Sunday, October 30, 2005

The night before Halloween...


Last Sunday, Kelsey picked me up from Bonney Lake and brought me to Bellingham for a few days. I'd kept saying that I'd be going up there, but didn't have a way to get up there until last week. The first night, I slept on Kelsey's couch, but it's way to small and uncomfortable, so I found a real bed for the next two nights. Lyle, from Tokyo was also in town, and he'd just bought a new bike, which he let me ride around the block. Very fast!

I also met Rick and Susan from my old job at ATUS, and went out to lunch with them. I also spent a good part of two days in the computer labs scanning negatives. Later that night, I was going out to Korean food with a friend, and we hit a road biker. He was okay, but his bike was bent up pretty bad, and it was scary watching him do a cartwheel through the air into a hedge. Now my friend, who hasn't really ever ridden a bike, hates bikes, so I want to buy her a bike. I think she needs it.

That kid in the picture moves too fast. He's hard to get a picture of.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Working in Wood


For my warmup to building a 4x5 view camera project, I've started building a pinhole camera. Dad's got tons of scrap plywood out in the shop, so I designed a camera to work around my 4x5 film holder. Last weekend I researched how to make a box joint, and after a few practice runs yesterday, got a working jig. Today, I adjusted it a bit to make it cut accurate 1/4 inch cuts, cut out the frame of my camera. The picture shows the box before I glued it, with the film holder in it to test the fit. Sitting next to it is a piece of coke can with a .23mm hole in it. Once the glue dries, I will mount the front and figure out how I'm going to hold the film holder in place.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Okay, I'll post...

I haven't posted for a while because I was feeling crappy right after chemo #3, and after that, I've been keeping myself busy. I'm finally on the way to emptying out my apartment in Tokyo. Hopefully, that will happen in the next week or two. Since about a week before my last chemo, my hair started slowly falling out, but not enough that I wasn't going to have any any time soon, or even that anyone else would notice it probably. But it was annoying to shedding hair everywhere, ( although Ellie does it all the time) so I cut it all off.


I've also been working in my darkroom, but I don't have enough film to keep up with my printing, and I left my two favorite cameras in Japan, so I started playing with a 95 year old Kodak Brownie that we've had forever. The pictures it takes are in what was called the "postcard" format, about 4x6 inches, and no film company has made film for this format for a long time. So I took a piece of photo paper and cut in down to 4x6 and put it into the camera. This way I can make negatives on a sheet of paper, then contact print them onto another sheet of paper.


Playing around with this inspired a few more projects. First, I need a contact printing frame, which is for printing negatives directly onto a sheet of paper without using an enlarger. This is pretty simple to build once I find a piece of glass I can use. The second project is a view camera. Typically, they use either 4x5 or 10x12 inch film, and many are made fairly simply out of wood. To buy a new one often costs over $1000, but a fairly nice one can be built much cheaper. The first project, is one that many home builders don't make on their own, the bellows. By studying a few websites and the Brownie, I was able to make a small paper model. After a few attempts, I was able to make a symetrical tapering bellows, but it's rectangular rather than square as I'd hoped. It makes sense that it's rectangular, but I still need to figure out how to make it square.