Happy Polaroid Week!

This Monday through Friday mark the spring Polaroid week on Flickr, where instant photographers post lots of incredible photos to a group pool to show how distinct and versatile that medium is. People always ask me, "What kind of camera is your favorite?" and my answer always has to be Polaroid, strange as that may seem. There are many reasons for this - my first real camera was a Polaroid SX-70, inherited from my grandfather. Also, I have many fond memories of Polaroids from my youth, when we would go fishing, or at a birthday party. When I got into film photography again, the Polaroid was there for me - easy to scan, instant results, and incredible colors.



But more than that, Polaroid made some very interesting film and cameras. The SX-70 is in my opinion the greatest camera ever made. It's an SLR that folds completely flat and is easy to carry, has a great lens that focuses down to 10 inches, and for the first time a camera developed prints before your very eyes, in daylight no less. It has the ability to amaze everyone from children to ol pro photographers. The film has that unique Polaroid look to it, with faded colors, development abnormalities, and an overall glow. There are photoshop actions that mimic it, but nothing ever gets it quite right.



So whenever Polaroid week comes around, it reminds me to shoot up the remaining film stock that I have, and to enjoy those cameras once more. The film I love is gone for good - Polaroid quite making Time-Zero, 600, 669 and all the rest a couple years ago. Thankfully I can stock up on the equivalent Fuji films for my old packfilm warhorse, and for the SX-70, the Impossible Project is doing some remarkable work bringing new filmstocks to the market. I personally can't wait to try their black and white 600 version of the new Silver Shade films. \

Here are some of my favorite Lansing-themed Polaroids:


Golden Harvest


JJ Live Here


Mt Hope Cemetery

Lansing Tweed Ride

Get down with your dapper self and join us for a Trajet de Tweed around Lansing on Saturday May 1st at noon, departing from Lansing's Frandor Shopping center, specifically the skate park area. It'll be a short leisurely ride about town, with the option of further riding with the Healthy Lungs Ride at 1:30 pm to celebrate the smoke-free bar legislation, or just partake in some refreshing ale at a nearby pub. Contact Marci Baranski for more details.



On an unrelated note, one of my friends was recently hit by a vehicle while riding his bike on campus. I don't know all the details yet, nor do I know if I should share them, but if you're driving around the area please be careful - there are beginning to be lots of bicyclists on the streets.

Time to make a change

There's this obsession with the newest, greatest equipment, whether it be the new $5000 Leica camera, the lightest wheelset for your bicycle, the fanciest steel lugs on a bike frame, or the quickest car around a track. Having functional equipment is certainly important, but taking things so seriously as to worry about the number of ounces of a crankset, whether all the components on a bike match, or the name on a camera? There comes a point when the emphasis on expensive gear takes on a condescending air, as if you need the best equipment to enjoy yourself. It also takes all the fun out of a hobby when you start to care about acquiring the latest gadget rather than riding your bike or taking photos. To a certain extent, I've fallen victim to it as well, getting excited about shiny bits for a bike, coveting a new lens that I'd probably in actuality never use.



For many, having inexpensive gear is a matter of necessity. If you don't have 2 nickels to scrape together, chances are pretty good you're not riding a Cervelo with a Leica M9 strapped around your neck, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a bike ride, or take some great photos. A recent post on a Ecovelo, a bicycle and photography blog that I have enjoyed, polled its readers to find out the maximum price they would spend on a bicycle used for commuting. The range in options, if you don't want to visit the site, was from $500 at the low end to $4000 at the high end. Ask the man on the street, and he'll tell you even $500 is a bit dear for a bike, let alone thousands of dollars, but from the comments on that post it seems there are plenty of people out there who think it's almost necessary to spend above $2000 to get a decent commuter bike. Many even wished for "no ceiling" as an option, which seems a little surprising.


If Contador were a photographer, he'd swing a Leica, guaranteed.

My commuter lately has been the Bridgestone XO-1, a bike that, with all the work and components, cost me a bit under $500, and I still worry about locking it up outside. The XO is an almost perfect metaphor for the pitfalls of our consumerist society - the magazines panned it because it didn't follow the set rules of the game at the time, so they sat on the shelves unbought for years. Now they're rare and chic again, and selling better than they ever did new. The bike rides great - it's comfortable, smooth, pretty, and fast enough for my needs. Looking around at my workplace, and at my commuting friends, I don't see a single person who rides an around-town bike that's worth in excess of $300-$400, let alone in the thousands of dollars. What exactly do we gain by spending $2000 or more on a bike to ride around town and run errands?



Parhaps you shouldn't mind spending money on quality, but is that what's for sale here? Most of the equipment the shops and magazines are selling will make little to no difference in your enjoyment of a hobby, and may be of poorer quality than what you are replacing. The Cupcakerator rides on an old Raleigh 3-speed around Chicago, and every once in a while she'll think that she wants a Pashley, or some other dutch bike. A Pashley, in all honesty, is not much nicer to ride or own than her Raleigh - both are big, heavy steel bikes, both have internal hubs for ease of drivetrain maintenance, both have that classic upright style. The Raleigh's brakes aren't quite as nice as the modern bike's but of course that's an easy and cheap fix. Why does she want a newer bike that costs well over a thousand dollars? "Because it has a curved top tube," she says, but I suspect it's also a bit of the consumerism that pulses through the hobby. To borrow some verbiage from BSNYC, you can be a beautiful Godzilla atop a dutch bike, a Fred on your way to the coffee shop clad in lycra and cleats, or a fixie-riding hipster in skinny jeans, but underneath all that highly stylized veneer they're all the same person. Spend all the money you want to buy a lifestyle, and you will still end up with only the illusion of one.


This bike is something to be scorned in today's society.

A friend brought me over to his place yesterday, and he was excited to show me his new bike. I looked quickly, and chuckled aloud when I saw it - a funky pseudo-mountain bike with a coaster brake, internal hub, and not much else - it's the kind of thing any "serious" biker would very much turn up his nose at. But looking closer, it had a nice set of touring tires on it, a 4-speed Shimano internally geared hub, and the frame wasn't all that heavy either, and besides, if he was excited and happy with it, who the hell am I to judge? I couldn't believe it when I heard it coming from my own mouth - the smug chuckle of vanity. His plan today is to take it on an ~80 mile ride with a friend, and that's something no cyclist should turn his nose up at.


Radiating Smugness

At best, this kind of attitude becomes a bit costly, and at worst, you turn into a connoisseur, a nice word for someone who hoards objects they desire for no practical reason. You get to the point where you look down on people who are actually using nice equipment instead of hanging it on a wall or displaying it in a museum. Before I get to that undesirable end, I'm going to start cutting off the offensive pieces of myself, Craigslist-style. This Bris of belongings will start with the most galling of extraneous objects, a fixed gear Fuji with Campagnolo components.

Developments in Cycling

Lots of new things have been going on in the world of cycling, but one of the most important recent events was the unveiling of Bike directions via Google Maps. Even more exciting, East Lansing and Lansing were on the initial rollout of the feature, which should be great for local bikers.

Let's say, for example, you're in Old Town's famous Golden Harvest restaurant, eating yourself a Bubba Sandwich. So tasty you forget that, holy crap, you gotta be to work at Bessey Hall all the way over on Michigan State campus in 40 minutes! Not that this has ever happened to me, of course. You wonder whether you'd have time to ride the Rivertrail, or should you instead take surface streets to get there faster? Well Google Maps will now tell you what route is best to bike - it recommends the Rivertrail - and it'll also tell you how long it would take to ride, taking different routes. In this case Saginaw to Michigan is a good 10 minutes faster, but I'd really recommend the Rivertrail route, or at least Kalamazoo, which has a bike lane. Good job, Google!



Locally, it's just about time for the season's first race, the Barry-Roubaix. If you want to dip your big toe in the world of bike racing, the Barry is a pretty good opportunity. It has levels of racing ranging from the beginner-friendly 23 mile lap to the extreme challenge of 2 laps, at 65 miles. It's raced pretty much entirely on gravel and a little on singletrack, so a fat-tired road bike is just about perfect (think cyclocross, 28mm or wider), but a mountain bike will do in a pinch of course. It's all happening on March 27th, in Middleville. You can buy tickets in advance, or register on the day of the race for an additional $10. Afterwards, there will be a big bonfire by the beach, so BYOB! I will probably be riding the Bridgestone XO-1, unless the mud or snow gets silly, in which case I'll try out the Rawland Sogn. Hopefully I can get some training rides in before the actual race...

More Snow...

Last day of February, and unless we get a few more inches today (it's forecasting for some light snow tonight), this month will go in the books with just more than 20 inches of the stuff, more than double our average. I don't mind riding in the snow too much, but driving on the expressways to clinical sites hours away has gotten tiring. And shoveling the driveway has gotten very tedious to say the least. Enjoy these photos of the snow, hopefully we'll have some signs of life from spring soon. I'm not holding my breath though.





(If you don't remember what April was like last year):

New Job!

Technically I've been working there for a couple months, but I haven't mentioned it here. I'm working at the Michigan State University's Bike Shop on campus as a mechanic. It's a bunch of fun, learning about how to polish and fix up old and rusty frames and make them usable, if not beautiful in many cases. We operate a cool rental bike unit, where students and faculty can rent bikes for unreasonably low rates, and have them serviced by us for free. It's a great service, and it's nice to see how well-used it is on campus. Many of these bikes are abandoned at the end of the semester, and the Bike Shop gets to pick over the pile that the police impounds for rentals.



We also accept donations from folks, which we either turn into rentals or sell to support the store. Some people have gifted MSU Bikes some incredibly beautiful bikes, Like a Bianchi track frame that was entirely unridden, a Tommasini road frame (also unridden), many cool three-speeds, and most recently a Peugeot PX-10 that needed a lot of work, but has turned out very well:





Finally, we do repairs, sell parts and accessories, and generally try to support the campus bike community in activism, get-togethers, races, or whatever else on two wheels that might be going on locally. If you've yet to check it out, go down to Bessey Hall on campus - the shop is on the riverfront side. It's a great resource run by caring people.

Can I ride in the wintertime?

If you live and work in Lansing or East Lansing, you've probably got pretty decent bicycling routes, and the roads are usually clear enough to ride in. Roads like Farm Lane, Forest, and other lightly traveled roads are a joy to ride on, and you can't beat the scenery. But even a dedicated summertime cyclist will sometimes balk at the idea of going out in any weather below 40 degrees, which doesn't make any real sense to me.

So why not ride in the winter? Here are some common things I hear.

1) It's too cold out!



Have you ever noticed that you can get hot and sweaty while exercising? Believe me, this is true on a bicycle, even in the winter. Sometimes especially in the winter. If you layer your clothing, you'll never be cold except for maybe the first minute you walk out the door. It's a lot warmer than walking to and from the car in a parking lot, because of the heat your body is putting out from all that aerobic exercise.

You don't need to spend a ton of money on winter cycling gear either. I usually wear a pair of long underwear on the bottom with jeans over top, hiking boots over wool socks, a long-sleeved wool shirt or sweater, gloves with glove liners, and some sort of ear warmers. On the very coldest days, you might need full face protection like a balaclava, but really I've only found that necessary in temps below 15 degrees, or in a lot of wind. The local Playmakers store has some awesome Smartwool gear that I swear by - the light wool wicks sweat, never smells bad, and looks good.

2) It's too icy out!

It rarely is. In Michigan, the streets are cleared pretty quickly in main travel areas of any deep snow, and if it's safe for a car to travel on, then it's safe enough for a bike. Bikes have narrow tires that cut through slush and light snow pretty well, and a set of knobby tires makes things even easier.

As for ice, I don't really run into it very much, and the few times I do, nothing bad comes of it. Just slow down around turns, walk the bike across railroad crossings, and Bob's your uncle. If ice really scares you, there are plenty of studded tires on the market made specifically for riding on ice, or you can even make your own. Personally I've not fallen due to icy conditions (knock on wood), and I ride on regular knobby mountain bike tires.

Lots of people make the mistake of riding on the shoulder or sidewalk, which are rarely cleared enough to ride in. Just invest in some lights, ride in the cleared sections (yes, on the road), and you'll find it's a lot easier to stay upright. The road is actually quite a bit safer to ride on than the sidewalks, but that's a whole other blog post.

3) I don't have the right equipment!

You might actually. Winter biking doesn't take a fancy bike or clothing, you can do it pretty cheaply. I bought a used cheap mountain bike at the MSU Surplus Store for $15. It needed a new front wheel, chain, and a tune-up, but even with all that work and parts it was less than $100. If doing tune-ups isn't your thing, then you could pop over to MSU's Bike Shop and spring for a freshly tuned used bike, or even rent one for a season cheaply. (Disclaimer: I work at the Bike Shop)

If you are serious about commuting, you'll want a set of fenders for your bike to keep the snow from jamming up your components and messing up your clothes. An absolute MUST HAVE is a decent set of front and rear lights, and you should run them day and night for visibility. I prefer Planet Bike's Superflash for the rear, and for the front their new Blaze 2 watt. A blinky mode with a bright LED light helps cars see you for safety, but the cold can drain batteries quickly, so bring an extra set of batteries just in case. Lights seem to be getting better every year, and cheaper too.

4) I still think you're crazy...

Well, I'm not. Winter cycling is a great way to get yourself outside and exercising in these cold bleak months, and it really doesn't take a silly amount of money or expertise to do it. Just invest in some lights, get your bike set up, and wear some layers. For maintenance, the most important thing is to keep your chain well-lubed on a weekly basis with a heavier grade of lube, like Pedro's Syn Lube.



If you decide winter commuting or riding is for you after trying it, you can spring for some accessories to make your ride easier:

- Goggles - nice to have for rainy or windy days. Buy a cheap set of snowboarding or even lab goggles.
- Rear rack and Panniers - I have a set of waterproof Ortlieb Panniers, and they're incredibly useful. Gets the load off your back, and holds a ton of stuff in a waterproof environment.
- Studded tires - as mentioned above, they're not truly necessary, and they're expensive, but some people swear by them. They can't hurt.

So give it a try, and maybe you'll like it. I do - it gets me outside, gives a good workout, and saves a lot of money on gas and parking fees, especially on MSU's campus.