Graham

I've uploaded some stuff I took at Lake Como to my Europe set.

I've updated the gallery again; this time with Tower of London photos.

Here are some photos I took today in London.

So tonight I was speaking to vivianteddybear about telescopes. I was having a very difficult time understanding why one would not want to have a variety of telescopes available—some narrow field, some wide field, and so on—and was horrified that, according to her, the way astronomers deal with "I want to look at Supernova X" is they throw the rest of the telescope's image away.

It literally did not occur to me at all that, because of atmospheric disturbances, it is not actually possible to image stellar objects to a resolution of better than about 0.4 arcseconds, which you can achieve with about a 12" telescope mirror. The reason why large mirror narrow field telescopes do not exist is because there is no point; you will not actually be able to get any better resolution than a similarly equipped wide-field telescope.

To restate, the problem is that the optics and the image recording medium are higher fidelity than the universe, or at least the part of the universe we can see through our atmosphere, and so it's perfectly okay to throw away some of the resolution.

I have just emerged from the school darkroom, where I have been ensconced since approximately 9:00 pm printing things for a class project. To give you some idea of the magnitude of this, I had an unopened 100 sheet box of Ilford Warmtone as of twelve hours ago. It is now almost empty. I have printed negatives from twelve different film boxes and in every size and shape that I can form an image.

I'm beat. And I'm scheduled to go in again this evening to get some C41 printing done. Oy. At least it's fun.

Today I learned how to do RA-4 color printing. It's not all that hard, although figuring out color balance issues can be a real pain. After many many hours in the school darkroom making contact sheets and then prints, I am tired (so very tired) but feel successful.

Good news: four more rolls down.

Bad news: hike photographs are not among them, instead being in the roll that was still in my little film collector.

Good news: development time for FP4+ is almost the same as for Plus-X in Ilfosol-S. So I can batch it all tomorrow night and still be able to print hike photographs on Friday night.

So a while back, I bought a Beseler 45 enlarger, which seems to work delightfully. I start looking around on eBay for accessories for it (first and foremost, film holders so I can print something other than 35mm on it), and notice a dichoric (color) head for it, and buy it. It comes in yesterday, I put it on the enlarger, and it doesn't work. Confused, I fiddle to no effect, and finally email the seller who disclaims all responsibility and says it worked for him.

Unthrilled by this turn of events, I take the top off and start poking around, and sure enough one of the circuit boards inside is moving around in a rather alarming fashion. I take the head halfway apart, spent about ten minutes trying to reseat the damn board, and then put the thing back together and sure enough, it works. I'm missing one entire LED on the magenta, I think, but I can probably work around that, or perhaps it's another pin disconnected or something.

My theory is that the external screw to hold the loose board in place went walkies long before the head reached the seller, and the process of shipping jarred it out of place—to support this, there were a number of bent pins that I had to straighten out.

Anyway, I'm off to buy a timer cord for it so I can use the bastard.

I have just cleaned up after being in my darkroom since, oh, 9 pm last night. I only stopped because the sun came up. To my great pleasure the Beseler 45 works perfectly, and the jury-rigged filter holder I made out of matboard seems to do the job fine. I've got quite a few prints made, although I didn't get quite as many done as I had hoped.

( Things probably nobody but me is interested in )

I'll bring the prints I made to Amorette's birthday party, if anybody wants to see 'em.

Well, the darkroom blinds seem to work just fine, although they're a little fragile sometimes during takedown. I'll have to work around that somehow, but hopefully this will make it easier for me to black the place out, thus making it easier for me to print at all.

In other news, I think the battery on my old Palm finally stopped being able to recharge reliably. This is sad, but it is five years old (and has outlived at least three hard cases, which get beat to hell!). So I got a new Palm T|X. It seems nice enough except for the part where I can't get it to sync reliably. That appears to be a Mac side issue, though, that I've been able to work around so far.

I have now constructed the preliminary frames for the blackout cloth I just receieved, hopefully making it significantly easier for me to black out the apartment and thus print photographs. It went a little easier in some ways than I thought it would, and I learned several things about chisels along the way without managing to hurt myself. Among them: ( Woodworking lessons ) Hopefully I'll finish up tomorrow.

Six rolls developed, umpteen billion to go.

Puccini sleeping

Second, a weird thing my Pentax did to me, with a vaguely impressionistic result--this was straight out of the camera, I didn't do anything, I think it's an overly aggressive sharpening algorithm:
( Read more... )
Finally, as a public service announcement, if the trail repeatedly requires you to climb up and down loose shale at varying inclines from 45-80 degrees, it is not a trail. Photos forthcoming when I get it developed.