Canadia Blog

The circus and an inflatable slide over rows of corn at the Pumpkin Festival

So I went with my girlfriend to Hunsader Farms’ Pumpkin Festival over a month ago, and I just now got around to sortingout the photographs, so figured I’d make a blog post about it now.  Not too much to it, I suppose.  Went to the Pumpkin Festival, walked around, looked at crafts and such, had a great time.  Of particular interest was a massive pneumatic pumpkin cannon, which hurled pumpkins a thousand-some feet off into the forest (I can only hope no unfortunate persons or woodland creatures became its target).

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A kangaroo, happily munching away at some fruits and leafy greens

I was back in Bradenton for the weekend today, and ended up going out to Majical Miniatures animal sanctuary with my dad, sister, and girlfriend.  My dad’s been running a pet shop lately, and some way or other ended up meeting the woman who runs it, who offered to take in our prairie dog, who’s getting rather old, and hasn’t been handling pet-shop life particularly well (she was sort of a display animal, just there to hang out and play with the customers).  So Annie the prairie dog went away to their shelter, and today we went out to see her, and the rest of the animals.  The interesting thing is, the shelter is next door to the house and land where my family used to live out in Parish: driving back onto the property, we actually saw the old chicken coop that we built oh-so-many years ago.  Dad had told us that they had kangaroos and wallabies, and sure enough, just as soon as we walked through the door there was a kangaroo eating his lunch (or was it supper?)  I just had to bring the camera along, and got some nifty shots, albeit with only a single on-camera strobe to work with.

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The Pier in St. Petersburg

Long time no post.  I went and got myself sort of caught up going to college.  I’ve been moved in for a couple of weeks now, and everything’s going pretty well, getting used to classes and whatnot.  Not much time to write out a big proper blag post just now, but I’ll jot down some stuff, and hopefully start posting regularly again later.

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Danielle in the park, from the old Kodak Six-20

Having patched up the old Kodak’s bellows with gaffer tape, I finally got a roll of film back that wasn’t horrifically marred by light leakage.  They went ahead and developed the film and made singles for me, but didn’t do the scans I’d requested from the lab, because the images weren’t exactly top notch,  owing to my lack of a light meter at the time.

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A shot in front of the pond. Lit by an SB-25 in a shoot-through umbrella to camera left, and a bare gelled SB-26 to camera right, for hairlight

Got a light meter recently, and I must say, incident metering is absolutely, immensely awesome.  I can now just stick the meter right up in someone’s face and get a perfect exposure straight-off: no chimping or guessing.  And as an added bonus, it even tells you how much of the exposure is made up by flash and ambient.  So, new meter in hand, I took a trip out to the recently opened Robinson Preserve, to give it a little test run, and have fun in the park, of course.

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One of the salvaged photographs: the doors on our backyard shed

I got the last roll of film back that I shot with my old Kodak foldout, and unfortunately it appears that my bellows weren’t nearly as mended as I thought they were.  Out of the 8 frame roll, I got one shot that was relatively decent, and another that was, shall we say…barely recoverable.

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Openmoko's Neo Freerunner

On July 4, 2008, Openmoko released the Neo Freerunner, their second generation free/open-source cell phone.  On July 5, I ordered one.  In the two weeks between placing the order and getting the phone, I went looking for reviews, and much to my surprise, couldn’t find any.  Even Gizmodo and the like, as of this writing, seem to lack an actual review of the phone itself: all I see is software reviews, apparently based on development snapshots, rather than the software stack that actually ships with the phone.  For lack of any reviews on the regular sites, I’ve decided to go ahead and write my own.

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I recently got myself a new Neo Freerunner, the second generation cell phone from Openmoko.  The phone itself is awesome, and I’m working on a post about it at the moment, but that’s going to take a while, as it’s going to be big (there seems to be a lack of actual reviews of the phone on the Internet, so I figure I’ll just write one myself).  In the meantime, since such a blog post demands a good photograph, I decided to make one, and since the next post could be a little while coming, I’ve decided to make one about the photograph itself.  If you’re into that kind of thing, take a look at the rest of the post.  For the less photo-nerdy among us, be warned: this could get a little boring.

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A lake near the entrance to Robinson Preserve

They opened a new nature preserve in Bradenton today, so I got myself up out of bed nice and early (and by early, I mean 8:00 AM.  This is Summer time, folks) and made my way over to the grand opening, and met up with a friend, Farrah.  It was quite the speech-giving occasion, with all the county commissioners there to give their own special insights about the preserve, which is pretty big and mightily awesome, but probably not worth quite as much lip-service as they gave it.

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So I got my first roll of film back from my old Kodak Six-20 camera, and all the negatives are completely and utterly washed out.  I first suspected that my…less than careful…respooling of the first roll may have been to blame, but then a flashlight and a dark room revealed the true culprit: leaky bellows.  I went ahead and stuck an SB-25 in the back of it and made the shot you see below, to illustrate the problem.  All those little pinpricks of light you see at the top of the bellows, those are holes where light can get out and, of course, in, ruining my film. Read the rest of this entry »