Justfolk's photos

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.

If there is a single trait that both my older brother and I inherited from our father, it is the propensity to stop while out walking to talk to perfect strangers. He and I were walking this day and he introduced me to two people he had, in turn, introduced himself to a few days before. Helen and Mike are in their 80s and walk for a couple of hours every day that they can. She can run a half mile. They have lived in this house for six decades.

I was trying to set the camera up to take this picture with its self-timer when a kind employee of the company inside the door came out and took the picture for us. Fujifilm X1000, but cropt, bordered, and tidied in PSPX5. These are the five oldest siblings in my family; our average age is 64. The three youngest were not there; and that would have brought the average down to 61.

In my enthusiasm for turning colour pictures into b&w ones I have done it with one of the pictures I took at my in-laws' house at midnight New Year's Eve. The whole neighbourhood was filled with private fireworks and I could turn in almost any direction to get shots like this. This was eight seconds of the camera jammed up against the corner of their house.

Yesterday, the last day of December, I finally got a path shovelled to the basement door and the furnace oil tank (on the right), and to my compost pile or piles actually (on the left). A cat had visited overnight and left her tracks, as she searched for birds or maybe rodents. I hadn't made a way through this through all of December and snow kept accumulating. And when it accumulates it gets denser and heavier. This view is from underneath the deck, taken with the Fujifilm X100.

These are my brother and his daughter at a celebration a month ago of his birthday. This was taken in my Fujifilm X100. I didn't like the colour rendition here (no flash in an overhead-lit restaurant), so I put the picture through Paint Shop Pro X5's b&w filter. Using a blue filter, I liked his face, but I didn't like what I got of hers. And vice-versa. So I did a red-filtered b&w version of her face and combined it with the blue-filtered version of his. I also did some local contrast adjustments and the frame in PSP.

Six sibs, including me behind the camera. We were in the Court House for some business related to the continuing estate of our mother who died seven years ago. There are eight of us in total; two live elsewhere. When I saw us all, the six of us, going down the stairs at the Court House, I wished I'd brought a better camera than the Minox 35GT. But I knew it would make a good exposure, despite being a long one what with 100-speed film (Fujicolor, expired in 2011) and the f/2.8 lens. I don't remember exactly how long the exposure was, probably something over a half second, and the camera could not be jammed very solidly against the roundish railing I held it against. There's a lot of camera shake in a half second. A better scan than the quarter-meg one I got at a WalMart I don't usually go to might bring a better picture. It was a pretty unsharp negative, pretty rough scanning, and pretty high contrast, so I converted it to b&w.

Looking out the window, the roadsseemed to be getting greasy (as only the cabbies used to say, but now everyone seems to). This was on Fujicolor 100 film, shot in the Minox 35GT, through a dirty window, and scanned at very low resolution by a WalMart lab I don't usually go to. Someone told me that cameras were banned in court but I tried to take as many pictures through the windows as I could.

The brother who lives in Brazil used his telephone to make a Christmas-party "Facetime" call to his siblings & in-laws back home. Another oranged-out X100 shot, blue-filtered into a semblance of b&w.

These two, C and M, and I, have been friends since September 1967. They too were at the party last night. Again, the colour in the original pictures I took in the Fujifilm X100 were very orange. In this case, the shutter speed was so slow, an eighth of a second, that there was considerably softening of the image, too. Dropping it through a blue filter made it at least seem a little sharper.

K, who was also at the Christmas party last night, has been a friend for over 45 years. We met when we found ourselves in the same class at the beginning of new school year in 1967. Again, the colour in this ISO800 picture (in the Fujifilm X100) was awry, orange awry, so I did a blue filter job to make it a b&w.

J and I have known each other since she started going out with my friend P in 1974. That's very nearly forty years. They're still together and we're all still good friends. This picture was taken with my Fujifilm X100 set at ISO800 with no flash, producing a very orangey picture. So I ran it through a blue filter in Paint Shop Pro to produce this version of a black-and-white picture.

The three of us -- D, P, and I -- have been friends since we were five years old (or four in my case, since I'm the youngest). Here, last night, we were among about a dozen old friends together for a Christmastime party. I don't remember who was talking when I took this picture, but neither D nor P seems impressed. I was using the Fujifilm X100 at its ISO800 setting, with no attention at all to white balance. The picture's colour was really "warm" (that is, badly orange) so I dropped it through a Paint Shop Pro blue filter to get this b&w version. I really should be shooting "raw" to make colour correction easier but, after more than a year with it, I'm still getting used to this, my best digital camera.

I took this picture about four weeks ago with my Olympus Pen D3 and the Kodak Supra 800 film that expired in December 2001. These young women were all around five or eight years old when the film was manufactured in the mid or late 1990s. The undergraduate majors in my university department are given this room to hang out in. It's a tiny room but it has great light. :)

This was just before 7:30 am this morning. Sunrise was about twenty minutes later.