Justfolk's photos

My nephew Din was his brother's best man yesterday. A few nights ago, he was preparing his speech which involved this picture of him twenty years ago.

The sun was gone from where I was but, in the more open, West-facing distances, it was still lighting things up. The crows were acting like it was roosting time again. No soccer players, just a couple of walkers in the vicinity. This was in my frame-separation-challenged Minoltina-S. I was using a roll from my dwindling stash of expired-ca-2000 Kodak Supra 800, shooting at about ISO200. I was just guessing at exposures and these two were something like f/8 at 1/60. I try to be aware of when the sprockets seem to be slipping and I shoot a blank shot, but here I didn't notice. So I got two shots overlapped in a pretty fortuitous way. Scanned on the Epson V700 using the Lomo Digitaliza frame so I could get right out to the sprockets.

Not much to say about this one. The Minox 35GT did what it could given the aperture setting I gave it. Fujicolor 100 film of unknown vintage.

This is the arse end of the provincial government building. The diaper-like, Christo-like white cover has been there this past year as they renovate its windows and external walls. Fujicolor 100 film in the Minox 35GT, scanned on the Epson V700 flatbed. I don't know how old the film is -- from the way it does colours, I suspect it's more than just a year or two old.

This was two weeks ago, on the Labour day weekend. Kodak Colorplus 200 in the Olympus Pen D3.

I think this is the nearest pub to my house these days. It's about twenty minutes' walk, all up a very steep hill. Thus I never drink there. The overall look of this picture is due to my hasty scanning. The film was good: Kodak Colorplus 200, not yet out-of-date. The camera was the Olympus Pen D3.

I understand the word "selfie" is now made honest and look-uppable by its inclusion in the OED. That's good. It's been used in these parts (I mean Flickrland) for a while. I've never liked the word, but I suppose I can use it in quotation marks. When I looked at this frame, it was completely black on the negative. The scan was completely white, or nearly so. But under the apprehension that many lost images have *some*thing there, I adjusted the tones to see what might be in this one. And I found me. I must have been checking whether the shutter was working. It was *way* overexposed, so maybe the camera got set at B. I just don't know but it's unambiguously me. That looks like a fluorescent light above me. Maybe. Kodak ColourPlus 200 in Konica Eye2.

Many birches around here have died in the past two or three years due to a leaf roller of some sort. I think it's really too bad because they are really good-looking trees. Or so methinks. Kodak ColorPlus 200 in Konica Eye2. Like some Agfa cameras I've owned, this Konica seems to have a signature notch about halfway along the left edge of the image. You can see it more clearly in the right picture than the left. . 1388

We were investigating the various plants in D's backyard before he served us supper. I might have spent some time cloning out the hairs. .. Kodak ColorPlus 200 film in Konica Eye2.

The city government planned to have this entire street dug up, its water & sewer systems replaced, and everything filled in and repaved by the end of the construction season. They are just putting the temporary water pipes along the street's gutter now, at the end of August. I suspect the snow ploughs will be worrying their way down this torn-up street come winter. Kodak ColorPlus 200 in Konica Eye2.

Kimberley Row is just around the corner from City Terrace. Both are mid-1890s rows of houses built quickly but solidly after almost the entire city burnt to the ground. Kimberley Row was dressed up very nicely about twenty years ago but has, at least with one house, fallen on bad times more recently. The whole neighbourhood has lately fallen victim to a "development" frenzy with a lot of older houses, and other buildings, being knocked down to make space for big, high, modern hotels. Ack. This was just after sunset, on Kodak ColorPlus 200 film in the Konica Eye2. I don't often turn my half-frame cameras for a horizontal shot, but sometimes I have to. . 1387

I went this week to the wake for Mrs C. For over twenty years, I lived across the street from her. We stayed friendly with her family after my wife and I moved down the street twelve years ago. But she spent the last ten years of her life in care because she had Alzheimer's Disease. That's an especially debilitating dementia when you are completely deaf, as she was and had been since birth. I never saw her in all that time. Deaf or no, Mrs C was no shrinking violet and, in the 1980s and '90s, she was the unofficial mayor of our neighbourhood, paying attention, passing on news, looking out for neighbours, introducing herself to new people, and so on. If you wanted to know what happened, you'd ask Mrs C. She did not vocalise with fluency as some deaf people do, though as a child she'd gone to a school that taught her speech. They also taught her ASL, and she picked up the local dialect of that when she moved to Newfoundland in the early 1950s. Her husband was also deaf, though he had become deaf as a small child, and he still had some residual fluency as a speaker. I never heard him speak much, and certainly not as much as his wife, but his children did, and so did other close relatives. Mrs C of course knew the North American hand-spelling system. I never learned that; my mind was already filled with the two-handed system that my father had taught me as a child. When I met Mrs C she was surprised that I knew the two-handed system (which is common in Britain and had been more common earlier in the 20th century in Newfoundland) and she enjoyed seeing me, a hearing person, spell things that old-fashioned way. She also lip-read with ease, making her, in my mind, a kind of five-language polyglot: ASL, Nfld SL, American spelling, UK spelling, and English lip-reading. And of course she could read and write. She could make herself understood to anyone who wanted to understand her, and she readily understood anyone who wanted her to understand. She was an amazing woman of whom -- in the two decades that I saw her almost every day -- I only took two or three pictures. Now that she's dead, I wish I had more. This was the last picture I took of her. It was summer 2001 just before we moved to a nearby neighbourhood. I think I was leaving for work and we had a short conversation across the street. I grabbed this shot in my Canonet, on Kodak Supra 100 film. Not exactly a sharp picture or anything, but a nice one that shows her laughing at me in mid-sign. When some people die -- after long illnesses and after successful lives -- their death is not so much filled with grief, as celebration and relief. That's what the feeling was at her wake: a celebration of the person she was, and relief that her long illness was over.

The three adult goats saw a dog and got the kid in between them. Then they didn't take their eyes off the dog until he was safely put back in a car ten minutes later. Kodak Supra 800 shot at 200 in Konica Eye2.

I think this bus is used for storage in poor weather of all the stuff that sits on flea market tables nearby. Kodak Supra 800 shot at 200 in Konica Eye2.

The first shot when I loaded my Konica Eye2 with Kodak Supra 800. It was just a wind-on-the-film shot, thus not focussed. But it was not-bad exposure. I keep my shortwave radio close at my left hand. I can't read what station I was tuned to but I listen a lot to the ERT shortwave service these days. They've been shut down by the Greek govt but the workers, unpaid, continue to produce good programming. I see my red scissors for cutting film, and my white patch cord for feeding sound into the computer speakers. And the distinctive cannister & cover that the Supra film came in. The film expired at least ten years ago since the film hasn't been made in about twelve years.

Whenever I use the native portrait aspect in half-frame for landscapes, I almost always wish I'd taken another picture each on the right and left sides. So it is here. But I was so taken with the ducks hanging around on the rushy part of the weir that I took a half dozen pictures of them from several angles. But nothing to contextualise the shot. Oh well. It's a favourite view of mine, looking up to that groups of electric poles, the chimney stack (of an abattoir, by the way), and the sailmakers's shop (with a Newfoundland tricolor flag painted on the wall). This was Kodak Supra 800 film in the Konica Eye2. The Eye2 is a lovely half-frame camera. The Supra is quite well behaved when overexposed a couple of stops, as I did here. I figured the ducks just liked the feel of the water rushing over their toes.

This is in Duntara, Bonavista Bay. Decade-expired Kodak Supra 800 film, shot at 200 in Konica Eye2. Some sky and foreground cropt out.

The official name of this was Moorland, named apparently for the family Moore that owned it. Everyone knew it (and still do know the small restaurant that remains) as Moorlands. It hasn't been a nightclub and dancehall in at least a couple of decades but did a thriving business in the early 1970s. Kodak Supra 800 shot at 200 in Konica Eye2.