today we went to stanford’s cantor arts center museum for the last stop of richard avedon’s in the american west tour.
avedon is one of my favorite photographers and his work inspires me greatly. he shot more than 17,000 sheets of 8×10 film for this project, many of which were enlarged to epic proportions. the prints themselves are jaw-dropping. it was great to see them in person for the first time.
the display at stanford ends may 6th.
i’d like to think it’s the practice. i got the idea tonight that i wanted to try again — this time i had certain parameters in mind. i wanted the background darker. i wanted to use the heliar, since it has such creamy bokeh. and i wanted fast light fall-off, so i put the umbrella right in ryan’s face. focus.. tighten down.. closer shutter.. check that the power pack is charged.. *POP*
just found this at work..
[jasonsch@atlantis]~$uptime
9:32am up 1923 day(s), 15 min(s), 1 user, load average: 1.08, 1.02, 1.02
my coworker chris got this for me. it’s a bayard-alpert gauge. it measures vacuum based on the thermal conductivity of a gas. if you look at the larger size of this polaroid, you can see a a thin wire that goes up the center of the metal cage. around it is a cylindrical cage heated by a nearby filament. these are still sold today, so this item may not be that old.. and now i know a little more about how vacuum is measured.
same camera and light settings as the glass relay, only this item is sitting on a sheet of glass (which i broke soon after taking this shot).
thinking about this series, i want to push the background up a few stops still. i probably need to swap my lights - use the speedo for the background since it’s higher power, and use the novatron to light the subject. i need a small lightbank for the nova.. :)
this is the first glass-enveloped relay i’ve seen.
tonight i picked up some foam core board, so i am getting much nicer edges on glass now!
i’m thinking this serious of glass electronics will make a nice set of prints once i’m done. when i was growing up i was fascinated by electronics and parts. now i’m combining that with my love of photography, along with the challenge for myself to photograph glass. it’s keeping me going.. the guys at the halted specialties shop are asking me what i’m building with all these tubes! i really do find these components to be beautiful objects.
similar as other tube polaroids - carl meyer 12" at f/16, burke&james 8×10 racked way out to 2′, speedotron 202vf head at 50w-s, two novatron heads at 120w-s each on background.
i also shot this at f/45 and f/64 on ilford hp5+.
this is my first print from my new brass canon lens. it’s a simple meniscus design so it has a very unique look to it. my first image from it was a polaroid of one of our house plants. the plant just glowed no matter how i shot it. i was instantly in love.
the lens is roughly 14″ and f/4. with no shutter or aperture, i roughly mounted (stuck in a rough opening and gaffer-taped) in a lens board and used a black kitchen towel as a shutter. i shot this in the shade, which had about the right amount of light for my ~1/8 sec shutter speed. the film is ilford hp5+, rated at ISO 50 and souped in rodinal 1:50 for ten minutes.
now i need slower film.. :)
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this is my new toy. a speedotron kit - a 2403cx pack and a 202vf head. 2400 joules of output. i also got a 42″ umbrella and a air cushioned stand. these are some of the parts i rented from calumet (pardon the poor white-balanced photo on that entry!).
so far, it is a fantastic experience. first, this newer version of the 2403 pack is low voltage (6v) so it is safe for use with digital cameras (like the canon powershot i use for documentation). it’s also professional gear. every reading i’ve taken is spot on, and dialing down a stop reflects exactly the same change on the meter. this is definitely a system i can own for a long time and grow into. now i think i need an optical slave for the novatron. :)
(472×650)
i collected this item because i found it really beautiful. the inside is a very shiny copper cylinder and has a teal color logo silkscreen on the glass. this is a vacuum tube capacitor, 6pf rated at 30,000 volts.
shot on polaroid 54, with a burk&james 8×10 camera with reducing back. the lens was a 4.5/210mm heliar, shot nearly wide open @ 1/100. light from a single speedotron 202vf head, 600w-s, bounced off the ceiling. background is white paper.
lots of fall made possible by tilting the camera down righting the standards. focusing in the edge of the image circle, and trying to maneuver while not getting blocked by your bellows is tricky (but fun).
not sure how i feel about this shot yet.. i may revisit this.
got some maintenance done on the servers tonight.
i discovered that a missing disk was actually a malfunctioning disk controller, so i was unable to fix it. i’m wondering if i should replace the machine with something more readily available.
i also replaced some fans in the backups machine. of course the chassis uses these weird fans i’d never seen before. i rigged together two fans that added up to the right size and glued them together. hopefully it will last.. stuff like this makes it difficult to run real servers on your own without a support contract.
on the bright size, i was able to bump the web/sql server and the backups machine up to 2gb ram each.. and it was nice to give everything a fresh reboot all at once.
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