Month: April 2006

Some lessons learned today. Instant film is pretty tricky to work with, unforgiving in fact. I finally got two images at 1 minute and 2 minutes where my 120 camera would have managed it in 6-12 seconds. Looks like 1:20 would have been about right, but that’s something I’ll figure out later as I work out the disposition of this camera.

Do I keep it close to it’s original configuration with the bellows? If I cut all that off and break it down to a Polaroid film holder with a pinhole, I can cut exposure times way down (as focal length decreases, you need less light, as the inverse square law states). There’s no compelling reason to keep it as it is, other than a trace of regret at taking what was a functional, if useless, camera and rendering it for parts.

The calculations here suggest it should work: with the shorter focal length, the exposure times are pretty manageable, even with instant film’s abysmal reciprocity characteristics.

On the real film front, things were OK. I wandered around the old Sand Point Naval Air Station, while a young cyclist worked up her confidence, and grabbed 4-5 images on color slide film. A beautiful day there today, some sailboats out, and some kind of intro to kayaking as well: you could walk up and take a sea kayak out. Colorful things, those. I’ll know this time tomorrow if any of that stuff came out.

I had some black and white subjects in mind but time and other commitments pushed them off the schedule. They’ll keep.

My stuff will go up here when I get it back from the processor. And a Flickr set will likely happen too.

Now playing: Last Boat Leaving by Elvis Costello from the album “Spike”

Technorati Tags: wwpd2006

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall April 30, 2006 02:19 AM:

The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president’s public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president’s poll numbers.

[ . . . ]

To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.

I like it. Read all of the analysis (I have elided a bunch of it): he, as usual, sees through the smoke and mirrors so beloved by this administration.

How annoying would it be if I installed this?

Explorer Destroyer – Switch to Firefox, Make money from Adsense Referral:

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox.
For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

I don’t think I would make a thin dime on this, so it would really be a matter of trying to break MSFT’s grip on its users. As obnoxious gadfly John C. Dvorak writes, IE was perhaps MSFT’s biggest mistake, born out of fear rather than out of any real purpose or (wait for it) design.

Technorati Tags: sucks less

Continue reading “is this worth doing?”

alspix stuff – Matchbox Pinhole:

My first couple of 35mm pinhole cameras attempted to be panoramic, wide angle jobbies but this time I thought it would be nice to get back to the classic square format.

Here’s my latest contraption which uses 35mm film to provide square images of 24 x 24mm. Using this size means that you can get up to 50 exposures on a standard roll of 36 exposure film. Now that’s what I call economy!

Heck, I’m thinking about it myself.

Living With War:

You can listen to Neil Young’s new album here.

Yow, he’s on fire.