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Not today, but yesterday: had an interview with a hiring manager, it's a really good fit both ways. They called me back THE SAME DAY to set up an (actually) in-person interview, which means they will probably move forward with an offer. I am excite.

Dropped Peter and Karen off yesterday for their four day backpacking hike up a chunk of the Long/Appalachian Trail

Inspired by Satyrnine's project and an attempt to recover from my Tube input CFA3smd failure some time ago I’ve been busy with this today. I call it Cascode Tube Input Something - intended for my CFA3smd something. +220/+15/-15V and filament needed. Based on ubaltoblatubeschem2, thank you Kevin.

I dug out and fired up my 30D for the first time in 6? 7? 8? years today. There were a number of false starts. I had to set the time (it had only lost half an hour, which is amazing) and it didn't like the first three CF cards I fed it. Finally, it stopped complaining and I tried some shots with 50/1.4. Confirming things worked, I immediately reached for my ancient Meyer-Optik Orestor 135mm F/2.8 "bokeh monster." My purpose was to photograph to old old widgets that belonged to my grandfather. I had the benighted notion to post the images to reddit's /r/whatisthisthing, but that subreddit has a slew of poorly defined rules and an aggressive AutoMod bot so they can individually and collectively go F themselves. With that said, I took a whole bunch of artistically questionable shots of two 19th century objects while making egregious and unnecessary use of a shallow depth of field: Old East German glass is a hoot. See more here and more broadly my use of manual focus lenses here.

A great way to end a graduation ceremony, as I have my priorities. Cannoli's for the masses!

Hello old friend.

Happy belated!

@crappyjones123

As the zoomers say, that last one hits just right. Serious purists would grouse about "nisen bokeh" but as most photographers eventually figure out, faults can make a lens interesting. I haven't taken too many photos since moving to MV, which is silly as when I lived off-island I took photos like mad when I visited here. I mentioned a while back I bought the Moment and Hipstamatic apps for iOS: Hipstamatic is never not silly, but I actually really like the framing of this image. The faux vintage effects add nothing, TBH. This one actually works pretty well as a photograph, hipster or not. Not hipster at all. The Edgartown docks. IR 5D, 17-40L at the wide end, F/4, 1/60th, ISO50. Straight out of the camera with no edits at all. This happens remarkably never. There are two types of photographers: those who have no idea about metering for infrared and liars. My street. IR 5D, 50mm F/1.4 @ F/8, 1/200, ISO100. I ambled around the neighborhood with the 5D and faster 50mm. The latter is actually a terrible match for the former, for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that the 50/1.4 has a huge bright spot dead center in infrared that doesn't appear at all in the visible color spectrum. Curiously, my older 1987 50mm F/1.8 doesn't have this problem at all. Of all the photos I took this afternoon, this was a last minute one as I was crossing the road. At the time I remember thinking "well, there was no effort in that one so it will suck." It was the best of the bunch, by a huge margin. South Beach, EDG. Moment app on iPhone 13. I adjusted the EV down a bit. I do not get along with touchscreen controls. Some days I wish I'd sprung for a 13 Pro, but the price difference could get me a Canon 35mm F/2 IS. The gateway to South Beach. Also Moment on the i13. I got the sea horizon reasonably straight but that didn't stop be from loading the image into Photoshop, pixel peeping and getting that MFer as level as I could. I do like the framing on this one. About 5 feet ahead of the previous photo. I adjusted the horizon and fussed over the levels of this shot quite a bit. It looks remarkably non-pseudo-HDR, and I consider that to be a success at this point. Missing from this image: the cold AF breeze coming off the Atlantic. EDG harbor again. Taken right after the IR photo at the top. The late afternoon sun was gorgeous and the iPhone was the best (visible spectrum) camera I had on hand. I did correct the horizon but didn't make many adjustments otherwise. I like it. Throwback Thursday: ("Knuckles, it's Wednesday.") Truly a monstrous edit. I started with a not very good photo I took and had previously edited in 2005 and rand it through Topaz Gigapixel AI, upscaling it 6x. Then I loaded it into Luminar 4, where I made dozens of tweaks and applied a lookup table. Next I used Topaz DeNoise AI to clean the image up and remove some of the posterizing effects brought on by Luminar. Lastly I dragged into Photoshop, used QuickMask to select the sky and denoised and otherwise cleaned it up (it needed a lot of work.) Then I straightened out the horizon and adjusted the levels. This was a project I worked on and off again for a week. Was it worth it? Probably not. I find the end result kind of amusing.

I¨m changing the pulley on my Perspex6 and doing some adjustments,: Jimi Hendrix: People, Hell & Angels,

Here's one of Dukei's he sent me. Primo work as usual:

Probably on the night my Dad lost all of his money!