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camera crazy 2005-11-21 Friday night when I got home from work, I discovered a yellow post office card indicating there was a package not delivered because I needed to personally sign for it. I took the yellow card to the post office on Saturday (just made it before the P.O. closed) and picked it up (Francisco rode shotgun with a plate full of lunch to keep him company); as expected it was the Smena 6 I bought from eBay. YESSSS! I went out again after picking that up and bought, amongst other things, some film so I could play with it, and that was a project in itself, since the Smena didn't come with a manual. After some staring at the camera and also gleaning as much info as I could from ye olde interweb (not much, dammit), I figured out how the take-up spool nonsense works and successfully got the film loaded. It involves masking tape--how cool is that?! Very, that's how cool. Francisco and I then went forth on a walk and I played with my new toy--I love it. I have no idea how the photos will turn out, but I suspect they'll be terrible, since I don't yet know what all the dials do, and since the focusing is all guesswork (I could buy a rangefinder, but I think I Like the guessing), but maybe I'll get lucky with a few shots; who knows. I can hardly wait to finish the roll so I can take it to be developed, but I'm also looking forward to locking myself in the upstairs bathroom (no window) and rewinding the film in the pitch-dark, as the Smena 6 doesn't have a rewind knob. I now know that my blindness and all my experience in doing things sans corrective lenses has been training me for the moment I rewind film in the dark; it is my destiny, and the next logical step will be to learn to develop my own pictures. Destiny is convenient in this case, since I already wanted to learn that anyway. To sum up, I like peanut butter. Oh, but in other camera news, I messed around with the Contaflex a bit this weekend, and I'm pretty stymied. I don't even know how to get the back off, and some of the things that are supposed to turn (dials, etc) don't. So it's possible I have a purely decorative camera here, but I'm not even close to giving up on it, since after all I have nothing to lose from trying. I like this kind of puzzle, actually. Francisco is under the impression that I get enraged at all instances of inanimate objects vexing me, but really I only get vexed by the ones that I know are supposed to work a certain way. Since I bought the Contaflex without knowing if it worked (or exactly how), I'm enjoying trying to figure it out. If it was, say, a cell phone that I couldn't get to work, I would already have backed over it with my car or hurled it into a canyon. Possibly that's because I already hate cell phones and therefore have almost no patience with them, but still, it's a good example of the kind of inanimate object that angers me. On Saturday morning, I made a heinously long weekend to-do list for myself, and to my amazement, I got almost all of it done. Some things I did I can't tell you, since they are part of the ornament exchange (Francisco mailed our 9 ornaments today), but I also sewed two bean snakes--those things you put in front of the crack at the bottom of doors (no YOU shut up!)--as well as trying to re-elasticate one side of a fitted sheet that had lost it's elasticness. If the sheet was really old I wouldn't have bothered, but we only used it a few times before the elastic blew, and I'm mentioning this elastic thing so I can tell you what an unmitigated disaster it was. I couldn't get the thread tension right, no matter how much fiddling I did with it, so the sheet has a big wad of thread going up one side of it and I left it like that because I was ready to In addition to the camera things and to-do list, I also watched soccer (two different games), read about soccer (my new book), and watched Velvet Goldmine last night, while feeling tired from doing so many things. This morning I felt more than a little off, and I was sure I was getting sick, but I feel better now. Must've been a very mild case of Monday fever. Songs of the Day: In honor of Miles and his and Riley's outdoor ululating yesterday, Femmes Du Village De Njombwa -- Gule Wamkulu, at Sound Roots. Bright Eyes -- Mushaboom--a Feist cover, at The Camera as Pen. Math and Physics Club -- A is for Alphabet, at You Ain't No Picasso. I'm going home to have dinner and watch Rome. Have you seen that show? It's really good.
come over some time & see me - 2011-02-25 |
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