Behaviour change is hard. But if we don’t evolve - we suffer the consequences.
Well, things are getting a little, um, motivating.
I’m self-employed, and make the major part of my income from face-to-face training. Looks like I need to find a way to replace that income stream for some months.
I have ideas. But this is going to be challenging.
Pleased with this one. The print is long gone - it was in display in a photo cube and was bleached out years ago. The negative was loose in my parents' junk drawer for decades, and was badly scratched up.
One scan, an hour’s work on retouching, and this is the result:
So. After supper Iris gets down, grumbling a bit. And then sits in the corner assiduously writing.
This is what she hands to me.
“I have just eetn (eaten) the yoyos and I am still hungree”.
4 years old and issuing her first letter of complaint.
I am so proud.
Trying to amplify signal, not noise.
Let this destress you in the midst of the current mess: A Joyful Flash Mob Plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
Scanning 126 and 110 format negatives with a Plustek OpticFilm scanner
I’ve been taking photographs for a long time. I was a photographer as a primary school child, using the cheap cameras of the 70s that my parents would buy me. And that means I have a lot of negatives from very long-gone formats. In particular, my earliest photos are on Instamatic film, of the 126 and 110 varieties. You can see examples of both below:
I’ve been progressively working my way through my much larger 35mm neg collection, but up until now, I’ve lacked a good way of scanning these older formats. I could scan the photo prints, but some of them are faded, and what’s the point of hanging onto these negs for decades if I’m not going to use them?
I did buy a cheap Veho scanner a couple of years ago that claimed to be able to do scan the negs, but the results were not good. I knew I could get better results from these negatives. I was contemplating sending them off for professional scanning, but the quality of the photos, in many cases, did not seem to justify the cost. Surely there must be a way I could use my existing film scanner?
Thankfully, when searching around the subject, I found a supplier of negative adapters for a variety of film scanner brands, including the Plustek OpticFilm model I use.
I put in an order, and waited impatiently for 10 day until they arrived. (They were shipped from the west coast of the US.) Here they are:
My scanning setup
I scan using VueScan software on my Mac. It is also available for Windows.
I put the scans into cloud storage, and then edit on my iPad Pro, using a mix of tools. I start with Pixelmator Photo for tweaking colour, levels and so on. I then clean up the dust and scratches using the healing brush in the iPad version of Adobe Photoshop. I used to do both stages in Pixelmator Photo, but I recently discovered that Photoshop’s healing tool works much faster, saving me significant amounts of time.
126 film scanning
Here’s some early results from the 126 film:
110 film scanning
And a first example of 110 film:
None of these are great photos. But they’re some of the only images I have from this period of my life, and so it’s great to have access to them digitally, at last.
This is one of the best and most measured pieces I’ve read on Coronavirus (from a scientist): Rupert Beale - Short Cuts: Wash Your Hands
Hidden in the UK budget - the government will levy an additional 2% tax on social media companies, search engines and so on from the beginning of next month - on value created from UK users.
I worry that coffee shops (and elsewhere) now refusing to let customers use reusable cups because of Coronavirus concerns will kill the momentum built up over the last couple of years.
Once the COVID-19 crisis has passed, the climate crisis will still be there.
Om Malik on how social networks lose our trust.. Thought-provoking.
Rather concerning, if not surprising piece: Russia ‘hired network of Britons to go after enemies of Putin’.
Some very careful wording in there…