Justfolk's photos

This chickadee and I are getting pretty chummy, though I haven't tried yet to get him to perch on my hand. He comes in pretty close to me -- if there are sunflower seeds to be had. He gets one and goes off somewhere else to eat it. Then he comes back.

I have a Tokina Reflex 300mm lens that is about as unsharp as any lens I've ever used. It can focus well enough but, being a manual long lens, it is very finicky. But, even in focus, the images are very "soft." However, it throws the out-of-focus things *way* out of focus, and I like that.

All day long it was storming, and the whole day the snowbirds were at the feeders, a little flock of a dozen of them.

I remembered this picture from ten years ago today, when I found out the man seated here, Shannon Ryan, died yesterday. Here, in April 2006, we were celebrating his retirement after 30-odd years university teaching. In fact, he figured he taught for fifty years as he had started his first job as schoolteacher at age 15. He was a good teacher, and researcher, and writer, and historian. When he died he was 75 years old. This was on Reala film, shot in my Spotmatic with its beautiful f/1.4 lens. The scan suffered badly and I dolled it up somewhat today (vignetting rather heavily) before posting it on social media for Shannon's other friends and admirers. The two women, co-workers of both Shannon and me, have since retired too. The young man (taught by Shannon in the early 1980s) is a successful lawyer.

At sunset yesterday afternoon, looking at the moon across what locals know as Uncle Art's Cove.

We went out early that morning to get some fresh bread. The store opened at 7:30am and this was just beforehand. There's little "straight-out-of-the-camera" about this. I can't say I believe that deity exists.

This spot is, as a crow would fly, just over half a kilometre from my home. But to walk there, down a valley and up a zigzag road takes about forty minutes. This was three weeks ago, looking west about an hour after sunset with lots of city light in the clouds. I pushed the camera up against a post to get a quarter second of near motionlessness.

This time of year, when the frost has kicked in, I get nostalgic for late summer.

He wasn't the only visitor. Within two minutes of my laying out a couple of handfuls of peanuts, there were four bluejays cleaning them up. But this one hung around on the rail, letting me take his picture.

Sometimes jpegisation is a bit of fun. I probably should have taken this as a raw file, but didn't and got stuck with a kind of rainbow coming up into the sky from the city lights. Ah well, c'est la vie. I was trying to get some streaks from the meteorites that were shooting that night, but I didn't. A thirty-second exposure that doesn't shake too much is just remarkable in itself.

Sean, who has the best beard of anyone I know, listening to A's story, and then laughing.

Venus has been very apparent lately in the SSW sky. This was two hours ago, about ten minutes' walk from our house. I balanced the camera on the bridge rail and thus had to make do with a tilt of several degrees. So I turned the image somewhat to make up for it.

I started interviewing Virginia Dillon more than fifteen years ago and we have accumulated over a hundred hours of audio recordings of her reminiscences and oral history. She had been sick somewhat the past couple of years and, although we kept in touch by phone, I hadn't made a new recording since 2014. But this week we sat down again, now in her new digs at a local old-age home. She had her notes at hand and we talked for ninety minutes. I expect some more interviews in the near future. Virginia was born in 1929 but has a detailed memory about her community going back fifty years before her own birth. She paid attention as a child to what the old people told her.

A crop from that hard-done-by negative; just the hands. Plus some light leaks and double-exposurey stuff.

I've been looking back through old negatives and the other day I came across scans the photo lab had done of this roll of film in early 2008. I figured I'd better rescan them myself since the lab was unable to line up where one image ended and another began. Not surprisingly, though. The developed film was uniformly black to look at. It had already been in a camera I bought and I decided to carry on using the roll. It was a roll of Kodak 400 film in a Fujica STX-1N. The film jammed in that camera before the end of the roll. So I wound it back and put it in my Olympus Pen D3, one of a series of four or five D3s I have had. They are lovely cameras but all but one have failed on me. This one, like the Fujica, jammed, so I removed the film and took it in for developing. It turns out I had miscalculated how many pictures I had taken with the Fujica, and shot my half-frame pictures over some of them. Additionally, the film was badly light-leaked throughout, from some previous adventure before I owned the Fujica, so there was really triple exposures. Here, on the left, is the colour scan I made. I can see in full-frame someone who was visiting me in my office. I *think* I know who it is, but I am not sure. The half-frame one, superimposed, is of my cat Minnie on a shelf. The lighting was quite different in the two exposures, so I converted to b&w first with a blue filter (middle) and then (on the right) with a yellow filter, each giving a little more clarity to one of the exposures. My favourite part of the picture is the visitor's hands though. I may try printing just that part of the frame.

In mid-August one evening, we sat outside with a little fire and soaked up the summer night. The bluebell was growing from between the stones in front of the fire. The snow started blowing around today, so this looks very pleasant to me.

Who needs tools when you have a head for nuts? This fellow, poking at the peanut shell, exposed his nut, as here. Then he turned it over to knock out the two halves. Immediately, he picked up one and flew away with it. I suppose that is to prevent the blue jays, crows, and perhaps even the snowbirds from bullying it away from him.

This is making the best of a bad, flat picture. I keep hoping to find regular use for the Tokina Reflex 300mm lens that I have. It's not a really good lens but it has some surprises now and again. This was looking 300 or 400 metres across the valley from our house, at the junipers catching sun above the highway. (Okay. I know. Hereabouts we call it juniper, but people in most other places call it larch or tamarack.) Anyway, the out of focus areas of pictures taken with this lens are expressed as doughnuts (does anyone write doughnoughts anymore?). Thus you see the brighter branches only about ten metres from the camera as a kind of chain of links; the duller ones are a flat hazy.