Wow, someone claims they have created a monobath for developing B/W film (instead of dealing with agitation, developer, stop bath, and fixer over carefully watched increments of time) to process film at home. I found out recently I have darkroom privileges at UMBC when I go back to teaching in the fall, and I intend to take full advantage of that shit.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading about, testing, and evaluating different bags and backpacks in the last 5 years, because I spend all day with one as my primary mode of organization. I have ADD, and I use a bag as my base of operations: If I need to take my wallet out of my pants, it goes in my bag. If I need to put my sunglasses away, they go in my bag: everything in its right place. I know where everything is, and if it’s not there, something is wrong. It’s a system I’ve developed over the last 20 years to avoid losing things, so the design and functionality of a bag is very important to me. This is even more important when evaluating a camera bag, when the amount of gear and accessories is multiplied times 10.
When I came to WRI I inherited a ThinkTank Airport 2.0 suitcase my predecessor used to carry gear overseas, and it worked really well for the first two trips I took. Designed within standard airline carry-on baggage measurements, it fits in an overhead bin and holds a huge assortment of gear securely and gently. This worked well until I realized I didn’t need to bring everything with me, and started to pare down my traveling kit for the sake of weight and simplicity. One drawback to its design is that it doesn’t hold a laptop, so once I was on the ground I had to either lug the whole suitcase with me or split gear out into a separate backpack I’d also inherited, which did some things well but came with its own limitations.
ThinkTank Airport 2.0
This was a LowePro Fastpack 250 AW, and while it held a camera body, two to three lenses, and my sound gear with a laptop, I found that when it was fully loaded it was extremely uncomfortable for long-term usage. For short distances it did the trick but most of my shoots are all-day events and by the end I’d be aching from the straps or the distribution of the load. As a light-duty, incognito backpack it’s aces but it’s not an all-day rig.
So I hunted around for a new pack to meet in the middle. What I settled on was a LowePro ProTactic 450, which itself fits inside carry-on measurements but adds space and is designed for longer-term use. It’s roomier than the first pack and will hold about 80% the gear the ThinkTank will, plus a laptop. It has two zippered doors on either side for easy access to primary or secondary cameras, plus a door on top for a third. The outside is covered with MOLLE-like webbing for addition of pouches or straps, which came in handy for strapping a mini-tripod to the bag in Colombia. There’s a waist belt which doubles as a removable fanny pack, and a built in rain cover in the bottom.
LowePro ProTactic 450
On this trip I pared my kit way back: I took a Canon 5D body, a 24-105 f/4L, 70-200mm f/2.8L zoom, a set of Sennheiser wireless lav mics, a Zoom H4 audio recorder, a Zacuto eyepiece, a GoPro Session 5, a DJI Osmo, and a mountain of batteries for each camera system. On the outside I strapped a Zomei q666 tripod. My laptop traveled through security in a messenger bag (easier and faster for airport security), along with a Kindle HD and my Fuji X-T10. I found it relatively easy to work with but found a few flaws in practice.
The bag held the kit above with ease. I stuck the 5D/24-105 in the right-side compartment, attached the tripod to the left side with one of the provided MOLLE pouches, and put the Osmo in the top compartment for most of the trip. Getting into and out of the main bag opening was easy as long as the waist straps were pulled out of the way. Jumping into cabs was much easier with a backpack, and I felt more secure on the street wearing it than I would have pulling a suitcase around behind me.
The provided dividers were plentiful but for some areas of the bag wound up being 1/2″ too short to allow the velcro to reach both sides of the chamber, so I didn’t feel like things were as secure as they should have been. The waist belt was good to use with a full load, but the front half is nothing but a thin nylon strap, which cut into my stomach after a while. The fact that it can be separated from the pack is interesting, but I’d prefer it to be permanently attached and fully padded to offset the weight of several big lenses. The shoulder straps themselves are comfortable but could stand to be reinforced and widened by another 1/2″ or so; after a week of constant usage I noticed the threads connecting the straps to the bag were visible and beginning to pull apart. This is the problem with making a pack built to carry lots of heavy equipment: it needs to be made heavier-duty to stand up to all that weight. This pack is underbuilt for a full real-world load, and that shows.
I like the laptop sleeve, and there are three flat zippered pouches on the outside for things like papers, small straps, and other flat objects. Anything larger needs to go in the main compartment because it closes up snugly to the dividers inside. The included MOLLE attachments work very well, although they aren’t standard military dimensions. I did buy a set of 10 elastic strap fasteners from Amazon which came in super handy for tying my jacket to the outside of the pack.
Overall, I’m mostly happy with this pack. I think they’d be able to make it better by addressing those few gripes, building it stronger for a full kit, and removing a few of the whiz-bang features with better-engineered, simplified elements.
I’ve posted 5,200+ photos to Flickr since becoming a member in 2005, so it was with trepidation that I learned they were just bought from Yahoo Oath by SmugMug (a name I’ve always despised) after Yahoo let them gather dust in a corner. Glenn Fleishman says we don’t have to worry, that SmugMug isn’t going to fuck it all up. After a decade of nothing, I guess I might have a little hope it’ll get better… (previously, previously, previously, previously, previously)
This week has been a busy one at work. I don’t think I’ve stopped to breathe in the 34 hours I’ve been there so far, and by the time I get home my brain is mush. It’s a good kind of tired because I’m completely, fully engaged in everything I’m doing, and we are flat out with about 10 major projects going on, but it’s mentally fucking taxing.
I sold the Fuji f/1.4 lens to a guy today, down $75 from my original asking price (and $50 down from the price I had it listed for this week). In the last Curbside Classic story I wrote about the Jeep, I complained about the buyer trying to knock off $25 for a new battery and how much that annoyed me–to the point where I was ready to kill the deal. A couple of commenters mentioned that I was probably unrealistic in my expectation that buyers would simply pay me my asking price, which came as kind of a shock to me. I’ve been buying and selling stuff for the asking price (generally speaking) for years, feeling weird for asking sellers to knock some cash off of something I’m interested in…but based on the responses I got, I think I have to start being OK with feeling like a dick and trying to haggle some bargains. And I’ve got to raise my pricing by 5% so that I can knock it back off and get what I originally was hoping for. Now to ditch the drone and the old XBOX in the basement. Strangely I’ve had more inquiries about the XBOX, but there was one guy who wanted to trade me a quad or an old motorcycle for it…NOT. It’s good to have that lens gone and not sitting in my camera bag, and I think I’ve got to be a little more ruthless with the equipment I’m not using.
Warby Parker update: they will cut me new lenses for my old frames, so I put the order in today and will probably have to drive downtown to their hipster storefront to have them put in. When balancing a $50 repair over a $400 set of new glasses, I think I know which way I’m going.
We have the rest of the floor tile in hand, so the tile guy will be back sometime next week to install it all. Then, we’ve got to sort out how to purchase the beautiful glass tile we chose for the bathroom and afford the installation estimate, which will wipe out the rest of our bathroom fund.
My birthday was a couple of days ago, and a bunch of people sent me congratulations on Facebook, which I missed, because I don’t visit the site anymore. Meanwhile, it was just revealed that Facebook was scraped by some company run by a bunch of right-wing fucks who used the data to weaponize political ads into echo chambers. I stepped back from Facebook couple of years ago, except to respond to a few messages and one event invitation, but increasingly I’m thinking about deleting my profile altogether. Not like it’s not been scraped and used against me anyway (and I’m on Instagram every day) but why have it out there if I’m not using it? There’s also advice on how to privatize it as much as possible (or, as much as they’ll let you without secretly rewriting the privacy settings again) to prevent third-party apps from scraping more information. It’s still up for now, but I just shut down a ton of privacy settings I wasn’t aware were on.
Back in November my sister stopped in for a visit, and while she was here dropped off two boxes of camera gear she’d accumulated over the years. Inside one was a bunch of old Kodak bellows cameras, a couple of bakelite 620 favorites, and some other oddities. In the second box was a pile of mainly 35mm gear in various makes. There was a bag of Fuji gear with several lenses, and a pair of Minoltas, one of which is a cleaner twin to my X-700. Among the treasures was a first-generation digital camera, a Sony Mavica FD-7, which is now 21 years old and used a 3.5″ floppy disk to record data. It just so happened a video popped up in one of my feeds where the author reviews three Mavicas of the same vintage, and talks about their qualities and quirks. Apparently it’s hard to find an aftermarket battery that will work correctly with these, so my momentary desire to find and order a new one will probably remain just a desire.
What you see there is the underlayment for the heated floor. The black lines are heating wires that run the span of the room. The tile guy is now skim-coating the floor and may be laying tile as I write this, but he may be waiting until the other three boxes that I didn’t account for show up in a week.
I said goodbye to the Rolleicord yesterday, selling it to a nice man who is taking photography classes and will hopefully give it another productive chapter in life. Talking to him got me thinking about how to print the film I’ve got; one thing I’d completely forgotten about was the darkroom I’ve got access to at UMBC as a faculty member. At Service Photo on Saturday, there was an entire shelf of photo paper and other chemicals, and I’ve got a stack of 6×6 negatives that I’d like to blow up and print.
How happy am I that the Eagles won the Super Bowl and the Patriots didn’t? Very happy.
Finn played soccer on Saturday and the coach put her in at goalie for the first half. I was initially worried, thinking that she might get bored and distracted if the majority of the play was far away from her and then suddenly right on top of her, but she did really well. The coach gave her five minutes of good advice, told her what to look for and how to set herself up, and she listened to every word. She was focused for the whole game, stopped multiple shots on goal, and by the half her team was up 4-0. The smile on her face as she walked off the field made my heart explode with pride. For the second half she played defense and did well, but I think I’ve got to work on ball-handling skills and her aggressiveness on taking shots. She treats the ball very gingerly and needs to get comfortable with hitting it hard and knowing where she wants it to go.
Afterwards we celebrated with a donut and then headed over the bridge to Easton for Zachary’s birthday, a Nerf dart war themed party held at the YMCA. The staff set up a room with obstacles and the kids chose weapons from a bucket of Zachary’s collection (Rob went a little crazy with buying and upgrading the Nerf gun collection; Zachary probably has 15 guns in various sizes and shapes) and they threw the kids in there for a half an hour to duke it out. By the time the staff blew the whistle the floor was covered in Nerf darts and jammed weapons. LJ and I loaded magazines and cleared jams and got things ready for the post-pizza rematch and I spent most of the second half in the room with the kids, fixing and loading guns for the kids. I might have taken a shot or twelve while I was there too…
Afterward, we went back to Karean’s house and let the kids play downstairs while the adults chatted over wine and snacks. By the time we got on the road, it was 8PM and Finn was beat.
A few months ago I switched DSLRs with Jen so that she would have the best one we own. The D90 I have is still a very good camera, but I haven’t used it much because I was shooting the Fuji almost exclusively in 2017. I charged it up today to carry it with me this week. When I turned it on, I got an error on the LCD reading r09, which means various things according to the Internet. It won’t autofocus or trip the shutter, which means something is wrong with the autofocus system. Either I have to clean the contacts on the lens and the body, swap lenses, format the memory card, reset the whole camera, or sacrifice a live chicken. None of the solutions online helped, so it might be that I’ve got to bring it in for servicing.
OOOOOH, DJI just announced the Mavic Air, a new drone that fits somewhere in between the Spark (too small, lousy camera) and the Mavic Pro (gorgeous but expensive) in terms of price and size. Foldable, 4K video, a remote that syncs up with your phone, 2.5 mile range and 27 minutes of flight time per battery. My neighbor has a Mavic Pro and it’s amazing; this promises to be even better. I think my Phantom 2 is going on Craigslist this month.
Taken with a manual Nikon 1.4 lens
I’ve been getting cards from friends and family ever since this process started, and I’ve kept them together in a stack so that I can write back and thank everyone for their love and support.
I shot the photo above with the f/1.4 Nikon lens I bought a couple of years ago, and as much as I want to love it I’m going to just retire it. Pretty much everything I’ve shot with it looks fuzzy, foggy and out of focus. I’ve got an f/2 manual lens I got with an old Nikkormat camera that shoots cleaner, clearer, and sharper stuff more reliably, and honestly I think I’m over the razor-thin depth of field thing now in favor of better composed photos. I’m leaving the manual lens on Jen’s D90 from now on, as I’ve traded her my D7000 in the hopes she’ll like it more.