soapbox

I only shot a handful of pictures in the hospital when Sarah was being born and I shot them all on film. Then, with the busy times, it took me a while to get things developed. End of story, one roll came back in the mail today.

Lately, I’ve only been getting negatives processed and then scanning them, so I was holding the strip of negatives up to the light. My thoughts were something like, “Waiting room, waiting room, hospital room, oh yeah, I remember taking a picture of that.” Then a few frames later, “Who the hell is that? What is going on in this picture? I don’t remember taking that!”

It turns out that, when we went into the OR, I handed my camera to one of the nurses and she photographed the entire c-section. In graphic detail. I’m actually kind of happy about it because now there’s a very interesting record of what happened. I’m very happy too that it was b&w film.

I like growing experimental things. Or at least experimenting with what I grow. As a kid in Alaska, I used to try to grow corn in our greenhouse, two or three whole plants!*

More long and boring story after the jump
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Chris may not post things on his own, but he does come up with some blogworthy stuff occasionally.

Michael made a post a while ago about the Eye-Fi memory card that can both store pictures in your camera and automatically send them to you. It turns out that they might not be such a bad idea, especially if you tend to lose things.

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0534545220080606

Basically, the woman had one of the cards in her camera and left the camera in a restaurant full of pictures of her baby eating its first food and other important pictures. The people who ended up taking the camera walked by an open wifi access point and all the pictures got emailed to the camera owner… along with pictures of the kids who took the camera.

(I’ll try not to get on my high horse about the fact that doing this basically requires that everyone be using unsecured wifi base stations named “linksys”…)

I was taking a little break from editing a paper and walked through a park right next to my office. There were some girls waving around a stick on the other side of the park so I walked over that way to find out that they were trying to defend a hurt bunny from a hawk. After a while, they realized it was kind of pointless and wandered off.

Anyway, I need to carry my real camera with me because the camera on the iPhone is shit by comparison.

A few notes: I saw this hawk a couple days ago on my way to lunch, so it apparently lives on the JHU campus. The campus is bordered by a pretty large wild park, so there are lots of birds here. Other than it being a juvenile something or other, I can’t identify it. I saw the bunny today on my way back from lunch too. It wasn’t doing a lot of moving around at noonish, so I’m guessing that the hawk chose the slow bunny to eat.

I found these plans for a paper pinhole camera that looks like a boxy 35mm SLR. The plans were originally published in a Czech engineering magazine during the Soviet era. Conveniently the pdf includes instructions in both Czech and English. It was a pretty easy build. I’m about 90% done with it. The hardest part was smoothly popping the end off an empty film canister so that I could reverse the spindle to receive the exposed film (I used a bottle opener). I pasted the printed pattern onto some black posterboard before cutting it out, but I think I’ll also tape over all the edges with electrical tape before my first shoot. Hopefully I’ll post some pinhole images soon.

Would you say this squirrel has been eating flesh? Check out the bloody teeth (click image to view larger).

focal length: 23.8 mm (142.8mm in 35 mm equivalence), aperture: f/3.5, shutter: 1/160, distance: ~0.5 m

I took this on Boston Common. Those squirrels have clearly learned that people won’t hurt them and might even give them them food: he was only about 2 feet away from the lens. I didn’t feed him.