Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally

/

There was a whole community of small traction engines

After a shaky start when the Whitby event was cancelled owing to bad weather our steam engine summer has gone from strength to strength. Today finds us at the Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally which was completely awesome in every way. We had great weather, lots of things going on and and lots and lots of steam.

A very nice piece of kit

I was playing with a zoom lens which was fun to use but very hard to hold still. The lens was made before we had things like image stabilisation.

Love the line about flying airships

Hulls best kept secret eating place....

/

I probably shouldn’t let too many people know about this one, and from the crowd there today it seems that the secret is probably out there anyway, but the café in Ferens Art Gallery in the middle of Hull is a very nice place to get lunch. Great prices, great food and great service. And a chance to look at some wonderful artwork while you are there. When we went they had an Open Art Exhibition which was fantastic. You’d look at a lovely piece of work and then discover it was made by a six year old. Gives you hope for the future.

Cheap film

/

That should last the month….

Film photography is expensive. Unless you compare its price with things like beer, at which point it starts to look like quite good value. If you want a good place to get cheap inexpensive film stock I can recommend S&J Foto who have Fomapan black and white film at rather good prices (although you do have to remember that the prices shown on their pages don’t include 20% vat).

Mysterious Tractor Matchy-Matchy

/

The game is quite fun though….

Every now and then something happens that makes your world rock slightly on its axis. I had one such moment last week when a courier turned up with a large box. Which contained a tiny deck of cards adorned with pictures of tractors. It’s a very nice implementation of the pelmanism game. Only one thing wrong really. I’ve never ordered such a game. In fact I don’t even own a tractor (or have any plans to get one). I’ve carefully checked the order. My name and address are all properly entered. I’m not sure where this has come from. I’ve contacted the supplier to try and find out what is going on. Most strange.

Watch the Tetris Movie

/

Not entirely factual…

We watched the Tetris movie last night. It’s really good. There seems to be a glut of “commercial” movies around at the moment. I think there is a even a “Beanie Baby” film around somewhere. Shudder….

However, the thing about the Tetris story is that the story is quite a bit stranger than fiction. Although it isn’t quite as strange as the fiction in the film. There definitely weren’t any car chases or May Day Parade shenanigans in real life. Worth a watch though. And if it piques your interest (great word “pique”) you should take a look at the excellent “Tetris: The Games People Play” by Brian “Box” Brown. This tells the story of the game as a brilliantly drawn cartoon.

Of course the real reason for me mentioning the Tetris movie is so I can reprise my one claim to fame, when I actually had my picture taken by the inventor of Tetris. Not with, by…

I was in Russia at the time, helping to run Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. I had just entered the judging room and noticed Alexey Pajitnov in the corner. He was helping out with the game judging. I was trying to think of a way of telling him how much I liked his game that he had not heard before when one of the student team members came in. The student saw me and decided that he really wanted a picture of himself with the famous Rob Miles of the Imagine Cup. He handed his phone to Mr. Pajitnov and asked him to take the photo. It is probably out there somewhere. And I never did get to say hello…

Pictures not of trees

/

Not sure about the passer-by

If you think my life has turned into a succession of days when I take an old camera out, rattle off a few snaps and then rush home and process them, you might not be far wrong. But then again, I am supposed to be on holiday. Or something. Yesterday it was the turn of the super-heavy Pentax 67 camera. This takes amazing pictures every now and then. I’d wanted one for ages and this year I’ve managed to get one of the earliest versions. I’m painfully aware of the possibility that the next time I wind on to the next frame there will be a twang or a whizzing sound and that will be that. But today all went well. We had a wander round the Fruit Market in Hull and we were blessed with nice light and some very impressive clouds. I’ve just got the shots off the scanner…..

Spurn lifeboat looking good

Hull tidal Barrier

The Deep

Humber Street

Developed in Rodinol 1+50 for 9 minutes. Negatives look quite dense, but otherwise OK. The last shot ran off the end of the film, so I might want to position the next film 1cm or so before the arrow mark in the camera next time I use it.

More photographs of trees

/

This was cropped from a square negative

This is the last set of photographs from the Dalby Forest trip. I’d taken along my Kiev 60 camera. It’s a bit heavy to carry up and down hills, so this picture was taken fairly close to the car.

I wasn’t able to get a good light reading from the camera so I took the shot with light settings I kind of guessed. I’m not unhappy with the results. Perhaps success in photography is all about getting better at guessing…

Getting better all the time...

/

I’m very pleased with how this turned out

After the mild disappointment of the pictures I took on Monday I was pleased to find that the second roll of pictures I developed today have come out a lot better. I’ve no idea why this is; although I suspect I might be getting better at working out the exposure. Or some days I’m lucky and some days I’m not. Either theory works with the evidence to hand.

Coming to a project near you soon…

I really like the idea that these images were created by chemicals and physics. And they pop out of the page in a most satisfactory way. At least for me.

Taking pictures of cameras is a thing

For your information (and so I don’t forget) I used 1+50 dilution and developed for 7.5 minutes at 21 degrees which is supposed to be for 50 ASA exposure. This seems to have produced some very tidy looking negatives though. Alternatively, it might just be that FP4+ is nicer film than the first roll I was using.

Strawberry Flavoured Milk for the Win

/

I suppose that now I’ll have to drink it all…

I’ve had my strawberry flavoured milk obsession for a while. Today I found a use for it. I’ve been looking for a nice box I can “upcycle” into a remote control for my latest project. Having decided that putting radios in tins is a bad idea I’ve now discovered this plastic Nesquick box. It looks like it will be perfect. I’m a big fan of getting boxes that are plenty big, and it seems like the top will be able to take the controls I want to mount on it.

Camera Mystery Solved

/

Turns out mum had a pretty good eye for a good picture

Got the pictures back from the mystery camera today. Some shots were taken by my mum around 20 years ago. So the camera must have belonged to her, and then found its way to me mixed in with a bunch of bits and bobs passed down by dad.

I’m amazed that they could still be developed today, and look pretty good. Next thing to do is put another film in and see if the camera still works.

Blurs in the woods

/

This is one of the better pictures

I took one of my lovely lenses for a walk today. We were celebrating being married for an unfeasibly long time and we went to Dalby Forest, one of my favourite places in all the world. I was hoping to take lots of pin sharp pictures of the scenery but when we got back and I developed the negatives I was a bit disappointed. I need to work on my exposure, and remember that wildly different colours might all end up looking grey when rendered into black and white.

Agile Octopus Histograms

/

This is a very nice lcd panel

I spent some time today working on my Agile Octopus price display. Agile Octopus is an electricity tariff where you get a different price every half-hour during the day. A while back I made a device that would get the current price and display it, but now I’ve added a little histogram that displays upcoming prices for the rest of the day. The picture above was taken at 7:14 pm. The solid lines in the histogram are the hours and the dotted lines the half hour prices. On the right you can see the minimum and maximum prices. It looks like the prices will be going down over the evening. We’ve found this quite useful when deciding when to put the washing on or bake a cake. The display is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO-W driving a rather nice LCD panel from Pimoroni.

It’s actually rather pleasing to make something that folks actually find useful and might even save us money.

The return of the sticky lenses

/

A while back I sent a couple of lenses to have them fixed. They both kind of worked, but one had a bit of fungus growing inside (never nice) and the other had super-slow iris blades so it was impossible to pictures at anything other than maximum aperture. I think someone had thought they could improve its performance by adding oil. Which is never a good idea where lenses are concerned.

They came back today and they seem to be quite splendid now. I’m looking forward to taking them out and grabbing a few pictures with them.

Dominion Calculator

/

Turns out I’m good at drawing hovels…

We had a great game of Dominion last night. The scores were very close, the last turn was played, the game ended. And then crashed. Everything locked up and we didn’t get the final score. Much unhappiness, because everybody thought they’d won. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to take a copy of the entire game log (you can cut it out of the window in the page) and saved it as a file.

So today I created “DominionCalc”. It takes in a log and figures out the player scores based on their actions. I don’t think it is perfect. But it did work out that I’d won. Not that anyone believed me.

Anyhoo, if you fancy having a go with it you can find it here:

https://www.robmiles.com/dominioncalc

Found a camera...

/

It’s a very neat device

I think my camera collection has grown to the point where it has its own gravitational pull and attracts other cameras. Which is a good thing. This morning I was tidying up the garage so that we could find the car (or something) and I found the camera above. It is a very neat little thing, but I’ve no idea where it came from. It has a nearly completed film in it, so I’m going to have it processed and see what we get.

Working with old film

/

I only did a tiny bit of post processing

A few years ago I bought some cheap film. It was cheap because at the time film photography was in what looked like terminal decline. Things have changed. Film is now popular and also super expensive. So I’ve dug out some of my old cheap stuff and I’ve been using in an old Pentax that I also bought a few years ago.

Today I took the exposed film into Max Spielman in Beverley to get it processed. When I picked it up they told me that the printing hadn’t worked too well for some of the shots and gave me a CD-ROM with the pictures on it by way of apology. I had a look at the negatives and they were very, very “thin”, which means that they didn’t get enough light to expose properly. This might be because the film is old, or perhaps my ancient Spotmatic has got the exposure wrong. Kudos to the Max Spielman folks for being so helpful. Back in the day all you used to get was a sticker on badly exposed prints telling you that it wasn’t a processing problem….

I’m getting to really like film photography.