That Tim Guy

Drove past this today and I had to grab a picture of my filthy car  next to it. There were some amazing burners on these walls. Hopefully more pictures to follow at a later date!

As I was rummaging around my parent’s basement I found an old dark leather case. I had no idea what was in this case. The clip was broken, the leather is dry, there was about 20 layers of dust on it, and a few cobwebs. I took a deep breath and blew off the dust and promptly coughed after inhaling the dust. I brought it over into the light and opened it up…it looked like there was another case inside of this one. This didn’t make any sense. Upon closer examination I found that there was one small label on it that said “KODAK.” I thought to myself….hrm…this is not the Kodak logo I am familiar with, but perhaps its an old camera?

Well, my guess was right. It took me a solid 15 minutes to figure out all of its workings and how to open it without breaking it, but it is a camera. “No. 1A Autographic KODAK JR.” The last patent date I saw on the inside of the film cover was 1917. From what I could tell, all of the mechanical operations of this camera still seemed to be functioning at about 100%. The lens looks a little bit cloudy and I think I can see an old fingerprint on it (I wonder who’s it could be? My Father’s? Grandfather’s?) It says it uses 116 film and after quick research, it doesn’t look like it has been produced in 25 years or so. From some of my other research…it appears that the “Autographic” feature of this camera was the precursor to the time stamp that we are accustomed to seeing on the lower right hand corner of photos. There was a door on the back of the camera. One would open this door and write the date, location, or anything else onto a red piece of paper with a stylus or pencil and then expose it to light for a few seconds and then close the door. This would then add the information to the film negatives in between the frames. Quite a handy way to keep track of what the photos are.

Other than this basic info, I don’t know a whole lot about it…prices of these cameras seem to range on eBay from $35-$100+

The Leonids Meteor Showers occurred during the wee hours of Tuesday morning. I managed to wake myself up at 3:30am  and went try and actually get a photo of a meteor with Mike. It was very difficult to try and catch them. They were shooting for all over the place even though they were supposed to be in the eastern part of the sky. I didn’t think I had caught any until I was looking through the 90+ photos I took and I saw a faint hint of a streak on one of the photos. Well I thank my lucky stars, I actually caught one! Granted, the photo quality is poor and you can barely see it, but I actually got one.

This shot was facing eastward and as you can tell the sun is starting to poke up. I had to verify that the streak wasn’t an airplane, but luckily I had 2 shots aimed in the same part of the sky and the other one did not have an airplane nor the streak, so this leads me to believe it IS a meteor and is falling in the direction we saw most of them fall.

We made a later attempt that night but saw maybe 2-4 meteors and with 4 sets of eyes. More of that night photography will follow.

Last night I packed up my photography equipment after my graduate class into my car and met up with an old friend. After a quick stop at McD’s to enjoy one of my favorite sandwiches we stopped at open field, setup our tripods and began to see what types of shots we could get with a full moon out.  After exhausting the area (and getting frustrated with my inability to manually focus the camera in the dark) we went over to the university’s  campus and walked around taking photos of a sodium-vapor light filled environment. I did manage to get a few photos that I deemed worthy (less than 5% of the photos I took). Have a look.

Carved Charlie tonight with the lady friend. Here he is in all of his Spooky Glory. His eternal soul will live on even though I roasted his seeds for offspring in butter, salt, and garlic. Happy Pumpkin Sacrifice Day.

Installed the Stat Counter plugin today…hopefully that is operating correctly. Everything appears fine in Firefox & Safari. Haven’t tested IE yet. Now I can see how many times my page is loaded.

Which isn’t a whole lot. I’m just an amateur and I do this for pure personal satisfaction. I set everything up and then realized…how am I going to take a picture of it all…I need another camera! Then it dawned on me….my cell phone! So pardon the crappy picture, but I took this with my phone (LG enV2).

• Olympus E330 DSLR Camera
• Olympus Digital 14-45mm lens
• Olympus Digital 40-150mm lens
• Olympus Digital 35mm Macro lens
• 2 lens hoods
• Fotodiox adapter to adapt old OM 35mm lenses — I no longer have these lenses or the OM-1 body
• Olympus FL-36R Electronic Flash
• Sunpak UV filter
• Sunpak Circular Polarizer filter
• Quantaray Cross Screen filter
• Quantaray Cross 6x filter
• Quantaray Diffuser filter
• Quantaray Fogg filter
• Sunpak 6060XL Tripod
• Extra battery
• 1gb CompactFlash memory card
• 2gb Olympus xD memory card
• Olympus FE-360 (Point & Shoot Camera)
• 1gb MicroSD card with Olympus xD adapter (not pictured)
• Canon ZR 500 MiniDV camcorder
• Plus all the necessary chargers, cables, adapters, etc. not pictured.

I’m currently testing out some image gallery plug-ins for Wordpress. I tried WPG2 which is used in conjunction with the Gallery free script. Unfortunately, I ended up getting fatal errors after activating it and my site would not display. Not being the techie I used to be I ditched it after 30 minutes or so. That one was designed to implement that gallery into a Wordpress Page.

Currently I am trying the NextGEN Gallery. So far it seems to be working. It comes with some weird JavaScript viewer called LensPic which I guess ends up being some sort of advertisement for an online 3D  imageviewer called CoolIris. Needless to say it loaded relatively slow and was too fancy for my tastes so I turned that feature off. Hopefully this all works and I can sort through my photos and get them uploaded.

Just installed the plugin “Yet Another PhotoBlog” and we’ll see how it goes. I’m trying to find a decent image management system for this site and I figured I would give it a whirl.

I figured I should give a quick review of this product and supply some pictures since everyone says this stuff is amazing. RaggTopp convertible protectant is…well…amazing. So far the product has been on the car for about 2 months. I applied RaggTopp right after getting the top replaced on my MX-5. When it rains the water literally beads right off of my canvas top. I am curious to see how it will hold up through the winter and I do have high hopes so far.

I must admit I was a little skeptical at first spending $20 USD on one (1) can of RaggTopp and I was nervous to be spraying this onto my top. Application was relatively easy. I kept a separate rag ready to wipe any excess spray off of the windows/paint immediately after it hit the surface. I did notice on the few spots I missed some effort was required in removing the spray off the glass. I personally applied 3 coats and alternated the directions I sprayed each time to make sure everything was hit. I spent no more than 30 minutes doing it allowing 5-10 minutes in between coats.

Overall I am a satisfied customer. I also purchased the cleaner as well, but haven’t had to use that yet. Pictures are included to prove the water beads off. These pictures were taken after it had been raining for several hours.

RaggTopp Protectant

RaggTopp Protectant