ULTRAsomething Magazine EXORCISM 10 is now available for sale on the ULTRAsomething STORE.
Below is the Apologia as printed on the final page of the magazine, followed by a smattering of sample photos:
Finally. After four years of publishing, the Exorcism count has reached double digits. It will not hit triple digits. Even if fate allows me to live and prosper for the additional 23 years that another 90 issues will likely require, I designed the magazine’s nameplate to support only two-digits — thus capping the maximum number at 99.
Granted, I could always employ a hexadecimal numbering system, thus ensuring a 254 issues count from a mere two digits. Which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the sort of ridiculous thing I would normally do. But if that were the case, you’d be holding “Exorcism A” in your hands and not “Exorcism 10”, which you can plainly see is not the case. Fortunately, the art world loves built-in scarcity, so placing a hard 99-issue limit on the number of Exorcisms should theoretically increase the value of each publication. Whether this is measurable on any known monetary scale is dubious.
So I hope you enjoy this first double-digit Exorcism. Savor it. There are only another 89 more of them to go.
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please look for ULTRAsomething on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, Tidal, Deezer, and others, as linked below:
Now that I’ve retired from a career spent designing, documenting and testing electronic music gear, I can finally spend my time USING all of it, rather than just developing it.
Sure, as energy allowed, I’d dabble with composing and recording — releasing music in dribs and drabs, which I gathered and released as a 2-volume, 4-hour anthology earlier this year. But I simply never had the time to work on an entire, cohesive album — no matter how much it seemingly overlapped with my day job.
So, once gifted with the time to finally write and record my first full album since the early 90’s, and with so many musically divergent interests bubbling inside me, what sort of album should I compose?
Given my disdain for the genre, my answer surprised me: Why not a “pop” album?
“Pop,” of course, needs a seriously bold set of quotes around it, because anyone listening to my new album, 26.MM.DD, will probably struggle to find anything remotely “pop” about it. And that’s because “pop” doesn’t define the album’s sonic footprint, but my approach to writing and recording it. Here, the word “pop” means “get the listener in and out of a feeling quickly and efficiently before moving to the next.” It does not mean “sound like regurgitated banality.”
In truth, 26.MM.DD is rather sonically dense, with enough sound design to fry a factory full of transistors. But I wanted the album to reward different levels of listening; whether you put it on in the background, road-trip with it, or give it your full attention in a deep-listening session.
So what exactly does 26.MM.DD sound like? I could tell you it was influenced by 70’s krautrock, 70’s minimalism, 70’s giallo soundtracks, and 70’s experimental space music. But that would just be even more confounding, since the album doesn’t resemble any of those genres, nor does it sound even remotely like it came from the 1970’s. It’s cacophonous yet soothing; rhythmic yet droning. Modern, but with tendrils to the past.
Fortunately, there’s no need to describe what it sounds like, since you can simply listen to it on most any of the popular streaming platforms.
14-tracks. 49 minutes. A dozen different hardware synthesizers. And (as has become the tradition) cover art by Nicole Langdon-Davies.
So give it a listen.. or two… or more. And be sure to share the links with anyone you think might enjoy it. Just, maybe don’t tell them it’s a “pop” album.
Click the link below for direct access to 26.MM.DD on your preferred platform (such as Spotify, Apple, iTunes, Deezer, Tidal, YouTube, Amazon Music, etc…):
REMINDER: If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
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I’m rarely the dumbest guy in the room, even when one considers my love of the sublimely ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean I’m not occasionally prone to bouts of imbecile-ia. And when I succumb, I succumb big.
Case in point: my entire approach to marketing ULTRAsomething magazine, and by the transitive property of geometry, this website.
Back in 2022 when I conceived of the magazine and designed its format, I got a lot of things right: The size; the glossiness; the layout; the full-bleed photos; its release schedule; and its rather high standard for photo inclusion. But I also got one thing wrong: my decision to make each issue contain only photos never-before published on the website.
I wanted the magazine to represent the pinnacle of my photography, and my intent was to give purchasers another reason to buy each Exorcism, since they knew they’d be getting previously unseen photos. Enter the moron-o-sphere. Because in doing so, I failed to consider how restrictive this would make blog posting.
The first problem is that I never know which photos I’ll include in a magazine until I lay out an issue. That means I’m forever loathe to post my best photos on the blog because I want the magazine to get the crème de la crème. To ensure I gather enough photos to achieve both the quality I desire as well as the flow and general ‘mood’ of an issue, I’m forced to withhold at least twice as many photos as I ultimately print — photos I can’t post on the blog because they might end up in the magazine.
Every time I develop a roll of film, I designate the best images to be ‘magazine worthy’ and bar them from posting. Even though they’re as unlikely to make the final cut as make it, I have no way of knowing at the time. So a lot of really good photos go un-posted, while a whole lot of lesser photos get posted in their place.
This means the website, which is supposed to help market that magazine, gets my least interesting photos. Who in their right mind would try to entice people to buy a magazine by only posting their lesser photos on the blog?
Couple this with the fact far more people read this website than buy the magazine — orders of magnitude more. So, saving all the best photos for the least-seen outlet means I’m just shooting myself in the foot month after month.
I’m trying to figure out a solution. I’m leaning heavily toward abandoning my dictate that every magazine contain only previously unpublished photos. If I take a photo I like and it fits the mood of an article, I should probably go ahead and post it. If it ends up in the magazine, oh well. If it doesn’t, then I will have published a good photo rather than a lesser one.
Another solution is to continue what I’m doing, but once I publish a magazine, I make its photos available for posting on ULTRAsomething. Since the vast majority of readers never see the magazine, this would ensure that my better photos eventually get seen by more people, and don’t wither and die in oblivion.
I don’t think either of these choices would negatively impact magazine sales. I suspect that people who purchase the magazine are like me: they believe there’s value in printed photos and they recognize that a book of quality prints is vastly superior to some downsized web photos in every possible way. Current magazine purchasers are encouraged to comment.
So I’m mulling it all over. Part of me thinks I should remove the “only found in the magazine” requirement, while another part of me recognizes that I’m the same moron who came up with that ridiculous impediment in the first place. So can I really trust my judgment?
In the meantime, I’ve populated this post with yet another collection of photos that I’ve deemed “magazine unworthy” — further ensuring that neither the magazine nor the website will gain in popularity.
ABOUT THESE PHOTOS : As promised, these photos are the dregs of my recent efforts — all gloriously failing the ‘magazine worthy’ requirements required to make it into the vast pool of actual good images I’ve been collecting for Exorcism 10 (which I will begin laying out immediately after publishing this plaintive wail of a post).
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please check out the 3-hour, 47-song, 2-volume ULTRAsomething compilation album, which is available on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music:
I have not, nor will I ever take a photo that changes the world. My photos don’t affect public sentiment. My photos don’t encourage public discourse. My photos don’t sell anything — much less themselves. They simply exist. Which makes me believe I exist. Which is better than believing I’m just an algorithm running inside an aging carbon-based computer.
Quite simply, I take photos of things that interest me, using whatever techniques yield an image that appeals to me on both a visual and emotional level. If other people happen to find enjoyment in my photos, all the better — after all, existence loves company. But finding acceptance beyond my own self has never motivated my photography. I shoot for me.
But every few years, I start to lose interest in what I’m photographing. Mind you, I never lose interest in photography — just in my previous subject matter, or my approach to those subjects. These periods, in which I struggle to take photos, used to fill me with a cataclysmic existential dread — as if not taking as many photos meant I didn’t exist. But with age comes insight, and I’ve learned this isn’t a sign that I’ve ceased to be, but a sign that we are always evolving and always changing, and that the photos I once took were literal snapshots of a previous me. I used to fear these periods of uncertainty. But now I accept them for what they are — a time to experiment, and fail, and fail some more, and learn about myself all over again.
I’m smack in the middle of one such spell right now — the first in nearly five years. My muscle memory takes photos of an echo of me, but I know there’s something more — some extra dimension I’m missing. Some other journey I’m meant to embrace. Sometimes it’s taken me months to find my way. Sometimes it’s taken years.
In the meantime, while I wrestle with evolution, I’ll continue to take photos. And I’ll occasionally take a few good ones. And I’ll definitely take a boatload — if not a flotilla — of truly bad ones. Fortunately, struggling to photograph also makes me believe I exist. It’s just a crappier version of it.
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please check out the 3-hour, 47-song, 2-volume ULTRAsomething compilation album, which is available on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music:
My interest in football could be described as subterranean at best, and only if I’m being generous. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the fact Vancouver is one of this year’s FIFA World Cup host cities, nor that my condo is only a half-block removed from the FIFA party zone. Anything that brings hordes of people together creates photo opportunities, so naturally I’ve been partaking.
FIFA arrived at a perfect time, since my attention is currently focused on writing and recording a new music album, which I’ll release in the fourth quarter of this year. But with Exorcism 10 also due for publication later this year, accessing thousands of people outside my front door makes it much easier to fulfill those photo responsibilities than if I had to venture far and wide.
(NOTE: my inner marketing voice demands I remind readers that, while Exorcism 10 is in the works, Exorcism 09 is now for sale in the ULTRAsomething store).
Convention dictates that I illustrate this post with a few representational photos to support the narrative… but which ones? I won’t even think about curating Exorcism images until September or October, so I haven’t a clue which FIFA photos are destined for the magazine — and since I continue to insist that every photo in every magazine be previously unpublished, choosing a photo to publish NOW means rejecting it later.
That said, since I always tend to favour photos that have more to do with the peripheral goings-on than with the actual event, I can safely assume nothing too FIFA-ish will make the cut — meaning all such shots are available for blog-duty. Besides, there are tens of thousands of people each and every day taking several hundred thousand photos of FIFA activities, so committing such banal shots to paper seems unnecessary.
But, banal as these particular examples may be, FIFA has indeed provided numerous other images that will help me build the next Exorcism, and it will continue to provide more for another week. So, thanks FIFA! If the streets could always be this easy, I might finally have time to write that electronic avant-garde opera I’ve been thinking about for the past 40 years…
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please check out the 3-hour, 47-song, 2-volume ULTRAsomething compilation album, which is available on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music:
Funny thing about poetry. I always think I like it, but when push comes to shove, I often don’t. Which, I suppose, is why I continue to search — raking through mountainous piles of maudlin woeismeism, while retching at the stench of overly precious prose that ferments in pools of rancid cliché.
Now and then, a single line or turn-of-phrase will bubble and rise above the surface — a tiny perfect jewel, which floats over the dreck in a fleeting moment of glory before it bursts and tumbles back into the quagmire of the lesser lines that follow it.
Maybe, to quote a Kristin Hersch lyric from 1986, “I only love pieces of things that I hate.”
I have the most success with poetry that is either sublimely ridiculous or mind-shatteringly abstract. Which probably makes sense, given my own personal tendencies toward life in general.
So it was with this mindset that, a couple years ago, I stumbled upon what might ultimately be my favourite poet of all time: My cellular phone service.
I have long subscribed to “visual voice mail,” which means my cellular service transcribes incoming voice messages and displays the text on my phone. It’s quite handy, since I don’t need to dial in and listen to all the junk messages, and it works well — provided the caller speaks English. But here in my city of Vancouver, over one-quarter of the population hails from China — with the neighbouring cities of Burnaby and Richmond sporting Chinese populations of one-third and one-half, respectively.
So, victim of voluminous spam calls that I am, this means around a third of spam messages are voiced in either Cantonese or Mandarin. Because Visual Voice Mail is not a translation service, but a transcription service, it assumes the language it hears is English and makes a most gallant attempt to decipher what it hears. The result? Some of the best abstract poetry I’ve ever read.
This became a random source of fleeting delight, and at some point I decided to start saving the transcriptions. Sadly, it wasn’t long before the phone company “fixed” the bug, robbing me of yet another of life’s simple joys. A couple days ago, while combing through an old visual voice mail log, I reconnected with a few of these poems — several of which I’ve opted to share. Like any editor, I did have to add punctuation, but other than that, it’s ALL the work of my cellular service.
If only all poetry was this good.
My son, you have an assigned letter She had, too, potential Quickly, and done with who she cheating on, son.
Teaching me initial since she called you 'fool'. Do you try to answer your dry food? CRTC told me. "Teach me in the show house,” she called. “Can you, fool?” “Do you catch?” You try, and when?
So we can change you quickly and done late, catching, you answer. “You can totally do!” Too intentional, you quickly and then... catching on.
We eat quickly and catching hands You and Cody, do we intentional? You, quickly, and done with catching on.
She, including how does she see? How much she jump out! She, changing quiet And she, truly inventing and joining her.
Because she said she called Jen to fool you and touch shit. Yeah, you do fool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 14. yeah.
Why? So she called jumping your food? You, and you, and Tashi.
Teaching me kind of quite the pipe. I wouldn’t change. Highway ink too went back. Your food and waiting. For you, I’m back here waiting for.
You mean she teaching you? And told you to lead to trashing something human? I eat too, to mention art.
Yo, honey! You need a deal. Why she only tongue jump, Panting, but shoot you? Yelling! Shouting in your fool, and you doing hunting on earth. Catching and back.
Super jungle you quickly. I’m done chatting you. Answer! You told me you told super jungle. You! Quickly! And then super jungle you quickly. And down, late charging, You answer...
My Life on the Astral Plane : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome
Concrete Poem : Olympus Pen-F fronted with a 30mm f/3.5 Macro
Memories of Jimbocho : OM Systems OM-3 fronted with an Olympus 12mm f/2 lens
Absurdist Poetry : Olympus Pen FT fronted with a 38mm f/2.8 pancake lens and shot on HP5+ at ISO 400 and developed in Rodinal 1:50
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please check out the 3-hour, 47-song, 2-volume ULTRAsomething compilation album, which is available on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music:
Finally, after the passage of much too much time, ULTRAsomething Magazine EXORCISM 09 is now available for sale on the ULTRAsomething STORE.
It was certainly not my intention to allow 10 months to pass between issues, but the gap was not born from the vapid void of laziness. Rather, it was caused by my choice to:
Design and release the extensive, career-summarizing So Far So So photography/blog anthology book last December (available through the ULTRAsomething STORE).
Assemble and master a 2-volume, 25-year retrospective album of ULTRAsomething music (now available on all major music streaming platforms as linked in the “Reminder” section at the bottom of this post).
Re-code the entire ULTRAsomething website from the ground up and create individual, annual PDF archives for easy, offline reading.
Re-build the magazine template in Adobe InDesign, to replace my old Affinity Publisher template (thus allowing me total nuanced control over the rich black images contained within).
Now that my past legacy has been tidied up, I’m back to expanding it further with new content. And thus comes EXORCISM 09. Of course, I’m fully aware that my legacy is entirely inconsequential for both humanity and our eventual Ai overlords, but I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for the enjoyment of the future race of aliens who will one day come and re-colonize the planet, and who are most certainly responsible for tinkering with my DNA.
In a feable effort to sell this new issue, I’ve sprinkled a few sample photos throughout this article. I say this every time, but I think it’s my favourite one yet — which is a good thing, ’cause it means I haven’t peaked yet.
Below is the Apologia for EXORCISM 09:
Some people claim to have a spirit animal —a bear, an eagle, a lion. Name a critter, and there’s likely someone somewhere who feels a kinship with it. To the best of my knowledge, I have no spirit animal. Instead, I have a spirit home — Tokyo. And like a man who empathizes with a wolverine but can never be one, such is my relationship with Tokyo. An ocean separates it from my actual Vancouver home. Literally. The entire Pacific Ocean.
I’ve been fortunate enough to make the journey numerous times through the years, and I strive to spend at least two weeks there every year. So essential is this, that the first expense I budget beneath ‘food’ and ‘shelter’ is ‘Tokyo’. I shall never buy another car. My devices creak and wheeze through a 7- or 8-year update cycle, rather than the more typical 2 or 3. I possess exactly one look, which blithely ignores fashion cycles and wardrobe conformance. But Tokyo sojourns? They’re non-negotiable.
Still, I consider myself extremely fortunate to call Vancouver Canada home. Legally bound as I am by the borders of North America and without benefit of a time machine, I can’t think of a single place on this continent I’d rather live at this particular time. And so, I am a man of two cities — a fact plainly evident in the pages of Exorcism 09.
Barring catastrophe, disaster, or catastrophic disaster, I will be releasing EXORCISM 10 in the fall, and an album of entirely new ULTRAsomething music in December… gotta keep those culturally savvy new aliens happy.
REMINDER : As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.
If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. Actual product, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase in the ULTRAsomething STORE.
And for those looking to engage with the site’s musical content, please check out the 3-hour, 47-song, 2-volume ULTRAsomething compilation album, which is available on all the major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music:
With the introduction of the Kodak DCS100 in 1991, I first realized digital photography might one day become “a thing.” Sure, it was a $20,000 chunk of ponderous 1.3 megapixel lab gear that you lugged around on your shoulder and tethered to a Nikon F3. And no, I was no more likely to ever own this than the Lotus Esprit I’d wanted since High School. But it pointed toward the future — a future without the wicked 3-day migraines I would endure after every printing session spent holed up in a sweaty, unventilated, makeshift darkroom with open trays of chemicals. In 1991, I made a wish: that I would one day own a digital camera capable of replacing my 35mm film camera.
Sadly, the migraines meant I couldn’t just sit idly by, year-after-year, waiting for the technology to mature. The most obvious solution was to simply let a lab print my film — but I detested the way lab prints looked and the lack of control I had over the final image. That’s why I invested in darkroom gear in the first place. So I began with the idea of “photographing” on video tape and digitizing frame grabs, which I’d process using Silicon Beach’s “Digital Darkroom” and Adobe’s new toy, “Photoshop.” Digital Darkroom was my preferred platform since it was purely a greyscale program, and I had little interest in colour. The tiny, digitized, freeze frame video results were, not surprisingly, awful.
Fortunately, in 1993, Nikon released their very first Coolscan film scanner. While exorbitantly expensive, it was an order of magnitude cheaper than the nascent digital cameras teasing the high-end journalism market. So I bit the bullet and bought one. Using it was a nightmare. Satan himself couldn’t have designed a more frustrating product. Crippled by its reliance on that God-awful computer connection known as SCSI and its persnickety tendency to disconnect mid-scan, it would often take 4 hours or more for me to get a single image from a single negative. It was harrowing. Clearly, this prevented me from scanning more than a few frames per 36-exposure roll, so I would painstakingly analyze and scrutinize each B&W negative with a loupe to try and decide which were worth the agony of SCSI Hell. I had divested myself of my enlarger, so making contact sheets (which would have been infinitely easier to assess) was no longer possible. Unfortunately, I proved quite incompetent at judging which negatives were worth scanning, so I switched to shooting colour slide film. The slides could be assessed easily for scan-worthiness, though I abhorred working in colour; bemoaned the film’s limited exposure latitude; and grumbled profusely at having to actually have a lab develop the film. But the scans, once arduously achieved, looked great! So I made do for another couple years, grudgingly shooting colour slide film and scanning it, until the first affordable digital cameras finally hit the market.
The first to grace my door was the Apple Quicktake in 1995, whose 0.4 megapixel sensor contained 0.2 megapixels of image data plus 0.2 megapixels of random spurious brightly coloured dots. More toy than tool, I spent another couple years scanning negatives until the Kodak DC120 arrived, with its glorious 1.2 megapixel sensor. Sure, its images still had 0.2 megapixels of random hideousness, but that was now offset by a million pixels of splotchy, oddly-hued, actual image data. It was the first digital camera I used with the intent of printing images, though I usually stuck close to the ‘surreal’ and leaned heavily into the image artifacts, since there was no getting around their existence.
From there I moved through several more digital cameras, including the Kodak DC260 in 1998 (an image from which appears at the top of this post) and, most significantly, the 4 megapixel Olympus E-10 in the fall of 2000. By this point, scanning film was still a laborious chore, but with enough time and patience, I could digitize an entire roll and had thus returned to shooting B&W film. I could have soldiered on with this hybrid technique, but I decided nine years was a long enough wait. And so, in spite of its many flaws, I sold all my film cameras and started shooting digital exclusively — thus ushering in the era in which I produced the fewest photos ever.
There would be several more cameras over the next couple of years — each leaps and bounds closer to achieving my wish for a camera to pull me from my film-less doldrums… until, in 2004, I purchased a Canon EOS 20D. It was the first digital camera with which I could see the forest through the trees — and it was here that I first realized I was in an entirely different forest. The fidelity was now such that I could plainly discern what digital was truly capable of, and that digital would never look like film. Instead, it would always look like digital — and it was a look I didn’t much care for.
For thirteen years, I’d been on a linear march toward digital — one step after another, always assuming the path would end in the replacement for film. And for most people around the world, this is precisely the time at which this happened. But it had the opposite effect on me. It hastened my return to shooting film and a realization that the only way I would ever get a satisfying film look was to actually go back to shooting it. Digitizing film had now become as painless as my dentist claims to be, and with my aesthetic and creative needs once again satisfied, I began to follow the digital evolution from a position of curiosity, rather than need. So, in the mid 200x’s, my digital and film lives finally settled into a peaceful coexistence. Neither was a replacement for the other. They were simply different, like an oil painting is different than a watercolour.
The next decade was a wild one for digital photography — each new iteration of cameras brought massive “improvements” to the previous iteration, and an even greater gap between my own photographic aesthetic and the world’s at large. I stopped chasing ‘the next model,’ and my digital efforts settled into a 3-camera workflow, which continues to this day: The Leica M; the Ricoh GR; and Micro Four-Thirds.
The Leica M decision happened because my photography had long ago shifted into a direction in which rangefinder cameras, far more than SLRs, satisfied my particular needs. For many years, the industry believed the format’s short flange distance made it impossible to ever make a digital version — until Epson did exactly this in 2004. Spurred into action, Leica released the digital M8 in 2006, and digital M’s have been part of my setup ever since. Though a bit financially burdensome, the fact I frequently shoot old Leica M film bodies means the lenses are shared across both disciplines, reducing cost and complexity.
The Ricoh GR joined my happy family because, while rangefinders were my camera of choice for “serious” work, I never left the house without tossing a high-end compact in my pocket. Because of this, I’ve taken as many (if not more) good photos with a compact camera (either film or digital) as I have with my rangefinders. I’ve been shooting Ricoh GR cameras for eons. This includes not only all the modern GR digital cameras but earlier ones (including the marvelous Ricoh GXR series from 2009, which is the only camera system I still regret selling). And right now, over in analog land, my Ricoh GR1v is, by far, my most used film camera.
Micro Four-Thirds entered my life in the fall of 2008, with the release of the system’s very first camera: The Lumix DMC-G1. Since then, there’s never not been a micro four-thirds camera or two (or three) in my collection. Everything I initially loved about Micro Four-Thirds back then, I love even more today. That’s because the system has basically stalled technologically — which I consider to be a tremendous benefit aesthetically, since each new generation of digital cameras rendered images that looked less like what I desire and more like computer animation. It’s obviously a look everyone loves (and continues to love now that Ai imaging is more popular than photography ever was), but it’s not something I ever wish to own. So for me, Micro Four-Thirds remains one of the only digital system formats that has character (or, at least, a character I like). Though it would be erroneous to call its look ‘organic’ (it’s digital after all), it produces artifacts that I find pleasing to the eye. It’s a bit like early digital synthesizers, which sound good precisely because of the digital artifacts caused by such things as aliasing and low bit rates. The brain actually LIKES noise, so as long as the noise remains random (as it does with Micro Four-Thirds cameras), the eye is happy.
Having thus settled into a film/digital cooperative lifestyle, I decided I had a new problem to tackle: Colour. My film cameras were now happily running a thousand feet of B&W film through them every year, but my digital cameras were still stuck shooting in colour — forcing me to continue dealing with its elimination and with the image degradation caused by all the crap needed to produce it. Sensors, of course, “see” only luminance values. Colour must be derived and approximated through a series of red, green, and blue filters placed over the sensor, which creates a mosaic’d image from which sophisticated software algorithms ‘calculate’ their effect on luminance and use this to interpolate a probable colour. So why, I surmised, not just make a camera with only a luminosity sensor? In other words, why not just make a black & white camera? It seemed painfully obvious that one could achieve a much more accurate image if one just got rid of the artificial colour hocus-pocus, ripped out the filters, and used only actual luminance (greyscale) values to form the image.
So, at some point around 2008 I started spamming every camera company on the planet with unsolicited requests for a monochrome camera. To anyone in any photography circle who would listen, I would say “why doesn’t anyone make a black & white digital camera?” It was a question roundly dismissed as ridiculous by anyone to whom I offered it. So imagine my surprise and delight when Leica released the first viable black & white digital camera (The Leica M Monochrom) in 2012. The day this camera arrived at my door was the day I finally knew the ultimate path for digital was not to replace my film camera, but to create an entirely new and different way for me to take entirely new and different B&W photos. I thought all the other companies would follow suit, and for the first time since 1993, I’d be able to consider a digital workflow without any need for a colour component. This seemed like a particularly obvious choice for the Ricoh GR series, since the niche into which it slots practically demands the photos be B&W. Unfortunately, for the next 11 years only Leica dared release a B&W digital camera. It wasn’t until 2023 that Pentax snuck a monochrome sensor into the K-3, becoming the only other company to do so. This gave me great hope, since Pentax is owned by Ricoh. Could a GR Monochrom finally appear?
Sitting next to me, as I type this, is the brand new Ricoh GR IV Monochrome — a camera I’ve waited 14 years for. I’m not a big fan of writing camera reviews, but perhaps I’ll file a few reports once I’ve put some miles on it. Needless to say, you can expect a smattering of Ricoh GR IV images to start hitting this site over the next several months.
So where am I, some 35 years removed from my initial wish for a digital camera capable of replacing 35mm film? Clearly, this did not happen, though the impetus for this wish — to make photographic prints without inducing migraines — was achieved decades ago. Still, much like I continue to feel cheated that the jetpacks predicted in my youth did not come to fruition, I feel let down that I never really got my digital camera wish.
Obviously, and for many hundreds of very good reasons, digital photography absolutely evolved into an industry-wide replacement for film. But it ultimately failed to achieve the one thing that mattered most to me: the “look.” Those things I most like about (B&W) film are still absent from digital images. Digital sensors have a linear response to light, insanely high resolution, and are now essentially noise free. B&W film has a very non-linear response to light and a strong grain structure that robs it of resolution but imparts an organic quality that I find immensely appealing. These attributes cannot be ‘simulated’ with software because they need to occur at the ‘capture’ stage and not at the ‘processing’ stage. If a digital camera has any hope of ‘replacing’ film in my life, it’s going to need a sensor with organically shaped, randomly scattered, grain-like pixels that have a non-linear response to light. So can someone get to work on this, please? After 35+ years of failed promise, is that really too much to wish for?
REMINDER : If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
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I’m currently assembling ULTRAsomething Magazine Exorcism 09 and, quite frustratingly, continue to bump up against a familiar problem — the gutter in the centre of the magazine.
I wrote about this annoyance last year, in an article titled, The Gutter. And now, once again, I’m rejecting one landscape-oriented photo after another, simply because the magazine’s spine swallows some crucial visual information.
I suppose I could extend my entropic capitulation reliance to cover “magazine layout,” but even as a child it bothered me whenever vital photographic information would disappear into a book’s spinal crevice — and those weren’t even MY photos. Which is why, when I designed the layout for So Far So So, I placed most landscape photos on a single page, rather than across a dual-page spread. Any photos that did cross the gutter were either shifted left-or-right to avoid placing crucial information in the spine, or they had no valuable centre content to begin with. But ULTRAsomething magazine, unlike So Far So So, is a full-bleed publication. So there’s no dancing around the gutter.
I remain ever mindful of this while taking photos, but in the heat of the action, it’s not always possible to ensure the photo’s centre remains a barren wasteland. Fortunately, my natural tendency to frame vertically means around two-thirds of my shots never need cross a gutter. But the other third? The ones I take without throwing my arms all akimbo in an awkward effort to rotate the camera? Those remain locked in an eternal struggle with the gutter.
Consider, if you will, the tiny selection of photos contained within this article. When I returned from my annual Tokyo trip a couple months ago, I performed my usual brutal photographic cull — reducing the collection to a tidy little group of selects, which I deemed worthy of future publication. But this week, after sifting through that collection for possible inclusion in ULTRAsomething Exorcism 09, I was forced to reject 30 of them simply because they wouldn’t survive the trip across the gutter. And that’s just two weeks’ worth of Tokyo selects. Imagine how many other selects get rejected for this same reason!
Fortunately, I have a vast collection of photos with which to assemble Exorcism 09, and there’s no guarantee any of these would have made the final cut — gutter or no gutter. But it’s just such a nuisance. And what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t whine petulantly about your nuisances to the rest of the world?
OK. Back to work on issue 9, which I’ll hopefully send to the printer in the next few weeks.
As mentioned, this collection of photos is but a tiny snippet of Tokyo-only landscape-oriented shots, which I was forced to reject simply due to gutter concerns.
An additional note on the final three “Surveillance” shots: These are part of a series I began shooting, which I hoped would illustrate the disconnect between people’s desire for privacy and the reality of the blanket of surveillance surrounding us all. Ultimately I decided to abandon this because, along with that cursed gutter problem, the concept just seemed too banal and obvious. Also, I forgot I’m not the sort of photographer who actually explores themes. Instead, themes seem to explore me.
REMINDER : If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
COMMENTS : Comments will be moderated before they’re posted to the website, and commenting will be disabled on any article more than 6 months old.
After spending the past several months beavering away on both the ULTRAsomething retrospective book (So Far So So) and re-coding this website from the ground up, I planned to spend February working on UTRAsomething Magazine Exorcism 09.
So much for plans.
In late January, I wrote and recorded two new songs, which I posted to the ULTRAsomething site. Thanks to a coding snafu (surprisingly not of my own making), subscriber notification was botched, and not a lot of people read that post. “No big deal,” I thought, “it’s just music.” But the more I thought about it, the more I decided music IS a big deal, and maybe it’s time I put some effort into creating an ULTRAsomething musical retrospective as well.
The timing was ideal. I’d already drawn a line demarcating 2026 as the beginning of the new ULTRAsomething, and 2025 as the final year of the old. Making things even tidier was the fact that a song I wrote in 2000 was the first song uploaded to the original ULTRAsomething site (eight years before it became a photography blog). So I could do a quarter-century musical retrospective (2000-2025) of ULTRAsomething musical material.
Unlike So Far So So, which absolutely needed to be physical media, the musical retrospective could get away with being digital. Problem was, I’d never bothered to put any of this music on any of the major streaming sites, since I never intended it to be anything other than support music for ULTRAsomething.
So the new plan emerged: assemble a quarter-century ULTRAsomething music retrospective album, and make it available to all the major streaming services.
Done.
The end result is nearly three hours of remastered music. Much of it was released in some form or other in the past — either as stand-alone music, or as soundtracks I wrote specifically to accompany numerous ULTRAsomething vBooks. A couple songs were written & published to showcase synthesizer sound libraries I had designed, and the rest are a smattering of unpublished recordings, including a few “live” recordings (no multitracking — just realtime improvisations, often recorded direct to iPhone).
Given this, the title became obvious: Sounds, Tracks & Soundtracks. I once again relied on Nicole Langdon-Davies to design the cover (as she had done for So Far So So) to ensure a sort of cohesion between the two different mediums. The cover art is perfect, since it looks exactly like the music sounds — always the Holy Grail of album art design.
I’d planned to release it as one long 47-song album, which began with music from 2000 and ended with music from 2025, but the universe (as usual) intervened. Apparently, many streaming services have a strict 35-song maximum on any album. Sure, you can circumnavigate this arbitrary number if you’ve got a name that makes people capitulate to your will. I don’t. I am the one who must capitulate. So once again, I embraced ULTRAsomething’s “Entropic Capitulation” tagline and split the album into two volumes. As often happens with entropic capitulation, this didn’t work out too badly. I kept Nicole’s original black on white cover art for volume 1, and simply inverted it to white on black for volume 2. This too, worked well, since volume 2 (which contains the newer recordings) is definitely the darker of the two releases, and I can now simply refer to them as ‘the white album’ and ‘the black album’.
Both the black and the white albums are available on all the major streaming platforms. Here are direct links to Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Tidal, and Amazon Music Unlimited:
Other stores and streams (such as Deezer and YouTube) are currently being uploaded/configured, so if your listening platform isn’t yet listed in the hyperlink above, try searching for ULTRAsomething in your music streaming service of choice.
Hopefully, this marks the end of my ‘retrospectives’ and I can now put the pedal to the metal on future projects… though I do have a nagging thought that I probably have enough vBooks and other films to do a blu-ray retrospective of ULTRAsomething videos… but I’m doing my damnedest to resist that temptation. You’re welcome.
Late in Volume 2 : Indeed, this was shot inside my recording studio late in the recording of Volume 2 — specifically around mid-2024. Not that I knew at the time there would be a Volume 2, much less a Volume 1. It was taken for the simple reason that I needed to burn the final frame on the Fuji Natura Black 1.9, so I could develop the roll. But, throwaway shot that it is, there’s still some insight to be gleaned. One, obviously, is that the look of studio pretty much explains the sound of the music. Anything this dark and murky will surely result in the sonic equivalent. Another is the photo’s ‘time capsule’ aspect, and the realization of how quickly gear turns over here. I basically have to run all that is ULTRAsomething out of a room that’s only around 8′ x 8′ (2.5m x 2.5m). This ensures I adhere to a strict one-in-one-out rule. So if there’s a new piece of studio gear I want, an old piece needs to be sacrificed. Believe me, I’d love to still have all the gear I’ve had for the past 50 years — Once gear reaches a certain age, it becomes much more valuable (unlike the way we view humans), and if I still had some of my synthesizers from the 80’s and 90’s, the studio could actually double as a retirement portfolio. Sadly, that’s not the case here. So, in spite of this shot being only two years old, I find myself looking at several pieces of gear that are no longer part of today’s studio.
Album Covers : As mentioned in the article, the cover art was created by Nicole Langdon-Davies, who also did the cover art for the So Far So So book.
REMINDER: If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
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This must be how it starts. The tumble into geezerdom. The slippery slope of cognitive decline.
How else to explain that I haven’t a clue what this is a photo of?
I developed and scanned it just tonight. I know exactly when I shot it — it was only a few days ago. I know where I was when I shot it — I recognize the photos I took both before and after it. I know what camera and lens I used — an Olympus OM3Ti with an 85mm f/2. I know I’m the one who shot it, because I was alone the entire time. I know it’s not an accidental exposure because it’s framed with the same careful attention to composition I always employ (even if it doesn’t look like it to the uninitiated).
So what is it? And just as importantly, which way is “up?”
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened — though I can probably count the incidents with the fingers of a single hand. I usually have pretty good recall of every photo I take — even all the murky, blurry, abstract ones. The last time something similar happened was a half-dozen years ago. In that case, I could remember taking the photo, and I knew what the photo was… but I couldn’t remember where I took it. I obsessed over it for months until one day I happened to stroll past the object. “Oh! That’s right!” I thought — pleased to have repaired the missing brain cell.
But this situation is actually the opposite of that one. In the case of this photo, I know roughly WHERE I took it (even though I don’t remember taking it), but I don’t know what it’s a photo OF. I have no doubt it’s going to drive me nuts until I waste an afternoon to go looking for the answer.
REMINDER 1 : Don’t forget to order your copy of So Far So So from the online store.
REMINDER 2 : If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
COMMENTS : Comments will be moderated before they’re posted to the website, and commenting will be disabled on any article more than 6 months old.
January in Vancouver never really cooperates with my desire to stroll around aimlessly with a camera in-hand and a spring in my step. On most days, the skies are belching rain — except on those rare occasions otherwise, when the air turns frigid and my fingers ache to hold a camera. So, my January’s are usually spent struggling with taxes, trimming my closets of unnecessary content, and feeling sorry for myself that I’ve seemingly ‘lost it’ as a photographer.
But this year, I tried something different to while away the January doldrums: music composition. Truth of the matter is, I’m pretty much always noodling around on some synthesizer or another — sometimes working out actual song ideas, and sometimes simply exploring new sound design avenues. Rarely, if ever, do I bother to take any of it to completion; much less publish it. But this month, perhaps spurred on by my new “who cares” attitude for the website, the thought hit me: why NOT publish some of these musical sketches? My photos are nothing if not sketches, as are the articles I pen for this blog — articles which I plan to make even sketchier now. So why do I balk at the idea of publishing my musical sketches? It’s not like I’m going to wreck my musical reputation or anything — I have none.
So here are two sound esquisses, both of which I developed in the past couple of weeks. They follow a similar theme (in that each incorporates some segment of sonic degradation), but not necessarily a similar sound.
If the titles seem a little opaque, that’s because they’re not really titles, but dates. Specifically, each song gets a working YY.MM.DD title, which corresponds to the day I began working on it. However, a song’s start date doesn’t necessarily correspond to when it gets finished. For example, in spite of 26.01.22 being the first song I started working on, I actually completed and mastered 26.01.28 before it. Songs gestate at different rates, meaning they may well be published seemingly ‘out of order.’ So don’t be surprised if, at some point, a new song drops with a title indicating a start date of last year.
I suppose, once a song is finished, I could give it a proper title. After all, that’s what I do with my photos. And it’s what I’ve historically done with my music. Doing this made more sense back when I was composing actual songs for actual albums that contained actual lyrics — but that’s not what these are. These are just little cosmic sketches.
I’m trying to think of them like I think about my photos — that each is merely part of a greater whole, and not necessarily a stand-alone product. Each is but a snapshot of a fleeting moment or idea; captured for anyone who cares look or listen.
These songs, 26.01.28 and 26.01.22 are now a part of the 26.MM.DD album, released on 26.10.12 and available on multiple streaming platforms:
26.01.28 : This song began life as a 15 second snippet of bespoke horror music, which I wrote as a joke to accompany my girlfriend’s 15 second video of a BBQ duck swinging in a Chinatown storefront. Curiously, I rather liked those 15 seconds, so I decided to expand it into an entire song that no longer had anything to do with BBQ duck. Midway through the composition, and no longer sure where to take it, I asked myself “what would Jaki Liebezeit play if he were still alive?” So I wrote the central Can-like drum groove as my mythical answer. It gets initially obfuscated by some rather cavemanesque drumming I added when the rhythm first kicks in, but it shines through nicely by the end.
The photo selected to represent the song (and be cropped into the necessary square) is called “Lo-Fi” (since it looks like a dirty waveform) and was photographed with an Olympus OM-3Ti and an F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 lens, on HP5+ pushed to ISO 800 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal) 1:50.
26.01.22 : This was supposed to be a jaunty little Buchla Music Easel piece and consist ONLY of sounds generated by the Buchla Music Easel. But after recording the little blippy pattern that begins the song, I accidentally noodled a piano part over top of it, thus hijacking the intended direction entirely.
The photo representing this song is called “Alternatives”, and was shot on a Contax G1 fronted with a Contax Zeiss Biogon 28mm f/2.8 lens, using FP4+ pushed to ISO 400 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal) 1:25.
REMINDER 1 : Don’t forget to order your copy of So Far So So from the online store.
REMINDER 2 : If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
COMMENTS : Comments will be moderated before they’re posted to the website, and commenting will be disabled on any article more than 6 months old.
