Thursday, March 23, 2006

Order up

Good news!

Today I ordered 49mm and 52mm reversing rings. I decided to do that because it's a LOT cheaper than extension tubes (although the pentax helicoid or "adjustable" extension tube, at about $140 is VERY tempting) and my 24mm lens is muy excellante when reversed if I get the exposure right. See small blue flower for reference.

At the same time, I ordered two rolls of Agfa pro 400 film, so next couple of weeks should produce dozens of fantastically awful pictures of flowers. It's what I love about spring (that and groundhogs).

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Oh, silly Communication

Update:

I have, in better judgement a couple weeks later, pulled the text of the email.

Let the following thus be known:
I do not respect people who do not respect me. If you make an enemy of me, I will do everything in my power to hurt your feelings.

I find it intriguing that a graduate-level representative of the Communication department would have the outright audacity to cite our policy when she herself is so fond of leaving eight or more thousand dollars of equipment laying around unattended.

Later, I called her out on it. Since then, she has waited with the equipment, but only with the biggest chip on her shoulder one could possibly imagine.

Even better than her not wanting policy to work against her, I'm pretty sure she reported my office's "misconduct" to the chair of the department. I haven't had a problem with the faculty, nor do I think I will: most of them seem nice enough. Both the graduate student and myself will be finished here in a lot less time than it would take to have everyone at this office fired. Just FYI.

Oh, and next time you take the time out of your oh-so-busy schedule to yell at me about how absurdly terrible our service is, please reconsider signing any follow-up messages with "Best" or "Kind" regards. Oh, and for the sake of communication, please respond to the messages that ask whether you will need stuff in the future because you didn't tell us you cancelled classes.

Got all that?

Thursday, March 2, 2006

Colorless musings

I want to do black and white with a normalish lens for one reason: I seem to take decent pictures that way. With bw film and longer lenses, you generally don't get enough homogenous color to have a meaningful exposure. I took a lot of good pictures of geese last year that I didn't want on a black and white frame, but they taught me an important lesson: sometimes, not "having to worry about the color interactions" means not "having to worry about having taken anything but an awful picture."

With a normal lens, one that focuses reasonably close as my 50/1.7 does, I get the presto chango of being able to say "wow I bet parking meters look really good in black and white." Thinking "I want to take pictures of a dark sidewalk" or "This stairwell is particularly inspiring" works out well also. 

And I might finally have an excuse to process myself. who would know?