What Am I Doing?

What am I doing? I don’t know. I feel like the universe is in a weird place right now (yes, I know that mathematically that sentence does not make sense). I don’t know.

I had the opportunity to play my guitar tonight and I sat on my ass on the couch watching TV. I watched an episode of Torchwood. I’m trying to get back into that. While I was on the AppleTV app formerly known as HBO Max I figured I’d maybe start watching The Leftovers again. I watched the first episode. I’ll go to my grave saying that the second season of that show is television perfection. The first and third seasons are great too. The first season is just so soul crushingly depressing though. It is tough to get through and I suspect that watching one episode is part of the reason why I feel like I am in a screwy state of mind right now.

The point of all of this though is that I could have played guitar tonight and I did not. Ugh.

I had two slices of a small pizza for dinner tonight. The second one came back for another view. Oh yeah, TMI Alert here. Yeah. It went down, but it didn’t stay down. Shit. I ate too much too fast and paid the price.

I’m on the youtubes right now watching a photography channel. It’s a pro photographer telling me I should use Aperture Priority instead of Manual Mode. But what if I want to use Manual Mode? I use Aperture Priority a lot with one of my film cameras. The term Aperture Priority wasn’t invented yet when the camera was built, it’s called Auto on the camera, but it’s the same thing.. I use it because the light meter inside the view finder is often hard to read. I like using Manual though. It makes me feel like I know what I am doing even though I don’t really know what I’m doing. The video also says to keep the aperture away from the extremes. Don’t use f2.0 or f16, use f5.6 or f8. You don’t get the blurry background as much as you do with f2, but you get some which is more than f16 gives. The video says the images will be clearer in the middle ground apertures. I think I had figured that one out on my own and was starting to come around to this way of thinking. Then again… I really dig all that blurry background.

Miss Robin Sparkles says hello.

It’s Monday night, just about bed time. Almost 10:00pm. At this time four days from now we’ll be about seven hours into our road trip to Florida. That’s the main reason why I am in such a weird headspace tonight. I just want to go. I want to leave now. I don’t want to worry about work or anything outside of travel. I just want to go. I have a shit load of stuff to do before we go, but I just want to go.

Ugh… I should just go to bed.

Looking ahead to tomorrow. There is likely going to be an NHL predictions post for the third round. I am hoping the Edmonton Oilers will win their game seven tonight against Vancouver. If that happens there will be exactly one team that I kinda like in the Conference Finals. If they lose, there will be three teams I hate one one team I don’t care about. My heart is officially no longer in the NHL playoffs at all.

Also, expect lots of posts where I talk about how I just want to jump in the car with Jen, my wife, and head out on our trip. I have vacation-itis right now. Big time.

Fun with Depth of Field

I filled the bird feeders and did a photography exercise.

The same view, with different depth of field.

Example #1, aperture set to f2, shutter speed set to 1/5000 seconds, ISO set to 800 (because that is the speed of the film in Dad’s camera right now).

Example #2, aperture set to f8, shutter speed set to 1/500 seconds, ISO still at 800.

Final example, aperture set to f16, shutter speed set to 1/100 seconds, ISO again at 800.

So the lower the aperture number (lower numbers mean wider aperture, so f2 is as wide as my lens gets and f16 is as narrow as it gets) the shallower the depth of field and the less of the image that is in focus. Get it?

The Oil Light is Off… For Now?

I took the car back to Valvoline today to see if they might have messed something up on yesterday’s oil change. They said everything looked okay but they drained and refilled it anyway. My cynical side wonders if that means they did find something but didn’t want to tell me. Probably not.

The oil pressure light was off when I started the car but I expected that. We had been driving around looking at lights for quite a while before it popped on last night and the engine was nice and hot, whereas this morning it was bellow freezing. I drove around for a while after leaving the shop just to see if warming it up would trip the light again. It did not. Is the car clear to give to Bellana? No clue, but we’ll do it and see what happens.

I made a couple of stops along the way. I stopped at the Spicket dam and took some film pics. I also stopped at St Mary’s Cemetery and took a few more. I might have actually been in Bellevue Cemetery though. I’m not sure where one ends and the other starts. I also stopped at Goodwill and dropped off a bag of jackets. The winter jacket I replaced the other day was in the bag. The leather jacket Jen bought me for Christmas in 2007 that I still wore all the time even though it was pretty ratty and the lining was falling apart was in the bag as well. I was sad to let that one go. The sentimental value of a gift from our first christmas together is very high, but I asked her if I should donate it or keep it and she voted for donate, so off it went.

As for fun with film, I took my camera and Dad’s 50mm lens. I want to bring that pairing to Disney but I feel I need to test it a lot first. I learned quite a bit today. First, the viewfinder gets REALLY dim when the aperture is small. I started at f5.6 and it was okay. I bumped it up to f11 at one point and I could barely see anything. I took to opening it all the way, f2, to focus, then closing it down to take the photo. That brings up the second issue: Focusing is a royal bitch. That’s a problem with manual lenses on all cameras, but it seemed especially difficult for me today. I hope I got things right, but it was a bit of a struggle for my old-person-eyes. Speaking of old person eyes, I can barely read the light meter on that camera. Dad’s camera has an arrow that moves around as you change the shutter speed or the aperture. When it points to the middle of the meter you’re good. My camera has an arrow that points to the shutter speed you need to use based on the aperture setting. It’s almost impossible for me to read the values. My eyes just don’t want to make it out, and it’s worse when the viewfinder dims. I eventually switched to the Auto setting, which is just Aperture Priority. I am thinking that’s what I’ll do at Disney. My manual film camera suddenly isn’t as appealing in full manual. It’s cool though, I can still go manual like crazy with the DSLR.

I did not finish the roll of film in the camera, so I will need to take it out again before I can send it out for developing. I think I have eight or nine shots left. It’s hard to tell exactly. Maybe the cat will come out and say hello and I’ll sneak in another pic of two.

I also had my digital point and shoot with me so here are some driving around picture. Enjoy!

I never even noticed this place before. Is it really ye olde town hall, or was Broadway (route 28) just formerly known as Town Hall Place? Whatever, it’s photo a day 109/365.

DSCN2816 — The glory and grandeur that is the Nevins Library.

DSCN2817 — Stop Light Theater: Red Edition

DSCN2818 — Stop Light Theater: Green Edition

DSCN2819 — This liquor store wall will eventually end up on film. I promise.

DSCN2820 — Salem, NH’s great big honkin’ flag.

And that, friends is the story of the oil light. I hope you enjoyed your stay today. Come back any time.

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