When I was 12, my best friend Eugene got a guitar for his birthday.  Of course, right away I wanted one too.  Since all of this was happening in the Soviet Union, simply wanting a guitar did not mean that you could actually get it.  The default state of store shelves was “empty” – sometimes you had to wait months or even years to find what you were looking for.

In any case, I finally got a guitar a year later, for my 13th birthday.  I was ecstatic.  I spent days in my room, practicing until my fingers literally bled.

Over the years, this guitar traveled with me all over the former Soviet Union – camping trips, summer jobs as camp counselor and even a few real gigs. 

When I immigrated to the United States, I left this guitar with my mom.  In 1996, I went back to visit my family.  By that time, I had a few much better guitars waiting for me in my Norfolk apartment.  However, since the rest of my family was getting ready to immigrate to the US, I knew that they would not be able to lug my guitar with them.  I could not bear to sell or give away my guitar, so I brought it back with me.  Let me just say that lugging a guitar on a 14-hour flight is not a lot of fun. 

A few years later, the guitar stopped holding tune; it was time to replace the tuning pegs.  Unfortunately, it was impossible to find tuning pegs that would match the holes in the head stock of my Soviet-made guitar.  A local pawn shop (where I bought my other guitars) gave me a number of a guy that they claimed to use for musical instrument repairs.  Not knowing much about guitar repair, I trusted the guy who said that he could modify the head stock by filling the old holes and press-drilling new ones to match standard American-made tuning pegs.

A few days later the “repair guy” called me and gave me a long speech about how my guitar was a cheap Soviet-made toy and that the neck was made from soft wood and that it cracked as soon as he started drilling.  I picked up my guitar from the guy’s shop and was truly shocked by what he did.

He did not fill the old holes.  Instead, he used a hand-held drill or a Dremmel to widen the existing holes to accommodate larger tuning pegs.  The vibration of whatever tool he used for drilling cracked the head lengthwise.
When I came home, I broke off the cracked part of the head and re-glued the whole thing.  I did not attempt to fix the butchered holes and reattached the old broken tuning pegs back.

The guitar was unplayable, but it still carried quite a bit of sentimental value.  That is, until a few years later my sister dropped it and broke off the bottom part of the neck, right where it attaches to the guitar’s body.
For the next 10 or so years, I kept my first guitar in it’s old beat up case.

Over the past few weeks, after reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers (http://www.amazon.com/Makers-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765312794/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265424527&sr=8-1) I decided that it would be nice to do something with my hands.  When I was a kid, my grandfather had a woodworking shop in his basement and he taught me how to do everything from woodcarving to working a lathe. 

Since for the next few weeks I have a bit of a break in my photography business, I decided to spend my evenings restoring my fist guitar. 

Hopefully, I won’t destroy it completely.

Today I bought a Seagate 1.5 TB harddrive and was appauled by the amount of packaging that was used on that particular item and on electronics in general.

The harddrive is about 7in by 7in

The packaging is 13in by 15in.  WTF?  There is absolutely no reason to waste so much plastic, cardboard and foam to wrap something that small!

As a web developer I often find myself struggling with the following dilemma – how much power should the end user have over the look and feel of the applications that I develop. 

Most people would shrug this off as a non-issue.  After all, why should I care about a web application after I turned it over to my client?  I did the work, I got paid, I am done!

Two days ago I decided to look through and update my web design/development portfolio.  I looked through a list of applications that I have built over the last 10 years and thought it would be great to see if the websites that I created are still up and running. 

I was shocked to find out how many of the companies that I worked with are no longer in business.  What shocked me even more was how horrible some of the websites that I designed look today.  Before you accuse me of being a bad web designer, let me just say this – the aforementioned web applications looked good when I handed them over.  The mistake that I made was giving my clients too much power over content.

In mid-1990s, when the Internet became the next best thing since sliced bread, everyone decided that they needed a web page.  Anyone with access to Microsoft Front Page and a couple of horrible animated GIFs suddenly became a web designer.  Overnight, the system that was designed for sharing knowledge and information became clogged with spinning icons, blinking fonts and obnoxious colors. (Homer Simpson`s Homepage)

The amazing thing is that most of those monstrosities’ owners do not have bad taste.  I’ve been to homes of some of my friends, co-workers and professors who created green and pink blinking web abominations and did not see plastic sculptures, hula dolls or ugly garden gnomes that would indicate complete lack of aesthetics.  However, when it comes to the web, people tend to have this notion that if you use bright colors and giant blinking fonts you are more likely to get your message across. 

The really sad thing is that people’s tastes did not seem to improve over the past decade and a rather large percentage of website owners are still trying to convert the Web into a Las Vegas casino (read garish, loud and obnoxious).

Case in point – about a year ago, my business partner and I designed a very nice, understated and elegant website for a client.  Unfortunately I cannot include screenshots of the original (or the current) website since I don’t want a lawsuit on my hands.  But take my word for it, the website was top-notch.  The one mistake that we made is that the custom content management system that we developed to go along with the website allowed site’s administrators to change font size, family and color. 

They (the website administrators) took this as an invitation to change things like

Customer Testimonials

to

Customer Testimonials

After the aforementioned geniuses were done with the content, the entire website looked like the paints section of an art supplies store exploded all over my screen.  For a few seconds, I wanted to shut down my web browser for the fear of an epileptic seizure.

Once again, why should I care?

The first and foremost reason for caring is very selfish – with the way the website looks now I cannot use it in my portfolio – no employer or client in his right mind would hire me after looking at what has become of my work.

Secondly, the way this website looks might prevent me from getting freelance referrals.  The company that maimed my web application is well known in Pittsburgh.  Sadly, they think that their website looks good and they brag about it at conferences and trade shows.  When people find out that I was the one who created it, I doubt that they’d want to work with me.

Finally, my business partner and I put two months of work into that web application and it is really upsetting to see what some talentless hack did to our efforts.

Just look at the difference between Facebook and MySpace.

Facebook – clean, professional, easy to read, easy to navigate

MySpace – Garish, unreadable, impossible to see navigation, f***ing ugly!!!

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, creators of MySpace, probably cringe every time they see something like that.  They have unleashed a monster that has grown and mutated in something that in most cases is truly offensive.

Now, let me ask again – should developers give clients/end users full control over content?

From now on, I think that in most cases my answer would be a big, resounding NO!

And if you think that I am wrong, just click on the links below.

http://belladesoto.us/
http://www.lingscars.com/

• My wife and I had a beautiful daughter Daniella
• Quit Smoking
• Completed 3 graduate courses
• Photographed 19 weddings, 2 corporate events, 7 Bar Mitzvahs, 4 Bat Mitzvahs and 6 engagement sessions.
• Learned to play banjo
• Learned Adobe Flash / ActionScript 3
• Started developing my own black and white film again
• Restored 4 old cameras
• Rebuilt my porch

The gods of traffic, weather and hotel reservations definetely hate me. After driving for 6.5 hours at the average speed of 25mph, we gave up and are now stuck in a Motel6 in York, PA.  Since now we are a day behind on our schedule, we had to shuffle some things around.  The original plan was to travel to Boston - Burlington, VT - Portland, ME - Boston - New York - Assateague Island, VA - Norfolk, VA - Pittsburgh.  Luckily, I was able to cancel some of the hotel reservations; we decided to stay in Boston for 4 days, skip Burlington all together and make a day trip to Portland.  We`ll see if Skadi, Aeolus and Podaga will take pity on us and don`t throw any surprises our way.

On the bright side, my daughter has been helping me with driving.

The legend has it that a few years ago someone asked Steve Jobs if Apple is planning on entering the electronic book market and that Apple’s CEO allegedly stated that “since people don’t read anymore, there is no point”.

If the aforementioned tale has a grain of truth, for once (or twice) in his life Jobs might have been wrong. 

After a few initial stumbles, it seems like the electronic books market is finally taking off.  As of April 2009, Amazon sold 300,000 Kindle 2s, and a few days before this year’s Black Friday Barnes and Noble’s “nook” was sold out completely.  While reader devices’ sales figures have a long way to go before they catch up to iPod, at some point Mr. Jobs might regret his decision to stay away from electronic books.

When I purchased my first Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, my friends thought that I was slightly insane.  I had people come up to me on the bus, in coffee shops and in airports, asking me about the magic device that I was holding in my hands.  Now, while not quite as ubiquitous as their venerable paper siblings, electronic book readers are popping up all over the place. 

Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s line of eBook reader devices, and Barnes & Noble’s strangely named “nook” are a huge leap forward compared with the first few generations of clunky and barely usable devices.  However, are they really good enough to completely replace their paper brethren?

An average entry price into the wonderful world of electronic book readers is about $250.00 – a pretty big chunk of change.  If you think that it will pay for itself because you will stop buying paper books, you are in for a surprise.  On average (at least in my experience), you only save about 20% by purchasing an electronic copy vs. a paper book.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that if you only read hardcover editions and save $5.00 to $7.00 on the cost of each book by buying the e-version, you would need to read 35 - 50 books before you break even.  Even taking into account that most people who buy these gadgets read a log, it might take you a good year or two to recoup your investment. 

Of course, two years from now eBook devices will not only allow you to read books, but will also boast videoconferencing, web-browsing, music-playing, TV-watching and butt-wiping capabilities, so you’d probably want to buy a new one anyway.

There are quite a few resources for free (public domain) books – Google books (http://books.google.com), Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), or helpful sites such as Fried Beef’s Tech.  One way to get decent sneak-peaks at the new stuff is to sign up for Tor’s mailing list (www.tor.com).  Tor is a publishing company that often gives away free PDF manuscripts of their authors’ work.  Alas, if you are looking for the latest bestsellers by Dan Brown or Stephen King, you’ll have to shell out the dough. 

I’ve owned Sony’s PRS-505 for about 2 years now.  It is a great gadget, although in this day and age using a 2-year-old digital device is akin to driving a T-model Ford.  I use my eBook reader a lot, but I still buy quite a few paper books.  I love going to bookstores, browsing the shelves, touching the spines of books, inhaling the smell of paper and ink; downloading books from the web somehow takes away from that experience. 

What bothers me the most about the current eBook market is that the major players have not learned anything from the multiple DRM fiascos of the music industry.  I bought music from iTunes once and when I realized that there was a limit on how many devices I could play it, I refused to buy anything from iTunes until they started selling DRM-free MP3s. 

I have a fairly extensive collection of paper books, probably somewhere around 500 to 600 volumes.  Some of my books are well over a hundred years old, and I can still read them.  Would that be the case with any electronic book that I purchase today?  Probably not.   As a matter of fact, even in the short period of time that electronic eBooks have been commercially available, the industry went through at least a few dozens of file formats.   Over the years, I have accumulated quite a large eBook collection, but before I purchased any electronic book, I always made sure that I had access to some type of conversion software that would allow me to convert publisher’s proprietary format to plain text, or at least to the ubiquitous PDF. 

I love the idea of having a slim device that will hold hundreds of books.   I really hate the idea of buying books that my daughter might not be able to read 10 years from now.  I really wish that instead of staging device wars and investing millions of dollars in developing online stores, the burgeoning electronic book industry would take a look at the last 10 years of DRM struggles and lawsuits within the music industry and at least attempted not to repeat the same mistakes.

I recently finished restoring a half-a-century old Kodak Tourist camera that I bought on eBay for $10 bucks.  The bellows needed a bit of work and the shutter had to be cleaned, but after a few days of work I got everything working.  Unfortunately, I did not realize that Kodak Tourist cameras take 620 film which is no longer manufactured.  Fortunately, a local camera repair shop had a couple of 620 spindles.  I found a tutorial online on winding 120 medium format film onto 620 spindles and after about 10 minutes with a film bag I loaded my new old toy with a fresh roll of Kodak Tri-X. 

Unfortunately I don`t have a film scanner, so I had to scan the negatives on a regular flatbed.  The negatives look beautiful and the scans don`t do them justice.

A few days ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Randy Pausch’s book “The Last Lecture”.  I never met Dr. Pausch, although I heard a lot about him from Jesse Schell, the current co-director of the CMU Entertainment Technology Center.  In the summer of 2007, while researching virtual worlds and avatar technologies for a work-related project, I came across Alice [www.alice.org] (an interactive game and story-telling development environment created by Dr. Pausch and his team) and subsequently, Randy’s website.  That is when I found out about his ongoing fight with pancreatic cancer and the upcoming Last Lecture.

Unfortunately, I could not make it to the actual lecture, but I watched it from start to finish as soon as it appeared on YouTube.  I kept meaning to read the book, but things kept coming up and I did not get to it until a few days ago. 

After I turned the last page of the book I found “The Last Lecture” on YouTube and watched it again.  Reading Randy’s book and watching “The Last Lecture” again was both inspired and depressed me. 

Randy’s lecture deals with achieving your childhood dreams; reading his book and listening to his lecture made me realize that I am 32 years old and very few of my childhood dreams have come to fruition. I could not get Randy’s words out of my mind; I kept thinking about my life so far, about all the dreams that I had and how few of them I actually followed through on.

I took out a notepad and a pen and wrote down the most important dreams of my childhood.  Here they are in no particular order:

Becoming a National Geographic photographer

I got my first camera for my 8th birthday and have been obsessed with photography ever since.  In my teens and early 20s I freelanced for a bunch of small newspapers.  For the past 9 years I have been running a successful wedding and even photography business.  Alas, I never became a National Geographic photographer.  I never had the guts to sell my possessions and move to India like Steve McCurry or go into war-ravaged countries like James Nachtwey.  While I was always able to capture fleeting moments with my camera, my captured moments were never even close to the perfect shots of Vincent Laforet. 

When I graduated high school I wanted to go to college to study journalism.  My father kept telling me that it would be a waste of my time and that I should pick a real profession, like a doctor or a lawyer.  I spent 4 years studying biology as a pre-med major at the Old Dominion University, hating every minute of it. 

I guess no matter how much I dreamed about becoming a National Geographic photographer I did not want it badly enough to make the necessary sacrifices.  And that is one of my biggest regrets in life.

Climbing the “7 summits” – the highest mountains on 7 continents (Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstensz Pyramid, Vinson & Everest).

I caught the rock-climbing bug when I was 13.   My best friend joined a rock-climbing club and convinced me to do the same.  At first I was a bit skeptical because I wasn’t a very athletic kid, but after the first trip to real cliffs I was hooked.  Ever since then I have been climbing on and off, scaling cliffs, falling down, getting hurt, getting up and climbing again.  I did climb on of the aforementioned 7 peaks when I was 16 – I was part of a group that attempted Elbrus in 1993.  I never made the summit and after immigrating to the United States in 1994 never had the time or the money to try again.  About 5 years ago I decided to resurrect that dream and began saving money and training for a Denali climb.  However, 6 months into my training I met my wife and all of a sudden the possibility of getting hurt or dying became pretty scary.  Now I have a beautiful daughter.  I’d love to be with her as she is growing up; as a matter of fact, my new dream is to walk her down the isle on her wedding day.  I do not want to do anything that might jeopardize that particular dream.

Writing a book

Ever since I learned to read at the age of 4, I have been an avid reader.  Even now, when I have a family, a full-time job, a part-time business and grad school I still manage to read at least one book every week.  I’ve always been envious of brilliant authors such as Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Neal Stephenson and China Mieville who can create entire worlds out of nothing and weave an intricate story that never gets boring, no matter how many times you read it. 

For the past 6 years I have been working on a book about my grandfather.  He passed away in 1999, after battling lymphoma for over 10 years.  My grandfather played a huge role in my life – he was my male role model.  Even though we were very close, he never told me anything about his life before he met my grandmother.  After his death, I was going through his papers and found documents and letters that made it clear that my grandfather spent 11 years in Soviet Gulag.  After grilling my grandmother and my mother about this find, I began doing research.  I found people in Germany, Israel, United States and Argentina that new my grandfather in the labor camps.  I wrote over 200 pages of my grandfather’s life story.  All I need to finish this book is a trip to Poland and to Russia, something that I will hopefully be able to do next year.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to achieve my childhood dream of writing a book.

Playing guitar in front of a huge audience

This is one dream that I actually managed to fulfill.  I never opened for a known band, nor have I ever played in an arena in front of thousands of people.  However, when I was in high school, a few friends of mine formed a Beatles cover band and I played rhythm guitar.  We played in front of our entire school and even played a few gigs at other schools. 

Writing a computer game

I have never been an avid game player, but I am (and have been for a long time) fascinated with storytelling, graphics and the incredible amount of technical knowledge that goes into developing a game.  Take Second Life for example – over the last few years that game has really lived up to its name and became very close to Neal Stephenson’s idea of Metaverse (if you have not read Snowcrash, drop whatever you are doing and get that book right now).  I have no interest in developing yet another shoot-them-up game.  Instead, I’d like to take something like Rosetta Stone language teaching software as my baseline and turn it into a game to make education easier and more interactive.  I have a notebook full of ideas and would like to at least get started on a computer game project once this year’s wedding season is over.

Really teaching someone

That one is not really my childhood dream.  Over the years I have had a lot of crappy teachers in both high school and college.  I did however have two professors who were truly excellent – Dr. William Chase (University of Pittsburgh history department) and Dr. Catherine Duane-Lennard (University of Pittsburgh mathematics).  Those two professors did not just teach – they inspired. 

A few years ago a good friend of mine taught a computer science course at a private middle school.  To make his students more interested in the subject, he invited a couple of guest speakers to give lectures on various computer-related topics.  Because I used to work as a systems administrator for a government contractor and have some background in network security, he asked me to lecture on the topic of “hacking”.  I took his request very seriously – I prepared slides, sample code so that students could write a rudimentary brute-force password generator and some handouts on basic network security.  I did my best to make those lectures interesting and interactive, but students did not seem to be interested.  There were a few people in the class who genuinely wanted to learn, but for the most part my lectures fell on utterly uninterested ears.

I really wanted to give those kids something useful and I failed.  Since then, I have spoken at various software conferences and overall, I am not a bad speaker.  However, just once in my life, I would like to give a lecture that would not simply convey information.  I would like to give just one lecture that would inspire everyone in the room, just like Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” had inspired me.

Randy’s book also made me realize that I have become a workaholic.  I have a full-time job, I photograph weddings almost every weekend, I have grad courses two nights a week and I spent virtually every evening in front of my laptop either editing photographs or doing homework.  I adore my wife and my daughter, but I never get to spend time with them. 

Yesterday my wife called me right as I was leaving work and asked me if I wanted to go for a walk at Frick Park with her and my daughter.  I started to say that I did not have time, that I had to re-caulk our bathtub and then I had to finish editing a wedding.  And then I stopped.  I remembered Randy’s book and decided that I would much rather spend a few hours with my wonderful family and leave the rest of the stuff for later. 

A few days ago I finished restoring a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII Rangefinder that I bought at a flea market for $10.  The easy part was replacing all the light seals that turned to black goo with age.  The hard part was fixing a stuck leaf shutter.  I had to take two precision screwdrivers, a pen and a bit of duck tape to make a spanner wrench needed to take the lens apart.  In the end, it took me a little over a week to put everything back together.  Even though I took photos of every step as I was taking the camera apart, I still kept ending up with a few extra parts.  Finally, I think on the fourth try, I got everything looking and working exactly the way it was supposed to and took the camera out for a spin.

The lab kind of screwed up and printed the roll instead of scanning it; I had to scan the paper prints, so the quality is not that great.

A few days ago I realized that for the past couple of months I have been in a kind of creative slump.  September and October are always my busiest months; this fall, however, they went from busy to absolutely insane.  At work my team has been running ragged trying to meet a deadline on a software project; in September I photographed 3 weddings and 2 bar mitzvahs; in October, 5 weddings and 2 bar mitzvahs.  Needless to say, I’m pretty burned out.

In the past, once the wedding season is over, I found it very helpful to step back from photography (or at least from digital photography) to gain some perspective and to get my creative juices flowing.

During the busy months I keep a list of projects that I want to do at some point in the future.  I never leave my house without a notebook; since I tend to get thousands of ideas a minute, I run through my notebooks pretty quickly.

Whenever I actually have some downtime, I go through my notebooks and make a shortlist of more interesting/promising projects.  On my desktop, I keep folders for creative projects, writing ideas and software/code projects. For every creative or software project that I think is worth doing, I create a subfolder under the respective desktop folders. 

Since I practically sleep with a laptop, it is a perfect way for me to do research and take notes/make drawings and diagrams for each project. 

For this winter, I decided that I want to build the following things:

1. A rocking horse
2. An electric guitar or mandolin
3. A tilt-shift lens
4. Printing press
5. A crossbow

My last wedding of the season is on November 24th.  After that (and after my grad school finals) I will have a few months of rest and relaxation, at least in the evenings.  As I work/complete these projects, I’ll post diagrams, drawings, research and photos of everything.  Wish me luck…

Last Friday I finally got a chance to get away from software development and photography and do something different.  I attended the FlashPitt 2009 conference.  This is the second time this conference runs in Pittsburgh, and it is really great.  Even if you are not a Flash or even a Web developer, you can find inspiration from some of the presentations no matter what your profession is.

My favorite presentations were by Josh Sager (http://joshsagermedia.com/blog/), Ian Coyle (http://cargocollective.com/IanCoyle)  and Dan Mall (http://www.bigspaceship.com/).  I took a ton of notes, book-marked a few absolutely amazing sites and got a few ideas for future projects of my own. 

It is a shame that Pittsburgh does not host more of such conferences – normally you have to go to Boston, New York, San Francisco, or at least Baltimore/Washington, DC to actually exchange ideas with like-minded individuals.  Pittsburgh does have a great Flash Users group (http://pittmfug.blogspot.com/); unfortunately, they only meet on Thursdays and this semester I have a class that night. 

I really wish that once in a while conferences such as FlashOnTap (http://www.flashontap.com/) or Small Press Expo (http://www.spxpo.com/) came to Pittsburgh.  

Alas, lack of interesting conferences is the price we pay for the low cost of living.

For the last 10 years a large part of my life revolved around finding out about my grandfather’s life.  He passed away in 1999 after battling with cancer since 1986. 

After his death I was going through his papers and found some documents that indicated that he spend some time in Soviet GULAG.  I showed the papers to my mom and my grandmother and for the first time in my life they told me that my grandfather spent 11 years in Soviet labor camps as a political prisoner.

After years of research, dead ends, expensive phone calls to various countries that used to comprise the former Soviet Union I managed to track down several people who knew my grandfather in prison.

One of them, Michael Fishman, lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  After getting in touch with him and explaining who I was and what I wanted, he agreed to a meeting and an interview.  I flew to Florida in February of 2002 and spent an entire day with Mr. Fishman and his wife, listening to stories about GULAG and World War II.

At the end of the interview, Mr. Fishman gave me a copy of his memoirs and asked me if I could translate them into English.   A few days ago I found out that Mr. Fishman’s memoirs were accepted into the permanent collection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

I know it sounds corny, but I am pretty excited that by translating those memoirs I managed to make some tiny contribution to history.

If you’ve read my blog, you probably already know that I’m obsessed with old cameras.  Whenever I have free time, I go to flea markets, yard and estate sales and hunt for old mechanical film cameras.  Unfortunately, it is very rare to find one in pristine condition, and after spending hundreds of dollars on having those “old beaters” repaired and CLA’d (Cleaned, Lubed and Adjusted) by professional repair shops, I decided to learn how to repair those little mechanical wonders myself.

I know that in this day and age most people prefer digital cameras.  As a professional photographer I use high-end digital SLRs to shoot weddings, but there is something absolutely magical about film.  Even if you don’t develop it yourself, getting a developed role from a minilab is like opening a little present.

So if you find an old Pentax, Nikon, or Canon in your grandfather’s attic, don’t rush to throw it away.  If you are willing to spend 20 dollars and a few hours of your time, chances are that you can enjoy your camera for many more years.

A few days ago I picked up a nice little Canon Canonet QL-17 at a flea market and would like to illustrate how to do basic cleaning and minor repair to get this camera working and shooting again.

Canon Canonet QL-17 Rangefinder with film door open

The biggest problem with these old cameras is that the light seals around the edges of the film door disintegrate with time and turn into black sticky goo.  Without the seals, the light leaks into the camera and fogs the film. 

You can see the disintegrated light seals and black goo that they leave all over your camera.

If you shoot a roll of film through a camera with damaged light seals, most likely your film will have bright blotches on the developed negatives.

Taken with a Soviet-made Fed 5 rangefinder (Leica knock-off).  The bottom light seal was completely gone in the right-bottom corner.

If you take your camera to a repair facility, a simple CLA will cost you about 100 dollars.  You can easily do it yourself in a few hours.
To clean an old camera and to replace damaged seals, you would need the following items:

• Nail polish remover
• Rubbing alcohol
• Q-tips
• A couple of wooden sticks used by nail technicians to clean under nails – they are thin round sticks about 6-7 inches long and have flattened ends.
• A few small sponges
• Replacement seals.  You can buy a camera seal kit on eBay for about $7-12 dollars.  Check out Jon Goodman`s eBay store - http://myworld.ebay.com/interslice

Be extremely careful with nail polish remover – it will discolor pretty much anything that you spill it on.  I usually work on a plastic tray to prevent any harmful spills.

• Pour a little bit of nail polish in a small dish
• Open your camera’s film door and remove the black plate on the inside of the door.  This plate is used to keep film flat.  Gently pull the plate up and it will easily pop off.

• Dip a Q-tip in a nail polish remover and gently rub it on the light seals.  Change Q-tips often, otherwise you’ll just end up smudging the black goo from the light seals all over the place.  Be very careful not to drip nail polish remover anywhere on the camera except for the grooves where the light seals are attached.
• Some of the seals are very stubborn, so that’s where those wooden sticks I mentioned before come in handy.  Dip the flat end of a stick in nail polish remover and scrape off whatever seals you could not get with Q-tips.  Make sure you clean off the goo off the end of the stick after each pass.

• Once all the goo is off, dip a few Q-tips in rubbing alcohol and clean off the grooves where old light seals used to be.
• Dilute rubbing alcohol with water (about a 50% solution).  Wet a small sponge in the alcohol solution, wring it out so that the sponge is still wet but not dripping and wipe off the entire surface of the camera (except for the glass parts of the lens). 
• Dip a Q-tip in rubbing alcohol and carefully clean out the lens between the aperture and focus rings.  Rotate the focus ring to make sure that the lens extends as far as it can so you could clean it.

If you are reconditioning an SLR, you might have to do a little bit more work.  SLRs (Singe Lens Reflex) cameras have a mirror that allows you to see and focus through the lens.  When you press the shutter release button to take a photograph, the mirror flips up at the same time as the shutter opens, allowing light to fall on a frame of film.  Above the mirror, there are usually one or two strips of foam that dampen the sound and vibration of the mirror flapping up and down. 

You have to be incredibly careful replacing those because it is very easy to damage the mirror.  If you don’t have steady hands and don’t feel comfortable replacing those strips yourself, just leave them alone – they are not going to affect your photos.  However, if you are brave and careful, you can fix those as well.

When I do delicate work like that, I prefer placing the camera on a tripod to keep it steady.  Since I repair cameras often, I took apart an old tripod and bolted it down to my workbench.  However, you don’t need to go that crazy.  Any steady tripod will do the job.  If you only have a small and light tripod, you can place the center column in a vice to keep it from shaking and moving.  Alternatively, you can weigh down your tripod by attaching a heavy bag to the bottom of the center column.

• Place your camera on a tripod
• Remove the lens.  On cameras such as Pentax, Zenit, Praktica, early Leicas and a few others, you can simply unscrew the lens.  Nikons, Minoltas, Canons, Olympus and other cameras have bayonet mounts.  If you are facing the camera, you will usually find a button to the right of the lens.  Press the button and turn the lens to remove it.
• Tilt your camera on your tripod until you can see the strips above the mirror.

Strip of foam above SLR mirror

• Do not use nail polish remover on the “mirror” strips – if it drips on the surface of the mirror, it will damage it irreparably.
• Use a wooden stick dipped in rubbing alcohol (make sure that it does not drip) to scrape off the foam strips.  Clean the area with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip (again, make sure that it does not drip).

Once you have removed old seals, wipe off all the spots where you used nail polish or rubbing alcohol thoroughly with a clean, dry cloth.  Just in case, let the camera dry for about an hour.
Take new light seals from the kit you bought on eBay.  They are self-adhesive, so you don’t need any glue.  Attach the new seals to all the spots where you removed old ones.

Congratulations, you’ve just resealed an old camera.

Some old cameras, mostly rangefinders and TLRs (Twin-Lens Reflex) cameras have leaf shutters.  Instead of a metal or cloth gate that opens vertically or horizontally when you press the shutter-release button, these cameras have a series of interlocking leaves that create a round opening when shutter-release button is pressed.  When a camera had not been used in a long time, the oil on those leaves thickens and they sometimes stick together. 

To test if your shutter is working properly, you need to take a few snaps at slow shutter speeds.  Set your aperture dial to the smallest number available.  With your film door open (and no film in the camera), set the shutter speed dial on “B”.  “B” stands for bulb and will keep the shutter open as long as you keep the shutter-release button pressed.

As you can see, the shutter speed is set to “B” and the aperture is set to 1.7 (the widest aperture available on this lens)

Lift the camera to your eye level and look at the shutter leaves.  Press the shutter release and hold it down.  Make sure that the leaves open all the way.  Let go of the shutter release button.  Repeat these steps with the next slowest shutter speed.  Make sure that the shutter closes all the way after you let go of the shutter release button.  If it does, chances are that everything works fine.  The shutter speeds might still not be very accurate, but film is a fairly forgiving media.

If your shutter does not open or close all the way, than you have a problem.  The proper way to fix it is to take the shutter assembly apart and clean the leaves.  However, if you don’t know what you are doing you will most likely turn your camera into a paperweight.  Here’s an easy hack to fix a stuck leaf shutter.  You will need a pipette (an eye dropper) and a bit of cigarette lighter fluid.  Make sure you are using cigarette lighter fluid and NOT the kind of lighter fluid made for lighting a grill.

• Place your camera on a tripod and tilt it so that the lens is facing down (pointing at the floor).  Make sure that the camera body is perfectly parallel to the floor.  If your tripod cannot tilt the camera at such an angle, place it on a flat surface lens down and prop it up with something so that it does not move.
• Open the camera’s film door.
• Set the shutter speed to the slowest speed above “B”.
• Put one drop of lighter fluid on the shutter leaves.  Be careful not to get it on the lens’ glass.
• Wait for about 30 seconds and press the shutter-release button a few times to make sure that the lighter fluid spreads evenly across the surface of shutter’s leaves.  
• Try taking a few shots on slow shutter speeds and on “B” and make sure that the shutter opens and closes all the way.  If it does not, put one more drop of lighter fluid on the leaves and repeat steps 4 and 5.

Leaf shutter closed (it’s kind of hard to see because of the bellows, but I did not have another leaf-shutter camera on hand).

Leaf shutter open

Hopefully, after putting in all this work into your camera, you can load a roll of film and take photos to your heart’s content.  If you decide you actually want to tinker with your camera’s innards and try to do more complicated repairs, I highly recommend the following books:

• Camera Maintenance & Repair by Thomas Tomosy
• Restoring Classic & Collectible Cameras by Thomas Tomosy
• How Cameras Work (???) by Issac Maisenberg.  This book was originally published in Russian, but you can find some English translations online.  In Russian, this book is titled "УСТРОЙСТВО И РЕМОНТ ФОТОАППАРАТОВ"
• Also, check out Ed Romney’s website for some books and repair tips - https://www.edromney.com/index.html
• For camera manuals, visit http://manuals2go.com/  or http://www.butkus.org/chinon/
• For tools, you cannot beat micro-tools - http://micro-tools.com

Good luck and have fun…

Credit for this photo goes to my wife Iryna who snapped it with one of my Canon DSLRs.

Many people hate Microsoft and they have good reasons for doing so.  After using Microsoft’s products for close to 20 years I am still continuously baffled by horrible UI decisions and lack of quality control.

As a PC user, I long ago realized that the only way to deal with constant issues brought forth by Microsoft’s products is simply to avoid them.  About 5 years ago I installed Fedora Linux on my laptop; 3 years ago I bought my first MacBook; 3 weeks ago I bought a MacBook pro.

Unfortunately, my professional life requires me to deal with Microsoft’s shortcomings on daily basis.  The software development lab where I work is a pure Microsoft shop; I am deeply ashamed to admit that we even use Microsoft SharePoint.

For the last 3 years I’ve been doing .Net programming and kind of developed a love-hate relationship with both ASP.NET and .NET framework.  Rapid prototyping and fast development are so easy if you are using standard .NET controls.  You can build sophisticated applications in weeks instead of months; bosses love it, clients adore it and newbie programmers think that it is the best thing since sliced bread.

Everyone loves .NET framework until they start testing their shiny new web applications in web browsers other than Internet Explorer and realize that the report that they created using .NET grid control in 2 minutes does not render the same in FireFox; the cool AJAX control from Microsoft AJAX toolkit does not work right in Safari; the StringBuilder class concatenates strings in “utf-16” encoding which most XML parsers cannot read.

At that point one’s love for .NET quickly turns to hate.  It takes weeks, if not months to rewrite those AJAX controls because simply fixing them is not an option; they are “black boxes” and no one knows what makes them tick.  Your boss hates you because it took you three days of frantic CSS coding to make that report look the same in every browser.  Your clients refuse to talk to you because they are pissed off that the XML you promised them was unreadable.

To sum up, Microsoft sucks.  Even if you are forced to use their products and their development environments, I highly recommend avoiding their build-in controls like the plague – it might take you a bit longer to develop your own controls, but at least you’ll know how they work and what the code looks like.

There are a few things that Microsoft got right.  Over the years, I have worked with pretty much every major relational database in existence, and Microsoft SQL Server is by far my favorite.  Another thing that Microsoft really got right is their implementation of web services.

For those who don’t know what web services are, read a highly technical and confusing article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service). Recently, I had to develop a series of web service-based API (Application Programming Interfaces) for a web-based application that my lab has developed.  As part of this project I had to write examples in all major web languages (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, Java, Python) on how to consume the web services and integrate the data that they provide with various LMS (learning management systems).  Prior to this project, I have only worked with web services in .NET and have always assumed that since SOAP has been pretty much ubiquitous for a number of years other languages and platforms provided good libraries and API for calling external web services.  Boy, was I wrong.

ASP.NET, Classic ASP and PHP were easy – I wrote examples for all three languages in under an hour.  When I started on a Java example, I hit a wall.  Now, let me admit that it’s been years since I worked with Java, and even then I never wrote any large serious projects in that language.  I asked every Java developer I knew about consuming a web service and no one seemed to know how to do it.  I found a bunch of examples on the web, and managed to get them to work on a Linux machine using Apache libraries, but could not get it to work on my Windows desktop to save my life.  That’s when I began to feel some sympathy for Microsoft.  I still don’t like them much, but at least they are not claiming that .NET framework is cross-platform and anything written on a Linux will work on a Windows or a Mac computer, and vice versa.  I realized that Java sucks as much as .NET and that Sun sucks as much as Microsoft.

Come to think of it, programming sucks in general.  Unfortunately, there are no perfect programming languages – they all have their shortcomings and advantages.  I also realized that I got into programming because I love to solve problems.  Unfortunately, 12 years later, I rarely get to work on challenging problems.  Very few companies are willing to pay someone to kick around ideas and see if something sticks.  Almost no one wants to write a check to figure out if you can do something; money changes hands only when the person with the checkbook is assured that they’ll see desired results.

I need to get a job with Google – I hear they actually let their programmers think.

A few weeks ago my friend Svetlana sent me her Joy of Not Working manifesto.  While I would love to be independently wealthy I am still not at that stage in my life when I could quit my day job, stop developing software and photographing weddings and travel the world with my wife and my daughter.

Just like everything else in this world, working as hard and as much as I do has both benefits and drawbacks.  Having a day job and a photography business allows my wife to be a stay-at-home mom and will allow me to give my daughter every opportunity to advance in life when she is older.  It also allows my wife and I to take a few really amazing trips every year.

The darker side of being a workaholic means that I have less time to spend with my family.  More often than not, I would leave for work at 7 AM, come home around 4 or 5 PM, grab a quick dinner and spend another 2-4 hours editing photographs from a previous week’s wedding or bar mitzvah.  On Saturday I would photograph another event, spend Sunday with my family and start all over the following Monday.

A few weeks ago Pittsburgh got hit by a pretty bad thunderstorm and my house was flooded.  Since my editing room was in my basement, both of my desktops got damaged by water.  Luckily, I keep offsite backups and I did not lose any data.  With my desktops gone, I had to move my photo editing to my 3-year-old MacBook. 

At first, I was a bit worried – I’ve always edited my photos on a top-of-the line desktop with lots of RAM and a large monitor.  To my surprise, I found that editing photos on my laptop tremendously sped up my workflow.  I was able to go through thousands of photographs from one or more events and delete the bad ones while commuting to and from work.  I was doing color-correction in Adobe Lightroom on my lunch break and during especially boring meetings.  I edited in Photoshop while waiting for my baby daughter to fall asleep.  I would set the laptop on my night stand and start large batches such as exporting raw files from Lightroom to JPEG before going to sleep.  The only time I connected my laptop to my 24-inch monitor is when I needed to do some precise Photoshop surgery.

All of a sudden, I had hours and hours of free time, time that I could spend with my family.  I no longer had to sit in my basement and miss my daughter’s laughter just so I could sift through thousands of photographs.  The flood that destroyed my basement office turned out to be a great thing.

As much as I loved my new mobile workflow, my laptop was really too old and too slow to run “heavy” applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop.  I needed something better.  When I told my coworkers that I was planning to buy a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, most of them told me I was nuts to spend over $2000 on a laptop.  A few days ago I bit the bullet and coughed up the money.  Now I am a proud owner of a brand-spanking-new MacBook Pro.  Today I edited a wedding on my new laptop and I’m loving it.  And while $2000 is a hefty price tag for a laptop, it’s definitely worth it to me because it buys me more time with my family.

P.S.  Macs rock!

In the last few weeks I’ve been on a bit of a reading bend.  Between trying to get my baby daughter to go to sleep, finishing up work-related projects and editing thousands of photographs, I managed to read eight books, four of them definitely worth mentioning.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
I’m not a huge fan of the mystery genre, but this book was excellent.  A journalist who though that his career was over because of a lost libel suit suddenly finds himself with a strange job offer – writing a family history of a wealthy Swedish industrialist and finding out the details of a mysterious disappearance of a girl from 30 years ago.

Old Man`s War by John Scalzi.
I am not even going to go into the details or the plot – there are simply too many.  I read this book in one night – if you like space exploration-style sci-fi, you should definitely check out any/all books by John Scalzi.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran.
About a month ago one of my co-workers sent me a link to the University of Pittsburgh library website (http://pittcatplus.pitt.edu/).  If you run a text search, the left-hand side of the page displays a great visual representation of your search results and how close/far other articles and/or search terms are related to it.  I wanted to see if I could reverse-engineer this little application, so I went to see my grad school advisor, Dr. Spring (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~spring/).  After I explained what I wanted to do, he told me that I should read Segaran’s book.  It was the best technology book by far that I’ve read in a long time.  Not only did I find a great overview of all algorithms needed to accomplish my task, I learned quite a bit about developing “intelligent” Internet applications.  The only negative thing that I can say about this book is that all examples are in Python, and I’m not a huge fan of that particular programming language.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.
This book is about the never-ending conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Instead of delving into the minute details of the politics and how we can “fix” things, Filkins presents a series of short stories about his experiences in the Middle East from a very human point of view.  Even if you are not interested in politics or what’s currently happening in the Middle East, I think that everyone should read this book just to get a better understanding of the whats and the whys of decades of violent conflicts in that part of the world.