When in doubt, bring the sun with you

/

A while back I took some instant pictures that were a bit compromised by colour balance of artificial light. I decided that one way to fix this was to bring along a light of my own. A quick search of ebay found me a Hannimex PRO550 along with mounting plate for around 10 quids. I’m going to have to modify the flash cable or find an adapter (the RF70 has a funky 2.5mm socket) but if I use this flash I don’t think I’ll need to worry about artificial light. Plus, as an outfit it looks awesome.

I just hope I don’t blind any of the subjects or give them a suntan they don’t want…..

See How They Run is a really good film

/

We watched See How They Run last night. This is a lovely little movie. Lots of laugh out loud moments - at least for me. I think it leans rather too heavily on real life with its use of a real play and a real author to hang the plot on. I reckon it would have worked better if it was all made up. But that doesn’t take anything away from some lovely stuff. I hope they make some more of these.

Comicon with Instant Pictures

/

Well, that was …interesting. Comicon was wonderful. Made even better because we travelled down yesterday and got to the exhibition fresh, rather than after a 120 mile drive. I took a bunch of pictures with my new camera and, as you can see above, results were mixed. Exposure is a challenge and because I wasn’t using a flash the white balance for the film wasn’t quite right.

White balance with digital cameras is not a thing. The camera figures out the colour temperature of the scene and adjusts for it. White balance with a film camera is a thing. Because it turns out that the sun is hotter than electric lights and puts out a lot more blue light. Inside you get a warmer light if you use bulbs with filaments in them (like they all used to be) or weird light if you use modern energy saving bulbs. Film is normally manufactured for outdoor use, so when you use it inside the white balance moves about a bit and you get colour casts on the picture. So, if the pictures above look as if they have strange colours, that’s why. The pictures above also look a bit blurred and dark. I can’t blame that on the film, that is down to me learning my way around the camera.

The funny thing about instant cameras is that you seem to give away your best pictures. I took a shot of a chap who sold me something (he wanted to know what the camera did). The picture came out really well so I gave it to him. He was really happy with that, which I think is what things like photography are all about.

Enter the Mint RF70

/

The bloke on the left is asking “What happened to you? Was it drink, drugs or crazy living?”. The bloke on the is replying. “Nothing like that. Instant photography”.

I’m getting my hands on a Mint RF70 camera. This will be even more expensive to feed than the Mint TL70 I got a while back and probably as hard to use. Better start looking for comfortable park benches now.

Dominion on the Steam Deck works rather well

/

The Dominion card game has kind of taken over our Tuesday game nights. The great thing about it is that by using different cards each week you can get a totally different game experience. I’ve started using my Steam Deck to play it (you can find the game on Steam). It works rather well. Probably overkill, but it works for me. I like having a Dominon game on the go when watching naff telly. Today I nearly managed beat the medium AI opponent, which was rather pleasing.

Trombone Controller Fail

/

The beautiful distance sensor box that I made yesterday only has one problem. It just doesn’t work. When you put the tube over the distance sensor you get a fixed distance reading. I think it is something to do with reflection off the end of the pipe. Above you can see what happens to the light on the sensor, perhaps something similar is happening to the distance signal.

Oh well. Perhaps I should have tested this approach before I designed and printed the box, but I was concerned that to test the sensor I really had to have it mounted and aligned just right, and a proper box was the best way to do it. I just have to move the sensor outside the pipe and create a target. And anyway, it’s only a failure if you didn’t learn anything from it.

Weston Light Meter

/

A while back, on a visit to the wonderful West Yorkshire Cameras I picked up Weston Euro-Master light meter. The main reason I bought it was that when I was a young chap learning how to take photographs this was the absolute bees-knees in light metering. I didn’t think I’d have a use for it, but I really fancied owning one. And it was only a few quid.

I’ve got a use for it now though. I can use it as a “sanity check” with the MintTL70. I can get an idea of the state of the light before picking the aperture value and taking a shot. This will stop me doing silly things, like taking pictures where the exposure is so long that you get camera shake.

If you are thinking that all I’ve done with this is find a way of making photography harder and much more expensive you are completely right. But I’m having a lot of fun.

The Mint TL70 Vertical Learning Curve

/

When I was researching the Mint TL70 camera the consensus was that it is awesome, but the learning curve you have to follow is a bit steep. I reckoned that having had film cameras back in the day I’d be able to get a handle on the device by using my experience. This has turned out not to be the case.

I took the picture of the puffin this morning. It is a bit darker than I would have liked. The camera has an automatic exposure which consists of a light sensor behind a hole on the front of the camera.

Modern cameras don’t work like this. They base their exposure on the incoming image. This gives them a bit of head start when it comes to working out what the exposure needs to be.

Precisely where you point the TL70 makes a big difference to what the sensor sees. If you point the camera up it gets loads of sky, adjusts for that, and then underexposes the image. If you point the camera down it sees darker ground, adjusts for that and then overexposes the image. The trick is to find the “Goldilocks” place to point it, where you get just the right amount of light on the sensor to get a good exposure. This is made a bit more tricky by the way that the Instax film doesn’t record a very large range from lightest to darkest. In other words you’re not always able to get the brightest and darkest parts of the picture at the same time. There are two ways to fix this, you either decide what you care about, and point the camera right at that. Or you change the scene so that there is less contrast about - perhaps by replacing the sky with trees.

The picture above has perfectly exposed highlights, but the puffin is a bit dark. I’m going to have to keep practicing. It’s actually rather fun. It’s going to make me a better photographer in the long run.

The curse of the greedy iPhone

/

Once upon a time there was a greedy iphone. One day it decided to eat all its memory. “Yum yum” it said as gobbled up the last gigabyte for no discernible reason. The master of the iphone was very upset by this behaviour. Particularly as nothing now worked and he couldn’t run any programs or save any pictures. So he went on a journey on the internet to find out what kind of magic could cure his phone. He was even more upset when he discovered that even the greatest seers in the kingdom came back with “Thou must wipeth the whole thing and starteth again”. The master wondered why such a fundamental problem didn’t have a much simpler solution. Then he remembered that the wizards who had made the phone were probably busy adding tiny incremental features to the next version of the phone so that everyone in the kingdom could be persuaded to go out and buy it. This was much more lucrative work that fixing issues with phones that had already been sold.

So it came to pass that the master did indeed wipe his phone, removing everything and requiring a whole heap of re-configuration and re-registering of services. And eventually the master got a phone that was a lot less needy than before and all was well. Until the next time.

Putting the clocks back..

/

I carefully set all the clocks back last night. Except for the two most important ones, the alarm and the heating controller. The heating controller appears to be able to look after itself. So, when I wound it back it this morning this did not end particularly well. All fixed now, although grinding through complicated menus on the clock radio at six thirty to stop the alarm from going off at the wrong time kind of took the shine off the extra hour in bed…