

I'm not as sure as I was that they shot digital. If they did, it would have had to have been full-frame, at least.

I think the author's main point was that that focal length (whatever it was) is a more natural normal lens than 50 mm is.

Years ago I read a photography essay (on the Web) about preferring a prime lens with a focal length shorter than 50 mm. It was probably 40 mm. The author shot digital, but only in black and white. I'd love to read it again, but this is all I remember about it and I've never been a diligent notetaker; and computers are, unfortunately, useless at augmenting this kind of recall.