Knuckledragger

In no particular order: Finished another roll of film. The first one I put through my Rebel K2 in 15 years(!) Still have no idea where I'm going to get it (and the other three rolls I have) developed. The only photo from my ferry ride back from the mainland that I've bothered to edit. Departing from MV. Those are some very Vineyard weather conditions unfolding. Makes for ethereal imagery. Fussing around with a circular polarizer on my 17-40L. The combination is a PITA to use because I have to adjust the filter with the lens hood off, re-attach the hood and then frame the shot. Testing out my 5D IV the first day I got it. Taken with my 50mm F/1.4, which I hardly use because I prefer my OG 1986 "Nifty Fifty" 50mm F/1.8 in every regard. A young buck across the pond. It is with great restraint that I avoid shopping for Canon 400mm or 500mm L prime. Wildlife photography is where dreams and bank accounts go to die. The contractor working on our house is ...quite a character. He's either greatly over or under medicated for his ADD. He's got a really nice doggo however. Her name is Turkey and she's an English Bull/Boxer mix. She has a gorgeous brindle coat. Watching her dart around my yard put me dangerously close to wanting a dog. A study of the tool shed my grandfather build in the 50s. Futzing with the 85mm F/1.8. Absolute silliness with the 17-40 at the wide end. From my first test of the nutty Suntar 135mm F/2.8 M42 lens I bought for under $20. It has an amazingly long minimum focus distance and an aperture that only increments in full stops. This was taken at F/5.6 or F/8 IIRC. I ran this images through Luminar 4 and applied a LUT to it. Did I mention I bought a Holga HL-C 60mm F/8 in Canon EF mount? It's enormously silly. I got a Asahi Super-Takumar 50mm F/1.4 in the mid 00s, as part of a lot of M42 lenses I bought of eBay. It's quite expensive now. I find it to be reasonably sharp when stopped down, but never particularly contrasty. I post processed the above two photos extensively in Luminar 4 and Photoshop. This is Sweetened Water Pond, which is the one across the street from where I live. It's normally a Vernal pond, going dry in the summer. It stuck around for all of this year and the ducks were quite happy about it. You've heard of Turquoise Hexagon Sun? This is Orange Hexagon Lens Flare. The Takumar's element coatings are decidedly a product of the 1970s. The CZJ Sonnar 135mm F/3.5 once again proving it's the best actual lens amongst the army of 135mm primes I own. Early evening moon. 85mm F/1.8 again. It is a really good lens that I don't use nearly enough.

Neat.

R34 Nissan Skyline in Akihabara Japan. Kodak Porta 400 in a Mamiya 6. [OC] Solid Jeep Owner/10. There's a lot to unpack here. That's a photo of a cracked Acer (laptop?) monitor, presumably taken with a phone and then printed on a vinyl billboard. That's beyond boomer/10. 1965 Chevrolet El Camino.

I I want to be clear, I have always been in favor of hacking the heads of little girls and putting 'em on my wall. My opponent has only recently adopted this position.

The official Biosphere FB account shared this link recently. That eccentric looking fella standing on the rocks looks familiar.

I've got a bunch of photos of high end systems stashed in a folder, and instead I'm gonna post these: The mainland house is now my remote outpost. I still have two NS-1000s stashed there, for a number of reasons (I have 4, I need some speakers in the old house until I demolish it, NS-100s are heavy as all fuck, and I'm not relishing the idea of moving them.) Sadly, my old 1970s Martanz receiver might finally be on the way out. One of its two "Protect" LEDs won't go out when I power it on. It also plays a monophonic signal no matter what I feed it. I think something inside gave up the ghost. The Yamaha receiver I helped my father pick out in 1997 so he'd have a sound system to woo his then-girlfriend (it didn't work out) was nearby, so I swapped it in. I never really liked the sound the Yamaha, it's kind of thin an anemic. It definitely doesn't have the balls to drive the NS-1000s as they were meant to be. With that said, it still works. How many other bits of consumer electronics from over 25 years ago can you point to that work as well now as they did new? The rest of the signal chain is the HeadAmp Pico DAC I bought off some HCer or other an eternity ago and my M1 MBP. Barely visible but of great importance is the USB-C to Mini-USB (vs Micro) cable I bought of bozos.com. I may have mentioned this before, but cables with that particular arrangement of connectors do not grow on trees. Both the Pico DAC and my HeadRoom Balanced Desktop use Mini-USC, so I make it a point to have a few of those cables on hand always. The sound of the above was ...fine. It's not like I had time for critical listening. I watched a couple old movies with my (sainted, octogenarian) mother while we were there. The TV is my friend Dave's 2006 DLP model he dumped on my lap when he skipped town. It will not being following me to the Vineyard, but it still works for now. Speaking NS-1000s... The other set are on the Vineyard. I spent the last two days clearing crap out of the living room, including: 9 boxes of records, four Unisound tower speakers I bought back in 2010 from some wacky site called ThingFling.com (a few HCers might remember them), and innumerable other things including an Herman Miller office chair that I am convinced wants to kill me. My back is not happy with me. I cleaned off the NS-1000s (which are 30 or so years old at this point, the Technics 1200 (ditto) and Outlaw RR2150 (much newer). If one knows anything about NS-1000s, it's that (A) the midrange driver is at least as famous as the speakers themselves, and (B) they have awful spring loaded speaker terminals. Earlier this year I bought a set of terminals specifically for this job: be s Today I dug out some speaker wire from a box in the attic and had it. The first record I put on was a 7" 45 of Yam Yam's Bahama Mama, which is a weird little downtempo ditty that defies description. You'll just have to hear it for yourself. NB: The version of the 7" is a bit different than YouTube rip, but that's life in the world of obscure promo downtempo vinyl. Next I rummaged up "I Spy" by Death in Vegas, which lifts a beat from a Notorious B.I.G. track. Lastly I found one of the four vinyl copies I own of Oliver Lieb's 1994 one-off album The Ambush. Talk about a timeless classic. I actually played all four sides of it and really listened to the system. Some Captain Obvious observations: The R2150 blows the poor Yamaha out of the water. The spot I chose for the 1200 is lousy, and resonance prone. Twelves are big beefy MFing turntables and resistant to vibration, but I could hear some unwanted resonance in the midbass range. The NS-1000s midrange is really something spectacular. The RR2150's phono preamp is very good, but it's hardly audiophile grade. With that said, listening some 90s (and one case, 70s) mastered vinyl through was just compelling. Vinyl is engaging in a way that nothing digital will ever be. I'm sure that 90% of is looking at the turntable spin and handling the actual records. It might be a very psychosomatic effect, but it's still a real one. EDIT: I completely forgot to mention the record in the photo. That's a 70s pressing of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. I played it in the wrong order (part II first) but it still sounded amazing. It's funny how the part everyone knows (the Exorcist bit) is a tiny segment in the beginning. Next week I'm replacing the 1200 with a television set. More on that later.

Oof. Matt Perry dies at age 54, apparent drowning.

Richard Moll, who found fame as a bailiff on the original sitcom ‘Night Court,’ dies at 80. RIP Bull.

Cars and cats, mostly. Firewatch_IRL. Mural in Amsterdam. First generation Mazda RX-7. Scotland has a police tractor.. "Put it in 'H'!" 300ZX Twin Turbo. Least confused Masshole. "Trophy wife." Trump's lawyer is using an Asus gaming laptop. 1971 Jeep J3000 pick-up. Studebaker Golden Hawk.

Nothing will top the ear-rape of playing Killing Floor with Colin, a decade or so ago.

Very long term HCers (which most of y'all, TBH) might remember I own a misfit assortment of vintage McIntosh gear. How vintage? 1969. Older than me. For reasons not worth explaining, in 1999 I got two C-22 preamps and one MC-75 amplifier. Two stereo preamps, one monophonic amplifier. Not exactly useful. With that said, I've stubborn held on to them for 24 years and counting. Today I moved them, and the amp nearly killed me. Glamor photo of the boat anchor I took in 2009. One of the pair of C-22s after I had all of the above serviced, 2009. A bunch of the Mac kit and other crap, hanging out in a spare bedroom, 2013. I stuffed the Mac kit, plus a bunch of other electronics, into an upstairs closed before I exited the mainland this past January. It collected quite a bit of dust. The MC75, looking rather grubby. I had a very bad moment getting it down the stairs. I grabbed it from the closet floor, and attempted to stand up. I was not wearing my back brace (100% necessary when lifting things these days.) I could stand up while holding the Mac. My legs said "yeah, that's not happening." Getting old is a real MFer. Eventually I got myself and the amp upright, but at significant cost to my back. After the above photo was taken, I did locate my back brace (stable door and all.) I loaded two pieces of framed artwork into the Fit (not exactly a specious vehicle) and used the MC-75 as a, well, anchor to hold them in place. There it sits. Yes, I straightened the damn 12BH7 once I caught my breath. This is the Fit, mostly packed. In there (besides all the Mac kit) is a Dynaco monoblock (visible behind the lamp), 3 wood clamps, a Technics SL-1200 Mk II, a Symetrix 528E voice processor (direly in need of servicing), a California Labs tube DAC I got from ...one HCer or other (which also needs repair), a Parasound DAC (still running strong, 30 years later), a Tascam 122 Mk III (the greatest cassette deck in history, I will die on this hill) that ALSO needs repair, a shit ton of semi-valuable fabric items used as packing material, my tool chest, and a giant "Ricky Ricardo" style chandelier. My (sainted, octogenarian) mother thinks I'm nucking futs. She's not wrong. My back is killing me.

A friend of mine posted about that thrift find in Discord. Turd in the punchbowl opinion: The Canon 50mm/1.2 is ass. It has remarkably lousy bokeh. It's better than the old Canon 50mm F/1.0, but so is basically everything else. TBH I'd rather have a good 50/1.8 like the OG 1986 Mk I. In the age of modern DSLRs and their insane high ISO settings, super fast primes are really not necessary. The cost and weight penalty brought on by super fast lenses is almost never worth it. Also everything I said above is not true for the the Canon 85L, and as best I can tell the Nikon and Sony 85/1.4s. Maybe I'm biased (I am) but the designs used in lenses longer than 50mm render OOF highlights in a much more pleasing fashion. In the case of the 85L specifically, it has this brilliant property of transitioning from the in-focus area to OOF seamlessly. The 85L paints the background in a way that the 50/1.2L completely fails to do. I have a bunch of photos I took back in the fall of '09 with the 85L and my crappy-ever-for-its-time 30D. I re-edited a bunch in the last few years. I posted some here a while ago, and I'll dig up a few more example later. Right now my (sainted, octogenarian) mother is pestering me to pack the cars to drive back to MV tomorrow.

I rescued what I believe is my grandfather's old table from my father's barn today: My grandfather went into a nursing home in 1994. My grandmother lived another 3 years but passed in 1997. My grandfather actually outlived my father by 6 months(!) There was a lot of chaos in my life between August of 2000 (when my father died) and uh ...today, really. At some point in the last 23 years I figured out that my father had grabbed a bunch of my grandfather's tools from the Vineyard and dragged them back here to the mainland. I don't think he ever actually did anything with them (he was already sick with the cancer that would take him.) I am far less inclined with anything involving woodworking than the previous two generations of men in my family. My grandfather build this house in the 50s, and expanded it in the 70s: (Seen here in regular digital, HDR, and Velvia 50, because I am a different kind of nut.) He also built this barn he called "The Doghouse": He also built the toolshed we moved next to it. My father, who was inhumanly energetic, invariably the smartest person in the room, and relentlessly competitive, was not going to be outdone. He built barns bigger than most people's houses: This was the "woodshed" he built, but he never actually put firewood in it. It turns out that he was even better at stuffing buildings full of ...shit, really. Meanwhile I'm barely qualified to assemble a shelf. Also I find most power tools kind of scary. Especially spinning blades. On the plus side, I still have all my fingers. Either way I'm dragging my grandfather's tools back to MV where they belong.

Not bad for a budget system.

I mentioned Katherine the dancer a number of times, but I haven't posted a photo of her in ages. She was a woman I met in a local nightclub not quite 20 years ago. She was a dancer in the New York club scene in the early 90s. For a variety of reasons she left NYC and now lives in a hill town in western MA. Katherine is ...quite a character, but I always had very good chemistry with her as a subject for photography. I took two sets of photos with her in 2006. The first of which was about 3 days after I got my first DSLR (the never very good EOS 30D) and the second was with the same camera 3 months later. At that time I had bought a 35mm F/2 and 50mm F/1.4. I also had learned quite a bit about taking photos, but still effectively knew nothing. Starting 2020, I began revisiting and re-editing the shots I took during those two sessions. I still pick away at the remaining unedited ones that I think are worth pursuing, but I'm largely done. In '06, I ran a bunch of the photos through the Holga and Lomo Photoshop scripts I liked at the time. In retrospect, it's clear I leaned in to lo-fi nature of the results those scripts produced to mask flaws present in the originals. 14 years later, I had different ideas, software and skills for editing photos. Instead of overly dramatic PS scripts, I've been working the use of lookup tables. LUTs are a thing primarily used in video, but with some careful work they can make subtle but impactful changes in still images as well. This shot always reminded me of the Houses of the Holy album cover. Taken with the never spectacular EF 75-300mm F/4-5.6 USM III. Her face is a bit blurred in this one, but I like the look of determination. A rare B&W conversion. This one just works better without color. Observant viewers will note that while I left behind many of my mid-00s bad habits, I still put a vignette effect on most of these images. I like how it looks on portraits.

These things are wild. Crazy phase correcting technology that I barely understand.

There's a French fella on Flickr named SBA73. He's got a Soviet made KMZ FT-2 panoramic camera from the mid 60s. Weird AF looking device. He's quite good with it: Apparently he develops the film himself.

125lb ~1200mm (1217mm, specifically) F/6.3 aerial espionage lens from WWII: It makes an "if you have to ask" sized image circle.

I like everything except for the position of that rotary mixer. Nobody wants to use a mixer placed at 90º near gut level. DJ Pro Tip(tm): Mixer location is far more important than where the decks are.

Cursed AI attempts a Christmas album by Arnie: I censored this one. AI legit dropped the hard-R N-word here.

Variations on theme: