this morning..

i was running late so i decided to not rush. late is late.

i talked to michael at the coffee shop a bit about books and what i’ll be reading next. i have one more book in the ender series. then i may read i, robot.

on my way to the coffee shop i stopped at a four-way stop with stop signs. a girl in a civic stopped at the same time, to my left. she started off and crossed me before i could go. i could have sworn you are supposed to give right-of-way to the driver to your right.

on my way to work from the coffee shop, i saw an old heavy set man on the corner holding out two pamphlets. he was looking over his glasses. i saw him as i was turning right and he extended his arms towards me, as if i could read the pamphlets from where i was.

and this morning, once again i am totally ruled by air’s how does it make you feel ……

do you know that when you look at me, it is a salvation?
i’ve been waiting for you so long
i can drive on that road forever
i wish you could exist to live on my planet
well it’s very hard for me to say these things in your presence
so how does this make you feel?

this is from one of my first rolls of provia 100f. it is one of two rolls i shot in san francisco on monday. 6×7 slide film is awesome to handle. i’ll take advantage of my coworker’s offer to do super high resolution scans on one or two of the frames.

my epson scanner did pretty well. i did scans at 3200 dpi, 48 bit color. in photoshop: crop, drop to 8 bpp, unsharp mask {500%, 2 pixel, 0 levels}, then resize. the images came out great. granted, i had to upgrade my desktop’s memory to a gigabyte before photoshop performed decently.

yesterday i took the day off from work. i spent the first half of the day walking around the mission district with my pentax. i picked the mission because it’s a very colorful area of the city.. i had decided to try out fuji provia 100f. i shot two rolls and change.

the second half of my day was spent recovering from the first half. almost all areas of the bay reported record temperatures, many over ninety degrees.

in the evening, i took ryan to a nice restaurant for his birthday, tamarine. the decor, service, and food were all excellent. definitely a place i’d go back to.

ok, this time around i picked up some items at the hayward show:

i almost picked up a fujinon 5.6/210… it was in pristine condition.. maybe i held off because it wasn’t mounted.. i should get a lens board wrench and look for used boards. then next time i won’t hesitate…

“sister carlotta quoted somebody in the bible about how a man and a woman marry and they become one flesh. very mystical and borderline weird.”

– bean, in shadow puppets by orson scott card

tonight i shot two images on 4×5 sheet negative film for the first time. in lieu of any proper equipment, i used 8×10 hard plastic trays for development (rinse, 1+25 rodinal @ 7 mins, stop, fix, rinse). my negative clips wouldn’t grip on the negatives, so i let them drip for a bit over the sink and i propped them up against a box to dry. one image is a shop window, the other is a textured wall. viewing a 4×5 negative is completely different than other, smaller formats. now i’m really anxious to pick up some color film.

decided to try a sheet of the type 79 today. the color came out rich and creamy. it looks a little better on the print than in these pixels. but you get the idea. controlling convergence is pretty easy.. now i want to learn more about controlling the plane of focus, then i think i’ll be ready to go out and play. i can’t wait to shoot chromes with this camera.

finished building jon’s machine and installed it at the colo last night. i’ve just about filled every cubic inch of my space allotted; next upgrade is to move the shell machine to a 1u server. i took matt with me, since he wanted to see the he.net colo.