Monday, February 20, 2012

Eastman Kodak Shutter

I picked up an old Kodak shutter the other day.  I don't know what it wants to be when it grows up, but it's got a really nice look to it.  I might try to attach a servo to the aperture adjustment bits and see if it can add some "feeling" to a project somewhere.  Okay, so maybe I'd better finish the Voight-Kampff machine first...

A Few More Ilford Films

Trying out some new film.  I'm kinda stuck on Ilford these days .. you kinda never forget your first love.  It's all 120 format .. dunno which camera I'll put it in.  Maybe the Brownie Hawkeye would like a little field trip.  I'm gonna be especially interested to play with the SFX, which is infrared.  The messed up lens on the Hawkeye might be *just* the thing to complement that.

Film Rescue International

Film Rescue International just finished resurrecting an antique roll of 127 film for me!  It required a developing process that the dinosaurs used before they went extinct.  And I'd totally exposed half of it to indoor sunlight.  They still managed to coax a few shots off the thing.  These people are awesome!

You know, this is one of those awesome things about the modern individual's ability to communicate globally.  Big service bureaus need to do the one-size-fits-most thing, to be financially stable at scale.  But a handful of specialists, when they're the *only* people who can do the job, are able to make a living collecting bunches of small orders from the entire world.

This is very kewl stuff.  I'm curious to see where else the model can be applied to keep "dead" technologies alive.  Throw in some desktop 3D printers, scanned service manuals, a wiki, and now you've got all sorts of possibilities!

Thursday, February 9, 2012

OLED Screen is Operational

I got my new OLED screen to run the example code.  To draw my own bitmaps, I'll need an app that can convert a monochrome bmp into a character array.  So far, there's only a windows app to do the conversion ... though I wonder if ImageMagick can do it.

This display is for my robotics class.  Since my robot needs to be autonomous, printing debug information to the USB port isn't gonna work.  (At least, not for more than a couple meters, when the cable slack runs out.)  I'll attach this guy to the robot and print debug messages to it.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

First Roll on the Superheadz Blackbird-fly

Click for the Flickr set
I shot a roll of Fuji Velvia 100 on the new Blackbird-fly dual-lens reflex.  (Actually, a couple of the photos were taken by my friends.)  Here's what came out.

It looks like I need to give it a little more time in the low-light situations.  I usually add about 50% on top of whatever my light meter tells me .. but I think I need to multiply by two (at least) for this one.  Full sunlight looks okay, but I think that also needs more light.

Next roll, I think I'll try either setting it to the "overcast" setting in full sunlight, or multiplying by two when I do low-light shots.  Actually, I'm thinking I'll multiply by three.  This'll be a neat one to mess with.