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I hate mice. No, not the furry kind with tails, the plastic kind that you waggle around to control your computer. Now before you criticize me or call me closed-minded, let me explain myself. I work on a computer for a job and I work on a computer for my art. My art is my life. Therefore I want my hands to last me until the end. I want to be doing art when I’m 80. So what does this have to do with mice? Two words: carpal tunnel syndrome (okay that’s three).

When my hand is sore at the end of the day from using a computer, I know that something is wrong. I also know that the longer it goes on the more permanent damage that happens to my hands. And yes, I do those little wrist exercises.

In an effort to save my wrists, I have been using trackballs for years and my hands have been happy for it. That is until this year. You see I’ve got a problem. With the advent of optical mice and scroll wheels, apparently trackballs have been on their way out. What was once a competitive market has now become a niche market and most of the competitors have dropped out of the race. So here comes my treatise to the input device makers of the world (and no I’m not the only one with this gripe out there, Google it).

There are currently NO good trackballs available anywhere. Sure, I can buy one of the classics on eBay for $150, but that for me, a starving artist is not an option.

Do a search for trackballs at any computer store and here is what you get:

1. Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman
2. Kensington Expert Mouse 7.0 Trackball
3. Kensington Orbit Optical Trackball
4. Logitech Trackman Wheel/Logitech Cordless Trackman Wheel
5. Logitech Marble Mouse
6. Kensington Turboball
7. Microsoft Trackball Optical.

And that’s it. Period. I challenge you to find another one.
Here is what (in my book) makes a good trackball (and why all of the trackballs now suck):

1. Optical and USB: Anything less that optical is pointless nowadays and USB is the going technology for mice. Thankfully they simple don’t make trackballs that aren’t optical or non-USB any more.
2. Scroll wheel: The scroll wheel is simply the best invention of the last 20 years for input devices. Good bye marble(5) and orbit(2). The expert mouse has a spinny thing that equates so we’ll keep it in the running for now.
3. Ergonomics: Hands aren’t square or oval shaped. A trackball should fit in the hand without the hand having to contort. There goes the expert mouse (3), which is a fricking square, hello. Also the turboball(6) is out because it is first of all just a regular bubble design and second the scroll wheel is in the middle of the thing. Find me someone that can control a scroll wheel with the palm of their hand and I will sell them one of these. The rest are more or less curved to fit a hand (I’m being lenient here).
4. Precision: I’m an artist and I better be able to make smooth lines with whatever input device I use. For this reason any trackball where the ball is moved by the thumb is totally out. Not only is this the most uncomfortable thing ever, but it also throws precision out the window. A thumb will never be as precise at the first two fingers. Good bye trackman(4) and MS trackball (7). My thumb gets sore after 15 minutes with these things.

Okay, so now that my criteria has been met, what’s left? The Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman(1). So I got my work to shell out the dough for one of these suckers (which are quite expensive) only to find out it too sucks and here’s why.

1. The scroll wheel is not on the thumb. You have to move your fingers off of the ball to use the scroll wheel. I HATE THIS! I shouldn’t have to move my hand to use a scroll wheel. I should have instant access to all the buttons without moving my fingers, especially a scroll wheel.
2. The thumb button sucks! It’s like they pasted a pebble where a button should be. It’s very hard, requires a hard press and is rounded, so it not only hurts your thumb to press it, but you have to press it hard. Get a soft flat button there.
3. The right click is done with the pinky. I don’t know about everyone else but my pinky is very neglected and not useful for much. I suppose I could exercise my pinky like typists and guitar players, but well, I really don’t want to.
4. Finally, the thing is honking huge, even for my big hands. I have to extend my fingers to fit the thing in my hand.

So what am I looking for? Quite simply one of these three things:

Macally Qball
My personal favorite, with the scroll wheel AND two easy to use buttons under the thumb. Plus it’s pretty.

Logitech Marble Trackman FX
This was the predecessor to the Wireless one that I have. Note the smaller size, ergonomic design, correctly placed scroll wheel, etc. What were you thinking Logitech?

Microsoft Trackball Explorer
Considered by many to be the holy grail of trackballs, this sucker will fetch you $150 on the second hand market. Microsoft, what were YOU thinking?

So here’s my plea to Logitech, Kensington, Macally and Microsoft. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a decent trackball! Here are three examples of phenomenal input devices and my two Qballs at home are aging quickly. Get rid of the thumb ball and make something ergomic and modern, PLEASE!

Greetings fellow superheroes. I am the Shoveler. You may be wondering why a hero of my status would be here, on this blog in cyberspace, instead of shoveling out evil with my fellow Mystery Men. Well, today I am shoveling out a different kind of evil: phony ghost pictures. Yes, you heard right. Phony ghost pictures are everywhere and they are getting in the way of real ghost hunting. Too many ghost hunters fall prey to the easy mistakes that can lead to fakes. I am going to demonstrate through some photos of myself what you are to avoid if you want to take real ghost pictures. Listen up.

To begin this excercise, you will need the proper tools. First of all, it needs to be nightime. We all know that ghosts only come out at night, because it’s really hard to make fake ghost pictures in the daylight. Second, you need a digital camera. Any old point and shoot will work fine, the cheaper the better. Bonus points for teeny-tiny cameras. Other than that you may want to recruit a couple friends and grab some household objects, but we’ll get into that later. For now, let’s proceed.

Lesson 1: Women and Hippies Need Not Apply
Why is it that your wife or your buddy with that girly hair always get the best ghost pictures? I guarantee you that it has nothing to do with estrogen. Take a look at these ghost pictures and guess how the evil apparitions were created.


Yup you guessed it. The hippy that took this picture forgot to put his hair back and it got in the picture. So next time you want to get a real picture of a ghost, get a manly haircut like mine or at the least, wear a stylish hemet!

Lesson 2: Sticky fingers
This lesson also applies to other body parts like fingers. If you’re going to take a picture of a ghost, don’t go sticking ANY parts of yourself in the picture.

Lesson 3: Strapping Photos
Now that you’ve got your hair and body behind the camera, you’ve got one more thing to check. Make sure that the camera strap is not dangling either. Those camera straps have a nasty way of swinging down at the instant you push the shutter button.

Lesson 4: Orbalicious
Behold the orb party! Believe it or not, there are things that are almost invisible to the eye that can get in front of the camera too. Take dust for example. Shine a flash on a speck of dust a couple of inches from a camera and viola, its an orb. The picture below was done with a very rare household item called flour. This one also required the assistance of a friend. So if you want to take real pictues of ghosts, then make sure that your house is dusted and that you didn’t just bake something.

Lesson 5: Rippling Reflections
What’s the most common tool in a magic show? No, not a top hat. The most common tool in a magic show is probably the mirror. The same can hold true for making fake ghost photos. If you have anything reflective in the picture you are likely to get some pretty creepy stuff. Take this image. Look closely at the picture frame. Do you see a creepy face there? It’s just a reflection of a lovely lady I had help me out.

Lesson 6: Blow up your TV
Ah, the TV, that vacuous vortex of evil. Not only can it turn your brain to jello (and your belly too), it can also ruin your real ghost pictures by looking possessed. Now this picture (and the next bunch) require a special shooting mode found on most digital cameras called night scene. Some moron came up with this one which as far as I can tell only serves one purpose: to create fake ghost pictures. For those technically inclined people see this blog post for a detailed description. For the rest of you, don’t use this shooting mode if you want real ghost pictures.

Lesson 7: Will O’ Wisp
The same technique can be applied to any light source as is demonstrated by these candle pictures.

Lesson 8: Get a friend
Another misuse of the night scene mode to create fake ghost pictures requires the assistance of a friend. For these pictures, I recruited a strapping young man who helped me by “popping up” after the flash went off. How does this work? The night scene modes primary function is to take two pictures and sandwich them together. One is a flash image to get the foreground and the other is a long exposure to get the background. By using impeccible (or accidental) timing, you can take advantage of this and get your friend to only be in one of the exposures, thus creating a ghostly apparition.


And if you have them run by during the photo, you can get a mysterious blur like this.

Lesson 9: Put it all together
Of course any of the techniques can be combined to make one purely evil spooky picture like this.

Lesson 10: The real deal
So now that you know how NOT to make a real ghost photo, how do you go about making a real ghost photo? Let’s recap. You make sure that no part of you or your camera are in front of the lens. Make sure that no foreign objects are floating in the air (dust, rain, snow). Tell your friends to sit still. Turn your camera off of night scene mode. Turn off the TV and the lights that are in the picture.

Once all of that is done, you are finally ready to take a real ghost picture. You simply find a ghost and take a picture. Viola, a real ghost picture.

Next time…
That concludes the first lesson on how to shovel out the phonies from the real ghost photos. Stay tuned next time for a lesson on old-fashioned film cameras.

Here I go again, the photography major, debunking “ghost” photos…

With today’s digital cameras it is easier than ever to get stange anomolies that at first glance can’t be explained. The orbs are a common one, but others creep up too. One that has been in discussion around the internet lately involves light blurs and tv blurs when the rest of the image is (realtively) stable. Photographers will instantly recognize this type of picture as a double exposure.

Of course double exposures in the tradidtional sense can’t be done on digital cameras, but most modern digital cameras have a built-in feature to do a form of double exposure. This is often refered to night scene or night mode. What this mode does is it takes a flash picture, then leaves the shutter open to expose the room by natural light. In theory this will give some definition to the background of the flash image. However, what this usually just ends up doing is making weird images. The reason? Because in a long exposure anything (including the camera) that moves gets blurred. So you will often get a crisp image of a peson from the flash with blurry edges where they moved.

I have taken some example photos. I did these in about five minutes at 12:30 a.m. or so, so no real preparation was done. These were not altered in any way. I used a Canon PowerShot A95 on Night scene mode. I stood in one place, pressed the shutter, waited for the flash to go off then moved the camera quickly to the right a few inches. And no, my TV is not posessed or some fancy newfangled holographic thing.

Here’s a little essay I did a while back on orbs…

“What is that mysterious ‘orb’ over Aunt Ethel’s head? Could it be the departed Uncle Fred coming in to check on the family for the holidays?”

Probably not. Instead you may be looking at a different, insidious incarnation. This foul monster lurks in the air we breathe, in the working of our electronics, and even on the lenses of our cameras and goes by the name of…Dust.

Yes, those orbs in your photographs are probably just regular old, run of the mill dust particles in the air.

“But how can dust do that, and didn’t we get rid of dust when we went digital?”

Well you sure thought so didn’t you, but Dust is here to stay and it won’t be intimidated by those fancy electronic devices without moving parts.

Still not convinced? Look at the “orb phenomena.” Go ahead, google “photo orb” and see what you get. As any ghost hunter will tell you, orbs are taking the paranormal world by storm. Unfortunately this isn’t a good thing. You see these orbs, while they may look mysterious and spectral, really are just Dust reflecting back that lovely flash that is centimeters from the lens of your pocket digital camera.

“But how do you know, so many people seem to think it’s ghosts?”

Actually, if you ask seasoned ghost hunters, they’ll probably discount the orbs for one reason, they’re too common. I work at a newspaper, and many photos come across my computer monitor. I see literally about five or six of these a week. Hey, look, a ghost in the town hall, and here’s one on a Christmas tree with a bunch of children. Ooh, there was a ghost at the local school play this year. Nope, it’s Dust, plain and simple.

“But why does this happen more with digital cameras?”

Ask any professional photographer what makes a flash photograph better and they will tell you one thing, get the flash away from your camera. Next time you’re at a wedding, look at the photographer (if they’re a pro). Chances are the flash will be about a foot over their camera on what’s called a bracket arm. If you’ve got a really good photographer, they may even have an assistant who is holding the flash on a pole.

There are a number of good reasons for this. I could list them, but only one pertains to the orb phenomena, the angle of the light. It’s the same thing that causes red eye. If the light source is coming from the same angle as the photograph, anything that is in the way of the flash will reflect light back at the camera, even something small as a dust particle. So if there’s a speck of dust floating in the air an inch from your camera and it happens to pass right above Aunt Ethel’s head in the photo frame, you’ll get an orb. Take another picture a second later and that dust particle may not be there.

“And this pertains to digital cameras why?”

They’re small, really small. This means that the flash is closer to the lens than ever before, which means more chance of orbs. Even those old instamatics from a few years back were two-to-three times bigger than the average digital camera. When the flash is higher up the reflection of the dust might be going to the ceiling or at least over the photographer’s head. When the flash is right next to the lens, it will come right back at you. So take a deep breath, put away the crystal ball, open up Photoshop and do what I do with those nasty little dust particles; clone-stamp them into oblivion. Because as any photographer will tell you, even in the digital age, a photos worst enemy is Dust and it’s not going anywhere. If you still don’t believe me, check out this page on Fuji’s (maker of film and cameras for years) Web site, http://home.fujifilm.com/products/digital/tips/reflect/.