I'm A Poor Hawaiian Boy

All I have to say is that the pineapple is lying to you.

Pack Up My Belongings, I've Got To Get Away

 So about 20 years ago, I was trying to get things figured out for moving.  I was going to a place where I didn't have a great deal of personal space to work with and no internet access in any way, shape or form.  It was also almost an hour away from where I worked, so things were weird there too.

I only spent about a week living there before I packed up my stuff, again, and came back somewhere closer.

I'm entertained to note that the computer I was attempting to put together at the time, for the reason I was trying to put it together, wasn't easily done in those days, but now it is a way of life. Especially for me.

My aim was to downsize a desktop to a laptop footprint and use a USB hard drive as a permanent, high-speed storage addition. In those days, anything that I could get my hands on would not have come with a reasonable number of USB ports, and USB 2.0 was a maybe.  External hard drive? Hah!

I did end up building one out of a USB CD-ROM enclosure at some point shortly thereafter. It looked like a mess, but it did the job well enough.

I did eventually get a laptop for pretty cheap that could run what I needed it to run, but by then I was a little more established with life.

These days I have a few things going on that weren't a thing previously.

I spent several years running my home network data off an old Dell rack server (Which I don't appear to have ever mentioned anywhere here), and an HP network switch that were given to me.  I had to do a little updating on the server to get everything set up the way I wanted to, but it worked.  

Here is where things get relevant:

Once I moved into a smaller house, that didn't have someplace I could run a giant server and switch, I had to figure something else out.

I am now running everything that was previously on the server, which ONLY (I know, I know) ~6TB of storage space to a 8TB USB hard drive plugged into my primary desktop PC.

I could, however, run it off a laptop these days, because they are now powerful enough to stream high quality video and audio in the background and not suffer from too much in the way of performance issues.

It's crazy what twenty years can do. 

I'm Back In The U.S.S.R

 So I finally developed the pictures that I took with the Exakta.

More accurately, it is an Exakta VX IIa with a Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 2/58 lens:

 The camera and lens were both pretty filthy, but after a decent cleaning, they didn't come out too bad.  Anyway, here are some of the pictures I took:

 

Given what the USSR had to say on the subject of religion, I found it both ironic and satisfying to use my first roll of film on one of these cameras at a Catholic Church.

There Ain't No Cure For The Summertime Blues

 Pictures.  I can actually place pictures in this space now, without paying for the ability to so.  Pity this wasn't a thing twenty years ago, since it caused me to migrate to a different platform.

I spent so much time not posting images to either of my LJ blogs, that I cannot bring myself to ruin the text-based world that I created here.

These posts will be (mostly) cross-posted on the blog that I migrated to, but I will not be bringing those over to this space.

Searching For My Lost Shaker Of Salt

The year is 2025.

I am laying on my couch typing this post on a Lenovo something or other PC. I have the screen flipped almost all the way over and am using the touch screen keyboard to type this.

As I do this thing, I am thinking of an article written by the late Douglas Adams, and published in The Salmon of Doubt wherein he is expressing his feelings about using a palmtop (or something similar) pc while in the bath and can't help but wonder what he would think of writing on something like an iPad (quite the Apple fanboy, he was), something like nine years later.

I vaguely recall writing a blog post on my phone on the side of the road in something like 2009/2010, but I cannot recall when. 

Nope, here it is: https://galeharpring.blogspot.com/2009/11/there-nothing-to-it.html 

That was a dumb smart phone. After that, things got real with the phones and many things were taken for granted.

But that isn't what I came to write about today. I was going to write about how I am currently reading Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72 and about how much more sense his writing style makes to me now.

Which is odd, because as I've perused the entries on this old thing, there are quite a few pieces I would almost call Gonzo Blogging.

Much of which predates me reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 2010.

Sweet Home Alabama

 Back in something like 2019, I decided to move this to WordPress for reasons that I'm currently unaware of.  I've become somewhat annoyed and disillusioned with WP over the last year or so. Again, for reasons that I'm currently unaware of.  It probably has something to do with the fact that they want me to give them an annoyingly large amount of cashey-money to be able to post whatever I want to on a blog that I've maintained for twenty-five years, across four (I'm pretty sure) platforms.

 All but one of those blogs I have access to and have considered writing in again in the last year or so, but since I would like to post pictures, I suspect this is the one to start leaning into again.

I would like to migrate everything from WP back over to here by the first of the year, but who knows how difficult it will be.  Easy if I can do an import/export, but more difficult if I have to copy paste.

I'm going to choose to be optimistic.  

Back In The USSR

A couple of weeks ago I came into possession of three Exakta cameras that came from Soviet occupied Germany, and were manufactured sometime in the late '50s to early '60s.  The cameras are hilariously counter-intuitive to use, but the lenses are apparently very desirable and seem to be worth a decently large amount of money if I should decide to flip them.

 I have a roll of film in one of the cameras now. When I finish this, I'm going to walk down the road to a catholic church and finish the roll of film there.

Why?

Because it seems to be very ironic to take photos of any kind of religious establishment, since that really wouldn't have been an option when the cameras were new.

I will post the photos when I develop them.  

There's Got To Be A Twist

 

I was "given" a Nintendo Switch 2 as a gift this past weekend. I'm enjoying it so far, and it is not lost on me that I got my first Switch (Lite) just short of six years ago.

I don't have any pictures to post right now like I did before, but I plan to get some screenshots and write a bit more about it in a few weeks.

When I got the Switch, I was about 2 1/2 years into the life of the thing, so there was a pretty good selection of games to choose from, and I'd say I snagged some good ones to go with it right out of the gate. The Switch 2 was the Mario Kart World bundle and I snagged a copy of Bravely Default, which I enjoyed on the 3DS, and really want the opportunity to go through again. I haven't gotten the chance to actually start that one yet, but I've been playing some Mario Kart and Animal Crossing.

Yes, I started another island.

I re-read my post from my first day with the original Switch Lite, and I must say. I'm disappointed that I haven't managed to play through FFXII yet. I don't use the Lite much anymore, that has been taken over by other people in my house, and the digital versions of games start to get a little weird when you have more than two consoles. I should probably start looking for a cartridge for that one. And maybe, you know, actually play the game.

But I digress.

And forgot what I was going to write.

Packing My Bags For The Misty Mountains

 

I’m thinking it is time to take a serious look at the ol’ camera bag’s contents. I’ve been carrying around the same bag for, give or take, 13 years now. It’s has gone through many changes in content over the years as I’ve gotten more, how shall we say, gear.

The bag has a slot for a computer. Originally I kept an HP Mini 1000 in there as my camera PC, I swapped that out for a crappy Chromebook five or six years ago. Once that died, I decided I wanted the ability to do some light work in Lightroom on the go, so I threw in this little HP Stream netbook someone gave me. That thing sucked. It only has 32GB of non-expandable internal storage. It was fine for a while, but when it got so that Windows couldn’t even update due to lack of storage, I just took it out of the bag and threw in my Surface Go 2 when I needed a computer in the bag.

But I wanted something dedicated.

I got my hands on a Lenovo Yoga 11e, and it runs Lightroom. It should fit in the bag, I kind of forgot to check that before I started messing with it.

Anyway, as for the rest of the stuff inside the bag, here we go:

Cameras: Nikon D40X, Nikon FE, Kodak Ektar H35.

Lenses: 28mm Vivitar Wide Angle, Vivitar TX mount 135mm, Vivitar TX mount 400mm, Nikon Nikkor 50mm (came with the FE), Spiratone 135mm, Nikon Nikkor AF-S 18-70mm, Vivitar Macro Focusing 75-300 and a Holga Pinhole.

I’m thinking about dumping the Spiratone in favor of a lens I dug out of storage the other day: 50mm Underground MC, because that lens is awesome and works with most of the filters I’m also going to add to the bag.

The Sony A6000 will be removed from the camera bag and probably just become an everyday walking around with camera. I just picked up this cheap, but neat little 35mm f/6.3 lens for that, and I’m guessing the Yashica “Red Special” FX-3 will become the general walking around film camera, because it’s awesome.

The biggest challenge for this whole bag thing is figuring out a way to store the filters I want to include. I want to spend a day walking around with a camera and doing some stuff, but I’m unsure if I will take the bag or a couple of walking around cameras. Or both, because I really want to use the lens on the Sony a little more.

And therein lies the problem. I want to get my bag set up to handle whatever I might need, and I use a great deal of this stuff pretty frequently, but I don’t want to carry it all around.

Why don’t I ditch the manual lenses film cameras and go with two or three AI zoom lenses, you may be asking. Because I hate them. I did that once. I cleared all of the manual stuff out of my camera bag and took several digital cameras and all of their automatic lenses with the intention of letting the camera do all of the work. It was horrible. I didn’t have a single picture turn out the way I saw it. Everything just felt so sterile and blah. Someone once told me that whatever it is that I do with the light is fantastic. What I worked out that day is automatic doesn’t do justice to my vision.

Anyway, I have more to come. Or rather, more to add from the past, but not tonight. Maybe next week.

Don't Take My Kodachrome

I was given these camera filters a very long time ago, and have never been able to get them to work particularly well. I asked Reddit about it last night, and someone kindly pointed me to an eBay auction for the exact same thing.

Turns out this is a filter kit from Korea.

As I said, I was never able to get them to work particularly well. Probably because the mounting kit that came with my set is for lenses with a 52mm filter ring, which I don't have many lenses that fit that description. The couple I do have, everything was just too close to get more than a vague blurry outline on the colored ones, so I took my Box o' Filter Junk and built something.

 

 

I ended up taking a wish.com fish eye lens, and clipping the mount ring from the kit directly to that. I paired it with an old but very beautiful Nikon 50mm f=1.4 lens on a D40X and had some fun with it.

Most of the filters with designs still won't focus, but the cloudy, dreamy designs are interesting:

What I really enjoyed, however, were the semi-transparent weird bokeh (maybe?) filters:

  

Yes, the light was weird. The sun just couldn't decide if it was going to come out or stay behind the clouds. There is very little in way of forgiveness with regard to a single f-stop or shutter speed setting. There were a few times where it was either super dark or super washed out and nothing in between. I did experiment with putting a crosshatch filter between the lens and the fish eye to tone down some of the light, but it didn't do much. Maybe next time I'll put an ND filter in there. I think I have an adjustable 52mm someplace.

All in all, I did enjoy messing with these and I will be figuring out how to use them more often.

Aurora Borealis Shinin’ Down On Dallas

I purchased my first DSLR at the very end of December in 2012. It is a Nikon D40x. I used that thing until I wore the shutter out in August of 2018. I spent an obscene amount of money getting it repaired rather than just replacing the camera.

Ironically, in October of 2018 I got my hands on a Nikon D3100. My roommate from years prior had one and I thought that I liked it when we were in Texas in 2012.

You know what I did with that camera? Not a whole lot. I whip it out and use it occasionally for some darn thing or other, most recently the eclipse in 2024. I like the pictures that it takes, but for some reason, that particular camera never resonated with me.

In May of 2021 I purchased a Nikon D3500. I like that camera, and used it pretty exclusively (for my digital stuff) for a couple of years. I never fully put the D40x aside. It still saw the occasional bit of use, but for a while it was relegated to backup (above the D3100, I might add) use.

After doing some serious soul searching and trying to decide if it was worth keeping all of my camera stuff or offloading it, I decided to do something. That something was to go use every camera that I own. That was an expensive endeavor, since the majority of them are 35mm and film isn’t exactly cheap anymore, but I did it. I also developed almost all of the rolls myself at home, which was fun.

In doing that, however, I realized that for me, the fun is being able to get a good photo with whatever is at hand, and I think that I kind of lost that for a while when I was using the D3500 with it’s fancy lenses and settings and blah blah blah.

There is also the random side effect of accidentally acquiring at least 4 more functional Nikon 35mm cameras, but that’s a story for another day.

Needless to say, the D40x seems to be back to being my go-to camera, which is fun and challenging, since I don’t tend to use automatic lenses with it. I went to the Robert’s Camera store annual garage sale last weekend, and snagged a Vivitar 400mm lens for $5, which I’ve been having some fun with as well. Maybe I’ll put a couple of photos with that lens up here soon.

Dear Lady Can You Hear The Wind Blow

 

I was working with one of my children on their schoolwork this morning, and we came to a color by letter page in the phonics book. My child colored the picture, but it didn’t have anything for the skin color.

After looking at it for a few minutes, I realized that if colored correctly, she looked an awful lot like someone I knew.

I went ahead and gave it a try…

I wasn’t wrong.

Made all the more entertaining since one of our other friends tends to refer to her as queen/princess/baby girl depending on the situation.