Ebay Bargains from Rob

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I took this with a camera I’ve just bought….

In a vain attempt to get in some cash to pay for all the cameras that I seem to have bought over the last six months I’ve put a few things on ebay. The way I see it, I’m getting paid to make space in the cupboards. Win win. Although I will miss some of them a bit.

Every item will be perfectly packed and promptly posted.

Avoiding Photo Heartbreaks

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This is a nice part of cottingham

I now regard a new ten shot roll of film as “ten potential heartbreaks”. This is perhaps a rather depressing, but I think it’s is realistic. Digital camera users don’t really experience the sinking feeling film photographers get when they see the developed renditions of the lovely scene they composed in the viewfinder. And for a digital photographer; if a photo comes out wrong you can always take another one there and then.

Today I took the Pentax 67 for a walk and took ten shots. Then I developed them. Most of them were not exposed correctly - including the one above which required some serious fettling to get it to look reasonable. Robs black and white photography tips (which he really should follow himself):

  • Exposure is really important. Getting the right amount of light onto the film is crucial. I was trying a technique where you get a light reading from the darkest part of the image that you want to see, go back two stops and then use that as the exposure. I got this wrong (didn’t find a dark enough place) because the photographs were all horribly over exposed (I’d let too much light in). Before you dial in the settings do a quick “sanity check” to make sure that the numbers make sense. If I’d done that I’d not have ended up with the bad shots that I got.

  • Focus is really important. A perfectly exposed picture is of no use to you if it is blurred. Aim for sharpness and make sure that all the subjects that need to be sharp are sharp. If the people in the scene are different distances from the camera you need to either move to line them up or adjust the focus so that you have enough depth of field (the distance range in which things are sharp) to make the picture look right. The only good news is that you can make your out of focus pictures look a lot better by only using very small versions of them. So make a mosaic of your blurred shots.

  • Holding the camera still is really important. If you get exposure and focus right and then wave the camera around like a fire hose when you take the shot you will end up with a blurred photo. If the focus for a picture is wrong some parts of the picture will be blurred. If you don’t hold the camera still every part of a picture is blurred, and you will have to print it the size of a postage stamp to make it look right. If the shutter speed (the time the film is exposed to light) is less than a sixtieth of a second you need to steady the camera somehow. Use a tripod, put your elbows on a table or wall. Breath in and hold your breath for the time it takes to take the shot. Squeeze the shutter button, don’t press it.

There are of course lots of other things you can do wrong. Particularly if, like me, you’re daft enough to process your own film at home. But I do find that in the shots that I take there are some which are good enough to make me keep going.

Bought some board games

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Now I just have to work out where to put them….

I found out about the board game sale via the Yorkshire Boardgaming group on Facebook. This morning I was down in a garage in Willerby looking at hundreds of games arrayed on trestle tables. I started with a little pile of potential purchases, but then things stepped up a gear when I was told that everything was being sold at half the sticker price. I ended up with a boot full.

We’ve not played all the games just yet, but we did have a quick go at Tonari last night. I bought it because I liked the look of the game art on the box (this is how I buy most of my games). It turns out to be extremely strategic, with simple rules, pleasing play pieces and lots of scope for cunning. We can work our way through the rest of them over the next few weeks.

Bluetooth Chord Keyboard

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Now avaialble for left and right handed users with adjustable key positions

The Raspberry Pi PICO-W powered Bluetooth Chord keyboard (I call it “Blue Chords”) is now on GitHub. You can find it here. I’ve updated the code to use the latest version of the Raspberry PI PICO SDK and updated the PC design and matching case design.

I used the Kicadstepup plugin to import the board into the design

I’ve built some prototypes (you can see them at the top) but I’ve not built the final design yet. The project will be the basis of an article in an upcoming HackSpace magazine.

Smiggle Python Puzzle Game

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I’ve not maanged to make thie elephant yet, but I plan to Try

This is a nice little puzzle game courtesy of number one grand-daughter that you can pick up here. It’s a meter or so long and is made up of sixty little wedges which are all connected together in a line. The wedges can be rotated 90 degrees and you can fold sections back into themselves to make interesting shapes.

The connection between the wedges seems pretty strong, although the first one I got was in several pieces when I opened the pack, so you might need to be a bit careful. Well worth the price (especially now it’s reduced).

My AgendA Lives!

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She’s a bit dusty, and some of the dust is behind the screen…

I found my AgendA power supply in the garage today. I found the AgendA about six months ago, so this was quite a useful thing to do. The AgendA is a personal organizer from the 1980s with a fantastic chord keyboard. I loved using mine back in the day.

At first it looked like it was broken. Nothing appeared on the screen - then it started beeping every thirty seconds or so. Then I turned it off and on again and it sprang into life. The problem with the AgendA is that it uses nickel-cadmium batteries which have failed big time. So it only really works when plugged in. However, work it does. I’ve got the spreadsheet, some memory cards and even a low-level programming manual. Somewhere I’ve also got the serial and parallel connector cables. I might see about how much I can get working.

Next stop is the Cybiko……

Pardon?

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If you are wondering why I’ve put a picture of York city centre in a post about earwax, you have to ask yourslef what you would rather have a picture of…

I’ve been deaf in one ear for the last couple of days. The problems started when I was proving my manliness by going on the big water slides while on holiday. As a result I got a lot of water in my ears. Normally this disappears after a while. You get a warm feeling down the side of your head as half a pint of chlorinated water runs out of your ear into your collar and you get your hearing back with a pop and a gurgle.

Not for me this time though. My left ear was completely broken. I think a sudden inrush of water had forced a bunch of wax up into the ear and blocked it. In the long term I suppose this would save money on headphones and give me the perfect way of ignoring things I didn’t want to hear (which I have apparently been doing for ages). But I really wanted to go back to the stereo lifestyle and so today I tootled down to a place in Cottingham to have someone look into the problem. The process started with an examination of the working ear, which was completely clear. The broken one however, was very blocked. Ear wax removal involves using a funky sucking thing to gently remove the wax. My wax was apparently very sticky and it took several goes, plus some rinsing with another funky device, to get it all out. The sounds I heard during this process were awesome.

I was tempted to ask if they would do the job for half price, what with them only having to work on one ear, but in the end I was so pleased to get my proper hearing back that I paid up and left very happy.

Adventures in colourizing

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I’ve no idea how it knew that the dog was blue-grey. Or that the carpet had that pink bit

I’m taking lots of black and white pictures now. I thought I’d put one through the new Photoshop colorizing filter to see what it could do with it. The result is above. I’m actually very impressed. I made a few colorized pictures of people and it did a very good job on them too - even managing to spot the correct hair colour. If you really want a colour picture you should probably take it in colour, but it is nice to know that there are ways of adding colour that seem to work quite well.

Yet another camera for Rob

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This is the first picture I took… I think we are going to get along fine

Whisper it, I’ve bought another camera. It seems that I’m slowly converting all my music production devices into cameras. This was our first trip to York since before the pandemic. Last time we went I wandered into York Camera Mart and bought a lens. This time I’ve got a camera, for around the same price. It is a very old camera, but I really like the way it looks and how nice it is to operate.

When we got back home I processed the film and took at the negatives. Every time you take a picture on a film camera you are setting yourself up for a little bit of heartbreak when the developed version fails to match up to the lovely image in the viewfinder. This is especially true when you take black and white pictures. Things with different colours might map to exactly the same shade of grey and disappear into each other. I’m very happy with the shots that I got though. I need to work on my exposure technique - quite a few shots were over-exposed - but I’m very happy to do this because the camera itself is just so much fun to use. And now I’m going to sell another synthesizer….

Hello from Lytham

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I’ve on more piers in the last two days than I have in the last ten years.

Today finds us in Lytham St. Annes. It’s only a couple of miles from Blackpool (you can use the tram to get from one to the other) but it feels like a different world. The huge and wonderful beach is front and centre, although there are still piers and of course arcade machines. We did some kite flying, dug holes and buried bits of each other and all the other things you’re supposed to do on the beach. We even got to watch someone get their car stuck in the sand. Happy days.

The tide does go out a heck of a long way….

Hello from Blackpool

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The most difficult part of holiday preparation (at least for me) was deciding which camera to take…

We’re having a few days away. Today we headed onto Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Everything you would expect from a British seaside resort. I managed to talk folks out of buying me a “Kiss me quick” hat. But we did have fish and chips for lunch and they were excellent. Then we went up the tower.

This is a view through glass, but I still think it looks pretty OK

Behind the golden Mile

Use Proper Printing Paper

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The picture looks even better in the flesh. For some reason a photograph doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve been playing around with thermal printers and using them to print pictures. One piece of strong advice that I have for anyone else doing this is to get some proper thermal paper. While you can use cheap stuff purchased from stationers, you will get much better results with higher quality stuff. I’m using refills for the wonderful Kidizoom print cam. These aren’t massively expensive and they last a while. Plus you can print sticky labels too.

Lidl Led Panel

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It runs very well off USB battery packs

If you are after a led panel for tracing, or you want to back-light some negatives so that you can photograph them, you should take a look in the centre isle of Lidl in the UK. They are selling a rather nice LED panel for 10 pounds. The lighting seems nice and even to me, and it works very well. It goes quite bright, so you could probably use it as a softlight as well.

Tip Tips

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Took a bunch of stuff to the tip today. Going to the tip is becoming increasingly complicated. Now they have lots of different categories for rubbish. My pro-tip (which I will follow for next time) is to put different rubbish in different bags. Otherwise you will be standing there for ages pulling bits of cardboard out of a huge bag that you’ve just filled. Like I did. The other tip (at least where I go) is to go in the morning. The afternoons seem to be a lot busier.

One of the things that used to puzzle me back in the day was “How to you get rid of an old dustbin?”. If you leave it out for the dustman they just empty it and then move on. It turns out that the answer to this age old riddle is to take the bin to the tip and throw it into the skip by hand…