Finally hitting the bigtime
Hull Pixelbot has been around for a while and has appeared in all kinds of places. But now it has made it to HackSpace magazine. The latest version can be powered by a Pico and I’ve built a website which you can use to program it directly over a serial port. You can find the magazine in newsagents now.
The film certainly has that seventies vibe..
Phoenix film is quite something. It’s an entirely new colour film launched by Harman Labs, who also make Ilford films. I got myself a roll of it for Christmas. I loaded the roll into my newest old camera, the venerable Pentax ME Super and we headed off for York. It’s sold as an experimental colour film. It’s an experimental film all right.
My biggest problem turned out to be that Phoenix film likes plenty of light. But the Pentax ME quite likes to under expose a little for moody dark shots. So I ended up with a whole bunch of muddy underexposed pictures that were lacking in much colour. The picture above was of a vibrant shop front full of colourful cakes. The sharpness is fine and the shot is not without merit, but the above was only achieved after considerable tweakage to bring up the light levels.
I’m going to have another go with it later (assuming I can get my hands on another roll). And when I do I’ll expose it at around half its speed. And I’ll make sure that I’ve got something very big and colourful right in the middle of the frame.
I’m on the Agile Octopus electricity tariff, which means that the price of my electricity changes every half hour depending on the cost of electricity generation. The cost is predicted each day and so I can plan when to do things like charge up the car, bake a cake or smelt some aluminium.
I love it when the weather is warm and windy. This means that demand is low and the wind generators are busy. For the last few days the cost of power has been very low (everyone being on holiday probably helps too), with more than a few occasions when the price went negative and I was being paid to consume electricity. I didn’t actually get up at three am to get paid to charge the car, but I was very tempted.
I could show you the inside where the film is stored, but it wouldn’t end well
The device above is called a “bulk loader”. The big round bit at the back is where you put a big spool of film (best to do this in the dark). You then close off the film storage area and open the light-tight hatch to load an empty 35mm cassette. Then you close the hatch and wind 24 shots of hopefully unexposed film into the cassette.
It’s a way of recycling old film cassettes and saving money on film, as film in bulk is a bit cheaper to buy. I’ll let you know whether or not it works when I’ve run a film through the camera and developed it….
I did say “don’t move” as I took the picture. Not everybody heard me.
With family members heading home I thought I’d get out the pictures that I took with the 3D printed camera at the Rather Useful Seminar I did in November and do some Boxing Day development. One picture seems to have suffered with a light leak (I need to be very careful not to pull the film holder away from the camera when the dark slide isn’t in place). But the other is quite good. At least the people there will be able to recognise themselves.
I need to work on my exposure
Although I have a policy of not sharing family pictures, I thought I’d break that rule and post a picture I took of everyone round the table. This was taken with one of my large cameras and the best thing I can say about it is that the bits you can see are quite sharp….
Merry Christmas everybody.
These are great fun
Chibli Lights Cards. What better way to keep a grandchild and an uncle busy on Christmas Eve.
Should really have cleared up the marks on the negative
Today I developed the first film from my “super cheap broken Pentax”. The pictures game out great, including some of the family.
The camera even managed to pull some detail out of the foreground
If you are thinking of doing some film photography you could do a lot worse than pick up a cheap old Pentax like the ME super and run a film through it. These things were made a long time ago, but they are pretty hard to break. Some film SLRs (for example the Pentax K1000) sell for silly high prices, but you can pick up a Pentax ME Super for less than the price of a video game. Not because it is a particularly bad camera, but because it is less fashionable to be seen with. You get automatic exposure and a nice pocketable form factor. And if it breaks you can sell the bits.
I do like the multicoloured silk filament
If you’ve got a bunch of people coming to see you it is always nice to print them their own ghost with legs.
Of course its something to do with photography..
Just ordered one of these. What do you think it might be for?
I think the meter is working OK now
Today found us in Hull shopping for Christmas presents. Hull tip number 1: There are some lovely gift shops in the Fruit Market in Humber Street. Hull tip number 2: Have lunch in Ferens Art Gallery café. We had a great time and I took some pictures which actually came out OK.
A nicely exposed Hull Deep
Well, that was fun. Tonight we had a murder mystery event; “Death by Chocolate”. We all gathered together and tried to work out who dunnit. Nobody guessed the guilty party. But it was hilarious. I thought I’d managed to map the folks attending onto roles that I thought suited them well. Me, I was a ventriloquist’s dummy….
It actually looks qute tidy
The broken Pentax ME Super that I bought by mistake arrived today, as did the replacement winder arm. They were a perfect fit, once I worked out that the fixings were all “left-hand thread”. Most screws and bolts are tightened by turning them clockwise, but sometimes this is reversed. The way that the winder lever on the camera works, each time you wind the film on the mechanism turns in a direction that would tend to loosen a clockwise tightened bolt. So they made the winder lever tighten the other way.
The camera itself seems to work fine, although it looks as if it has been sat on or wacked hard on the top (or both) at some time in its life. I’m going to put a film through it to see how it goes.
I think I may be in the grip of a camera buying addiction. Ebay don’t help. They keep sending me emails telling me about things that have dropped in price that I might be interested in. As a result of one such message I seem to have bought a Pentax ME Super for fifteen pounds. It’s in the post at the moment.
The camera is cheap because it lacks a winding lever - making it hard to test. So I’ve also spent ten pounds on a winding lever. My reasoning is that the winding lever works I might have a functioning camera. If it doesn’t I can simply take the camera to pieces and sell the bits. Looking at the price of the parts, this might even be a profitable enterprise. I’m just hoping that these are not the rationalisations of an addict.
We had a splendid time at the Hull University Computer Science departmental Christmas party yesterday. David handed out a quiz from Instant Quizzes which was excellent fun, including a round where we had to identify chocolate bars from pictures of their interiors. And I was part of the winning time - whose chocolate bar knowledge eclipsed even mine.
They’ve covered every wrong way to do it
If you, like me, have been wondering why your Olympus OM2n camera (you know - the one you bought yourself for Christmas despite having promised not to get any more cameras this year) doesn’t seem to be measuring light very accurately you might be interested in this snippet.
You often find people using LR44 alkaline batteries to power cameras like this. After all, they fit in the hole, the meter needle moves about a bit and the batteries are easy and cheap to get hold of. But they are also a bad idea because these batteries only put out around 1.5 volts when they are brand new. Their output voltage steadily drops over their life, which makes the meter progressively less accurate over time. The fix is to get proper SR44 batteries which are exactly the same size but use a different technology which lasts a bit longer and holds its voltage right to the end.
Today, amongst other great achievements, I fitted a toilet seat and bought some pies. And I did thoroughly wash my hands in between.
Ready to rumble
I took the robots into the university to take part in the Computer Science Christmas Bash. There was quite a bit of interest, in spite of competing attractions in the form of lots of video games and a hard fought game of Risk going on at the same time. I think I need to make the gameplay a bit more compelling and come up with a better way of letting players test and deploy their code before the game starts. Great fun though.
Ready for action
Took some robots into the university today. The MQTT server port has been opened up and now all the robots work perfectly. Rugby tomorrow….
Colonel White
This is her backstory
I’m getting the robots ready for the rugby match tomorrow. I’m giving each robot a backstory. Because everyone has a backstory…
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
