Posts

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Delving into Medium Format Film Cameras

*** What follows is a post which, as usual, is written more for me then anyone else. It has taken more than 1300 words to help wrap my mind around medium format, the Mamiya 645 Pro, and how it compares to my past knowledge of 35mm cameras. I only hope you are sitting if you choose to read this, as you will be asleep before it’s end ***

I’ve been thinking for some time about picking up a medium format film camera. It’s been nagging at me for a few years and when I was recently helping my parents dig out some old slides from their honeymoon, we ran across a few medium format slides from when my dad was a child.… Click here to read more!

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Three Shades of Photography

To my mind, I see three ‘goals’ in photography: Documentation, Journalism, and Art. You may have other goals in mind but for me I’m usually shooting with one of those goals in mind.

The art goal is easy to define. Any picture that you have taken simply for the sake of taking it. Maybe you’ve spotted an interesting texture, a unique geometric pattern or just a vibrant flower and taken a picture.

Defining journalism photography, especially in contrast to documentation photography, can be a little more difficult to put into words. I see the types both being about gathering information, be it about a local disaster or celebration.… Click here to read more!

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Review: Nikon Coolscan V ED – Still Awesome!

First, as always, the story. Scroll down for my ‘review’.

As a film shooter I’ve been struggling a lot lately with getting my images converted to digital. I have tried two scanners, the Epson Perfection V500 and the Plustek 7500i and while both get reasonably good reviews online, I was not having any luck getting quality scans from them. I’m sure it’s operator error but even at low resolutions the scans were not even half as sharp as the source film and once scanned it took me a long time to process each image to have good color and contrast (let alone getting the scanner to help clean up dust and scratches).… Click here to read more!

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One Guy’s Approach to Being More Healthy

I’m not a doctor. I’m not an expert. I know only what I’ve been doing and how it’s been going for me. I’m not telling anyone what to do or making a recommendation. This is what I’ve been doing for the past year and it’s been working well for me so I thought I’d document the process a bit.

All that being said, let me explain a bit of background. I’m a pretty average American guy with more then a few extra pounds hanging around that I would like to get rid of. Generally speaking, I’ve never been one to eat a lot of fast food but I do have a sweet tooth.… Click here to read more!

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Back Burner Blogging…

I know it seems like the blog here is dead. It appears Twitter has taken over and I’ve given up writing longer form articles. It’s as though my world has moved from 1400 words, to 140 characters. When you get right down to it though, I’ve just not had the time or motivation to get things posted here. I don’t have anything to say at the moment…

I’m in the process of buying a house, my first house. In keeping with my current life goals of growing an increasing amount of my food, I’m trying to find a livable place with a good bit of land for short money.… Click here to read more!

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Food, Inc. Is Worth a Trip

Most movies dealing with the business of food are jam packed with horrible images and generally scary content. They typically seem hell bent on scaring you and then the movie just ends. This was not the case with Food, Inc. Sure, the film included the obligatory clips of the mistreatment of animals and other not so pleasant topics, but in the end I didn’t leave feeling powerless, I left thinking that I could, in a small way, begin to correct what is happening.

The movie was laid out around many topics, each of which is covered only briefly. They offer a description of what each problem area with our food supply is and then brought in some people to help put a real face to the issues.… Click here to read more!

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The Low Power Atom Server

Time for another incredibly exciting post about linux servers and their power use. I have built and tested my Atom server and I’m pretty excited to note that it uses 33 watts when idle and a whopping 37 when under heavy load. You can find a detailed description of the parts I ordered to assemble the server on another post on my blog, so I won’t go back into it here. I will need to make one change going forward though. Hitachi no longer makes the 80GB laptop hard drives that I was planning to use but Seagate’s Momentus drives are almost exactly the same power use.… Click here to read more!

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Building a Low Power, Atom based Server

As a geek and IT person by trade I have a somewhat unique setup at my home, in terms of computers. I have several web servers, a mail server and a large storage array that I keep running for my personal use. On the one hand, it’s fun for me and allows me to do things most people can’t dream of, but on the other hand it’s all valuable training setup and a great place to do testing before trying it on production servers at the office. The stakes are much lower for me then for the company I work for.… Click here to read more!

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Video Production has begun!

This past Saturday we began building our first poly tunnel. This project also signaled the start of filming for the upcoming video podcast. I enlisted some filming and photography help from a friend of mine that was there and I think we got enough recorded to make an episode work. Time will tell.

We have some final work to do on the tunnel which we are planning to take care of next weekend. Once that is done and filmed I should be able to start piecing together the video post, which makes me pretty nervous…

Fingers crossed!

Topslakr

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Starting a Video Podcast…

I’m preparing to go out on a limb here. I’ve ordered a camcorder, some various bits of kit and I plan to embark on a project to create compelling footage that is both entertaining and informational about… farming on a small scale. I just might be crazy.

I believe that producing a substantial amount of your own food will be easy and not take a tremendous amount of time. Based on this I am going to try and document my process to do just that and will publish my findings for all the world to see, even if I’m wrong. I don’t want to post some clips of me pulling weeds or looking at a gathered information about time spent per day ect, I want to talk about my process, the costs, the reasons, and how it turns out.… Click here to read more!