One of the salvaged photographs: the doors on our backyard shed
I got the last roll of film back that I shot with my old Kodak foldout, and unfortunately it appears that my bellows weren’t nearly as mended as I thought they were. Out of the 8 frame roll, I got one shot that was relatively decent, and another that was, shall we say…barely recoverable.
Openmoko's Neo Freerunner
On July 4, 2008, Openmoko released the Neo Freerunner, their second generation free/open-source cell phone. On July 5, I ordered one. In the two weeks between placing the order and getting the phone, I went looking for reviews, and much to my surprise, couldn’t find any. Even Gizmodo and the like, as of this writing, seem to lack an actual review of the phone itself: all I see is software reviews, apparently based on development snapshots, rather than the software stack that actually ships with the phone. For lack of any reviews on the regular sites, I’ve decided to go ahead and write my own.
I recently got myself a new Neo Freerunner, the second generation cell phone from Openmoko. The phone itself is awesome, and I’m working on a post about it at the moment, but that’s going to take a while, as it’s going to be big (there seems to be a lack of actual reviews of the phone on the Internet, so I figure I’ll just write one myself). In the meantime, since such a blog post demands a good photograph, I decided to make one, and since the next post could be a little while coming, I’ve decided to make one about the photograph itself. If you’re into that kind of thing, take a look at the rest of the post. For the less photo-nerdy among us, be warned: this could get a little boring.
A lake near the entrance to Robinson Preserve
They opened a new nature preserve in Bradenton today, so I got myself up out of bed nice and early (and by early, I mean 8:00 AM. This is Summer time, folks) and made my way over to the grand opening, and met up with a friend, Farrah. It was quite the speech-giving occasion, with all the county commissioners there to give their own special insights about the preserve, which is pretty big and mightily awesome, but probably not worth quite as much lip-service as they gave it.
So I got my first roll of film back from my old Kodak Six-20 camera, and all the negatives are completely and utterly washed out. I first suspected that my…less than careful…respooling of the first roll may have been to blame, but then a flashlight and a dark room revealed the true culprit: leaky bellows. I went ahead and stuck an SB-25 in the back of it and made the shot you see below, to illustrate the problem. All those little pinpricks of light you see at the top of the bellows, those are holes where light can get out and, of course, in, ruining my film. (more…)
Swaying grain
Today was basically the last day. We’ll be here most of tomorrow, but I’ll be spending most of it sleeping to combat jet lag, which makes this the last blog post, after pretty much the last day. Another not-doing-much day, mostly. Got up, ate breakfast, went bicycling. Ate lunch, rested some, went running and subsequently shadow boxing. Rested a little while longer, went back to Sammy J. Peppers for dinner with our hosts. I ate the same thing as last time, but this time I found it a little more bearable. Admittedly, my eyes still watered and my nose still ran like crazy, but at least there was no shock about it this time. After that, we went out to the dyke, and I made some landscapes. The landscapes will need some more post processing when I get home (ran into a little too much dynamic range out there), so for now all I have is a sort of semi-abstract of some swaying grain. And that’s it. Next time I post, I’ll be in America again.