Pig Sty Avenue

If I get a Kodak Brownie Reflex, (my first camera), I'm going to need 127. I think I've still got the Ilford Sporti 4 around, somewhere, too. Anyways, these are the best prices I've seen for 127 .

Arrived this morning.  It's got the F, the FED2, the Isolette 2, the Holga, nine rolls of film, flash with ttc cable... And room to spare.  There's space for a laptop, too.  Splendid.

1st time in years.  A wee bit cheerier than I remember it.

I've never blogged about it much, but a fair chunk of my internet time the last seven years or so has been spent on Flickr, and especially the DMU groups and their various offshoots. Enough. I won't go in to the details, but having this post from Jeremy Nichols' blog , (now on the blogroll) drawn to my attention this morning was definitely the last straw. I would need to deconstruct the twists and turns of internet discourse, the dealings one has had with the painfully inadequate sociopaths who people or have peopled the DMUs, over the course of these seven years to explain it all, but that blog post crystallized it: there's photography on planet Earth, and there's photography in cyberspace. And frankly, most of the latter is gash, and to be avoided in future. Flickr's ok for checking on details, chatting with and staying in touch with the handful of genuine pals I've made there, but that's it. You judge a man by the company he keeps.

I'm going to Russia next month for a few days, so I got the FED2 out and remembered having a downer on it, or its Industar61 lens when I used it last summer - but I looked at the photos, like the one above, and they're ok, for Fuji Superia and Dock Head St shop processing. And then one thing led to another and I got to thinking about the cameras I have and want to keep and wtf I'm going with photography. Anyways, the Nikon F will be the main camera for now, though I might get an F5 later in the year. All manner of lenses and filters, too, of course. I'll keep the FED2, also, having mended its light leak and bonded with it somewhat in the process. I'll maybe get some better LTM lenses for it. For MF I'll manage with the Agfa Isolette folder until I can afford a Hasselblad 500. And of course the Holga, the one I paid over the odds for in China, I love it - strong vignetting yet very sharp in the middle of the image. The Ilford Sportis were a wee coll...

I've bought a couple of sets of cheap 52mm filters, and altogether I've now got five colour ones for B&W, a UV, a PL, and a purple one, (to use in fluorescent light).  I can't believe now that I gave away or ebayed all the good ones I had, when I went all Leica and medium format, swearing I'd never get an SLR again.  Heigh ho.  But now I'm back with and SLR, and I need to get to grips with this whole subject.  The only ones I really understand are Red, UV and PL.  Learning the Wratten numbers , and watching out for Hoyas and B+Ws on eBay will be a good way into it: the learning process, I've found, is enhanced when the concept you're learning about is embodied in an object you're going to shell out for with some of the old hard earned.  Pre AI lenses, ditto.

Where can I get the T-shirt?

On train Edinburgh to Glasgow.

Anything supported by that bastard Murdoch can't be good for you.

And dynamic views?  Shite!  Good to be back.  I've been trying to puzzle out the updated UI for weeks.  Can't do anything I want, like chatting with my mates in the blogroll, and using The Avenue as a reference.  Normal Service Has Been Resumed. EDIT 19/01/2012: Chris, I don't know wtf is happening with that comment you left, but everytime I try to comment in reply, I get a page lock, back-button won't work, the whole thing.  Is this some mad anti-linux thing blogger are pulling, or what? 

Thanks to  Ma®tini for this link to a test of all kinds of UV filters .  I've paid £14 for a set of the five main colour filters for black and white photography, and was wondering about the enormous price differences between them and well known brand names.  So this is a note-to-self to look at the results of those tests, when I've time.  And I'll assume that whoever makes the best UVs makes the rest of their filters as good.

That's the converted church in Dockhead St, Saltcoats, now without a tenant.  It's on Fujicolor 200iso.  I'm using the F in all kinds of situations, with cheap colour film developed at the shop, until I get the hang of it.  And then get back to b&w and my own developing, with a range of films from 100 to 3200iso.  I'm going to need a good bag and a tripod.  And at some point this year I might go all the way and get an F5 .  Or maybe an F4 , because, if I'm skim-reading things right, I could use both old pre-A1 lenses, and the newest ones, and everything in between.

In a pub in Victoria.

Not when they keep plying you with free drink.  Forsooth.

Amy Winehouse.  Yesterday in the evening; 5.20am; and again around midday, suddenly blasting out from the new HTC Wildfire S phone. It's not a ringtone or alarm, and the music player isn't running.  The only way to stop it is to switch the phone off.

Me and My F , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . That's from the 2nd roll with the F. Couple of things: first, I really don't like Kodak Ultra Max 400iso - very grainy, and the colours shifted noticeably for the better when I hit auto-correct in PS - which shouldn't happen with good film. I'm thinking of giving up on this flirtation with colour and concentrating on Neopan. The second thing is, I'm not getting the focus right when there's a narrow dof, when I'm at f1.4. I've just found out from my mate Martini that the eyepiece-thread on modern high-end DSLRs is the same size as the F3 - and presumably the F. So I can buy one of these reading-specs style eyepieces and actually see what I'm snapping properly, which frankly I can't do now, with or without the specs.