the same damn acorn again

I think I may need a little more variety in my subject matter. I'd really rather be taking photos of flowers, but it's not exactly spring out there, is it? I guess I could go buy some flowers or rob someone's flowerbed or something, but it just wouldn't be the same somehow.

While I'm waiting impatiently for the seasons to run their course, I've been taking some pics of a pinecone I had on my desk at work. I've forgotten where I originally picked it up or why, but it'll be a change from the acorn, I guess.

foliage on film, fwiw

A few more pics taken with that vintage film SLR I've been playing around with. I did a bit of GIMP tweaking on the ones with the fern, since the camera obviously doesn't have that fancy digital auto white balance business. I gather you were supposed to use different types of film depending on where you thought you might be shooting photos in the near future. Like I'd really know that in advance, or something.

I'm also still playing the exposure settings guessing game. I did find an old analog light meter dating back to the 50's or 60's, but I haven't figured out how it works quite yet. Once I do, then I'll have to figure out whether the selenium photocell still gives accurate readings these days. Oh, well. I chose this silly little hobby, didn't I?



Below are a couple more macro shots for your entertainment. I had the sense to use a tripod this time, along with a cable release I just found at a junk store, but I didn't have enough light, having forgotten to use the flashlight this time. So I did what I could to correct it in GIMP, and these are the result. I can't really regard these as high art or anything, just as documentation of my ongoing learning process.

Yet another toy camera: JamCam 2.0

Turns out that this coming Saturday (October 20th, 2007) is "World Toy Camera Day". And it just so happens that I recently added to my small but growing menagerie of toy cameras, so I figured I'd take one for a spin today. I realize that technically I ought to have waited until Saturday for this, but I didn't. Oh, well.

So today's delightful gadget is a JamCam 2.0, which is what passed for an inexpensive digital camera back during the previous century. You get 24 shots at 320x240, or 8 at 640x480. Or 48 at some godawful postage stamp resolution I can't recall at the moment.



Ignoring image quality for the moment, the JamCam has three big problems. First, the user interface is strictly from the stone axes 'n bearskins era. The $14.99 VuPoint camera I bought new a few months ago leaves the JamCam in the dust, UI-wise, and the VuPoint is nobody's idea of intuitive. It might be easier if I had a manual, but it didn't come with one, and I can't find one on the net either. Which brings us to problem #2: The camera's manufacturer has long since shuffled off to the great bit bucket in the sky, and it's tough to find drivers for current operating systems. This site claims to offer downloadable drivers and more, but first you have to register, and their registration system is either nonfunctional or remarkably slow. So making Windows talk to the JamCam is still an unsolved problem, but luckily someone's written a JamCam app for OS X. JamX only claims to work for the subsequent JamCam 3.0, but it works like a charm with the earlier camera too. Problem #3: While the ergonomics aren't bad overall, the shutter button is easy to hit by mistake. I actually used up most of my "roll" of 24 exposures when I shoved the camera into my coat pocket. I must've had the shutter depressed, because the camera silently took one dark frame after another until it ran out of memory. Niiice.

On the other hand, the camera looks cool. It's brighly colored and excitingly chunky, which counts for something. I haven't actually tried to damage it, but it looks pretty robust, at least by camera standards. It only cost six dollars, which is an important point with toy cameras. It's reportedly a good camera for infrared work, if you can live with 640x480 resolution. It has a tripod mount, believe it or not. If you can find software for it, it talks to your computer over USB, not some cheesy serial port link or SCSI cable or proprietary connector or whatever, and on top of USB is our old friend TWAIN, just like the VuPoint and every flatbed scanner in the land. And it takes a standard 9 volt battery, not some hard-to-find proprietary thing. Ok, sure, I've never seen a 9 volt battery in a camera before, and the world may never see the like again either, but every convenience store carries 9v's. So the camera ought to be usable for a long time to come, and maybe that's good and maybe it isn't.

I say "maybe it isn't", because you'll never make the cover of National Geographic taking photos with a JamCam, as you might've inferred from the photos here. And all of these except the last one were run through GIMP for a bit of brightness/contrast and color balance work. The originals were generally darker and full of dull bluish-purple tones. I just couldn't post 'em the way they came out of the camera. Sorry, purists. In my defense, mostly I was just correcting for the weather, which was dull and overcast and blue-grey everywhere.

The night pics are a bit more, er, interesting, with all sorts of exciting color artifacts. I have no freakin' idea what the third photo down from here is supposed to be. Maybe it's the inside of a coat pocket or something. I had no idea my coat pockets were so exciting.







A few words about World Toy Camera Day, in case I've piqued your interest for some reason:

• A Flickr group dedicated to the upcoming holiday.
  
• A forum thread about the event on photo.net
  
• A post on Moominstuff with more links & info.
  

Joan of Arc & Her Sisters

So here are a few photos of Portland's very own Joan of Arc statue, located in the traffic circle at NE 39th & Glisan up in Laurelhurst. I don't get over to Laurelhurst too often, so I vaguely knew it existed, and I vaguely recalled that she'd been restored a few years ago, but that's about it. Then in July, during this year's Tour de France, I noticed the riders passing a statue that looked exactly like ours, so I made a mental note to investigate further. (The riders themselves were probably too wigged out on EPO and steroids to notice the statue, but that's neither here nor there.)

So I made a special trip to go find the statue, on behalf of this humble blog's nano-horde of Gentle Reader(s), and took a few photos. I'd intended to use a bunch of photos taken with my "new" antique store film camera, but that was one of the rolls I trashed early on, so I've only got these two pics to show for all my trouble. There are plenty of better photos of Joan out there on the interwebs if you don't like mine: Portland Ground, Portland Bridges, Waymarking, and Dreamstime.

Updated 7/29/09: It always bugged me that the two photos attached to this post were fairly substandard, since it really is a very cool statue. So I went back and took a new batch, and I like to think they're a step up from the originals. I also added the now-obligatory embedded Google Map, just to keep things modern and all. I punted the original photos to the end instead of deleting them, I guess so you can make up your own mind about the "step up" thing, if you care to. I took some infrared photos too; they didn't seem to fit here, so they got their own post.

In any case, it turns out that our Joan has eight sisters scattered around the globe. The one in Paris, four others in France, including one in Nancy and another somewhere in the Vosges region, near the Swiss border; ours; two others in the US, in Philadelphia & New Orleans; and another in Melbourne, Australia. I'm not sure where all the French ones are located. The Musee d'Orsay has an ungilded statue that might be stone or plaster. I'm not sure if it counts as one of the four or not.

It might be a fun project to travel the globe and visit all of the statues. But a word of warning, it seems that the Paris statue is revered by the French far right, and they make regular pilgrimages to it and do whatever it is that French right-wingers do. If you see a bunch of disreputable thugs (or whatever French right-wingers look like -- I really have no idea) hanging around the place, it's probably best to steer clear. Or at least bite your tongue and not mention the fact that the guy who donated the statue was Jewish. Explaining this inconvenient fact to them will just make them irritable and stabby, if they're anything like our right-wingers.

Our own statue has no unsavory associations, at least not that I'm aware of. If you want to know more about it, and how it got here, there are a few good starting points OurLaurelhurst.org, Portland Public Art, and jejune meanderings. Or if you just want the executive summary, a local businessman donated it to our fair city as a World War I memorial. The same conflict also brought us our very own Stonehenge, out in the Columbia Gorge. In contrast, our official World War II memorial is Memorial Coliseum. It's certainly much larger than Joan of Arc or Stonehenge, but the Coliseum's gone a bit shabby over the years, and these days it mostly plays host to Winter Hawks games. Meanwhile both Joan and Stonehenge have been extensively restored within the last decade or so. It's odd how these things work out.

The traffic circle is a city park ("Coe Circle Park"), although as usual the city parks department's website doesn't list it. It does show up in assorted city documents such as this one, which is also one of the only mentions of cute little Jewett Park and the Talbot Property anywhere on the interwebs. Other than this humble blog, of course. For whatever that's worth. Said document also manages to misspell "Glisan" as "Gilsen", which I understand is a deportable offense, or at least one where everyone else in the office gets to make fun of you. Since it's a park, you can technically go and wander around, or have a picnic, or at least get a closer look at the statue. I didn't, as you can tell from my two photos, because crossing the street looked dangerous, and I didn't think it'd be worth it. But here's a report at Urban Adventure League about a gaggle of cyclists riding to the park and having a picnic there en masse. So it's obviously possible to do that with nonzero odds of survival, at least if you believe stuff you read on the net. Sometimes I think this blog would be more interesting if I was just a little bit braver, and/or less antisocial. But the thought passes quickly, and I go back to my usual photos of flowers and acorns and whatnot. So it goes.

Updated 7/29/09: For the new batch of photos, I did cross the street and get a closer look. Does that mean I'm braver, or at least more determined, than I used to be? It's fun to think so, although getting across to the statue wasn't actually a big deal. I just used the old "wait for a gap in traffic" trick, and voila. Yay for me, or whatever.

an acorn and an old camera

So a week or so ago I picked up a 60's-era film SLR camera at a local antique shop. I paid peanuts for it, because nobody wants to shoot film anymore, and nobody wants to tweak all those confusing exposure settings by hand. A couple of days later I picked up a macro bellows at a different local antique shop. I paid even fewer peanuts for it, since nobody even knows what a macro bellows is these days. I gather they're deeply unfashionable devices even in photo-geek circles. And I'll grant it's a rather awkward device to work with, even when you're just sitting at the kitchen table taking photos of an acorn.

I really ought to have kept notes about what I was doing in each photo, but I didn't. I think the first two shots were with the bellows plus a 2x teleconverter I tracked down at a third antique shop (and paid peanuts for), and with the bellows only extended a short ways. I think that's what I was up to, but I'm not 100% sure now. The next photo is basically the same as the first. I know I must've done something differently, maybe used a different shutter speed, perhaps, but I can't recall what I did now.



Since I'm new to this, I wasn't 100% certain of what exposure settings to use. I've been using my digital point-n-shoot to estimate other situations, but that wasn't possible once I started connecting macro widgetry, so I had to guess instead. I still need to track down a PX625-ish battery for the camera's meter. Although that might not be 100% reliable, since the camera really wants a mercury battery, ancient politically-incorrect beastie that it is. More about that fun situation and what to do about it here if you're interested.

So my big concern was whether I had enough light or not. The bellows came with a little chart explaining just how much longer your exposure needed to be at various bellows extensions. So to be on the safe side I cranked the aperture all the way up to 1.4 to let as much light in as possible, and set the shutter as slow as I figured I could do and still handhold the whole contraption. Putting it on a tripod just didn't occur to me. So setting it at 1.4 means you've got very shallow depth of focus, which to me is kind of cool. I've never had anything with a lens that fast before, so it's still a bit of a novelty for me. This setup is going to come in handy when there are flowers out again, several dark & rainy months from now.

I should point out that in this next photo there's also a fair amount of motion blur, which isn't anywhere near as l33t. Like I said, I'm new to all of this stuff.



Oh, and for the sake of completeness, I picked up the acorn at the MAX stop near Lloyd Center. I just picked it up and paid zero peanuts for it. I have no idea what the peanut-acorn exchange rate is like these days, come to think of it.



Now here we go. Holy narrow depth of field, Batman.



Oh, and here's my super-elaborate "studio", with the acorn ready for its closeup:

an unusual sunrise, fwiw

Or, Additional Adventures in the Blogo-Doldrums.

I happened to be up at dawn the other day, something I usually go to great lengths to avoid. The sunrise looked a little odd, so I took a few photos, and here they are. Are sunrises always like this? I ask, because I don't see them very often, and when I do, generally the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet. I'm curious now, but not quite curious enough to get up early on a regular basis, so I was hoping maybe someone out there on the interwebs knows. And then I can just say I'm sure it's true, because I saw it on the interwebs. Or something.

I also took a few photos with the "antique" film SLR I bought recently. But you won't see those photos here because I managed to ruin my second roll of film in a row. Last time I just didn't know how to thread the film into the sprockets properly so it didn't advance. The second time, I forgot it was 24 exposures, not 36, and tried to advance the film anyway, and it broke clean off. I blame both mini-calamities on bad habits I picked up with my last film camera, an 80's era fixed-focus point-n-shoot. It's not a great camera, by any means, but it did protect you from shooting yourself in the foot, which is something, I guess.

I did manage to get a third roll exposed and rewound without incident, and it's at the photo shop as I write this. I'm curious how it turned out, and I suppose a bit nervous too. I really shouldn't be nervous, since M42 SLR gear is extremely inexpensive these days. I'm having the pics put on a CD too (a medium only slightly less obsolete than film itself, if you ask me) so if they don't completely suck I'll post a few when I get 'em back. I might post a few even if they do suck, just for kicks.

I figured I'd post the sunrise pics anyway, since I'm kind of short on material at the moment. I do have one batch of mini-roadtrip photos I still haven't posted from way back in June, and I've seen a few bad movies recently, so I might write about those. But overall things are in something of a rut right now, both blogwise and otherwise. I'm not sure what sort of action is called for, however. Maybe we'll move overseas for a while or something. That would certainly shake things up a bit. This humble blog might even become interesting again, if I'm lucky.

Anyway, about that sunrise: It started out innocently enough...













As the sun came up a bit more, it got weird:











At the time, I was sort of thinking these might be mammatus clouds, but they weren't quite that dramatic, and we didn't get any severe weather afterwards. Unless you think 50 degrees and drizzly is severe. Which I sometimes do, if we get it day after day for weeks on end.







Things eventually tapered off...






... and ending in a perfectly unremarkable October weekday. Sigh....