Month: July 2006

film question: your experiences/insights? – f295: The Art of Lensless Imaging:

Yep. This is the golden age of BandW, in some ways. Sure, paper suppliers are dropping like flies and we’ve lost two film manufacturers in the past couple years (AgfaFoto and Konica-Minolta, via different routes), but I can *still* buy more different kinds of BandW film than I had access to in the 1970s, and some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get back then. And I can still get good, easy-working papers, even with Kodak packing in their lines (and again, some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get, at any price, 30+ years ago).

If Foma were the only BandW manufacturer on the Earth, things wouldn’t be *too* bad — they’ve got a nice line of middle-of-the-road films, very good papers, and they cover the formats pretty well. Same is true of Forte, and their products are distinctly *different* from Foma. Efke, also good, and different yet again. Fuji doesn’t even sell us Americans some of their most interesting stuff, and they’re still top drawer. And as long as we have Ilford, we won’t miss Kodak much. Give it another few years, and there’ll be two or three Chinese brands in regular distribution here (Lucky is pretty decent, and I’ve been hearing good things about Shantou Era, though the Shanghai is on the cheap side).

This illustrates the point I was trying to make here and to some extent here, as well.

Accidental double-exposure on two different cameras.

The smaller person — me — with the umbrella was taken behind my house on my cigar-box camera. I somehow neglected to flip the film holder before dropping it into a camera loaned to me by Ralph Young of the f295 group and exposing a shot of this truck. Both shots were in the 60 missippi range and it’s surprising how little of this got blown out.

1 minute exposure on the north shore of Green Lake. The timeless look of this is aided by the disappearance of the skyline: the Space Needle has been washed out completely. Cropping might help, but I kinda like the framing effect of the leaves at the top.

Shorter Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan (ret’d) writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

While in Moscow as US Defense attaché from 2001 to 2003, I received several calls from Russians with a remarkable and unexpected request. They wanted to join the United States Army.
I often think of those phone calls now as I consider the efforts our nation makes to find and recruit quality men and women into the service. Is there an opportunity out there beyond our borders that we ought to explore while recruiting the best and brightest to our nation’s defense?
<snip>
America could put recruiting shortages in its past, and the country would gain educated, legal, patriotic, new immigrants who, like immigrants before them, would do the work that many Americans won’t – serve their country in its defense.

[A] country whose national leadership cannot motivate its healthy, heterosexual men (and some women) 42 and under to volunteer to serve their country in its defense, not even its governing party’s strongest supporters, faces some serious problems that a 21st century version of King George III’s hired Hessians cannot solve.

To be fair, these would not be mercenaries in the usual sense. They would not be soldiers of fortune, willing to fight for whoever pays best, but aspiring patriots.

But can you imagine recruiting and fielding military units of men and women who are drawn from the same parts of the world where our alleged enemies lurk?
And picture these veterans in military housing or after being discharged, trying to find a place to live among the people for whom they have risked their lives, the same people who have been told Asians and Middle Easterners are the enemy. Yeah, that’ll work.

I don’t think the Brigadier General (ret’d) has thought this through.
Continue reading “A country that has to outsource its national defense is not worth defending”

I tried Delicious Library tonight, finding yet another use for my new camcorder.

It’s as cool as you may have heard (I realize I may be the very last person to try it, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this) and tempting to put to full use. Given how many things are already claiming my time, as well as realizing how many books I have pre-date barcodes, it’s unlikely I’ll create a full library.

I like the fact that, as a Mac application and the product of an Omnigroup alumnus, things work as you expect, even if it doesn’t seem obvious they will. I found a book with a barcode that wouldn’t turn anything up. So I ended the Amazon SKU and hey presto, the Monster located all the details.

Could be interesting, especially if you loan books or other stuff: I don’t and on the rare exceptions, I regret it. But at least I would be able to know where something went and perhaps have some way of extracting a replacement.

Continue reading “Delicious”