Justfolk's photos

I have a history going back about ten years of making cartoony pictures of Din. This was last night when he introduced me to his girlfriend Sab. I took several pictures in succession and they broke up on this one; it was the best.

When I showed a picture of my wife from thirty years ago to one of her nieces, the niece said she looked just like her own cousin, another niece, today. So I dug out this picture of that other cousin, her brothers and another cousin, taken in 1985. This was taken on that long lamented film Kodak Panatomic-X with my Minolta X-370. Pan-X was one of the very best films ever made for 35mm. And all of these kids are in their thirties now. The one on the right has his own son. There was dust on the negative and, if you look closely, you'll see where I cloned out some big gobs of it. Ah well, it's a decent picture anyway.

I can't leave a good thing alone. This was cropt, burned, noised, and framed.

With temperatures as high as sixteen degrees (C) this past week, we've been spared the snow that much of North America has had for a couple of weeks. But this morning we woke up to about eight inches (20 cm) of snow everywhere. Luckily for them, we had seed in the bird feeders and the juncos were taking advantage. This was the scene out the window, over my shoulder, as I ate breakfast just after sunrise. There was a flicker there when I first looked but there was no suet so he went in search of better treats elsewhere. This is a composite picture so, although it represents what *I* saw from my breakfast window, at no time did my camera get all these birds together. :) I did the "composing" in PSPX6 with a little finish in Picasa.

This was in a parkinglot a half hour after the last picture.

Today's was the last moon of the month, which is to say that tomorrow's moon will be a "new moon" -- no moon at all. This picture was taken at 4:45 when the last sliver of bright moon was "holding" the mass of the new moon (the "no moon" or dark moon) in its arms. I was walking back across campus from the successful PhD defence of a student on whose supervisory committee I sat.

I particularly like my Olympus E-P2 for night shots because it has a very effective stabilisation system. Who'd a-thunk it back in the 1960s?? This is another night shot of my part of Town, taken on a supper-hour walk yesterday. That bit near the right edge that looks like weird smoke is a piece of grass about two feet from the camera.

They've been working on the water and sewer lines in our neighbourhood for a couple of years now. They may get this paved before the snow comes but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

Somewhere in there is my neighbourhood. This was a one-second exposure with the camera held sturdily on the wooden post holding a highway railing in place. I stripped away a lot of the red channel, but I couldn't take it all out because a lot of the detail is just red.

We were out walking just after dark the other day and crossed what people used to call the Long Bridge, from where I took this snap. The older Mill Bridge was much lower and shorter, and was just beyond this turn in the river. It -- the Mill Bridge -- is long gone now. I was carrying my Olympus E-P2 (with its pancake 17mm lens) and putting it on every surface I could find for one-second-long exposures; here it was on a surface that jutted out from the bridge railing. In three or four decades of using film, I never made night shots that I was happy with; digital cameras at least offer that possibility to me. I see from the EXIF data I haven't changed my camera's time back to standard time yet. One more clock to reset.

We were out for a walk today, the Remembrance Day holiday and it was beautifully sunny; we ran into my wife's cousin's daughter and her husband. We usually only see each other at funerals so it was good to see them under other circumstances. I took a single picture of them and I accidentally had the camera set more than two stops below what I needed, so their faces were pretty dark. I took advantage of working on the picture to do the hokey things that I am addicted to -- like vignetted edges and a noisey border.

L submitted her master's thesis for examination a few days ago and she dropped by to show it off before dropping it off down the hall.

For seven years, my wife and I and some friends have comprised a team of eight, the Sallee Rovers, against a dozen and a half other teams in an annual fund-raising Trivia Night for the local Victorian Order of Nurses. At the end of the night most years, we have been in the middle of the pack. For the first time, last night *our* team came first. Here the top teams and the "booby prize" winning team are being announced. It was all a lot of fun. But I'm right proud of us. [ . . . He says, polishing fingernails on shirt-front.] I have probably over-processed the screen somewhat in order to bring it up for better legibility. For post-pro geeks: I selected the screen, deepened the darks and mid-tones fairly substantially and increased local contrast a little. I didn't like the outline of the screen (it was too sharp and jagged due to the selection) so I drew the "softening brush" over the screen's perimeter to reduce that effect. Then I did an unsharp-mask procedure on the entire picture and I built the border. Finally, I decided the odd coloration of the mix of light was not as pleasant as a filtered b&w conversion which this is the result of. All of that was done in PSP X5, except the b&w conversion which was done in Picasa along with generating the less-than-one-meg .jpg for posting.

Another shot from Gerry's funeral. This was a few minutes after the short religious ritual at the graveside.

Two days ago one of my wife's uncles, Gerry, was buried. This was the scene at the graveside. A lovely day for a funeral, with bright cloud and warm air. It is a fairly poor shot; Gerry's widow and her eight sisters were present but only one can be seen clearly (though I can identify three more in the cluster behind the first pall-bearer). It is a poor shot, but at funerals few people take pictures, so it is almost the only one. I cropt it and did the voguish vignetting.

Yesterday, my friend Alice turned 66, and he joked if he stood on his head he'd be 99. I told him he is now two parts of The Beast. He liked that a lot and (according to his wife) repeated it to everyone he talked to afterwards. Life brand (=Fuji) 800 film that expired in March 2007, shot in my Olympus Pen D3. Guessed exposure (since my Pen's meter wasn't working), at f/1.7 and 1/15 sec.

Alan had just finished raking a lawnful of leaves and I asked to photograph his beard. Many's the slip 'twixt cup and lip, and the race is not always to the swift . . . and maybe you can come up with a few more proverbial brush-offs of failure. In any case, the camera (Olympus Pen D3) didn't do quite what I expected it to do. A light leak extraordinaire got onto my film and this is what I was left with after some selective-colour filtration to get a b&w image from the original C41 colour film. The light leak is odd and I haven't ruled out lab error rather than camera failure. The leak was a bright red light flashed from one edge of the film. I will see with the next roll whether I get it again. These three frames are lined up on the negative as they show here, but they were scanned at the lab in pairs and I ended up moving them somewhat, cutting corners more sharply than on the negative. The film was one of several rolls of 2007-expired Life-brand (= Fuji) 800 film that a friend gave me a few weeks ago.

October 18th this year was World Toy Camera Day and I used my last roll of well-and-truly-expired Kodak Supra 800 in my Lomography Fisheye Camera as celebration. I finally got the film developed today, ten days later, and see 39 shots on it. There were two or three other decent ones, but these are the two I like best. The film expired somewhere around 2001. This is a selfie with hydrangeas -- last year's blooms with this.