Learning…

Duke and I are having a hard time…

This morning i skipped my swim to rejoin the battle with teh crazy camera i have on loan from Scart Labs. It feels like i’m slowly getting to grips with it, but in the immortal words of someone, “damn thing was crazy! bam-bah-lam!”

It doesn’t help that the polaroid back refuses to spit out the film. Maybe i’ll get better results with real film…

Still, you can’t help but be excited by the softness in the background. If the beast can be tamed, i think it’s going to be spectacular! Obviously i’m working up to the coke machine; one does not prostrate oneself before God without the requisite training…

Pain in Soft Focus

Lunch today found me chopping up one of my limited supply of sun-dried habaneros. I know that they are sun-dried because it was me that left them in the sun to dry.

Wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The plant that grew on was sold to us by local farmers as an Okinawa Chilli… but it’s obviously habanero, and not 島唐辛子 (never noticed that kanji before… how strange). It’s also the first time that i’ve used dried habaneros…

The sensible thing to do was obviously to chop one up into relatively small chunks, stir fry with plenty of garlic, ginger, tasai, tofu, and black beans, then eat it and see if it killed me.

Guess what? It didn’t! In fact it was remarkably good. Drying did seem to have turned the heat down a little, but i’d say it had also concentrated the flavour, making it more earthy and rich.

Needless to say this was celebrated by taking a picture of the remaining chillies. First with the 10D and then a polaroid (above). No need to post the digital one: it’s mundanely in focus.

FP-100C Negatives

It turns out that you can actually pull the colours out of a Fujifilm FP-100C negative:

This had been left around on the window sill over night, and dried a little unevenly. All it took in Gimp was inverting the colours, and a tweak of the levels, pull the centre slider into the middle of largest peak. White balance, contrast adjustment, and sharpening were done in Lightroom.

Still need to solve the issue of keeping them in one piece whilst outside… a little lunch box filled with tea (honestly, that’s what someone uses!) seems a little unwieldy…

Goop Scanning

 

Hmm. That’s not working… but it is rather pretty.

(This is the negative side of a “Polaroid”, left to dry, and then scanned…)