Year: 2014
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Baby Olive Ridley Sea Turtles
Sea turtles have been on this earth for 110 million years, compared to humans’ 200,000. If my math is correct, relating Earth’s 4.6 billion-year existence to a 24-hour clock would have seen sea turtles arriving at around 11:26 pm…and humans arriving at 11:59 and 56 seconds. Yet we’ve been tremendously successful – there are now…
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Found Film Friday: Hannah’s Tenth Birthday
This week is the second of three “found film” Friday posts in which I’m sharing film that was found (by someone else) in a storage unit in Worcester, Massachusetts. The first post, last week, was a 110 cartridge from what appeared to be a young girl’s first camera. I decided her name was “Hannah”, although…
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Vintage: Testing the Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A
If you’re at all interested in my occasional posts about trying to make old cameras work, read on – this one is the oldest one yet. The Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A was manufactured in London around 1912, and is gigantic by modern standards, at about a foot tall, 4 1/2 inches wide, and a…
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Found Film: Hannah and her Sister
This week we have one of three rolls found (by someone else) in a storage unit in Worcester, Massachusetts. This set of film rolls is interesting in that they are all different types of film, and thus came from different cameras. There is a fourth in the set, which I already posted a few weeks…
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Chennai: Textures
I’ve posted before about Chennai’s endless walls and the fact that many of them get postered, painted, repainted and repostered. This creates interesting textures; so much so, that one of my predecessors did an entire photographic exhibition on just that theme – and sold many of his photos to boot! When I heard about that,…
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Chennai: Grit and Grain
In Namibia, photography was all about long lenses, tripods, “the golden hour”, and finding the right guide. Since moving to Chennai, a large city in India, the lenses have gotten much shorter, shooting is sometimes instinctive; and sweeping landscapes have made way for the grit and grime of everyday human life, toil, and aging buildings.…
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Found Film Friday: Laguna Beach Photowalk
After last week’s “surfing” theme, I thought it would be fun to share another roll with a seaside theme. This one is not that old, and it came with the same batch of film as “Michelle’s” fisheye roll, and “Mike’s” roll. Like the other rolls, this one includes a “selfie.” After having seen this batch…
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These Student-Athletes Can Use a Hand!
Those of you who know me may recall that in Windhoek, I was quite active in teaching Namibian teens to swim, and training them to compete in multisport competitions involving swimming, running, and/or cycling. The story of one of these athletes is captured in this blog post. A group of 4 athletes (and a chaperone)…
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Swimathon: Bird’s Eye View
Last week I took part in a “Swimathon” in Goa, on the eastern coast of southern India. Participants were to swim either 2 km, 1 km, or 250 meters in the calm sea. It was a great set of races, and had lots of participation by a local swim club as well as members of…
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“Blessed:” My Entry for the “India Is” Video Contest
All living things love their life, desire pleasure and do not like pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life and to every being, his life is very dear.” – from the Yogashastra (Jain Scripture), from around 500 BC. While on an early morning photowalk at Marina Beach in Chennai, India, I…
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Found Film: Everybody’s Gone Surfing
This week’s found film has a little bit of a story to it. It was found by someone in a storage unit in Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote them back and asked for more details, but didn’t get any. But anyhow, the film was advertised as “4 exposed rolls and 2 unexposed rolls”. They were 35mm…
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Testing the Ansco Regent
Sometimes I’m not sure whether these posts I do on whether or not I’ve been able to make these vintage cameras work are more about the cameras, or about the content of the photos I’ve managed to snap. This is one of those posts, and explains why I’ll share more of the photos from the…
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Found Film: Seasons
This week, I thought I’d post TWO rolls of found film. One roll has suffered quite a bit from age, and the other only had a couple of usable photos on it. I’m titling this post based on the photos having been taken opposite times of year. There is no other relationship between the two…
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Three Vest Pocket Kodaks
These are “Vest Pocket Kodaks” – of which nearly two million were produced, from about 1912 to the early 1920s. I’ve blogged about one of these cameras before – to sum up, they represent an important step in the miniaturization of cameras, making them the first mass-produced cameras that could actually fit in a vest…
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Chennai’s Walls: an Endless Canvas
Chennai is full of walls. Many of them are marked “stick no bills” – and people will generally abide by that request. But the majority end up being political advertising space. The successive layers of paint upon paint, posters upon posters are accepted as a part of the texture of the city, and are rarely…
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Found Film Friday: Dress-Up Dog
This week’s roll of found film is a roll of 620 panchromatic that not much is known about, other than that it came from an estate sale near Alliance, Ohio. I had quite a bit of trouble loading it into the developer tank. As I was unrolling it in the dark, it was extremely difficult…
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Found Film Friday: New Baby AND a New TV!
Sometimes when I develop these “found” rolls of film I find it kind of sad that their original owners forgot to do so themselves. This is one of those times. The fact that I picked up these rolls on eBay suggests they came from an estate sale, which means the photographers are likely no longer…
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Badrian Street and the Flower Market
Badrian Street or “Budirian Street” as it is painted on the street sign, is the site of Chennai’s old wholesale flower market. While technically, the vendors in what is commonly known as “poo-k-kadai,” sell “wholesale”, their typical clients are ladies who buy less than a kilogram of flowers, typically to be woven into garlands using banana…
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Found: Michelle’s Fisheye Film
It’s “Found Film” Friday, and this week’s “found” roll comes to us from the same place as last week’s roll – but appears to be from a different photographer. Among that set of different 35mm rolls, none of which appeared to be particularly old, one had been marked with permanent marker, “Dev for Michelle” (the…
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It’s always hardest cutting your own video…
Why, other than a few hardcore fans, is a film’s director the only one who likes the “Director’s Cut” better than the movie that was released to the public? It’s hard to delete the footage you worked so hard to get, or even sometimes to eliminate scenes altogether because they don’t help the “story” along,…
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Goa is for the Birds – Literally
Just north of Panaji, Goa’s “small but spritely” capital, where the Mapusa and Mandovi Rivers meet, is what appears to be an island – Chorao Island – which has 11,000 inhabitants, and whose western end is a 1.8 square kilometer mangrove forest known as the Dr. Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary. Looking at the map, it…
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Hack Your Brain: Mrs. McKinley in 3D
I have an old Holmes stereoscope that dates from around 1900 or so. What’s a stereoscope? It’s a device that allowed you to look at two side-by-side photographs in such a way that the image appeared to be in 3 dimensions. This is not new technology. The earliest stereoscopes date from the 1830s. They were…
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Found Film Friday: It Doesn’t Have to Be Old
One of the fun aspects of “found film” is the fact that it’s usually old, and developing it opens a window into a forgotten past, maybe involving forgotten people. But this week’s roll is an oddity in that it’s not that old at all. Which I find strange. I picked this up as one of…
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Review: Phantom 2 Quadcopter
One of my photographer friends posted a video on Facebook a couple of weeks ago and wrote something along the lines of, “This video is guaranteed to convince you to buy a GoPro and a Quadcopter…” He was right. Proceed at your own peril! 70812846 Aerial footage of surfers at Steamer Lane, Santa Cruz (DJI…
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Vintage Camera Test: No 2 Hawkeye Model C Anniversary Edition
This week’s vintage camera test is an interesting one (yes, but aren’t they all?), despite its rather long name. Waaaay back in the late 1880s, a small company called the Boston Camera Company introduced a model called the “Hawk-Eye” Detective camera. The Hawk-Eye Detective camera was unique in 1888 because it enclosed all of the…