diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | bus-todo.txt | 4 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | film.txt | 31 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | house-todo.txt | 5 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | ko-kradan-wally.txt | 21 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unused/mold.txt (renamed from mold.txt) | 0 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unused/sketch.txt (renamed from sketch.txt) | 0 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unused/technology.txt (renamed from technology.txt) | 0 |
7 files changed, 51 insertions, 10 deletions
diff --git a/bus-todo.txt b/bus-todo.txt index 9ddd24f..f8c5234 100644 --- a/bus-todo.txt +++ b/bus-todo.txt @@ -1,11 +1,9 @@ To BUY: water tank $650 -1 sm LED bulbs $8 floor $500 foam and padding from couch: $150 copper piping type k 25 ft $50? -propane tank and regulator $200? total: ~$1500 @@ -31,7 +29,7 @@ bathroom Cockpit insulation - sand out and paint dash + paint dash floor buy and install diff --git a/film.txt b/film.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b21486 --- /dev/null +++ b/film.txt @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +I recently acquired a manual focus film camera from the early 1980s and it is the most exciting piece of technology I have purchased in several years. I bought it for a variety of reasons, ranging from nostalgia -- I am old enough to have shot film longer than I have digital -- to the simple fact that it was so cheap -- camera and a well worn, though optically fine, 50mm f/1.4 lens were $99 shipped to my door. Another $100 worth of Velvia and I was ready to go. + +I know what you're thinking, this is going to be some piece about how film has physicality and digital is too ephemeral and we should all hold hands and sing kumbayah together with our various full hipster, full mechanical archaic camera's around our necks. + +But no. It's not like that. + +The first few rolls of film I shot with my new $99 wonder were absolute rubbish. + +So were the next two after that. So I shoved the thing to the back corner of my desk and went off to review the very shiny Yi M1. After I packed the M1 in the box and shipped it off I went back to the film and forced myself to wade through the crap. + +It was immediately obvious that I had forgotten how to compose a scene, forgotten how to meter a scene in my head, forgotten even how to focus for christsakes. I had produced crap because I had forgotten all the fundamentals. With digital it's easy to not worry too much about composition because you can just keep shooting, look at the results and tweak your composition a bit and shoot again. The same is true of exposure, perhaps moreso give how much you can tweak exposure after the fact in a good RAW editor. I mean I know you still do it the old fashioned way with care and attention every time you delicately push the shutter, but me I tend to just point and mash that thing 20 times and sort out the results in post. + +In film none of that works. Unless you're fantastically rich, or it's a heck of a scene, you aren't going to shoot more than one or two exposures of any scene, which means you have to have your exposure dialed in ahead of time and the scene composed the way you want it. You have to spend more time thinking when you shoot film. I had forgotten how to think like a film camera. + +So I went to the library and checked out an incredible old, worn and faded copy of John Hedgecoe's Complete Photography Course and reread it cover to cover. I pretended like I was back in college, I took notes, I wrote out exposure formulas. One night I had an anxiety dream in which my old college photography teacher scolded me for considering a crop: "The image is made out there, not in here" she used to say. + +The next day I pulled Martin Parr's Small World off the shelf and spent the afternoon pondering why it is that we seem to want photography to be so serious when in fact it seem to not really want that. I reread my Galen Rowell books and thought, well, maybe it is serious. + +All the while I didn't take any film pictures. I did however start taking a lot more digital shots. I dusted off my old GF1 and slapped the Panasonic 20mm lens on the front. What it lacks in resolution it makes up for in portability. I don't know why I like the GF1 so much, but I do. I've yet to find a digital camera that I enjoy quite as much (save perhaps the Fuji XPro 2). + +The more I shot digital the more I realized that it wasn't the film I missed. The digital medium is fine with me -- both have their pros and cons. No, what I missed was the manual focus and the shutter ring. I missed the mechanics of photography that, silly though it sounds to write this, seem to somehow pull me into the experience in a way that just doesn't happen with autofocus lenses and A mode and a dial to turn. Now if you'll just join hands with the person next to you and we can start singing. + +And yes, I know you can manual focus even with my old GF1. It's not a great experience though. I've never used a m4/3 lens that was any fun at all to manual focus and there are all too few lens these days with nice mechanical, clicky aperture wheels. Step up to full frame from Nikon or Canon and there are plenty of lenses with nice satisfying clicks and buttery smooth focus wheels but most of them are older. + +In fact, I realized that I didn't care at all about the camera. I never had, except for a brief flirtation with an utterly amazing Toyo 4x5. Holy shit that was a camera. That I could never afford. No screw cameras, they're expensive, lose value the minute you buy them and all more or less do the same thing. And they're all pretty good these days. Just buy one you can afford and move on to what matters, what's always been the only thing that mattered: the lens. + +I ended up keeping the film camera. I've remembered a few things, my percentage of keepers is slowly creeping back up. But for me the big takeaway was not the transformative power of film, but the return to manual focus lenses. I'm not alone. Forums and blogs about manual focus abound. And the best part is that most people don't want theses lenses, which means there are some really fantastic lenses out there for next to nothing. A Tokina AT-X 2.5/90 Macro, probably the sharpest lens I've ever used, for less than $400? Yes please. Or grab my favorite "normal" lens, the Minolta MC Rokkor-PG 58mm F1.2 for about $350. + +Thanks to an abundance of adapters you can use these on virtually any mirrorless camera out there. I plan to invest in full frame mirrorless because I want to use them at their intended focal length, but they'll work on an APS-C or even micro four thirds camera, you'll just be using them at 1.5x and 2x their origial focal length. So the Tokina attached to say a Sony A7ii is a 90mm lens, slap it on a Fuji X-E2 and it becomes a 120mm equivalent. And on the GF1 it would be a 180mm equivalent. + +No matter which digital camera you chose you'll end up with, to my mind anyway, the best of both worlds, the conveniece, cost savings and tremendous post processing power of digital and the solidly built, smooth focusing aperture clicking mechanics of manual focus lenses. diff --git a/house-todo.txt b/house-todo.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ccfc8b7..0000000 --- a/house-todo.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -House todo: - -finish website -call attorney -list on Zillow diff --git a/ko-kradan-wally.txt b/ko-kradan-wally.txt index 25ad9b5..241b50c 100644 --- a/ko-kradan-wally.txt +++ b/ko-kradan-wally.txt @@ -1,6 +1,23 @@ -In February of last year, Wally Sanger died of natural causes at Paradise Lost on Ko Kradan. +In February of 2015, my friend Wally Sanger died of natural causes at Paradise Lost on Ko Kradan. + +I spent two weeks on Ko Kradan. I arrived their on a whim. I had been island hopping, traveling alone after a long time with a group, working my way down the Andaman sea side of the Thai peninsula for the better part of the month, mostly by convincing day trip snorkel boats to drop me at various relatively remote islands. + +Ko Kradan was not supposed to be the last. I was heading down to Thailand's Tarutao National Marine Park and then perhaps into Malaysia, but I never made it. And the reason I never made it was Wally Sanger and Ko Kradan. + +There was a storm blowing in the day I was dropped off so the snorkle boat I had convinced to take me from Ko Hai down to Ko Kradan would only drop my at an isolated beach on the windward side of the island. I jumped out from the bow and my bag hit the ground about the same time I did. The boat was gone two minutes later. The beach was small and lined with a thick wall of jungle. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I could tell it would be pouring in 15 minutes. + +I sat down on the sand and smoked a cigarette. I figured, worst case scenario, I'd get a little wet. + +The guidebook I had claimed there was a trail to the other side of the island, and somewhere over there were a couple of guesthouses. It took me ten minutes to find the trail and another ten to make it to the other side of the island. The rain held off longer than I thought. The first place I encountered was Wally's Paradise Lost. + +He offered me a room, but at this point I had been in southeast asia for nine months, no way I was taking a room from the first farang I met. I might have literally been fresh off the boat, but metaphorically I was too cynical to take Wally up without surveying the island first. I set off for the other guesthouse on the sidea which was down on the beach. + +The rain hit at the edge of the tree line on the leeward beach. I followed a couple of dog deeper into the trees for shelter. A woman walked up off the beach and came into the thicket. We chatted for a while and she talked me out of even seeing the other guesthouse by describing it as “more of a refugee camp.” I did later head down there and that was in fact an apt description. + +I went back and got a room at Paradise Lost. Wally seemed entirely unperturbed by my snub and reversal; I trust he had seen more than few of my kind -- there's no shortage of self assured dumbasses in Thailand. I would not have blamed him for being a bit standoffish with me, but he was in fact the opposite. That night he pulled some ribeye steaks out of the freezer for me, as well as Tony and Zoe, the only other people staying there are the time. Sure, I paid for the steaks, that's not the point. They weren't on the menu. + +The whole of Paradise Lost was like that. There were quite a few layers to the place. There was the one most people saw while I was there, which was the standard guesthouse experience. It was a clean, friendly and cheap place. There'd be no reason to complain if that was all you ever got. -I spent two weeks on Ko Kradan. I arrived their on a whim. I had been island hopping, working my way down the Andaman sea side of the Thai peninsula for the better part of the month, mostly by convincing day trip snorkel boats to drop me at various relatively remote islands. Ko Kradan was not supposed to be the last. I was heading down to Thailand's Tarutao National Marine Park and then perhaps into Malaysia, but I never made it. And the reason I never made it was Wally Sanger and Ko Kradan. diff --git a/mold.txt b/unused/mold.txt index a9724e1..a9724e1 100644 --- a/mold.txt +++ b/unused/mold.txt diff --git a/sketch.txt b/unused/sketch.txt index efa7f11..efa7f11 100644 --- a/sketch.txt +++ b/unused/sketch.txt diff --git a/technology.txt b/unused/technology.txt index bfd7577..bfd7577 100644 --- a/technology.txt +++ b/unused/technology.txt |