Two weeks ago I took a bag full of cameras to Boston to shoot some film for the Frugal Film Project. I got half way though things and had to leave to go home for something. It was the day after the 4th of July and I wanted to walk along the Charles River by the Esplanade.
Today I went back. I also stopped at Acorn Street and wandered around Arlington and Berkeley Streets near where I used to go to school. I shot a roll of Kentmere 100 in my Lubitel for the Frugal Film thing. I also had most of a roll in my Nikon N90. I loaded it at Sail Boston last week and only shot a few pics before it was too dark for film. Finally, I had a roll in my dad’s Pentax K1000 that I loaded in… April? May? I don’t remember. I finished all three rolls.
When I got home I took those three rolls and three other rolls that I finished over the last two weeks and sent them off to get developed.
While I was in town I also shot a bunch of stuff with my Digital camera. My Nikon Z5. Here come some highlights.
Acorn Street
Acorn Street from the other direction
I took a ton of pics of the Hancock building
I also took a ton of pics of the Pru
I also took a ton of pics of little foot bridges
I was using the 70–210mm zoom so I could take pics of things that were really far away
The Longfellow Bridge from a crazy distance
There is a chance that one of the film pics I took of this fountain has a rainbow in it but I think I missed it
The view from one of the foot bridges
Same bridge, other direction
Bridge
The Hatch Shell. The Boston Pops are not there anymore
I’m so happy that my silly little point and shoot camera still works on day two. I haven’t broken this one yet. Sigh of relief.
I’m also pleased that my car has an inspection sticker (the last one expired two months ago and I just got around to it today) and I was able to play some guitar today. I am not happy about how the lack of calluses on my left hand fingertips results in HUGE pain when I play, but I will rise above that little hiccup.
Gas station
Inspection
First clock pic with the new camera. My car windows are so dirty.
Extreme clock close up
Of my four electric guitars, my SG is probably the last one I go to but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.
It was just over 11 years ago. June of 2015. We had tickets to two Rush concerts. One at TD Garden in Boston and the other at Madison Square Garden in New York. I wanted to bring a pocket sized point and shoot camera into the two arenas so I bought a little Nikon Coolpix S7000 at Best Buy. 16 megapixels, a 20x zoom. Good stuff.
I took about a couple hundred pics at the two shows and was really happy with some of the results. For example:
New York
New York again
Boston. Alex auctioned off that guitar.
Over the years, I used the shit out of that camera. It went with me pretty much everywhere. I made a conscious decision somewhere along the way to use the S7000 instead of my iPhone and from that moment on I took a zillion pics with it. Then it broke. Shit. The lens cover wouldn’t open all the way, and it wouldn’t close at all. It just died. Boom. Dead. Sadness.
In September of 2025 I went to eBay and bought another one. A replacement. I was so happy to have my stupid little pocket camera back. Unfortunately it was a lemon. Every single photo it took was blurry. All of them. I would crank up the ISO in the hopes of it using the fastest shutter speeds possible but it didn’t matter. Everything was blurry. Sadness again.
Now here we are in July of 2026 and I have tickets to see Rush at Madison Square Garden (the show is less than two weeks away! SQUEEEE!!) and damn it, I want to bring a pocket sized camera into the show again. I want more of those pictures. This time there will be a keyboard player and a different drummer, but otherwise I want more of the same.
Fuck it. Back to eBay I go. I bought another one. If this third camera is also a lemon then I will give up and just use my iPhone like a normal person in 2026. The seller was in New Hampshire so the shipping was nice and fast. It was delivered today. The battery was charged. I threw the memory card that was in the second camera (that I am pretty sure started life in the first camera) and did a lap around the house snapping anything.
Is it a lemon?
Nope. It looks good!
Success (he said knowing a million things could still go wrong between now and the Rush show, but give me a break. I want to be happy for a change. Let me have this one, m’kay?)!
Random Baby Yoda
Random record player
Random lego
Here’s hoping this little sucker lasts me for about 10 years the way the first one did. Fingers crossed
The nazi fuck in the white house is going to give a speech tonight where he will say the 2020 presidential election was stolen even though it clearly was not stolen. There is zero credible evidence to say it was stolen, but the nazi pedophile rapist in the white house (which I legitimately just typo’d “shite house” and will probably forever call it that from now on) wants to pass the uber racist/sexist and utterly unnecessary save america act which will effectively remove voting rights from millions of americans including all married women who took their husbands name so he’s going to lie to our fucking faces again (which he does literally every time he opens his nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist mouth) and tell us how he has evidence that 2020 was stolen even though he will present no evidence because no evidence exists and his base will get down on their knees and swallow every word.
Okay… I need to calm down. I’ll change the subject.
On my personal laptop, I use Vivaldi as my web browser of choice. It has recently started being unable to connect to certain sites. Like, random sites that no browser should ever fail to connect to. Things like… wordl. Why? Why are you fucking with my word games, Vivaldi? I can connect using Chrome and Firefox. Why not Vivaldi? It’s not me, it’s clearly you. I don’t want to go back to Chrome, damn it. I’m not as pissed about this as I am the nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist in the shite house, but I am pretty pissed about it.
Ugh… what else. Music. Let’s talk about that. The 50 songs in 90 days Challenge. I have had three days in a row with little to no progress. Today I recorded some guitars. I feel a little better. Not much, but a little.
I had used my Les Paul Standard on everything I’d done since the project started on July 4th. Today I changed guitars. I was going to go to my Les Paul Custom but instead I went to my SG. I hereby declare that today is officially Gibson SG Standard day in my basement music nook. You heard it here first.
Before we get to the main story, how about a couple of photos?
First, our house was painted! Doesn’t it look all clean and freshly painted? The doors getting a coat of white paint was… a surprise.
Second, there are wild fires in Canada that are spewing smoke into the atmosphere that are blocking out the sun and turning the sky in Massachusetts into a weird, hazy, orange/yellow kinda thing. It is making our sky look like a Mad Max movie.
Okay, now that that is out of the way I can tell you the story of how dumb I was yesterday.
I have two pairs of glasses. One is a set of progressive lenses. The top half of each lens is for distance and the bottom half is for up close and reading. I wear those glasses most of the time, especially when driving.
The second pair of glasses splits the difference between the two halves of the progressive lenses. They are middle distance glasses. They are perfect for sitting at a computer and working. I wear those glasses while I am working.
When I work in the office I take both pairs of glasses with me. I wear the main specs while driving in, then swap them for the computer glasses, then at the end of the day I swap back to drive home. I put the progressives into a case and put the case in my desk.
Sometimes, rarely, I forget to swap back at the end of the day and I leave my desk with my computer glasses on. Once I made it as far as the car before I realized my error and felt pretty dumb going back to the fourth floor to return to my desk.
Can you see where this is going?
Yesterday I made it all the way home before I realized I had the wrong glasses on. I have no idea how I managed to drive with the middle distance glasses on. I think the traffic was really bad so I never had to look further than the car in front of me and that car was close enough that it wasn’t blurry. I guess?
I felt like a total moron. I drove for an hour and 10 minutes without noticing. What a schmuck! I didn’t want to risk it a second time so I had to dig out my old pair of progressives, which I replaced a couple of years ago. They got the job done, but still… what an idiot.
I did not make the same mistake when I left work today. I am wearing the correct glasses. Moron.
Today is Monday. At about 7:30am today the house painters arrived. We booked this months and months ago and in the intervening time we’ve had 100 things go wrong in the house and we just sort of lost track. They have been here for 11 hours. They are scraping the old paint off and prepping for the actual painting. Will that start tomorrow? Who knows.
In the meantime, here are a few more pics from our visit to Sail Boston on Saturday. Talk about your gorgeous day in the best city in the world, am I right? It was spectacular from start to finish. We walked about 400 miles in total. I took about 100 pics with the digital camera and one roll of 35mm film and a handful of shots on a second roll. Someday I will get them developed, but not today.
Here are some digital pics to hold us over until the film is developed, probably before the end of the century.
Two of my favorite people
Norway fans. They were sad. The lost 2-1 to England
I took a bunch of fireworks pics but they are all lame so I am only posting one.
There you have it. Our trip to Sail Boston. I am guessing we saw maybe 5% of the ships, but what we saw was worth it.
I have been super busy today working on new songs and running errands and I haven’t had a chance to post about yesterday.
My wife and step daughter and I paid a visit to a tiny fraction of Sail Boston. We didn’t see the tall ships parade, but we did see a bunch of them up close. We managed to stay for the fireworks too.
I took a lot of pictures and I hope to post a bunch of them eventually, but for now here are just a few to serve as a teaser for a post that might not ever happen. Aint I a stinker?
Today is day seven so I need to write up yesterday’s progress. Day six. Unfortunately the days are sort of running together. What the hell did I do yesterday?
When I got up yesterday morning I had a riff buzzing in my head. It was in an awkward sort of time. I think it was trying to be in 10/8. I picked up my iPhone and played it into GarageBand for iOS in 4/4 with an absurdly fast tempo. The program doesn’t give you the ability to work in wacky time signatures so that was the best I could do. There wasn’t much to it, but let’s call it song number eight.
About an hour or so later there was this:
I put rhythm guitars on the simple little thing I had come up with the night before, song number seven, and onto song number two. That’s all I had time for. I had a meeting at 9:00am and it was getting a little late. Not too late though, I finished my morning routine and logged in to work on time.
Later still, while sitting up in bed shortly before falling asleep for the night, I added some new things to the song I started when I woke up. I tried changing the time signature to 10/8 but that made the GarageBand drummer go super weird and I couldn’t follow what it was doing. I kept losing “the one”… if you’re a musician you know what that means. I switched it back to 4/4 with the tempo set to double time and then set the drummer function to play in half time. It all came out in the end.
When that was done and I was just about ready to fall asleep… I wrote a melody and lyrics for song number one. The first lyrics of the project. I’m hoping to get a couple more done tonight so that I can record some vocals early tomorrow morning. We’ll have to see about that though.
And that is what I accomplished on day six. I fear things are going to be light today and day seven’s update will be uneventful. I’ll let you know tomorrow.
I feel like I owe the universe a detailed post discussing all of the things I did today. Things like picking my step daughter up at the train station after she traveled home from Baltimore.
Instead, I will share a clue as to something that took up a little less than 1/24th of my calendar day:
I am typing this post on a MacBook Pro using a Windows keyboard which means the keyboard shortcut for copy and paste is different than I am used to, which means that I am going to screw things up left and right. Enjoy.
The Frugal Film Project Lives. My second attempt at shooting a roll of (relatively) inexpensive film through a camera I spent less than $50 on each month for a year. I tried it last year and failed after four months. This year I am trying it again. I started in May. This post covers June. July’s edition is 50% shot but nothing has been developed yet. It’s only July 6th, give me a break, okay?
As stated in the May edition of the blog posts, I am trying to do this twice this year. One attempt is shooting Kodak Gold 200 through my Lomo Lubitell 166 Universal. The other is the same camera shooting Kentmere 100.
First, we’ll look at the Kodak Gold images. There should be 12 but because I suck at life there are 11. The camera needs to be manually wound. There is a little red window on the back that lets you see the back of the film as you wind it. You’re supposed to wind it until you see the number 1 in the little window and then stop. That spot will be your first photo. Makes sense, right? Numbnutz over here wound too far and had to start on number 2. Idiot.
So here come the 11 shots. First we have a sunrise at Hampton Beach in Hampton Beach, NH. I took these on June 14, 2026.
Seagulls
Here Comes the Sun
Fishin’
I suck at photography, part 1
After a short drive to the North…
I want to say I like the lens flare but… maybe not
Okay, we’re done with Hampton Beach. Now we move on to the Newburyport Harborwalk Rail Trail in Newburyport, MA.
I had a feeling the sun was going to be too much for this really slow camera and sure enough…
That’s a little better
I feel like I am learning a lesson here
Boats Boats Boats
The bad photography continues
With that, our color experience comes to an end. There should be 12 photos but I am an idiot and there are only 11. Project 2A is complete. Now we move on to project 2B and everything is in black and white. These pics are also from the Harborwalk Rail Trail and they also have problems with too much sun… because I suck.
Water, right?
I mean, at least I wasn’t looking directly at the sun, right?
I suck at photography, part 2
Do I actually like this one? If so, why?
How do you spell buoy?
A bridge too far, or something
I suck at photography, part 3
Yup, I suck at photography, part 4
That’s a little better
Chairs. I feel like I could have composed this better
What was I thinking?
Fun with Flags
There we have it. Frugal Film Project 2B has been shared. Next time I will avoid shooting into the sun when it’s high and overpowering like this. Oh well.
I said the July edition of the project is half done. I shot the roll of Kodak Gold yesterday (July 5th) in Boston. I was planning on shooting the Kentmere roll too but I got pulled away. I will have to go out and shoot one more time this month in order to stay on track. I mean, I can’t have a project go bust faster than last year, right?
Also, in closing… I feel like a putz for missing a shot on the first roll. I’ll share one more pic. This was taken one week later, July 21st, on Harman Phoenix II, which I have officially moved to the “never buy this film again” list. I just don’t like it. Unfortunately, I still have a bunch of it in my film stash. Crap. This one is the Concord River in Lowell, MA. It sucks, but at least it brings this masterpiece of a blog post up to 24 photos.
Bonus
PS: As I was posting these pics I was blowing them up pretty huge on my big gigantic monitor. These are medium format photos and even though they really suck ass, after viewing them… I get it. The medium format thing. I get it. The resolution is just… I don’t know. It’s something though. I get it.
Inside the Red Head's Head 