This was cropped from a square negative
This is the last set of photographs from the Dalby Forest trip. I’d taken along my Kiev 60 camera. It’s a bit heavy to carry up and down hills, so this picture was taken fairly close to the car.
I wasn’t able to get a good light reading from the camera so I took the shot with light settings I kind of guessed. I’m not unhappy with the results. Perhaps success in photography is all about getting better at guessing…
Only one dodgy soldered connection…
I spent a very happy hour today wiring up the device above. The idea is to use the potentiometers to control the level of red, green and blue in a colour and then send the colour values to my PICO powered flashlight over Bluetooth. The button on the right is the power switch.
I’m very pleased with how this turned out
After the mild disappointment of the pictures I took on Monday I was pleased to find that the second roll of pictures I developed today have come out a lot better. I’ve no idea why this is; although I suspect I might be getting better at working out the exposure. Or some days I’m lucky and some days I’m not. Either theory works with the evidence to hand.
Coming to a project near you soon…
I really like the idea that these images were created by chemicals and physics. And they pop out of the page in a most satisfactory way. At least for me.
Taking pictures of cameras is a thing
For your information (and so I don’t forget) I used 1+50 dilution and developed for 7.5 minutes at 21 degrees which is supposed to be for 50 ASA exposure. This seems to have produced some very tidy looking negatives though. Alternatively, it might just be that FP4+ is nicer film than the first roll I was using.
I suppose that now I’ll have to drink it all…
I’ve had my strawberry flavoured milk obsession for a while. Today I found a use for it. I’ve been looking for a nice box I can “upcycle” into a remote control for my latest project. Having decided that putting radios in tins is a bad idea I’ve now discovered this plastic Nesquick box. It looks like it will be perfect. I’m a big fan of getting boxes that are plenty big, and it seems like the top will be able to take the controls I want to mount on it.
Turns out mum had a pretty good eye for a good picture
Got the pictures back from the mystery camera today. Some shots were taken by my mum around 20 years ago. So the camera must have belonged to her, and then found its way to me mixed in with a bunch of bits and bobs passed down by dad.
I’m amazed that they could still be developed today, and look pretty good. Next thing to do is put another film in and see if the camera still works.
This is one of the better pictures
I took one of my lovely lenses for a walk today. We were celebrating being married for an unfeasibly long time and we went to Dalby Forest, one of my favourite places in all the world. I was hoping to take lots of pin sharp pictures of the scenery but when we got back and I developed the negatives I was a bit disappointed. I need to work on my exposure, and remember that wildly different colours might all end up looking grey when rendered into black and white.
This is a very nice lcd panel
I spent some time today working on my Agile Octopus price display. Agile Octopus is an electricity tariff where you get a different price every half-hour during the day. A while back I made a device that would get the current price and display it, but now I’ve added a little histogram that displays upcoming prices for the rest of the day. The picture above was taken at 7:14 pm. The solid lines in the histogram are the hours and the dotted lines the half hour prices. On the right you can see the minimum and maximum prices. It looks like the prices will be going down over the evening. We’ve found this quite useful when deciding when to put the washing on or bake a cake. The display is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO-W driving a rather nice LCD panel from Pimoroni.
It’s actually rather pleasing to make something that folks actually find useful and might even save us money.
A while back I sent a couple of lenses to have them fixed. They both kind of worked, but one had a bit of fungus growing inside (never nice) and the other had super-slow iris blades so it was impossible to pictures at anything other than maximum aperture. I think someone had thought they could improve its performance by adding oil. Which is never a good idea where lenses are concerned.
They came back today and they seem to be quite splendid now. I’m looking forward to taking them out and grabbing a few pictures with them.
I’m quite pleased with this one
Spent today working on Connected Little Boxes. Great fun. I’m hoping to release the upgraded system soon. I really must stop thinking of new things to make it do….
I was sitting at my desk today and it started to rise up underneath my hands. Turns out that the gas strut thing in my new chair is leaking causing my chair to descend down to the lower levels. I’ve been in touch with the supplier and they are being helpful, which is nice.
Turns out I’m good at drawing hovels…
We had a great game of Dominion last night. The scores were very close, the last turn was played, the game ended. And then crashed. Everything locked up and we didn’t get the final score. Much unhappiness, because everybody thought they’d won. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to take a copy of the entire game log (you can cut it out of the window in the page) and saved it as a file.
So today I created “DominionCalc”. It takes in a log and figures out the player scores based on their actions. I don’t think it is perfect. But it did work out that I’d won. Not that anyone believed me.
Anyhoo, if you fancy having a go with it you can find it here:
It’s a very neat device
I think my camera collection has grown to the point where it has its own gravitational pull and attracts other cameras. Which is a good thing. This morning I was tidying up the garage so that we could find the car (or something) and I found the camera above. It is a very neat little thing, but I’ve no idea where it came from. It has a nearly completed film in it, so I’m going to have it processed and see what we get.
I only did a tiny bit of post processing
A few years ago I bought some cheap film. It was cheap because at the time film photography was in what looked like terminal decline. Things have changed. Film is now popular and also super expensive. So I’ve dug out some of my old cheap stuff and I’ve been using in an old Pentax that I also bought a few years ago.
Today I took the exposed film into Max Spielman in Beverley to get it processed. When I picked it up they told me that the printing hadn’t worked too well for some of the shots and gave me a CD-ROM with the pictures on it by way of apology. I had a look at the negatives and they were very, very “thin”, which means that they didn’t get enough light to expose properly. This might be because the film is old, or perhaps my ancient Spotmatic has got the exposure wrong. Kudos to the Max Spielman folks for being so helpful. Back in the day all you used to get was a sticker on badly exposed prints telling you that it wasn’t a processing problem….
I’m getting to really like film photography.
It seems we are not quite out of the woods yet…..
I was showing off my 3D printer last week and it promptly buried its head in the print bed and dragged it around. Wonderful.
I’ve had this problem for a while. The BLTouch sensor on my machine has got very unreliable. This is the little probe that tells the printer when the had is close to the bed. Or not.
Anyhoo, I’ve spent the afternoon removing it. I’ve been manually adjusting the print height for years and I don’t mind doing it again. I’ve loaded up the Jyers firmware which has a very nice automated levelling function which moves the head to the different corners so you can set it up by hand. This works very well. Now all I need to do is solve the bed adhesion problem I had while printing some more Tags of Fun. The good news is that the print quality is excellent. The bad news is that half way through the print process the thing I’m printing tends to want to go off for a walk…..
There were loads of engines like this
Last week we couldn’t make our annual trip to the Whitby Steam Fair because bad weather got in the way. So today it was excellent to be able to go down to the Driffield Steam Fair and look for some traction action (sorry).
I was worried that the Driffield event might be smaller than the Whitby one, but it turned out (at least to me) to be a bit bigger. There were loads of engines, large and small bustling about the showground. There was a funfair, pizza and amazing bubble waffles. The weather had a little go at spoiling this show too, but there were only a couple of showers during the four hours we were on site. It was great. I’m definitely going again next year.
The display looks really nice
I’m building a little device to make it easier to use Agile Octopus. It’s a Raspberry Pi PICO W with a really nice LCD panel from Pimoroni. Today I got the Pico connecting to the WiFi and pulling down the tariffs from Octopus. Next I have to do some data display stuff.
I think we’ll have salad for tea
I’ve just added another monkey to my back. I’ve signed up for Agile Octopus. This is an energy pricing scheme that uses green energy which can change in price depending on the weather. I now really like the idea of strong winds...
The tariffs are set on a half hourly basis and you get them the day before. I’m keen to have a go with it because it would be nice to get paid for charging the car (if there is a lot more power than demand you can actually get prices to go negative). If I had a battery in the house and/or solar power it would be even more interesting.
We’ve been on it for a couple of days and it is quite fun. I’m not sure if we’ll be on it for ever, we’ll have to see what effect it has on the bills.
This is almost exactly what buses look like around here..
Well, that’s another rite of passage out of the way. I’ve applied for my bus pass. It will mean I’ll be able to go up town and visit Hull Makerspace for free. Yay!
You can interact with the pet by tapping the moving leds. A bit scary but it seems strong enough.
One of the many nice things about having kids around for a while is that you get to look at their toys. For example there’s the Bitzee digital pet. It comes in a little case like a ring-box and when you open it you see a little vibrating bar which has OLEDs on the end. These use persistence of vision to display your little pets. The picture above was the best I could get after several attempts. It has slightly cut off the head of the little bird.
You get to feed and clean up after your pets. There are also some simple mini-games and you can attract new pets over time. I really like the display - it’s much more interesting than a panel and the different animals have distinct personalities. It doesn’t look like it will take over your life either, as when you’ve done playing with it you just close the box and everything stops. It’s a bit pricey but I think it is worth it given the display.
I should probably use some smart technology or other to remove the bin on the right..
Today finds us at Sewerby Hall for the day. If you happen to have a six year old to amuse this is a great place to visit. They’ve got a zoo with penguins, mini-golf and a land train that takes you down to Bridlington sea front where you can find loads of arcades containing penny falls machines. Great place.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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