Justfolk's photos

I've known D for forty years, forty years almost exactly. We met taking archaeology courses in the winter semester of 1974 and have remained good friends ever since. I took this picture last weekend at a dinner in honour of his wife's birthday. She's not normally a cook but she has some recipes from her time living in Spain before she met him. So she served us a delicious paella. I took a half-dozen pictures at the table with some slightly (three years) out-of-date Fujicolor 100 film in the Rollei Prego. The Prego's flash is a little overbearing and I didn't like the pictures until I tried a black mask behind the colour. That brought down the high tones a bit, and gave a bit more depth overall.

This morning I picked up my Konica Eye2 and decided to put a roll through it. So I looked back at pictures from previous rolls with this camera. There were quite a few pictures I'd done nothing with, like this one from last summer. Three businesses in a row -- a construction company, a metalwork company, and the West End, a pub. The film was Kodak ColorPlus 200 and I scanned it myself -- thus the film border (not a digitally added border!) around it including the little cut in the film plane edge on the left.

I think this sort of behaviour by musicians only happens at tourist places. I am not sure of that fact and your experience may be different. This was a very pleasant tourist restaurant in Cuba a couple of years ago. I didn't have, or didn't want to use my flash, and the camera calculated the shutter speed at 1.6 seconds. That's rather too long for my handholding. Nonetheless, I liked the weird trails of light in the picture and I decided to weird it up a little more.

This is not my neighbourhood graveyard. But I do like it and it has some of my relatives, and relatives of friends, adding to the ecosystem. So I visit it from time to time. And I visited it a few days ago. It was a mild day in late January, almost as green on the ground as in June. I deliberately pointed the camera towards the sun partly because I wanted to know what it would do. But partly it was to catch the bright haze. I liked this gravestone on the right, much like that of the three sisters which I posted a picture of yesterday and which is about ten metres to the right of this. Again, this is (fresh) Kodak ColorPlus 200 film in the Rollei Giro.

Glenn dropped by for a chat about some mutually interesting stuff. I took advantage of his visit to take a picture with my Rollei Giro. My office looks positively spacious with a 28mm lens. This was on modern (unexpired) Kodak ColorPlus 200 film. The Rollei Giro decides for the user whether it will use the flash or not and, as you can see, here it decided it was needed. But it does a good job of calculating what light is needed, and it has an excellent lens, so it's a reliable p&s camera. And wide. (I think it's actually a bit wider than 28mm.) I could not resist doing some burning and noising and the like.

I should have written down what the inscription said. But I know it was devoted to the memory of three sisters, Catherine, Ellen and Mary; their last name I don't remember and cannot read. It is one of the most strangely made headstones I've seen in this city of plainly carved stones. It reminds me of the railings in some parks in Paris, like Des Buttes Chaumont, made of cast cement to look like logs, and here to look like cobblestones too. This was two days ago when the weather had not yet twisted back into real winter as we have today. It was ten degrees at about noon when I took this. It was down around minus ten seven hours later, and we started getting snow soon after that. (For F-lovers, ten above = 50 degrees; ten below = 14 degrees.) Kodak Colorplus 200 film in the Rollei Giro, a 28mm-wide p&s with an excellent lens. The Giro does not vignette to the extent seen here. In cropping some top and bottom, and building a border, I did some edge-burning, too.

This was a perfectly good roll of Fuji 100 in my perfectly good Rollei Giro, but my dear wife and supper companion decided to shoot a few quick shots to deter me from taking too many myself. Along with two shots under the table, she took this and another one above the table. This is my favourite.

When my maiden aunt (what a strange term!) died in 2001 at nearly ninety years of age, she left behind a small collection of negatives with pictures that none of us had ever seen. I scanned them and circulated them to my family in hopes we could figure out who the people were. The best we could do here, with this one, was guess that the woman in the lower right of this picture was our aunt's mother and that the woman standing behind her was in turn her mother -- my great-grandmother jauntily leaning against the post. My grandmother was born in 1884, and the woman in the bottom right looks to be a teenager here so, if it's her, the picture would be taken about 1900. But her mother was born in the 1850s and that jolly older woman looks older than fifty. But then, as they say, fifty is a lot younger today than it used to be. And perhaps it's her grandmother. I like to imagine that the others are my grandmother's brothers and sisters, but my second-cousins tell me that no one here looks like their grandmother. In any case, it seems the two women on the right were visiting the rest of them. On the right, we see outdoor, somewhat dressy clothes, and on the left we see round-about-the-house clothes. I don't know if kitchen staff wore hairnets a hundred years ago, but the woman on the top left does seem to have one on. But I think that may be just an illusion since, if anything like that were worn, a bandana of some sort would have been far more likely. And I would think she'd remove it for the photo, even such a casual one as this. The picture *might* be of my aunt herself. That woman in the lower right could be her, which would place this picture at about 1925 - 1930. She was born 1912 and the lower-right person is probably in her teens. I don't have the negative right at hand but I remember it being about 2x3 inches (maybe 5 x 7 cm) and it was cut as a single negative, probably for contact printing at the time. Hmmm. I should find it and put it in protective freezing since it's probably a nitrate base!

I don't use the Pentax PC35AF very often, though I really like the feel of it. I understand it was one of the first "autofocus" cameras and it feels much more substantial than many later AF cameras even though it is not much bigger than, say, an Olympus XA which it was a contemporary of. When I pick it up, I often forget that I must give the autofocus system time to do its job; that forgetfulness leads to really unfocussed pictures sometimes, as the shutter will fire when the focus may be at the farthest distance away from actual focus. Oh well, aiming into a field of snow is probably stretching the proto-AF algorithms beyond their abilities. This was heavily over-exposed, too; I am not sure whether I can come up with an excuse for the camera on that count. I scanned the negative and did a lot of post-processing including adding a heavy dark border and then making that disappear again. In its place I put a lot of noise. This spot, by the way, is about fifty metres from my back door. But since I'm not about to run through neighbours' yards, it is seven or eight minutes' walk.

It's Jan 18th which some people -- jocularly? -- call Old Old Christmas Day. (Old Christmas Day = Jan 6th; Old Old Christmas Day = Jan 18th.) It's sort of late to have the Christmas tree still up. In fact, it's considered bad luck by some people. But, what with our Christmas being a little interrupted this year, we still have ours standing in the corner of the front room. It's not bad luck for us; we're just getting the most of it. This picture was taken a couple of evenings ago with an Olympus XA, one of the XA's I own that lack a proper flash sync speed. Thus every flashed shot is exposed for the ambient light plus the flash whichis really calculated for about six-ten feet. Anything really close, like Minnie here, is washed out. It took a bit of burning to get a semblance of her actual colour. Fujicolor 100 film which I wish I'd bought more of -- it reminds me of Reala. But I think I've used the last roll of my stash.

This was in our backyard two weeks ago when we were in the middle of a major cold spurt, with lots of snow. Today there's about three feet of snow less than there was that day on the ground. That's a fairly substantial holly under the apple; you can see all the holly today. And the apple is gone. At mid-winter, like now, birds often peck at the remaining, softened apples. I have heard stories -- probably best treated as apochryphal -- that on warm days old fruit like this contains alcohol and the birds get visibly drunk. ("Why, yesh, I think I will have another.") I've never seen that myself. Fujicolor 100 in the Olympus XA, with the flash firing though in such bright daylight conditions that the absence of a controlled flash sync speed made no difference. Cropt and otherwise amended in PSP X5. The amendments included adding to the natural vignetting of the XA's lens or its limping shutter.

I had just introduced L and S who will be working together over the next while. Then I took a picture with my Olympus XA. They were not arguing; they were actually very friendly to one another. I have owned two or three XAs over the years and every one of them has had the same problem, what in "better" cameras is called Slow Sync Flash. When my XAs are set at Flash, they use the same shutter speed they would for a non-flash picture. That makes for odd effects, as in this picture. The lens was open for about a second and, although I tried to hold steady, a second is a long time for a hand-held camera. This was from a roll of Fujicolor 100 film, hardly expired at all.

This was looking west from the same courtroom I took the previous picture about a month ago. This was on Fujicolor 100 film (a couple of years expired -- nothing serious) in the Minox 35GT. Again, a very low-tech, small-file scan.

A few weeks ago I posted a picture from this roll of Fujicolor 100, shot in the Minox 35GT, and taken from a window of Courtroom Number Seven (I think it was Seven but I'm not sure). The earlier picture was looking down at the sidewalk. This was the somewhat higher view, out over Baird's Cove to the Harbour where a couple of ships were tied up. The scan was a bit of a disappointment in terms of file size. It came from a WalMart store I don't usually go to and whose employees are not as adept at producing high-quality scans as my regular shop. But the overall tone of the picture is quite nice. Perhaps I'll get around one day this winter to scanning the negatives myself. The Minox 35GT does not vignette nearly as much as is apparent here. I liked the natural vignetting and amplified it a bit when I was adding the frame lines around the picture.

My mother-in-law died last week at age 91. There was a lot of embracing and a lot of warmth at the funeral; this was one of the coldest days of the winter but funerals are warm events. This was only a minute or two after the graveside ceremony ended, but already people were dispersing; most of the people at the graveside were headed to their cars to get to the house she had lived in for fifty years -- a reception went on there for eight or nine hours afterwards. It sounds like an oxymoron, but "funeral parties" are good parties. This one was no exception; a lot of stories got told, and a lot of glasses got raised. I underexposed this shot pretty substantially. I took advantage of the need for more light in the picture to do some noising and burning, too. Excuse the haloing around the trees.

We've had a *few* near-freezing days since early December, but generally the temperature has been well below freezing. So little snow has melted in over a month. When the big municipal snow blowers go through, they often leave lovely stratified sections of snow banks.

Walking back from the grocery store, I saw this chrome set for sale.

My brother was showing me his new apartment and I stepped out onto his little balcony where a former occupant had put chicken wire against the pigeons' attempts to come aboard. I shot nearly directly into the sun and got a nearly completely washed-out shot that I blue-filter-converted into b&w -- rather pleasant, I think. In a continuing holiday from film, this was taken with the Fujifilm X100. I'll be back to film soon enough.