Justfolk's photos

I always like trying to make something out of nothing. Or out of very little. This was the first shot on a roll of Fuji 800 film of unknown vintage, but perhaps a couple of decades old, given to me last month by a friend who gave up on film 25 years ago. It was taken in my light-leaky Olympus Pen D3 and developed by a send-em-away service at a local drugstore. In cutting the negatives, they cut through this first image; thus the jagged scar down the right side. The drugstore service doesn't include scanning. In scanning them, I accidentally put the smaller piece in the tray both flipped and upside down. The incomplete sprocket hole is from a similar difference between the two scans. Even though it *was* just a throw-away shot taken while winding the film on, I thought I'd try to reconstruct it. I had to flip and rotate the smaller scanned image to pull it in next to the bigger part. It worked fairly well. But the light-leaky colours were altogether weird, so I converted them to b&w (using a green filter for best detail). And thus this.

I haven't started divesting myself of my absurdly big collection of cameras yet, at least not in a big way. Last month a friend told me he figured he was never going to use his 1970s-era 8mm Nizo 156XL camera: would I take it? Of course I would, and did. But in turn I figured I wouldn't use it either, so I immediately put a call out on Facebook: who wanted it? I got a half-dozen requests right away. The first, and the winning, request was from a friend who is doing a film about a local woman who left fifty-odd years ago to become a (successful) bull-fighter. She thought she could use the 8mm camera to make some nice film footage to intercut with the higher-class video her film is mainly being shot on. So she got the camera -- and I took a picture of her with it when she came to pick it up a half-hour later. This was on expired Fuji 800 film (a gift to me from another friend) in my Olympus Pen D3. The D3 is leaking light now but this frame was pretty good.

Time flies by and I'd forgotten about this picture from the summer of 1982 (which I'd scanned in 2007). My wife and I were out for a walk, probably looking at birds; she's wearing a pair of binoculars. The film was Plus-X ("Kodak 5062"), probably shot in my Zenit-E, though I had access at the time to a Contax 139 with a fairly cheap Yashica lens; but the out-of-focus stuff here makes me think it was the Zenit-E. I used to use the Zenit-E in wide-open mode almost all the time because I didn't understand the manual stop-down mechanism. Luckily, here, I did not overexpose very much, though the negative is definitely a couple of stops darker than it should be.

I discovered this picture on my computer this evening. I had taken it with the iPad three months ago and forgotten about it. The relationship between the two machines being what it is, this picture migrated to my computer. The iPad takes lovely low-tech pictures. This is about a quarter-meg and incredibly soft in its detail, but it has a nice overall tone to it. The cat is always willing to pose.

It was R's birthday, or close, and he went at the candle with ingressive breath.

Five pics cropt and pasted together. Then substantially resized down to post here.

We had run outside to watch the ISS go overhead. It was minus nine and it didn't take long for us to go back in.

It was a few days after Jack's birthday, but it was worth celebrating, even late.

The amount of flare that appears on a window lit by the bright morning light is substantial. Once the window had dried up a bit, I may have got a clearer picture. But by then that rare-to-come-by-my-feeder grosbeak was long gone. He at least stayed long enough for me to get a few pictures, flared as they are.

I used to be right into over-processing my pictures and I still like the results when I get this cartoony look. But I don't do it very much anymore. This is the view from my office door one afternoon late last week. It was still January but I had already changed the calendar to February. My mother used to say that was bad luck.

Over the past few years I have bought a couple of dozen little carvings from Harry Brait. He hadn't been in to visit me in some time; today he stopped by and we talked about some of the pieces I have. Here he is pointing out an orangey pyrophylite piece he carved for me about three years ago. I had my camera set at ISO2500, and didn't notice that fact until I looked at this picture on the computer. The colours were somewhat off, and that bad highlight is on his face, so I tried converting it to b&w (using a blue filter, by the way). It's not too bad. It's hard to take a bad picture of Harry.

This was lunchtime today when the goldfinches were gobbling up as muchof our seed as they could. This is the leftover Christmas tree outside our kitchen door. We keep it plugged in for months after Christmas is gone and past.

This guy and several of his friends were at the feeders today while the rain froze around them.

After work today, a half-hour after sunset, it was very mild, ten degrees C (= 50 F), but there was still heavy and very slippery ice everywhere, and the ponds were solidly frozen over. (That made for nice ice fog but you cannot see that well in this picture.) I hand-held the X100 for this. It doesn't have any stabilisation software but at 1/15th sec it wasn't too bad.

We were out for a walk one night during Christmas. Our neighbour Harvey's house had lots of festive lights out front. This is a crop of about 60% of the frame from the Fujifilm X100, with the ISO shot way up to 4000, using the lens wide open, handheld at 1/8 second. Switched to b&w, methinks that it's not bad.

It's not February yet -- it's a full week before that -- so it's not a record in our house. But today we finally got the Christmas tree undressed and cut up to take outside. The cat paid attention when I was sweeping the needles, but otherwise slept through it. All the ornaments are laid out on cushioned chairs. We have yet to face the boxing of them.

I met Bob in the early or mid-1970s when we studied linguistics together. We've been working colleagues ever since. I've no idea what he was dropping by my office for in August 2001, when I took this picture, but I see a computer disk in his hand. This was on very expired b&w film (dated in the 1960s) in a 126 cartridge, shot in the Kodak Instamatic Reflex. I saw this batch of negatives a couple of days ago and scanned them.

I was using my first Minolta Hi-Matic rangefinder in July 2001 (loaded with Tri-X) when I took this picture, here faked a bit by being joined with a second picture to get more sky. Thus the elongated aspect. I *think* it was the Hi-Matic F but my memory doesn't serve me well in this -- I went on to buy a half dozen different Hi-Matics since I loved them all so much. I probably developed this film in T-Max liquid developer but it might have been Ilfosol.