My new (actually around 55 years old) camera seems to work OK - although it is not terribly good at focussing on things that are very close to the camera. Apparently there are some rangefinder settings that I’ll have to pluck up the courage to fiddle with. But everything else about the camera works really well.
Is it wrong to buy a camera just because of the way it looks? In my opinion the answer is no. Above is my latest buy investment. It’s a Mamiya Press Super 23. These were made in the 1960’s for use by press photographers that didn’t want to carry around heavy 4x5 press cameras but couldn’t afford to buy a Nikon 35mm camera. Or something.
I like it because it comes completely to bits. The lens contains the shutter and fits in the hole on the front of the camera body. The film is in a holder which clips over another hole at the back. Push the handle on the side, connect the shutter trigger to the front of the lens and away you go. And if any one of these elements fails in some way I just have to replace that bit rather than junk the whole thing.
It’s not a light camera, but it is nicely weighted in the hands. It takes enormous 6x9cm negatives on 120 roll film. I’m looking forward to posing taking some pictures with it.
I lost my lovely little Polaroid Meter. I managed to convince myself that I’d left it in my room when on holiday. So I bought another one. Fortunately it was not terribly expensive. Unfortunately it didn’t work. They must have been using a much more liberal definition of “tested and working” than I do. Anyhoo, the good news is that I then (of course) found the original one in a place I hadn’t thought of looking. Truly, the best way to find a missing item is to buy a replacement (whether the replacement works or not).
We had an awesome meetup tonight. Loads of people, loads of stuff and so much technical chat that I forgot to take any pictures. Update: I managed to find the picture I took…
Thanks to everyone who turned out in spite of recent events.
This is a bonus pic that I took first thing this morning, when I noticed the way light was hitting a mobile.
Went to York today. The weather was lovely (for a change) and the loveliness lasted all day (for a bigger change). On a whim we booked a couple of tickets for The National Railway Museum. You don’t need to pay to get in, but you do need to book. The museum is one of my favourite places in the world, and fortunately I had a camera and a couple of lenses with me.
The place was busy, but it is also huge, so that the crowd was swallowed up. They have a kind of storeroom off to one side full of amazing stuff. One of the exhibition halls is closed at the moment, but we had plenty to look at. And I’m definitely going back there first chance I get.
Number one son took a look at my newly arrived shorts. “You’re going to want to send these back” he said. He’s right. Instead of ordering XL I’d gone and bought XS. At least I didn’t get as far as trying them on. That would probably have killed me.
Selphy Portrait (sorry)
After having watched a video of someone using a portable printer at an expo and producing large, high quality colour prints to order for the folks there I thought I’d investigate the possibility of obtaining a cheap printer to maybe put in a box. Instant camera pictures are all very well, but they are a bit variable in quality, expensive and hard to duplicate. I had a look on “the world’s favourite on-line auction site” and found that I could pick up a used Canon Selphy 4000 for well less than 20 quids. A bit of research convinced me that I could drive it from a Raspberry Pi Zero and even make it into an Apple Airprint device if required. So I bought one.
It arrived today. For giggles I checked to see if there was a Windows 10 driver for it. There wasn’t (boo) but it turns out that the Windows Vista 64 bit drivers you can find here worked fine with my copy of Windows 10 (yay!). The printer I got even had some ribbon and paper with it. The image above doesn’t really do the printer justice. The printed picture is vibrant and really nice to look at. You can get Canon branded film packs delivering 36 images for around 12 quid from Cartridge People. They even sent me a free deck of cards with my first order. Next step is to start designing a case to carry everything around in.
Went for a walk to the Lamp Room cafe today. If you are ever at Cottingham station I can strongly recommend it.
Just a few of the engines on display
There are some things we do every year. And one of them is the Whitby Steam Rally. Last year the weather wasn’t great. This year the weather was awesome. Blue skys and bright sunshine.
The chap wouldn’t describe how the tap is suspended over the liquid…
They had all the usual things, including a bunch of static engines pumping water and lighting lamps.
The beach was super busy.
What with all this, and a great lunch at the Magpie a great day was had by all.
In anticipation for our trip to Whitby tomorrow we got a steam engine running at home. I bought the little engine a while back and it still works, which is nice. It even had enough steam to actually power the little led lights (although they are a bit hard to see in this picture).
Today we went to one of my favourite places in all the world. Harlow Carr. The weather was fantastic and I was using the new Phoenix film. I didn’t have much success last time I tried it, but this time I was going to make sure that I gave it plenty of light. I’m not unhappy with the results.
There is plenty of grain, but the pictures are also pretty sharp and the colours really jump out. If you fancy something different (and you are going somewhere with plenty of light) it is worth a look. I took a bunch of pictures of people (which are not the kind of things I ever put on the interwebs) and they came out really well.
Just for fun we got our Rock Band setup down from the loft. I was surprised (and pleased) to discover that most of it works. I was even more pleased to discover that you can run Rock Band on a PlayStation 5 and it works too. We’ve also tried some of the original games on a PlayStation 3. You can also buy DLC for the game, including some tracks by Steely Dan, which is awesome.
The only problem we had was with one of the guitars. The strummy thing (to use it’s technical name) only worked in one direction. We’ve traced the problem to a reed switch in the guitar which is not firing when a magnet is moved close to it. I’ve ordered some reed switches and we might have a go at fixing it. I’m super impressed with the design and construction of the guitar itself. It is amazing that they could make and sell such a complicated piece of kit for such a low price.
If you have the kit in the loft and a PS5 I’d strongly suggest that you get it down and have a go. The game itself is now very cheap to buy and comes with lots of rock classics.
Took a picture of a street near our house yesterday with the Rabbit. There are a few potholes I guess, but it is nowhere as dystopian as this…
We had a very nice BBQ at home today. Perfect weather and plenty of ketchup. Apparently.
We took the Light Leak camera to the Humber Bridge today and took some leaky pictures. The one at the top shows the original shot with no leaks. The one in the middle has “benefitted” from a single pixel yellow light leak. The one at the bottom got a blue light leak from the entire pixel row.
I’m very pleased how these have come out. I need to work a bit on the level of the light. It turns out that colours which use more than one led are much brighter (who knew?).
This is what the Rabbit thought of our TV while we watched the Olympics opening ceremony
Made a little menu system for the leaky camera system today. It lets you bind Python methods to button presses and seems to work quite well. I’m using the lovely Pico Display from Pimoroni. I’ve got one of the very original ones, which doesn’t seem to work with their current Button code. It took me a while to discover this, what with my policy of always assuming that if something doesn’t work it is my fault. Anyhoo, it now works and will be going on GitHub soon.
They don’t actually put the eggs straight on the tray…
Went out for a drink at our favourite coffee shop today. Took the Rabbit and grabbed a magic picture. I think it has captured the essence of place quite well.
I was hoping that the Rabbit could tell me exactly what kind of pattern this is.
We had a nice Hardware Meetup tonight. We’ve made some patterns that could be used by a robot to determine where it is. It seems to nearly work, which is nice.
YOu can print a case too
I’ve put my Minox Cassettes on Thingiverse so you can download them and have a go at printing your own cassettes. You can find my other Minox resources here.
It would have been so cool if this had been what you could buy
Today we had to head home, but before we got on the train we took a look in a few places, including the Microsoft Experience Centre on Regent Street. If you are ever in that part of town it is worth a look. They have all the new Microsoft machines on show (including the latest laptops and tablets with CoPilot) and upstairs they have a lovely gaming display including the original X-Box which was unveiled when the console was announced. This is interesting because it really is a giant X (see above). We had a look around the back and it has all the connections so, in theory it should be possible to plug it in and play it. They had lots of other XBoxes too plus a range of games and accessories.
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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