Justfolk's photos

I've been taking a lot of pictures with modern cameras lately but I still love shooting with old cameras and expired film. A young friend gave me three rolls of film formerly belonging to her grandfather. She and her father figured the film must have been from the 1980s and I think they are probably right. This was Life Brand (=Fuji) 100-speed film. I shot it in my half-frame Ricoh Caddy at about ISO 50. It probably could have used another stop or two of exposure. Here I was a passenger in a car driving through a place where new pylons were being strung with wire. We were travelling at only about 30 km/hr. I don't usually take pictures in horizontal mode in half-frame cameras, but I did with this one.

There is a part of the university campus I work on that is basically just late 19th-century farm meadow, though now reshaped and landscaped to allow for some well-treed walking paths around the km-long Long Pond. And there are lots of old lazy roses growing in various places, including these. In August they smell good.

I didn't know what this was when I took pictures of it this afternoon. But there's a page devoted to local insects; I asked there and was promptly told it is a red-shouldered pine borer. (If you're interested, it is about 2 cm long, 3+ with the antennae.) Terms like "hive-mind" are unfair to the knowledgeable and kind people who answer questions like mine. It's not everyone in the hive who contributes; it's the experts.

This was just before sunset, but I exposed for the nearly full moon, so the hilllside was dark.

This was after these starlings, and three or four dozen others, spent an hour feeding on the caterpillars and moths in the trees behind them. For some, it was a rest. For some, it was a time to go on about something. This is another rush-stitched pair of photographs.

A flock of a couple of dozen starlings and bluejays descended on our neighbourhood this morning. They came especially for the worms and moths in the trees. But they were also just flying around, showing off to one another. This jay was hide-n-seeking on a neighbour's roof.

As much as this may look like a single picture of two birds, it is two pictures of one bird, taken a couple of seconds apart. On the right, the mother had just arrived and was checking out her surroundings. She then hopped into the nest she and her partner built two weeks ago. Every morning for four mornings there was another egg but they stopt at four. Whew. Their nest has made watering the hanging pot (of bacopa and begonia) more difficult than it would otherwise be. But we're trying to help out the young family. Today about two dozen blue jays and starlings came into the garden, en masse and excited, gorging on the moths and worms in the trees. One of the jays seemed especially curious about the pot. We shooed him off. If you look closely, it is not hard to see the join between the two pictures. I didn't try to match the details.

Raining, I said.

I've long been a fan of half-frame cameras. I've had the Konica Eye2 (on the right) for five or six years and it is loaded right now with a roll of Fuji 1000 film that went out-of-date in 2007. I received the Ricoh Caddy (on the left) last week, buying it for under ten dollars (though of course I did pay shipping on top of that. . . ) because the seller said it was broken. Broken it was. But it turned out its only fault was that the shutter release button was missing. So I installed a short cable in its place and the camera seems to work fine. It has a roll of "Lifecolor S-SR 100" in it. The roll was given to me (with two other rolls) by a young friend whose grandfather had owned it. The family thought the film from the 1980s and I suspect that is so. I'm testing a new Fujifilm X100T right now. It is very similar to my old X100 which is the only digital camera I have ever liked as much as a good film camera. I don't anticipate any problems with the X100T.

Right now, it's five months from Christmas (or seven since it), but this old negative just poked its face at me. I scanned it a few weeks ago but I'm just now getting to it. It was a fairly dark day so, even though I had pretty fast film in the camera, when my friend took a picture of me with it, the shutter speed was slow. I'd guess this was about a tenth of a second, or longer. And the camera was skewed. Maybe it was an accidental shot! But I like it now, 30 years (and seven months) later. The snow was falling off the trees onto us. Our strategy was to get under a tree and bang its trunk with the back of the axe to knock as much snow out of the tree as possible. Then we'd start cutting. This one appears to have been chopped at a bit. Taken, I think, in my Minolta X370. Tri-X film.

Crackerberry is the main local name for Cornus canadensis. The fruit is bright and tasty but it has a large central stone. When I was a kid my older sisters loved crackerberries but I hated them because of the stone. I have always imagined someone called it crackerberry because it could crack a tooth.

We're at that time in our short summer when everything seems to be blooming.

When I went to the office on Monday, I found a few blooms fallen from my Adenium and stuck to a filing drawer I had left ajar.

A little bloom off someone's potted plant, squat by walkers in the doorway at a local nursery.

As I walked by this local school this morning, I realised first that the lettering was Stymie Bold and, second, that the paint was so faded the sign might be in danger of being changed. So I had to photograph it.

I'm not normally *very* squeamish about my tea. But I decided I wouldn't drink my mug of tea after this drowning in it. He just sort of dove in, toppled over, and apparently drowned . . . or got cooked by my hot tea. Now, what made him do it? Do flies have strokes? Heart attacks? Sudden suicidal thoughts?

I don't know what this fellow is, or will be after he grows up and transmogrifies, or whatever it is that caterpillars do to become moths or butterflies. But he was hanging around while we sat outside at lunchtime a day or two ago. I was interested, and the cat was interested in that I was interested.

Last summer this little bluebell plant took root in some stones at the bottom of my garden. It returned this year.