Justfolk's photos

We were on Water Street before 7:30 this morning, Christmas Eve, waiting for this bakery to open, for to get some of their fresh French bread. Their tables were already out on the street. Happy Christmastime (or Short-Day, Long-Day, End-of-Year, Festivus, or whatever the time is to you) to all!

I was just going back through some older pictures and saw this one from seven or eight months ago. It was taken in the Instamatic 500 camera on 25-year-old Kodacolor VR-G film. I added the frame but did no colour/contrast adjustment beyond the original straightforward scan.

Some Fuji 200 film with a fully-open aperture and a slow shutter speed, since it was late on an early December afternoon and the light was dropping off quickly. And a scratch across the negative. Olympus OM1.

I took this almost two weeks ago, at the beginning of December. Fuji 200 film in Olympus OM1. Cropt and worked over in Paint Shop Pro.

This is what was known as Mill Bridge. The bridge doesn't exist anymore but the dead end is called Mill Lane. About ten years ago the original mill stone was dug up right here. The poured concrete building was an aerated waters bottling factory about a hundred years ago. That was after the mill closed. It was a television station in the early 1960s. And it was French bakery until a couple of years ago. Old Kodak Supra 800, expired in 2001, shot at 200 in the Olympus Pen D3 half-frame camera.

This, too was taken in the Olympus Pen D3 on Kodak Supra 800. It doesn't look as grainy as the last picture, probably because I gave it an extra stop or two even beyond ISO200. I guess at exposures and count stops down from sunny. In bright cloud, I often overestimate how many stops down I need to come. But here the overestimate was probably correct; maybe I should be shooting this film at ISO50. This was a few days ago, after an overnight fall of light snow. It's gone again now.

This very grainy picture was taken on Kodak Supra 800 film that expired in December 2001, twelve years ago. I expect that means it was manufactured fifteen years ago and, although I have kept it in a fridge the past two years, I doubt it was well stored during the first years. I normally shoot it at about ISO200 and I get pretty grainy images. Like this one. This was taken in my Olympus Pen D3 half-frame camera, in this case turned on its side.

My wife and I were walking yesterday counting the number of things still in bloom despite the date, 16 November. There weren't a lot: some hawkweed, a red clover, this lupin, and then some things in people's gardens. I think all three of the "wild" ones are actually feral, introduced species -- what self-respecting native plant would bloom this late in the year, wasting energy on a bee-less environment and when seeds could not possibly be set? This was taken in my "new" Olympus OM-1 with (fresh) Kodak ColorPlus 200 film. I was in a junk shop yesterday morning and saw this camera in a kit with the f/1.8 F.Zuiko lens and an f/4 Zuiko zoom. There was also a Minolta Freedom Zoom and a plastic 127 box camera. All of it for $60. I wasn't interested in anything except the OM-1 and its prime lens, but it all came together. It seemed to be working well enough so I paid the man the money. I'm pleased with it. The OM-1 is *very* heavily used, with as much brassing as I've ever seen on a camera. But mechanically it's in good shape. And the meter even does a good job.

This is where the hole on my street got to by last week. They are changing all the pipes and some of these are probably ninety years old. This is one of the most (not the most) degraded pictures on the roll of Supra 800 (expired Dec 2001) that I shot in my now-retired Agat-18. I exaggerated what vignetting there may have been on the negative, and I added the thin-line frame, but otherwise the shot is more or less as is.

I bought a box of forty rolls of expired Kodak Supra 800 a couple of years ago. Today I took the last three rolls out of the fridge and noticed the box said the film expired in December 2001. I've been generally shooting it at about ISO 200 and getting decently exposed pictures. The grain is another matter altogether, but I like the pointillist sort of detail that I often get. Here I also have the strange glass of the Agat-18 making its Holgaesque effect. The Agat-18 is really one of the wonders of photographic history. The exposure is adjustable by means of a devious Sunny-f/16 calculator. And it has a real-glass focussing lens -- it seems to go beyond its otherwise all-plastic construction. I've gotten interesting pictures every time I use it. But remember that that word "interesting" is part of the traditional curse, "May you live in interesting times." All that said, I like this squarish crop from a negative shot on Supra in my Agat this week. If I could paint, I'd probably paint like this. This is part of "Red Oktober" for using Soviet-era cameras.

And still another shot from that E6 roll I put through my faulty vfr camera (an Agfa maybe . . .) in 1977 at Postville. I'm a little mystified by my poor framing here. What I like best (now, nearly forty years after the fact) is the little girl running through the foreground. If I had framed the picture to include her, I would have gotten the building chopped at the peak as I got. If I had framed for the building's peak, I'd have lost her. What was I thinking? Mystery. This bulldozer and a pickup truck were the only vehicles besides snowmobiles and boats in Postville at the time. The bulldozer here is tied to the old schoolhouse which was being moved away from the site where we dug. It had pulled it off the site a few days earlier. The school was on logs and rolled fairly easily. When we were finished digging, the bulldozer came back and grubbed away a spot for a new schoolhouse's foundation.

I took this picture in May or June of 1977 when I worked at a prehistoric archaeological site at Postville on the North Coast of Labrador. The viewfinder of the 35mm camera I was using (with now unknown slide film) had shifted. I meant to get my friend Stephen's head in the picture, but sadly it's not there. It seems surprising to me now that I didn't notice the shifted viewfinder since the pictures are so very awry. I scanned this slide last night using Epson's more-or-less automatic settings on the V700 flatbed, and then I tightened up some of the "curves" in Paint Shop Pro. I made one last automatic colour adjustment in Picasa before posting it.

In the 1970s I had a series of short-term jobs as an assistant at archaeological digs. At Postville, on the coast of Labrador, I worked for four or five weeks in May and June 1977 with Stephen Loring, then associated with the Smithsonian Institution. Here Stephen was getting ready to fire off some shots on the overhead camera we'd rigged up with three or four "longers" -- skinny tree trunks tied together at the top. I can't remember the name of the camera I was using then, but it was a German non-slr. Its viewfinder was faulty and I had a lot of difficulty framing pictures without cutting off the tops and losing level. On that trip I didn't know the vfr was awry, and this was one of the best shots I took that trip. I also can't remember what kind of film it was other than being an E6 slide film. It was probably a Fuji film because the colour strikes me as bluey, like Fuji of that time). I scanned the set of 32 slides tonights because a friend showed me a group shot of the pit crew and a dozen or more children who hung around the site everyday. I will post later one of the shots I took of children.

I haven't picked any apples from this tree which is very near the building I work in. These apples are pretty small and green. I did pick apples from a couple of trees in my backyard and I have never seen a better year for apples. Both of my trees produced decently sweet apples, and on one of them the apples are huge, much bigger than what normally gets imported here. (There's no commercial apple agriculture here.) Tonight I made a small curry for supper and cut up a couple of apples to go in it. They were delicious. Fuji 200 film in the Olympus 35DC.

There were fourteen of us who got together for a pot-luck post-Thanksgiving supper at some friends' house. I brought (delicious if I can say so myself!) beets in white wine. Here we were circling around the kitchen table filling our plates. I had some fairly fresh (like only a few years old) Fuji 200 film in the Olympus 35DC and I was shooting it about one stop under (at about 400). Most of the shots were 1/15 second at f/1.7. Luckily, I ran out of film before the night went too long; I would not have been able to hold a fifteenth of a second very steadily later on. The camera does not vignette -- what vignetting you see here was digitally added by me by burning the edges.

Our street an hour ago as I left for work.

This was the view in front of our house just before sunset last night. Today, the hole has moved another six metres -- twenty feet -- or so along the road to the right edge. It involves digging wayyy down (like 6 metres or more) for new, bigger storm sewer pipes (about 1.3 m. in diameter). We slept last night with the sound of a waterfall right outside our open window -- an old spring-fed brook runs down the pipes under our street and the water comes out of the old pipe, only 2 m. below the surface, and falls brightly to the open mouth of the new pipe about 3 m. below it. Quite a pleasant sound (since no trucks or steam-shovels work at night). And the waterfall is a pleasant thing to see, too, since the water is crystal clear. The blue pipe at left is our current water supply. It's good water. The smaller hose, sprayed red, is the actual water connection into one of the houses to the left outside the picture. All the houses on the street now have that kind of temporary water connection. The reddish hose you see snaking at the extreme right is the supply of sewage from most of the houses so disrupted, by-passing the excavation. It's an education in municipal services.

Din & Dave are younger brothers of the groom; A is Din's girlfriend. This was about three hours into the party that followed the wedding and we'd all been dancing. The dancing was still going on when my wife and I left at 1:30 or so. This was with the Olympus E-P2. The colours were a bit awry as I don't usually bother with setting white balance. I did send a copy of the colour original to the boys' F'bk pages, but I like this desaturation better. Mind you, you can't see A's red hair here.