Justfolk's photos

My friend Virginia spends all her days now in a care home. She still enjoys books and I try to bring her another each visit I make. She's completing her re-survey of Dickens novels right now, so I brought "Our Mutual Friend" the day I took this picture. I have a copy of "Dombey and Son" to bring her in a few days. I think she read them all when she was younger, but she's enjoying them again now. She's a bit shocked at the carers and other visitors who don't even know who Dickens was. We were recording when I took this picture. You can see my little Edirol R-09 by the coffee cups, aimed at her. Her memos to herself about what to tell me are in the notebook on top of Our Mutual Friend. She will be 88 in a couple of weeks. This was another fairly well exposed picture in the Ricoh Elnica 35M, on 2002-expired Fuji 200 film, shot at about 100.

Besides being a working folklorist these days, Jeremy is a photographer and we enjoy chatting about cameras and lenses. His photographic life is entirely digital so he is intrigued by my use of film. Here we were considering the expired film in my Ricoh Elnica 35M. The film was 2002-expired Fuji 200 (shot at 100).

Gerard was interested in some work I had done thirty years ago and dropped in to ask me about it. I of course took advantage of the situation to take pictures. I like how, even though he's looking down, you can see he is smiling. This was with Fuji 200 film that expired in February 2002, so it was probably manufactured around 1998, nearly twenty years ago. I used the very reliable Ricoh Elnica 35M and shot it at ISO 100.

Unlike the picture I just posted, this was from the earlier part of the roll, when I knew I needed to shoot the fifteen-years-expired roll of Fuji NPS 160 at about ISO 80. Thus the exposure is not bad for such old film. This was taken in the Kodak Retina 1a. It too has lots of digital processing, mainly to reduce contrast, but the original scan of this was a lot healthier than the other picture's scan.

I had an old, expired roll of Fuji NPS 160 (expired in 2002!) in my Kodak Retina 1a camera for more than six months when I finally finished it and got it developed this week. When I put it in the camera I knew it was the 160 film, so I was shooting it at 80 or so, and getting pretty good exposures. But by the time I was half-way through the roll, I forgot what film it was, and thought it was a fairly recent roll of Fuji 400, so I was shooting it at something around ISO 300. That stop-and-a-half difference made a big difference in the exposure. This shot, for instance, was very much under-exposed. But R has such a sweet smile that the picture's not bad anyway. (I did quite a bit of stuff -- dusting, burning, dodging, de-saturating, etc. -- to this picture to get the best from a very bad negative.)

I keep trying to get good moon pictures. Working from the Olympus M4/3 raw file, I did a lot of processing to get to this. I like it, but I will continue to work on getting a moon picture I like more.

Bluejays are the profligate takers-away of our local bird world. Peanuts, I suspect, are just entertainment for them. They pick them up and carry them somewhere, burying them under leaves or in the snow, and then come back for more. And more, and more. I don't know if they ever dig them out. The squirrels seem to. And no doubt the other rodents too. Juncos like peanuts too. They stay around to eat and will sometimes tear apart a peanut very carefully, eating a few bites at a time, guarding what's left over until it's all eaten. Chickadees are takers-away, too, but not for peanuts. They dash in to the feeder, grab a seed, and dash away to a quiet spot to patiently open it, chew it, and think about it. And then they dash back for another seed. Wonderfully polite and considerate. Pigeons come in like drunken pirates and swing on the feeders, spilling as much on the ground as they can and strut around when they are full, laughing at us.

It got cold Saturday night and, even late Sunday morning, there was still some sish ice most of the way across the cove.

Among my pets over the years were a snail, who escaped his tether overnight the first night I had him, and Wally the Wasp, who seemed to thrive under my care. Wally lived in my office from mid-summer until December 2004. I fed him mostly sugared water, though he was interested in a few other things like flower parts, too. He lived mainly under glass and, when he died, I moved him to a former candy-box for viewing. He's been there ever since.

My life seems lately to have gotten so that all I take pictures of is birds. It's the weather, which has been rotten. It keeps me from walking much. The storm the other day, a hurricane without a name, dashed this feeder to the ground. The bit of tape here was my quick fix to the broken bottom. After seeing this picture, methought I should turn the feeder around. Maybe so.

This was a couple of hours ago, while I was cooking supper. This Northern Flicker stayed for about ten minutes, filling himself on the suet. Flickers have long tongues and I took two dozen pictures of him, hoping to catch his tongue stuck out; every shot missed. I'll try again another time.

That's a lie, the title. This wasn't on a roll. It's digital. But it reminds me of pictures that are at the beginnings of rolls, when I am not paying attention to what the camera is aimed at, but trying to get to the unexposed bit of film. I like the colours. And the lack of focus.

We have a little flock of goldfinches coming every day to our feeder. This was one this morning.

While I ate my breakfast this morning, this song sparrow was hanging around outside my window. The blue colour on the top of his beak is probably just reflection from the sunlit back wall of my house. You can also see a junco's tail hanging from the other side of the feeder. I had at hand my oldest digital camera, the Olympus E-P2, with its extremely compact Tokina 300mm "Reflex" lens. This about 50% of the original frame. This lens gets in close but is very soft. Pictures taken with it always need a lot of contrast adjustment, which is what this got before I posted it. I think I over-sharpened it, too; don't look too closely.

E dropt in to show me pictures of her new puppy which had arrived just the night before. Fuji 1600 film, expired 2007, shot at 800 in Ricoh Elnica 35M.

I've known Jeff for well over forty years and, although our paths don't cross much nowadays, in the mid-seventies we shared a rented house with a few other people. I've taken a picture of Jeff only twice. The first time, four years ago, he joked that his evil powers would ruin the film. His powers didn't, but the lab did, so I was left with no picture of him. But he was also willing when, two weeks ago, our paths (literally) crossed again and we stopped for thirty seconds to chat. This was on 2007-expired Fuji Superia 1600 film, shot at 800 in my Ricoh Elnica 35M, which is almost as good as the Canon Canonet, my favourite 1970s rangefinder.

It must have the previous winter that I remember so fondly as the year I never shovelled the driveway even once, there was so little snow that fell. From the looks of this picture, it certainly wasn't the winter of 1998-99. I don't know what day in March 1999 this was, but it was my first roll of film that month so probably early. It was Ektachrome 100SW. I put the Canonet on one of the steps and used its self-timer to get this shot of us. From the looks of things, I had probably been outside shovelling longer than she.

It's pretty busy at the feeder itself, so some birds do it buffet-fashion, grabbing something and taking it to a quiet spot to eat it. So this pine siskin with his sunflower seed.