Tag: film camera

Friday at Last

It wasn’t really a long week, but now that we’re up to Friday it suddenly feels like a long week. Eight hours and 11 minutes to go until the weekend. Who’s ready?

I was hoping for some car music today but I didn’t get a chance to write any lyrics last night. Maybe tomorrow. The plan as it stands now is to go to see a matinee of the new Thor movie tomorrow. That is both exciting and nervy. It will be our first visit to a movie theater since the pandemic started. That’s why we’re going to the first showing of the day. We’re hoping the place will be empty. We’ll see.

I thought about asking the bariatric surgery facebook group about the pros and cons of small amounts of popcorn, but then I re-declared the facebook boycott so… yeah. I’ll stick to water, thanks. Wicked smaht there, Robert.

I am going to visit my mother tonight. Hopefully I’ll get there once or twice more over the weekend. I need to stop by Dad’s too. We’ll see how things shake out.

I want to do some music, preferably car music and guitar playing and some lyric/melody/riff writing. The faux 50/90 is still happening, but I am about an astronomical unit* behind schedule. There are only six songs in the pipeline right now and none are even remotely close to finished. Also, July ends next week. I should have 13 songs complete by the end of the month. Not happening. Not even close. Still, it’s fun. I just need to get into the groove somehow. I was feeling pretty good on Wednesday. Let’s channel that and do some more.

Photography… I don’t know. Downtown Andover? Downtown Lowell? Boston and Cambridge? We’ll see. I want to have one or two more rolls finished (I have two finished now and one in progress) before I ship off to a lab somewhere, but that could take ages at this point. We’ll have to see.

Okay. Let’s get through the work day before we worry about any of this stuff. Happy Friday, folks!

*An astronomical unit is defined as the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. That is a perfectly accurate description of how far off the pace I am at the moment.

Photo a Day Weirdness

So I am not doing a third consecutive photo a day thing on Flickr. Nope. I am not two months away from completing a third year with at least one photo taken every single day without exception. Nope. Not doing it.

The film thing makes it weird. I took like 15 pictures today that will not get to Flickr for weeks at least, and will not even have exif data with the dates embedded into the file and the camera and lens used and the aperture and ISO and shutter speed. They are going to be just like… pictures… only. How strange is that? I am going to have to remember which cameras shot which images and which lenses they used. Well, the Nikon only has one lens but the Pentax has two.

So weird.

FG-20: It Seems to Work

I put film in the new/ebay camera. It was a little difficult getting it to advance. It moved okay when the door was open, but not at all when it was closed. I think I need to roll it back a little to tighten it. It seems that way at least.

I also have to remember to half-push the shutter to get the light meter to work. That has gone wrong once as my attempt to half push accidently turned into a full push. Woops. So far it seems to be advancing the film correctly. Hopefully that continues for… forever, I guess.

Now I just have to shoot the whole roll and get it developed so that I can know the whole thing actually really works instead of just feels like it works. I also need to know if there’s anything fatal with the lens. It seems okay, but focusing feels a little difficult.

It’s all very interesting.

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Welp, I gots me a film camera that I can use when I would otherwise be nervous about dropping and breaking Dad’s film camera. The Ebay listing described the lens as wobbly. The focusing ring feels a little loose, but everything else seems okay. Fingers crossed, right?

All of the mechanical parts seem to be working fine. I don’t have film in it yet, but I will at some point soon. Lunch break just started, don’tchaknow.

Tuesday Stuff

Happy Amazon Prime Day. I don’t really know what that means, but my beloved wife spent her pre-work morning shopping for bargains. I don’t know if she got any, but we have a new dorm room to partially populate at the end of next month so fingers crossed for good stuff.

Today is my work anniversary. 18 years ago today I started a new job. Eighteen (18) years… That’s the longest I’ve ever stuck with anything in my whole life. It’s crazy. Crazy, I tells ya.

My father is moving to a new room within the assisted living facility he’s currently living in. The moving day is tomorrow. I haven’t seen his new room, but I’ve seen one that is similar. It’s bigger than his current room and it has an actual kitchen. I took the day off to help out. I’m not sure how it’s going to go yet. We’ll see. I’m optimistic that this is going to be a good thing. I am not sure if my father agrees or not. Again, we’ll see.

Bellana is coming home on Friday. Repeat: Bellana is coming home on Friday. We’re going to have both kids in the house at the same time and it’s everything. Literally everything!

My Ebay camera purchase that I kinda wanted to back out of but didn’t is supposed to be delivered today. Here’s hoping the lens that the seller chucked in for free actually works. I am not sure it will. Unfortunately, Amazon Prime Day doesn’t have any deals on Nikon lenses from the 80’s so there’s no help coming from there.

18 years. I’ve actually stuck with something for 18 years. Who woulda thunk it. I wonder how many other folks from my new hire group are still around. Our careers are old enough to vote. So weird.

Silent on the CVS Front

It’s been two weeks and two days since I dropped off my first roll of film at CVS in Methuen. No word from them yet. It’s long enough that my second roll of film is now within the 7-10 day window. It’s been eight days.

Pretty much guaranteed that I won’t be using CVS again. I’m going to have to start trying online labs. There is one in Maine and one in Portsmouth, NH. They both look promising and the shipping time will be nice and short. I have one roll of film sitting in my desk ready to go. I’ll hold on to it until I have another roll or two to develop and I’ll send them all off together. The Ebay camera is supposed to be here by the weekend, so I’m probably going to want to shoot a roll on that to test it out. The seller was iffy on the lens he/she is sending along with the camera body. If it’s bad, developing a roll of film will show that, and then I can wait for Santa to get a lens upgrade.

I need a less dumb hobby, don’t you think?

Unrelated note: There is a fly in here with me. It has the whole friggin’ cellar to bother but it’s hanging around near me and it’s driving me crazy. I turned off all of my desk lamps in the hopes it will go find other lights to circle, but it’s still hanging around me. Maybe it is drawn to the window? Maybe my monitor is brighter than each individual ceiling light? That’s doubful.

Either way, as soon as that sucker lands somewhere within reach, the little notebook sitting on my desk to my right and I are going to terminate it with extreme prejudice. Splat, bitch.

ADDENDUM: The fly has ended. The world is safe once again.

Ebay

I put a bid on an ebay auction for an old Nikon film camera. I don’t want to bring Dad’s camera on vacation in January because I would be afraid of dropping it or having it stolen or accidentally sit on it or Donald Duck might savagely attack me and smash it over my idiotic head.

You know, something like that.

So I put in a bid on a camera that lots of people on YouTube and Reddit said was both good and similar to Dad’s camera. The auction ended last night. By the time I got up yesterday morning I was feeling quite a bit of buyer’s remorse. Even though I hadn’t even won yet. Turns out I actually did win it. I didn’t welch on the bid, even though I was pretty close to cancelling my account without paying. I couldn’t be that big of a prick so I paid up.

I’m sure it’s going to be fine and I am sure it’s going to survive whatever Donald Duck may throw at it, but somehow buyer’s remorse is more obnoxious when ebay is involved.

For now though, let’s just leave this with a little Lock Monsters Hockey. It used to be alive.

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Ebay = Stress

I put a bid on a Nikon camera with a lens that may or may not work last night. There were no bids on it at the time and the auction was set to end just after 9:00 on Sunday (tomorrow) night.

I just checked it and someone else put in a bid as well. It wasn’t enough to top my tiny max bid, but it bumped up the price from $10 to $17.50.

Eeek! Ebay is stressful!

Tuesday July 5, 2022

The long weekend is over. It was nice, even though July 4th is now meaningless. Mostly Jen and I just hung out, but I also visited mom a few times and bought some clothes that fit (for now) and took a shit load of pictures on both Dad’s camera and my camera. We also went for a random drive to enjoy the nice weather yesterday. It was a pretty good weekend.

And now it’s over. We have a couple of contractors coming today to give estimates on fixing a potentially huge issue in the new bathroom. We’re pretty much guaranteed to lose the shower in there, which makes me sad. It is a walk in shower and I always wanted a walk in shower. Unfortunately there is a leak somewhere and there is evidence that the wall behind the shower stall is rotting so… buhbye walk in shower. Not sure what we’ll do with the space once it’s cleaned up. A linen closet? Maybe?

As for everything else. I did not get a chance to work on any music last night. I’ve been so hung up on the photography stuff lately that I haven’t been thinking music much at all. Time to find a middle ground where I can obsess over both topics. Music needs to be written, guitars need to be played, thrift stores need to be combed for inexpensive old film SLR cameras. Lizardfish needs to reunite. I sent a chat to the band yesterday saying if we don’t practice soon I am going to die. Here’s hoping they can save my life.

Okay. Get to work.

How Did it Go

So based on the previous post you may know that I went to the beach this morning to shoot the sunrise with Dad’s camera. How did it go? Did I learn anything new?

Last night I checked the weather forecast for Hampton Beach, NH on weather.com. It said the skies would be clear and the sunrise would be at 5:13am. The first part of that was accurate. The second part… not so much. The Dark Skies app said that sunrise in Methuen would be at 5:13. I wonder if somehow the weather.com app got confused and gave me local sunrise time instead of the time for the location I was viewing?

I got out of bed at 4:20 or so, which was 20 minutes later than I planned. I got dressed quick, grabbed my stuff, forgot the bottle of gatorade I put in the fridge last night, and hit the road. Waze was telling me I should get there with a few minutes to spare. It was almost right. There’s a draw bridge just before you enter the Hampton Beach area and the bridge went up just as I was getting to it. That plus the inaccurate sunrise time did it. I was late. The sun was breaking the horizon at about 9:10 or so, and I didn’t get down to the beach until a minute or so later.

It was also high tide, and my usual spot was both under water and crowded with people. In the post Covid world, a crowd of people is three. At least it is to me. I boogied down to the next beach entrance and had a nice spot all to myself. I took a few pics and then attempted some long exposure fun.

The most the camera can do is one second, but it also has a bulb mode where the shutter will stay open as long as you hold the shutter release down. Unfortunately for me, actually holding the thing down means the image will be shaky because my hands will be shaky. That’s why I bought a cheap little shutter release cable. You screw it onto the button on the camera, and then you can control the shutter without actually touching the camera. It also locks itself so you can push it, let go, wait for as long as you need, then release it.

I made one super dumb ass goof in this process. I tried three long exposures. About 30 seconds, about 15 seconds, and a ridiculous three minutes. Unfortunately, with the sound of the ocean a few feet away, the sound of the cable triggering sounds pretty similar to the camera triggering so after the first shot I didn’t notice that I forgot to advance the film. Same thing happened after the second shot. I only noticed the third time because I took the camera off the tripod and tried to use it normally. Sooooo I set it up again (after moving back a few feet, the tide was getting close to me) and did it right.

I finished the roll with some shots of the waves and the sun hitting the wet sand. I will be completely shocked if anything I did today looks decent, but I finished a roll of 24 and unloaded the camera without any problems, and setup a new roll (Kodak ColorPlus 200, 36 exposures) and I am ready for whatever is next. Probably pictures of the cat.

I think I am done with film projects for a while now. I’ve shot three rolls successfully, including the one that was in the camera when I took possession of it, and I haven’t seen a single image yet. Two rolls were dropped off at CVS and the third just went into the desk drawer that I use for photography stuff. This whole lack of instant feedback thing is actually stressing me out a little. If I had a digital camera with me today I’d already be posting the results. Now? Who the hell knows if I’ll ever get anything useable back?

Film man… film.