Weston Light Meter

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A while back, on a visit to the wonderful West Yorkshire Cameras I picked up Weston Euro-Master light meter. The main reason I bought it was that when I was a young chap learning how to take photographs this was the absolute bees-knees in light metering. I didn’t think I’d have a use for it, but I really fancied owning one. And it was only a few quid.

I’ve got a use for it now though. I can use it as a “sanity check” with the MintTL70. I can get an idea of the state of the light before picking the aperture value and taking a shot. This will stop me doing silly things, like taking pictures where the exposure is so long that you get camera shake.

If you are thinking that all I’ve done with this is find a way of making photography harder and much more expensive you are completely right. But I’m having a lot of fun.

The Mint TL70 Vertical Learning Curve

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When I was researching the Mint TL70 camera the consensus was that it is awesome, but the learning curve you have to follow is a bit steep. I reckoned that having had film cameras back in the day I’d be able to get a handle on the device by using my experience. This has turned out not to be the case.

I took the picture of the puffin this morning. It is a bit darker than I would have liked. The camera has an automatic exposure which consists of a light sensor behind a hole on the front of the camera.

Modern cameras don’t work like this. They base their exposure on the incoming image. This gives them a bit of head start when it comes to working out what the exposure needs to be.

Precisely where you point the TL70 makes a big difference to what the sensor sees. If you point the camera up it gets loads of sky, adjusts for that, and then underexposes the image. If you point the camera down it sees darker ground, adjusts for that and then overexposes the image. The trick is to find the “Goldilocks” place to point it, where you get just the right amount of light on the sensor to get a good exposure. This is made a bit more tricky by the way that the Instax film doesn’t record a very large range from lightest to darkest. In other words you’re not always able to get the brightest and darkest parts of the picture at the same time. There are two ways to fix this, you either decide what you care about, and point the camera right at that. Or you change the scene so that there is less contrast about - perhaps by replacing the sky with trees.

The picture above has perfectly exposed highlights, but the puffin is a bit dark. I’m going to have to keep practicing. It’s actually rather fun. It’s going to make me a better photographer in the long run.

The curse of the greedy iPhone

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Once upon a time there was a greedy iphone. One day it decided to eat all its memory. “Yum yum” it said as gobbled up the last gigabyte for no discernible reason. The master of the iphone was very upset by this behaviour. Particularly as nothing now worked and he couldn’t run any programs or save any pictures. So he went on a journey on the internet to find out what kind of magic could cure his phone. He was even more upset when he discovered that even the greatest seers in the kingdom came back with “Thou must wipeth the whole thing and starteth again”. The master wondered why such a fundamental problem didn’t have a much simpler solution. Then he remembered that the wizards who had made the phone were probably busy adding tiny incremental features to the next version of the phone so that everyone in the kingdom could be persuaded to go out and buy it. This was much more lucrative work that fixing issues with phones that had already been sold.

So it came to pass that the master did indeed wipe his phone, removing everything and requiring a whole heap of re-configuration and re-registering of services. And eventually the master got a phone that was a lot less needy than before and all was well. Until the next time.

Putting the clocks back..

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I carefully set all the clocks back last night. Except for the two most important ones, the alarm and the heating controller. The heating controller appears to be able to look after itself. So, when I wound it back it this morning this did not end particularly well. All fixed now, although grinding through complicated menus on the clock radio at six thirty to stop the alarm from going off at the wrong time kind of took the shine off the extra hour in bed…

Greedy iPhone

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Mosty of the time the devices around us just work. Which makes the occasions when they go wrong all the more scary. Yesterday my iphone started moaning about being short of memory. Which was surprising, bearing in mind I don’t do things like record videos or put lots of huge games on the device. I thought I’d sorted out the problem by deleting a few movies I had downloaded but today it ran out again. Something in my phone is eating all the memory. Searches online list a bunch of things you can do to try and fix this which end with the action “wipe the phone and restore everything”. Ugh.

Mint TL70 Arrives

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The TL70 has arrived. Rather excited. It’s a twin lens reflex. There are two lenses underneath the lens caps above. One is for the viewfinder and the other takes the pictures. The lenses are connected so that as you focus through the viewfinder lens you are also focusing the camera one too. This means you get to do manual focus, something I’ve not had to do for a while. You also have to set the aperture (the size of the hole the light comes through). The camera then chooses the shutter speed (the time the film is exposed to light). If you get everything right, you get a picture that looks OK. Looking forward to trying it.

Spray Glue is awesome

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The non-sewing sewing project is coming along. I’m now making cases for things, still with flat components that are bolted together. I’m using spray glue to hold the fabric elements to the 3D printed sheets that give the case its structure. Spray glue is awesome. It’s really for sticking down carpets, but it turns out it sticks pretty much anything else too. Just make sure you open the windows before you use it.

Get them journalling

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A while back I mentioned some discussion on first programming languages for four-year-olds. I’ve been thinking about all this. If I could teach a child to do one thing from very young, it would be to start a diary or a journal.

One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I can’t remember that much of it. I’m lucky. I’ve been blogging for a while and I can go back and look at my posts from 20 years or so ago and get an impression of what I was up to. But if I’d had a proper journal I’d have a lot more to go on, including all the things that happened but are not for public viewing.

I envy the young of today who will grow up with a hinterland of pictures and sounds that will always be with them. Me, I can hardly remember what my bedroom looked like when I was 10. Perhaps 4 years old is a bit young to be emulating Samuel Pepys but getting the habit of putting in effort to remember what you’ve been up to is a really good thing. And these days there must be tools out there that you can use to get started. And writing a jounal does something else for you too. It gives you a reason to write and get better at it, which is a skill that will be useful whatever you end up doing.

First programming language for a four year old?

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People post the strangest questions on Twitter. Someone was asking about the best programming language to use to start teaching their four-year child old how to code. Perhaps they were asking in jest, or to perhaps to create the tweeting frenzy which followed as some people suggested Scratch and others weighed in saying that four is much too young. Which I think is the right answer. Although there’s nothing wrong with doing things together that show how much fun you have solving problems.

Instant Camera Fixations

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When I write a book I usually develop an obsession with something or other. It helps me take my mind off class constructor syntax or whatever I’m grappling with. For the Python book it turned out to be electronic music devices. For the JavaScript book it turned out to be robot dogs. this time it seems to be instant cameras. I’ve spent most of today writing chapter 7 and taking quick breaks to read all about the Mint TL70.