Another Start to Another Weekend

It’s another Friday night and I’m chillin at home watching Lilly while Erica is out doing stuff with her mom. I was going to play Halo but Justin is going out with people and Rick didn’t answer his phone.

My car decided to shit itself yesterday and I had to leave it in the parking lot at work over night. I looked at it over lunch and the serpentine belt has come loose and the tensioner has sheared off of it’s mount and lodged itself between the engine block and the chassis. So without cooling going to the engine it’s not a good idea; not to mention the lack of power steering or having the battery charge up.

I was just messing with the OS X Automator to create my own workflow for certain things and it’s a pretty cool feature of the OS. I now have a workflow to batch rename files to “image-XX.XXX” and another to convert to gray scale (black and white essentially). The only problem with Automator is that you can’t have it ask for user input, it if did, I could easily make a batch resizer which asks for the percentage to resize the image to.

No luck with the camera winder from the guy at work. His eBay auction didn’t have it in the box, but I am going to get the broken Pentax ME Super (all black and hard to find!) that was in the shipment. Evidently the mirror is locked up, but I have some ideas on how to fix it. It’ll be exciting if I can get it working because I’ve realized that I need manual control for panoramas. Aperture priority works fine until you get to different light into the sensor that changes the shutter speed causing the exposures to not match up. Since I don’t have the winder I can go ahead and load the 36 exposure roll into my camera and hopefully head out to the Sac & Fox Trail bright and early in the morning for some pictures along the river.

I’ve made two of the camera lens bags out of the 6 I have material for. I’m sure I can make more, but I don’t have enough boot laces for the draw strings. They work well and I’ve even made a DIY front and rear cap for the 2X tele-converter. I’ll probably work on the rest sometime this weekend, maybe even start sewing one up tonight before I cut out more material for the Pentax 80-200mm, the 135mm for my Vivitar, and the one that Erica has requested.

A post just for Bailey

Pentax ME with Fuji Super HQ 100: f/4, 1/250s, 1/2x EV

This is Bailey’s normal look, sad and sleeping because Lilly takes up all of our time.

Craptacular Images and Awesome Japanese

I had finished off my 12 exposure roll of Fuji Super HQ film and took it to Sam’s to develop yesterday hoping I’d get some decent pictures. I got a couple, but that’s it. Some were blurry or out of focus, of which one was intentionally done thinking I’d still get a nice shot of the icicles off the roof. The first lunar eclipse picture didn’t come out too bad, some slight motion blur from the cable release, but it looks like it did in the viewfinder with the haze around the moon. I haven’t posted any to my flickr account yet, still determining what to post.

I have a lead on a winder for the camera though, one of the guys at work won an eBay auction that included one and all he wants is the lenses. I am excited for this as now I don’t have to pull out the wood carving skills to mold a false grip.

In my errands yesterday I picked up a bulls eye level at Ace Hardware for the Pano Head, not I can keep it level. I also ran to Wal-Mart and got some microfibre car polishing cloth, 3 packs of 45″ boot laces and some jean thread to make custom lens bags. I paid $13.75 for the materials and I can make 6+ of them which is a whole lot less than buying commercial ones. I’m excited and Erica is too and wants me to make her one. I just have to finish cutting some material and then bust out the sewing machine.

I found this DIY Stealth Camera Bag and I think it’ll be a better bag than the Claymore mine bag that Sean gave me. Don’t get me wrong, the Claymore mine bag is awesome, but it can’t really hold the equipment well enough. It works for the time being which is a huge plus.

Erica baked a lot of Amish Friendship bread yesterday and with 8 loafs, we’re set for a while. I’m excited to try the ones with banana pudding. I’m a huge fan of bananas, possibly because Potassium is radioactive. Treasure Hunter invited us to go to dinner with him and Erica’s mom, so we went to Osaka, the Japanese steakhouse in Marion. Awesome food even though we didn’t sit at the table where they cook in front of you. I wish I could get the recipe for the sauce they had on the veggies as it was the best I’ve ever had. We took Lilliputian with us and she attracted a lot of attention; the little girl at the table next to us kept looking at her.

I’ve noticed that I haven’t programmed in ages or even thought about it. Surprising since I thought I had projects that I wanted to start of finish.

I have no idea what I’m doing today. I should think about food because I’m hungry; guess it’s pizza rolls for the time being until Erica gets home. I am thinking if I should put film into the camera or wait until I get the winder. It’s sunny and Noelridge park is looking like a fun outing, maybe even a trip downtown to the train bridge that everyone takes pictures on.