My Journey

Not really common for people to hang out these days. However, I remember a time not so long ago when friends would come over and you could just sit there and watch television or head out and wander around town.

There was no plan. There was no goal. You didn't need a reason to be together and you didn't need to constantly babble at one another. You just enjoyed each others company. You hung out.

Maybe you stood in a parking lot and watched cars go by. That was good enough.

One of the worst things about getting into music, photography, or any other moderately costly pursuit is that you just don't know what is going to work for you until you try.

If it is guitar you will quickly discover that there are electric, semi-hollow, and accoustic options as well as long scale and short scale. Will you shred on a metal guitar with strings barely hovering over the fret board? Will you strum and sing like a cowboy on a parlor guitar? Unfortunately you will not know until you try.

Consequently, you go through a few guitars finding you and what works for you.

I have a digital camera that can simulate film photography. And folks this is more than simply adding some noise to the picture and calling it 'grain'. Fuji have gone out of their way to make the digital processing behave like film even simulating how grain behaves around areas of high contrast etc. And the Acros film simulation is wonderful.

I took my Fuji camera out to the lake this weekend and shot Acros. I have a manual lens that I use for zone focusing and it has a lot in common with my vintage lenses. With that setup I can get some really nice looking pictures.

It makes you question if film is even worth fooling with.

It's my birthday and I feel like I just received a great present. The film that I sent off to the darkroom was processed and I was able to see the results online.

Up to this point I had no idea if the camera was even functioning so I had to temper my expectations. Wow. I have to say that I was truly shocked at how beautiful the pictures came out. Sometimes I think we forget just how good 35mm film truly is.

For this first roll of film I just ran through Fujicolor 400. This is not the old Fuji film that leans cool. Unfortunately, that film stock will not ever return. The materials that were used to produce it are no longer available. This is the new Fuji film that is produced in the United States by Kodak for Fuji.

I have an electric kettle that contains a ring of blue leds along the bottom. It lights the water up bright blue while heating. There is no practical reason that it should do this. It simply exists as a way to distinguish itself from other electric kettles. A desperate plea to look cool and give you a reason to purchase it over any other electric kettle.

For over a decade now the US economy has relied on cell phone sales as a major market. But now every phone is essentially the same. It is a black rectangle with a glass front. There is not a whole lot of room for one phone to distinguish itself from another. In fact, the only way they really can is with the camera.

This is why when you see a new phone release (I'm looking at you Apple) the camera is the only thing they talk about. Actually, these days it's usually more than one camera. There will be a wide camera, a narrow camera, a camera that sees in the dark, one camera that uses lidar and can capture your cat videos in 3d. Honestly, the possibilities are endless. Can you have too many cameras on a phone? I submit to you that you cannot.

One of the weird things about a consumerist society is that a product is never simply pronounced 'mature' or 'completed.'

A case in point is the bicycle. By the 1980s the chromoly ten speed was perfected. Bikes were lightweight, the frame geometry was excellent, and the engineering in the derailleurs meant smooth shifting for years and years. Nobody ever rode a Univega or Puch and said, 'Golly whiz, I just wish I had more.' When it came to bicycles the job was done.

This is a problem for manufacturers. They constantly have to improve and sell the next thing and so they cook up a story like, 'An aluminum frame is lighter.' Right. I have an aluminum Trek and it weighs much more my Univega does. How about carbon fiber? Okay I guess. If you want to risk a fork snapping in half so that you could potentially go that extra mile nobody was looking for.

Today at lunch I decided fill up some water jugs at the natural grocer and check a couple of thrift stores for goodies.

Honestly, I was hoping to find some old digicams that I could give to the kids so that they could do a bit of point and shoot at the zoo. But when I started digging through the cases at the front of the store I was in for a huge suprprise.

First I found a Minolta MC mega zoom lens. This thing looked like a bazooka. It was pretty clear from what I could tell but it looked neglected and I didn't want to take a risk that it had fungus so I moved on from it. It was only $8 so I'm still kind of torn on that one.

Not long ago my oldest son came to me and said that he would like to explore photography. So I decided to go about some thrift shops to see if I could find an older solid DSLR for him.

The whole family packed into the car and we drove all over the city going from pawn shop to pawn shop, thrift store to thrift store. And the majority of what I found was old 'entry' cameras. Canon Rebel and that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with that but it just wasn't what I was after.

Towards the end of the day we came up on a thrift store situated right next to a BBQ joint. It was the perfect combination.