The Humans Are Dead

Well it finally happened. The entire Midwest (possibly the entire world) has been destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake. I believe I may be the only survivor. I have already stockpiled food, supplies and weapons and have begun fortifying my home for the impending zombie attack I know will come with the setting of the sun today (zombies tend to take advantage of these types of world ending disasters). Above is a photo I took moments ago of me walking thru downtown West Salem, Ill with a kick ass stray dog I found.

I’m going to try to make my way to Effingham Ill. I’ll be on the boat dock at Lake Sara everyday at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there… if anyone is out there… I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there’s anybody out there… anybody… please. You are not alone.

put this together real quick last night to assist the robot deficient in generating their own random binary solos. FireFox only for the time being (don’t have much time to devote to silly stuff like this lately, but I’ll clean it up for version 2 at some point, promise) and yes I’m fully aware of the message that is sending… only people using FireFox are worthy of the binary solo generator 3000!

Binary Solo Generator 3000

Been a long time without a post, so it’s time to kick start this bad boy again. I’ve revived an old hobby/obsession… chasing freight trains. I’ve always been fascinated by freight trains, walking the tracks, standing next to the cars, watching them speed by at an intersection. More so, I love the graffiti hitching a ride on the sides of trains as they traffic through the industrial arteries of America. So that’s what I’ve been up to, photographing trains and documenting freight graffiti when ever I get a spare moment from work… which has been abnormally hectic and busy since the new year.

check it all out over in my Flickr sets:
Trains
Old Freight Graffiti
New Freight Graffiti.

As discussed in the previous post, an important part of shooting TtV is building a usable contraption. The crucial purpose is simply to block the light (and thus any unwanted glare or reflections) when shooting between top and bottom cameras. There are many fine box or tube style contraptions out there for connecting to unmodified bottom cameras. To put one together you just have to find some kind of tube like material of approximately the right diameter to work with. I scrounged around for a while and came up with the idea to use cardboard postal shipping tubes. After trying out various ways for cutting and notching the tube to fit over my bottom camera I opted to go a completely different route (influenced by what people were doing over at the sPiNoFF! Group). Instead of keeping the bottom camera intact, I decided to remove the glass elements completely from the bottom camera, in this case a Kodak Duaflex IV and build a homebrew cannon style “lens” to hold them.

The idea was to get two different size postal tubes that would fit inside of each other, a 2 1/2″ and a 3″ diameter tube would do the trick. Then cut holes to mount the glass elements from the Duaflex in the plastic end caps that fit the tubes, so I could switch glass as easy as popping in a new end cap. The back element (bubble) pops into an end of the 2 1/2″ tube, the other end of this tube jams snugly into the lens hood that fits the pentax kit lens. Then the front element (objective lens) mounts into the 3″ tube, which slides over the 2 1/2″ tube. There would be a consistent 1/8″ gap between the tubes which I figured I would fill by wrapping black felt around the end of the inner tube to block light and tighten up the telescoping action.

But before we can get to all that, we have to dig the glass out of the Duaflex

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I was clicking around Flicker shortly after I join when I stumbled on the amazing photos of a member known as Dabadoo. The technique used to create these photos is referred to as TtV (Through the Viewfinder) and it turns out there are quite a few people trying out out. The idea is pretty simple. You point an old TLR camera at your subject and then take a shot of it’s viewfinder with your digital. The result will pick up all the scratches and specks on the viewfinder to instantly give the shot a funky aged look.

So yesterday while I was out and about I stopped in at a antique shop to see if I could find a TLR camera to put to use turning out my own TtV photos. I found two!

The first is an Argus 75, and it set me back a whole $2.

The second is a Kodak Duaflex IV. The Duaflex line seems to be a popular choice for shooting TtV, though the Dauflex II is more the preferred model because it lacks a popup shader to get in the way of things. The Duaflex IV set me back $7… yet one more example of how the middle class is being squeezed these day!

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It seems like a very long time ago that I added myself to the waiting list to be notified of the TIOTI site launch. This promising web service had all but slipped my mind. Then today I found an invite to join their beta test sitting in my inbox. I immediately created my account to check it out.

Yes, that IS the tv show Matt Houston they are recommending to me there in the screenshot Now Matt Houston is no Colt Seavers by any means. But it’s cool that TIOTI is spreading the word about these gems of early 80s television, just the same.

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Alicia at the General Motors blogs contacted me yesterday to ask if they could feature my Ice Age Cadillac as their photo of the day. Everyday the GM FYI blog features a photo of the day selected from GM related photos posted to Flickr.

I thought I had better try to get a few more photos added to my set to give anyone coming from the GM blogs something related to look at. So I added a couple older photos taken with the *istDL when I first got it this summer.

So, a big thanks to the GM folks for selecting the photo and for producing the many fine Cadillacs I’ve had the fortune to cruse around in.

I go through a phase where my thoughts converge on painting. It builds up for a while and I eventually start to work. That was happening a few weeks ago… then I got a new camera. So the older paints hang around and wait.

I’ve always had problems trying to photograph my paintings. The colors tend to be super saturated and the surface shines like glass. I dread the day I have a need for slides of these works. So last night I just took photos of them like they any other object.

The moon was up before the sun was down and the sky was full of subtle gradients at dusk today.