First eBay experience
I've always been a bit wary of buying stuff off eBay, something about it just always put me off. My recent acquisition of a old camera though is forcing me to give it a go.
I wanted a few things for the camera, a few more lenses I find 50mm a bit claustrophobic, it needs a leather case and some other bits. So I've been looking at eBay again. This past weekend I did my first purchase of a Schneider-Kreuznach Retina Tele-Xenar 135mm F4 Telephoto Compur Lens for my Retina IV camera, the item was a Buy Now and I was happy with the price so I got it.
The lens arrived this morning and is as good as new I'm very impressed with it, here is a shot of my camera with the lens fitted. It came in its original protective case and everything, not bad for GBP24!
I've also bought another Retina camera, this one is a Retina S, very similar to the IV but it includes 35mm and 85mm lenses, bags, kit bag and all the goodies even some thirdparty book on the Retina cameras. Still waiting for this one to arrive though.
The second auction wasn't a Buy Now so I had to way up if I wanted to actually try and bid on it or not, in the end I decided to go with one of the Sniper services. I searched around, there are tons out there with payment options going from monthly, yearly, per item etc it was hard to choose which one. I eventually came across Gixen, it's a free Sniper run by someone who is passionate about doing so and I felt happy to use his service rather than some company I guess it's years of using Open Source. Anyway in the end I got the item after the sniper did it's bid, now I am just waiting for the knock on the door.
Domain Name Suggestions
Recently I had to buy up some domains for my employer - iTouch - so I typed into a domain registrar the word itouch to see what it came up with, what was available etc.
It also showed me a bunch of suggestions of other similar domain names:
It's wonderful, IsItWorthTheHurt, ItWillHurt, ItHurt these are great and a lot of ex-itouch people will want to rush out and buy some of these I am sure, but the best of the lot has to be WhyDoesItHurtWhenIPee, priceless.
Film Development part 2
Last night I developed my 2nd roll of film, this one went a lot better than the first.
I got the film into the spiral without any hassles at all thanks to some tips on the Flickr "I Shoot Film" group. There are also several other useful resources, a photoset that shows it step by step complimented with some text to describe it and also a very good PDF from Ilford called Processing your first B&W Film.
I am using all Ilford chemicals and film at the moment based on the PDF file above and I am happy with the result so I'll stick to it I think.
In terms of cost, it's hard for me to say exactly now since I bought all the actual equipment from Jessops due to the website I got it from screwing me over, if you buy from the right places and do some research all the chemicals and tools you'll need shouldn't set you back more than GBP60.
There are some recurring costs for the chemicals, below a little table of costs and estimated amount of film I should be able to develop with each:
| Chemical: | Cost: | Expected use: |
| Ilfotec LC 29 Developer | GBP5.68 | 17 |
| Ilfostop stop bath | GBP3.36 | 34 |
| Ilford Rapid Fixer | GBP6.96 | 17 |
| Ilfotol Wetting agent | GBP8.14 | 100s |
Based on the above the cost of each development is around 84p, add to this a fair amount of tap water but that can't really be quantified in an amount.
Films I have bought till now at GBP2.99 each from places like Jessops, but I am waiting a shipment of 25 rolls of Ilford HP5+ from 7dayshop that cost GBP1.89 each.
DPReview on the D80
DPReview has finally posted their in-depth review of the D80, in the past with my D70 I waited for their review before buying the camera because there were a lot of questions about it, with the D80 I didn't bother waiting since the word on the ground from those in Asia who got it first were very good.
From the conclusion part of the 29 page review:
The number of cons, and the fact that there are no serious ones, is a testament to the thought and work that has gone into the D80's design. It's one of those cameras which just feels 'right and sorted' from the moment you pick it up. Things just get better the more you use the camera, you will begin to discover the usefulness of major features like the customizable automatic ISO and the subtle touches like being able to tap the DELETE button twice to delete an image
This is a very good review and they give the camera a 8.83 average out of 10 points.
Very interesting to me are the new areas they've started including in their reviews, these relates to RAW vs JPG performance and for me it validates what a lot of people have been saying, always shoot RAW the advantages are staggering, now it's been quantified.
If you look at Page 19 of the review they go through a test that defines the color range captured in JPG vs. RAW - a full explanation of dynamic range is in their Glossary. The test clearly shows that in a RAW file will give you a lot more luminance out of your images than just shooting JPG would. The D80 now has a RAW+Fine JPG mode so you can get best JPG and RAW files out of it for each photo, this gives you the best of both worlds.
Another RAW vs JPG related test in the review is that of resolution, it basically just takes a group of lines on a piece of paper that comes ever closer to each other, this demonstrates when the camera just cannot tell the difference between 2 lines anymore. The D80 test is on Page 16 near the bottom. From the samples you can clearly see that by just shooting JPG you will loose a lot of finer details in some circumstances.
Film Development
I've recently blogged about my Kodak Retina Reflex camera and wanting to do some development etc.
I ordered all the needed goodies from http://www.firstcall-photographic.co.uk/ who I at first thought had a good service, I mailed them and they confirmed the order was shipped and should be with me today, at 4pm the ordered arrived incomplete! You'd think if you mail them asking for a update they would tell you they'd only ship half of it. Anyway, so I won't be using them again in a hurry.
I rushed into London at the 5pm rush hour to the Jessops and spend another small fortune on tanks, measurement beakers, and all kinds of other crap to get this going and developed my first roll tonight.
There were some hiccups getting the film into the developer tank coil as you have to do this in total darkness inside a bag and it involves cutting bits etc, it really is not fun, so I managed to get some kinks into a frame here and there but I guess I'll improve in time.
Overall I am very pleased with the first attempt you can see most of the roll here.
Mac Freeware goodies
A quick post to point out some Apple freebys that I've come across recently, first up is a replacement for the standard unzip tool that comes with OS X, it is called Unarchiver and adds support for a ton of new formats from inside Finder:
It is very simple to use and install - simply copy it into your Applications folder or
whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either
be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver's
preferences.Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt
and many other more or less obscure formats. Support for so many formats is
achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.
It's opensource and unobtrusive, there really is no reason not to use it.
Second app is a replacement for the normal Flickr Uploader, this one is called Gleam, it is still early days for it but already it shows major potential, supports Geotagging, setting custom descriptions etc before uploading and some other nifty stuff, if you're a Flickr person and you use a Mac you should check this out.
Kodak Retina Reflex IV Manual
I recently posted about my circa 1966 Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it came with a manual and as you can imagine these manuals are very rare. I took my scanner and scanned in the manual, the result is available on my Flickr Stream.
I've already come across one very happy Flickr user who had the camera and no manual, I hope more people get some use out of this.
Kodak Retina Reflex IV Retro photography
I've often wondered about doing my own development of black and white film and full manual cameras but never succumbed to the temptation, till now.
This weekend I picked up a Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it's in mint condition, original box and manual included. It's missing a lens cap which might pose to be a big hassle as they don't have what we now consider standard threads on its lens.
The camera is really amazingly built, the full mechanical operation is really impressive and while the ergonomics of using it is totally dismal compared to my Nikon SLR's I think it's quite manageable.
I bought it spur of the moment for GBP50 and just popped a color 35mm roll into it for some testing, the results aren't bad at all:
So my intention with this is to go down the route of black and white film and do my own development, I probably won't do printing since we have a really good negative scanner here and the printing equipment requires lots of space and a dark room and all that, things I don't have.
More information about this range of cameras can be found on Wikipedia. The stall I got this one from had one of each of the 4 models made.
Some new photography gear
My trusty Nikon D70 has been in for repairs for the best part of a month now, it is suffering from the Blinking Green Light Of Death which is a pretty common bug in the first batches of D70.
It's now around 2.5 years old which is pretty good going for me with a camera, yet Nikon is still fixing the problem under terms of the warrenty, the only problem is it's taking some time.
So I picked up a Nikon D80 2 days ago, the body cost me 600 pounds including delivery and a 2 year warrenty, I also got a Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. I am especially excited about the lens as it was promised to be in the shops last November already but it never made it, I've been obsessivly looking for one but no suppliers have been able to get stock, 3 weeks ago I found one just sitting on a desk in a shop and immediately picked it up.
I am very impressed with both, the combination together is a really good combination and I do not regret the £1100 the set put me back for 1 second.
I've only taken a few shots with the D80, you can see them here.
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- Caffiene infused. 2am to bed day before delivering the last talk of the day is not recommended
- Once again discovering that something as simple as correct MX and NS records is a very effective CAPTCHA to weed out idiot hosting companies
- I love the E4 ipad ripoff ad http://srt.ly/epad
- RT @garnaat: The only accurate model of the system is the system itself. All other representations are a compromise. <- what he said
- Parallels announces support for Google Chrome Operating System http://bit.ly/aCXXCJ
- RT @brunns: RT @jaywgraves: This is pretty awesome. http://bit.ly/aJ12Gb
- Kelway are totally wicked hardware suppliers. Threw away a £100 cable by accident, they gave me a freebie replacement
- Police stop runaway Toyota Prius http://bit.ly/904jED
- Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby http://bit.ly/cttcgQ
- RT @lochii: http://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic <-- mosaic now on github, yay!
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
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