Roses …
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Wordless Wednesday
First World Problem
Did you ever wonder why your stick of margarine comes out of the waxed paper broken in the middle?
We don’t use a lot of margarine but every stick in the last few pounds out of the freezer has looked like this.
I tried Googling for the answer. Out of about 6,290,000 results, 6,289,004 came back that “No insect will touch margarine and neither should any human.”
I don’t care about the butter aisle wars. Butter was a no-no. Saturated fats are a no-no. Now trans fats are a no-no. Butter is “all-natural.”
Pfui. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, butter and margarine each must contain a minimum of 80% fat. The difference between them is simply the source of the fat: butter is made from cream (moo), and margarine is made from vegetable oil. (“For the purpose of this subpart P ‘butter’ means the food product usually known as butter…”)
Margarine can be used just like “butter” in most types of baking. Since margarine is softer than butter, you probably should not use it pastries and candy made from a boiled syrup. For the record, Anne makes excellent pie crusts but she uses lard.
This is a slippery slope and I don’t care what’s at the bottom. I just want to know why the stick is broken.
Heh. Slippery.
The Pennsy1 still ran when my mother and grandmother were at Swarthmore College but that train station is now part of SEPTA. The fare to and from Central Philadelphia is currently $4.25 during off-peak hours, about the cost of two pounds of butter on sale. Despite the fact that butter comes from cows, this is not the story of the cow in Parrish (cows will climb up but can’t come back down the stairs).
It seems a group of students who shall remain nameless because their legacies might still want admission saved their butter from the dining hall for most of a term. Freezers weren’t available then, so I’m not sure I want to know its condition when that same group wandered down to the Media Local tracks and slathered and slathered and slathered. As you might expect, the train rushed into the station and rushed right on through, much to the surprise of everyone aboard.
College students are one reason butter costs so much more than margarine.
Can I freeze margarine?
Yes, but probably not the whipped style or the low-fat brands which charge you to replace about half the fat with water. Place the package in an air-tight container or freezer bag. Freeze before the use-by date on the package, and store frozen up to six months. The limit is mostly to inhibit freezer smells.
I don’t think freezing had anything to do with the broken sticks I have. We’ve been buying margarine on sale and freezing it for most of my semi-adult life. The sticks sometimes come out a little bent at the corners but they rarely look licked and never have been so consistently pre-divided.
The floor is open for suggestions or scientific proofs.
Me? I think someone dropped the entire pallet of margarine off the top rack of the warehouse.
1“The Pennsy” was the affectionate name for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad by both traffic and revenue in the U.S. for the first half of the twentieth century. It was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.
Wordless Wednesday
Cropping Issues
If you came here expecting a discussion of the corn used to make fine Kentucky whisky, move along. This is about photography.
A recent Miami Herald article about a West Palm Beach museum includes a shot of photographer 
Annie Leibovitz aiming a point-and-shoot camera at the reader. Kind of reminds us that a great photographer can take a magnificent picture with pretty much any box with a hole in one end.
But she still has to print it. That’s where I run into difficulty.
If Ms. Leibovitz printed her photos to fit in a standard frame with a pre-cut mat, (most) arts and crafts stores carry frames and mats with openings in only these sizes:
| Frame Size | Mat Opening | Image Size | Aspect Ratio |
| 5″ x 7″ | 3.5″ x 5.5″ | 4″ x 6″ | 1.5 |
| 8″ x 10″ | 4.5″ x 6.5″ | 5″ x 7″ | 1.4 |
| 11″ x 14″ | 7.5″ x 9.5″ | 8″ x 10″ | 1.25 (about 5:4) |
| 16″ x 20″ | 10.5″ x 13.5″ | 11″ x 14″ | 1.27 |
| 20″ x 24″ | 15.5″ x 19.5″ | 16″ x 20″ | 1.25 |
| 24″ x 36″ | 19.5″ x 29.5″ | 20″ x 30″ | 1.5 (exactly 3:2) |
| 30″ x 40″ | 21.5″ x 31.5″ | 22″ x 32″ | 1.45 |
(Frame and mat openings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.)
Most digital point & shoot cameras had an aspect ratio of 1.33 (4:3), the same as analog television or early movies. However, a 35 mm picture’s aspect ratio is 1.5 (3:2). This means that the long side is 1.5 times as long as the short side. Several digital cameras take photos in either ratio, and nearly all digital SLRs take pictures in a 3:2 ratio, as most can use lenses designed for 35 mm film.
The Advanced Photo System (APS) film, a now-discontinued film format for still photography, has about a 7:4 aspect ratio, coincidentally almost perfect for HDTV except for how lousy an enlargement APS film yields. In 2005 Panasonic launched the first consumer digital camera with the very similar aspect ratio of 16:9; that matches HDTV and is the same as Ms. Leibovitz’ Canon G-15. 16:9 is the same as 1.77 which you might notice matches none of the standards in the table above.
Confused yet? Me, too.
I’ve taken thousands of photos with either a Kodak or Minolta digital. The Kodak has a 1/1.76″ (7.3 x 5.5 mm) CCD sensor, the Minolta a slightly larger 2/3″ (8.8 x 6.6 mm) sensor. Both are on the sweet spot 1.33 aspect ratio which means I had to throw away part of the picture for all their 8 x 10″ and 11 x 14″ prints in the gallery.
That’s one reason I changed to a full format digital for most shoots.
All these different aspect ratios is why everyone has cropping issues when printing photos. An aspect ratio of 4:3 translates to a print size of 4.5″ x 6.0″. This loses half an inch when printing on the “standard” of 4″ x 6″ with its aspect ratio of 3:2. Similar cropping occurs when printing on other sizes, i.e., 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, or 11″ x 14″. In fact, the only two “standard” print sizes that capture all of the frame of a full frame digital or its 35mm uncle are 4″ x 6″ and 24″ x 30″.
There’s not much market for 4″ x 6″ or 24″ x 30″.
On the other hand, there’s a lot more market for 16″ x 20″ or 24 x 30″ than for a post card size print and I couldn’t reliably enlarge my early work to those sizes.
I want to compose in the viewfinder so I want to print what I saw. I’m homing in on 10″ x 15″ and 14″ x 21″ as the “usual” enlargements in my own gallery. The first is perfectly sized for the standard 16″ x 20″ mat; the latter for a 20″ x 28″ which is fairly large. Now all I need is a processor who can print them. And a mat cutter ditto.
Of course, every photographer has great photos in some odd-ball format, so I’ll print that palm tree with the sap bucket at 10:1 and frame it vertically. I’m working on an interesting 3:1 panorama that I will probably print on canvas and display as a loooooooooooooooog horizontal triptych.
I hope you’ll buy them anyway.
