110

Obviously, my “Thing A Day” attempt was dead almost before it began. I am, it turns out, just too fucking busy to faff about making disembodied hands videos every day for the shit of it. 

But w/e. I’ll see if I can’t catch back up but I ain’t sweating it. I’m not numbering them any more, though. That is a tyrannical way to make things. Which brings us to these photos. I buy virtually every camera I come across in thrift stores or yard sales. As a result, I have a whole lot of consumer crap film cameras, including several 110-format (and disk, but those are basically paperweights at this juncture.) A few years back, Lomo was having a sale on four-packs of mix-and-match 110 film, and I bought some. I loaded two cameras (a fairly nice Minolta 110, and a piece of shit Kodak 110) and then immediately forgot about them. A couple weeks ago, I found them in a drawer, both with unexposed rolls of film in them, and took them out for a spin. 

The piece of shit Kodak camera _sucks_ at abstract photography. Everything I took with it looks like a 1970s tourist snapshot. However, the Minolta, with a roll of Lomo Orca black-and-white, got some fairly interesting abstract shots. I think the last one in the set above is my dog. I am pleased with these, but I couldn’t say why. 

In other news, I entered my first juried photography show. I’ll let you know how that goes. 



12/365 DTPHX

Since both Doggy McDogface and I get mighty bored walking around the neighborhood twice a day, we have started taking field trips to other parts of the city for our morning walk. For this one, we drove down to what traffic reporters call “the Tunnel,” which is a section of the I-10 freeway that is covered with a park. The neighborhood is our “arts district,” such as it is in Phoenix. Lots of interesting things to see and photograph. I only had the LX-7 with me, so these are Panasonic-centric looks. Really starting to like this little camera. I scored a little movie for an instagram reel of these photos, which you can see here.


11/365 Vibe

This kind of thing doesn’t photograph very well (or, if you’re a Twitch streamer or some sort of shouty “BWUTZUPGUYZEZZZZ!!!!” vlogger, perhaps too well) so let me just say that in person, it doesn’t look so ARE. GEE. BEE!!!! I decided to give my office a vibe check, and I found it lacking. So I built a shelf, which effectively gave me half again my desk space, back lit it, and gave it a rack. Now I can just push everything out of the way and have a full desk for whatever. Next few days: I’ll design a little bracket in Blender and 3D print it to attach a powered USB hub to the underside in a convenient place, and I’m going to dress all the cables very neatly, thus forcing this to be my situation for the foreseeable future. 

Short term: gonna get rid of the shitty pine shelves above my desk, and add nice floating shelves of baltic birch ply to match the desk, and 3D print an organizer to go on the wall space currently occupied by my AxiDraw. 


Long term: going to empty out my office, scrape the popcorn off the ceiling, do a treatment for sound, and put built-in cabinets along the wall behind me (per this photo.) Then we’ll be vibin’. 


10/365 Canary

Apologies for the lack of throughput. I have been doing Things every day, and documenting them, but this has been a remarkably busy week for me; we got our main bathroom renovated, and a lot of the finish work is on me (because it “saves money” or whatever, apparently). 

Which brings us to the photo above; we hired out most of the renovation (plumbing, tile work, drywall, etc., basically the tweaky parts that suck) and I restified the original vanity from 80s Coke Dealer Honey Oak to something that would theoretically be in a tasteful mid-century modern house. I also removed the big built-in closet in the bathroom, and in its place, I am building a sort of sideboard thing. Through shear happenstance, Woodworker’s Source (the best store in the world) was having an end-of-year sale on live edge slabs, and I bought the gigantic slab of canarywood you see pictured above. 


So, I have spent the last several days molding this slab in to the perfect size and shape to fit in the bathroom; it is not finished yet. For photography’s purposes, I engaged in the fine woodworker’s trick of wiping it down with denatured alcohol. I will finish it with Odie’s Oil, as I do all of my woodworking, and weld the lower part. I haven’t decided whether to do shelves or drawers underneath; I’m going to weld up the carcass, and then we’ll live with it for a couple months and see how we feel about things, which is normal for furniture I build. I am, however, going to make two floating shelves above it, also of canarywood. As soon as I have this built, I’ll do those. 

Thanks for suffering this brief pause. I am taking tomorrow off from chores, and episodes 11, 12, 13, and 14 will all go up tomorrow throughout the day. 


9/365 Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

So I have solved the “everyday carry” problem. While that Nikon S8000 point and shoot was fun, and it does take some interesting images, at the end of the day, I need something with a few more features and a bit more heft to it. I had been looking at a Ricoh GRIII, but honestly, the thought of spending a thousand dollars on a point-and-shoot just seems ridiculous. If I was a professional I might have a different opinion, but I am not. So it is obviously far better to spend $200 five times than $1000 once. To that end, I had settled on the “premium point and shoot” market, and principally the Panasonic DMC-LX7. There are current models, the LX10 and LX100, but I think the 7 had the right combo of features and glass that I was looking for. It was actually kind of difficult to buy this very common camera. I initially ordered one from mpb, but their relationship with online commerce is rooted in 1997, and after two phone calls to try to get this fucking camera in a box and on its way, I just said “this is stupid cubed right here” and canceled the order. 

Next stop was eBay. The first one I bought, the seller cancelled the order (I assume they sold it locally, on Craigslist or Facebook.) The second one I purchased the day after Christmas, and this knucklehead didn’t even send it until last Friday. But it finally arrived yesterday, and Luna and I took it for a test drive. This short video is the result. 

I am _extremely_ happy with the abstract stuff. It will take some faffing about with the settings to get it to do macros how I like, and the A7C with its Sigma macro lens is always going to be the more useful tool for that, and for product shots and what not, but I think this will be my main street photography axe for some time. 

Music: Axon 3 + Quanta 2 + Continua.


Copyright © All rights reserved.
Using Format