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Did I say film scans? I mean "through the viewfinder" silliness. So there's a longstanding technique of pointing modern digital cameras at the viewfinder of old film cameras. Specifically top down viewfinders as most TLRs have. This process works best with medium format cameras that have large, square viewfinders. I don't have one of those. I do have an early 50s Praktica F. X 2 35mm SLR that has a wacky waist level viewfinder. First off, the photo that inspired me, all the way back in 2009: Oskars Cirsis on Flickr pointed his D700 at his Pentacon Six (neither of which I have and both of which I covet) and really hit it out of the park. He wisely removed the viewfinder hood, which would make the Six hard to use, but much easier to photograph. It only took me 14 years to finally get around to trying out this technique myself. Alex Yanchenkov did the same thing in late 2012 with a 5D Mk II pointed at a Kiev 60. Same idea done in 2018 with an iPhone by Josh White on Flickr. The iPhone's pseudo HDR makes the process much easier. As I have said, I don't have a medium format camera. I've priced out various MF SLRs and TLRs on the 'bay, and they suffer from the "small pickup truck syndrome." 10-15 years ago, they were dirt cheap on the used market. Now they're all "no lowballs, I know what I have." It's a really weird time to be alive. The F. X 2 SLR I have is 35mm of course, so it has a much smaller viewfinder. It also has a pesky flip out focusing loupe which gets in the way: It folds away ...mostly. Also my poor F. X 2 is much, much more dirty than this example and no amount of cleaning will fully restore it. With that said, others have used this exact camera for through the viewfinder photos: Both done with a smartphone. The telltale pseudo HDR is all over these shots. NB: I don't hate the fake tonemapping that smartphone camera apps do for snapshots but it's one of those things that cannot be unseen. So anyway, I've made a couple attempts at my own TTV shots over the last few days: F. X 2 with an Ashai Super-Takuma 50mm F/1.4, wide open and infinity focused. Shot with a 5D IV and 35mm F/2 (F/16, 1/4, ISO100) which has had a broken AF motor since 2009. I used a pair of tripods, so there's legs visible all over the place. Same as above, except for I swapped my Tair 11a 135mm F/2.8 in place of the Ashai. The following day, with the Ashai 50 again, this time using my iPhone (which weighs about 1/100 of what the 5D on a tripod does). It was not my plan to capture the truck in the middle of the viewfinder. I was explicitly trying to avoid any cars, but I live on a busy road. Even on a Sunday, there's a bustle of vehicles going past. With all of this said, the truck did manage to get itself framed rather well. "I meant to do that!" Bonus: This is what the setup looked like from my first attempt (using my 17-40 vs the 35mm). The problem here was that the sun was beating down on the deck and the camera body was brighter than the viewfinder. Also, I've been looking at non working medium format cameras on the 'bay. The problem here is that besides the "small pickup truck" syndrome, TLRs are for the most part quite good looking cameras. People like having a TLR as an art piece on their mantle or wherever. While I'd love to have a non-working Rollei (Bill Tague's personal one, photographed by me in 2010), the prices of them are too expensive for what they are. I understand the appeal. Rollies are beautiful mechanical marvels. There are some cheaper models out there: This Ansco Anscoflex II TLR 620 is $50 plus shipping. It is, and I want to be delicate here, also the UGLIEST GODDAMN CAMERA I HAVE SEEN IN MY ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE. It has the most horrific institutional aesthetic to it imaginable. It looks like it was used for mugshots in 1963. It is genuinely so repugnant I'd rather be condemned to a life of shooting Kodak Gold 200 than ever use it. I'd rather quit photography for another 10 years than have it in my house.

I did a quarter century (just under) in honor of your ride prep. Considering a half century before leaving Michigan soon. Congrat on beating your goal!

What was that? Sorry, I didn't hear you.

Diet Coke and The Beach Boys 5th row center, but the bloody chairs were aligned wrong to the stage, so it was just a hair left of center, but still, not too shabby. The Beach Boys obviously had to give it up to the greatest Beach Boy, Sir Uncle Jesse. Sadly, he wasn't there this day, but they're playing Vegas in a couple weeks, and I wouldn't be surprised... The Beach Boys covering The Ramones - Rockaway Beach Rockaway Beach - The Beach Boys covering The Ramones.mp4

Touch Yello (Deluxe) Yello 2009 https://album.link/i/1443789417 Example: It is more like a soundtrack to a David Lynch film. But I am here for it.

BBC History Of Photography

I think the first album I bought was Dear Science and the first and only turntable I bought was JP's old Sony PS-X7

Your first record was much less embarrassing than mine. I got the RCA record player/speakers combo (mod 70's blue plastic/with stand), for Christmas. I was 10, and the two records I got with it were Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii and The Chipmunks.

The lady is stupid and gave the son whatever he wanted, now he steals a kiss from a player at a very inconvenient moment, the guy should resign, the mother shows how stupid she is. Nothing you haven't seen elsewhere

I think my first vinyl "rig" was around 1971 or so as well.... Definitely had it by 1973, as I remember my first vinyl (J Geils Live Full House) playing on it. It was either a Craig or Fisher, complete with 8track, receiver, and turntable. Something like the below.

Me too. I didn't get my own vinyl system until 1971. 😝

Forgot to take pics of the rest of our lunch but corn nuts and tempura fried zucchini with blue cheese tomato fonduta (sauce) and pea shoots were a very good start.

Went with the cheap AT table. She asked me if she could only put one speaker in her room and figured anything more was overkill 🤦‍♂️

learning to make soup dumplings

Thanks, Al, #NFLO. Got in a solid training ride yesterday with two of the other guys. We ripped the first hour at 21mph and then decided to chill the heck out.

Morrissey Viva Hate, vinyl

Good point (especially applicable to Spain... unfortunately) 😞 Has anyone read this? It is by a certain Maquiavelo written back in the 16th century....

Man, not until you were in your 30s? Damn. Glad you got something finally, though.

Whoa can’t believe that thread above how not only old it is but how much a vinyl newb I was

I love Yello so hard. I even got their ridiculous multimedia boxset.

Hello Corte Madera! Rounding out the summer season with Danny Click and the Hell Yeah's (He has some groupies who know all the words!)

Another round of Fondant Potatoes.

The question is less about the possibility of faking it, than it is your track record for this kinda stuff. It's not like you're some random yahoo showing up with "proof"

So a person accused me of faking my scope picture, because it had to be my signal generator. And that the amp performed better at the higher gain setting. I completely disagree. Q15 has no emitter resistor and the resulting gain of just this transistor is 30db. which makes the miller capacitance absolutely huge. which is why you see two different slew rates. the first bit is due to the output amp (everything left of r12 which is a diamond buffer driving a pair of current mirrors driving another diamond buffer). The second bit is due to Q15. edit: shenzen audio is now selling these things brand new in the box on ebay for $50 off. soon it will be $100 off.

Just started watching this last night (s1e1). Enjoyed it, and will continue.

Looks good, but to me, without 🍌 or 🥭 chutney, kinda lacking

w/naan, sans 🍌

What.

I think I'd get one of these Audio Technica offers. Nothing to adjust, good speed control, and what is more important to me, a more than decent cartridge.

U-turn Audio Orbit Basic is also $249 There are a variety of colors to choose from. https://uturnaudio.com/products/orbit-basic-turntable

Thanks Peter. Now sitting at 95%, I donated personally today to make sure some of my contribution adds to the doubling effect.

The rock history podcast I listen to just had an episode on the Band and "The Weight." What a great goddamn song. Have heard it a million times and I could hear it a million more before I get sick of it. RIP Robbie, btw. https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-167-the-weight-by-the-band/ One of my favorite versions of it is on Before the Flood. Killer live album front to back.

I bought Al's niece, Dorothy a pair of those Edifiers. For the price, I find them pretty amazing. Along with a U-turn Audio turntable (with built in phono amp) and a cheap Blu-ray player for CD and video playback, and she has a system that's easy to use and with built in Bluetooth, her phone is her usual source.

Anthony Garcia - Live in Zug, Switzerland: Seagraves Serenade:

Project Brazen ... announced the launch of “Spy Valley: An Engineer’s Nuclear Betrayal” The series, hosted by award-winning intelligence and national security journalist Zach Dorfman, explores the story of a man named James Harper, a Silicon Valley engineer turned spy, and how he began selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Bloc. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spy-valley-an-engineers-nuclear-betrayal/id1696589693

I've been going through scans of film exposures I took in '06-09. I had very mixed results. For reasons still unclear to me, I had massive beginner's luck with Kodak BW400CN and Fuji Velvia 50, followed by some just awful photos (largely due to bad processing I think.) I experienced hugely mixed results with Kodak Gold 200, which is to say I did quite well with a meh film stock. I also had a lot of fun with a couple trash cams. One I bought at a dollar store in 2006: Shown here last week (taken with my new 5D IV and 85/1.8). I actually had two of these IIRC. A black one and this blue one. Both have crappy plastic 35mm F/11 lenses and lots of light leaks. I got rid of the black one at some point, because one dollar store camera is arguably too many. I also had (and still have) a Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim: Seen here in the summer of '08. It's got a 28mm F/22 lens and considerable better build quality than the $1 camera. It's still a plastic toy, but it's a damn Leica by comparison. I put 3 rolls of film through the $1 camera(s), and one through the Vivitar. I had mixed results with both. At the time, I only uploaded a handful of photos from each roll. Revisiting the scans I'm much more forgiving of bad shots now. My relaxed attitude is for a host of reasons not the least of which is the fact that's been 15 years. Below are only newly uploaded photos. I might go over some ones I liked back in '08 later. The family cottage on MV, taken with the $1 camer and Kodak Gold 200 in November of '06. I really like this shot, and not just because the cottage has been torn down for over a dozen years now. The $1 camera managed to do organically what all the Hipstamatic type cameraphone apps attempt to recreate. The hill across the street from my house on MV, November '06. This shot has been hugely popular on Flickr and I'm not entirely sure why. The truth is that it was a cold November day, but not nearly as bleak looking as the $1 camera and Kodak Gold made it out to be. Pointing a cheap plastic camera with an F/11 lens and fixed 1/30th shutter at the setting sun is a dumb idea. This is a terribly exposed shot, but the car with is headlights on makes the image for me. I get a strong 70s horror movie aesthetic from it. My yard on the mainland, October '06. Six years before I had a bunch of trees cut down. That's an authentic $1 camera light leak on the side there. The view from my back yard on MV, April 07. $1 camera and Kodak Gold engaging in some impressive synergy here. Another shot of my back yard, very similar to the one above. Most of those trees are gone now. What these two shots illustrate is that lighting is the single most important part of photography. Also water is wet, and I strongly suspect it rolls downhill. Edgartown Harbor with Chappaquiddick in the background. That's the famous Mad Max catamaran sailing along, which is something I only just down figured out. My mother had a good friend on MV for many years named Ruth. She was an Austrian, born in 1924. Ruth had done a great many things including being a skilled sailor. She spent her last years owning a farm on Chappaquiddick (Chappy is not that big and there are not many farms on it.) Ruth took a very dim view of Mad Max precisely because it was a catamaran. The first shot I ever took with my Canon EF 17-40mm F/4L, 7/23/08 - 5:58PM (by that point I'd learned to take mostly complete notes on time and exposure.) I had the 17-40 attached to my Rebel K2 loaded with Fuji Superia X-Tra ISO 800 bleh print film. Not a very interesting shot, but it was my first time using the 17-40 on a full frame format. None of the photos I've posted so far had any edits to them, except for this one. The colors were too washed out and the contrast was just awful, so I relented and did a slightly cleanup in Photoshop. $1 camera and Kodak Gold, October '06. In this case, the cheap plastic lens made the image look cheery and nostalgic and less like a horror movie. I have ...a lot more print exposures that I've gone through. Next time: A cheap fisheye adapter a friend lent me attached to a mid 1950s 50mm prime, further evidence that 35mm F/2 is my favorite lens and maybe some terrible B&W shots. Also maybe some current stuff taken with the 5D IV.

Black Cat is a pretty sweet for medium dark roast; I don’t consider it a negative for espresso, but I could see why others would. I’ve been using Elmhurst Pistachio milk for my milk drinks, lately. It’s delicious, and if even I can get basic latte art with it I would say it’s easy to work with. Recommended. Sorry about the Argos taking so long! AeroPress will happily show you exactly what you are getting from your grinder, and I bet that is a delicious cup. How loud is the P100, Bryan? One of my cats hates the Niche (doesn’t mind other grinders): it’s maybe not enough on its own to get me to spend so much on one, but I take his well-being seriously, so maybe it’s a good excuse!

I have some very good discussions with my son about various political theories: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, and variants.... Ultimately I argue all would fail, because people will be in power, and they will be corrupted in some way. Theory is one thing, application into reality another. What Antonio says encapsulates much of that belief. It would almost be better to be in the Matrix.... But we are faced with the lesser of evils at this point, so I will do what I can to keep that lesser evil....

IMHO the "problem" is not the number of parties. The problem is that their delegates in the chambers and government work for their own agendas and lobbies, for their personal benefit, not for the people that put them there and is paying their wages and gifted lives. They're incapable of working together for a general common good, finding compromises and agreements to make things to work and to improve. They just don't care and what's worse, they play the game of making people enemies of each other by pulling emotional strings based on lies, stupidity, beliefs and whatever can be used to not let us think.

Said me to a twink NEVER! 😘

I am not sure I have recovered from this one, but I might watch it again.

They look delicious but for a former hotshot lawyer, it’s time for an Ooni. Even this soon to be hopefully retired…shhhh…small town lawyer, an Ooni is a necessity.

Cheese Buldak. The rice cakes were sticks and looked like marshmallows poking out under the charred cheese. Divine, if I do say so myself.

first grilling of the new year. prime tomahawk

I made brisket chili today so that dinner would be ready when I got home, I then decided that I wanted biscuits as a side.

Pre-Test - all is looking good, though all my suitable thermometers are broken..

Austria is offering free public transportation for a year, but you have to get a specific tattoo first. Did they even say it out loud before enacting such a policy? Even read it back once to themselves?

Bob Barker, Longtime Host of ‘The Price Is Right,’ Dies at 99 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/arts/television/bob-barker-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=4YbM2mJnqZNndwBV99ivNoczqtsUTXhji-ygPqyfZBZYrVsUtTAxCzomNTRZMbpq7DwJ_1dcCBDeWojww25xevkjZfWLhYRg5l5zeFHHbWUYSNSF6r4dwnXGuigODMHtALYuQRKQTWW2Nzgiu1Qrw3zBSxK39OpBrytH0d8lyJqra54rkyFNcs9jmHLvAPOmkmlpJSQ2aj-NZke1aSa2K7bBXYs4NH5i_FkjZS0J1izeHq38BwzwtWUIwbIZ6neObqg6LopEdJd8Rql7aiFHSShB-rtrLVXegHBovBAI97M_sJIzg4tBQFOVMzKYUm1fg0TrY5QbgdXwfti7LeOySg&smid=url-share

No. I bought them for myself. Very shellfish of me.