my life, my thoughts, my world.

A few hours ago my sister and I landed at IAH. My two weeks in Scotland has come to an end. Now, I’ve got real life to tend to while also working in the development of many, many, many rolls of film. My color film will be heading off to different labs in an attempt to not spend a ton of money. The C-41 120 rolls are going to Fuji via Wal-Mart. It will take two weeks but there is not a cheaper option anywhere by any metric. The C-41 135 rolls are off for Aker Imaging tomorrow morning, I’ll have them back tomorrow afternoon. The B&W fun will start tonight. I need to mix up some fresh chemistry, but I’m getting started tonight for sure.

Anyway, these will tide you over until I can start posting photos taken with better cameras.

A few more cell pics.

This was shot just before 0100.

Castle Edinburgh

Loch Ness

Moray Firth

Mamiya C3 and Kodak Retina IIa @ Moray Firth

In unrelated news, I got the internship I applied for just before my trip. I’ll take the weekend of Independence Day to get back into the swing of life closer to the equator, and start the internship immediately thereafter.

I’ve only been here a few hours and I’ve already exposed three full rolls of film and finished the two I’d started yesterday. Impressive views everywhere are making me wish I’d brought more color film with me. The castle here is awesome.

The only digital camera with me on this trip is in the back of my increasingly annoying HTC Aria. Two of my film cameras have done the bulk of my shooting, which has totaled something like 9 rolls of film so far (with the 10th and 11th in progress). Good thing I brought 38 rolls with me. Anyway, it’s too gorgeous here not to share so here are a few cellpics.

These are the cameras tasked with really capturing my vacation.

A few weeks ago I bought myself copies of Ansel Adams’ instructional books on photography. “The Camera” was a quick read and contained little information with which I was not already familiar. As of right now, I am about two thirds of the way through “The Negative” and I’ve learned quite a lot. Several sources I’ve read attempted to explain the Zone System in summary. None of them ever made as much sense as the chapter dedicated to the Zone System in “The Negative.” Today, I took a trip into the back yard to try my hand a visualizing the values I wanted to see, deciding how to expose my film after carefully using my light meter, and then actually exposing the film. The results are quite encouraging. Quick scans are below, but next week I will be enlarging these negatives in the darkroom.

Update: No maybe about it, the diode was backwards. Resoldered that part of the circuit and all is well.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have little to no idea what I’m doing when electrons are involved. I’m a mechanical engineering major for a reason. Forces, heat, work, and power? That all makes sense. EMF, circuits, and all of that jazz? Voodoo magic.

That said, I’ve embarked on a project to build a digital timer. It’s definitely not my design, as I wouldn’t have even known where to start, but I found it here. I’ve made a few small changes to where I’m running the power, but nothing has changed (intentionally) with the circuits on the PCB. Sparkfun shipped me the wrong LCD, so I really don’t even know if there’s anything going on at all. I suspect something isn’t wired properly though, as no combination of button pressing will close the relay. If I power up the microcontroller, and then touch the wire connected to the base of the transistor to the end of the diode with the stripe on it the relay closes. If I touch the opposite end of the diode I get nothing. So that makes sense, I’ve scribbled on some photos to identify what’s going on.