Space Pilot

 I've been away trying out exotic film stocks for a while and I decided it was time to post something photographic. One of the things I have been thinking a lot about is taking film shots with old cameras that lack built in light meters. These cameras were designed to be used without such a thing and, if you get hold of a Kodak camera manual from the 50s or 60s you'll see how folk took good pictures with them. The basic Sunny 16 rule that was used to judge exposures, worked pretty well for most situations that relied on natural light. If you found yourself indoors or taking pictures at night, the recommendation was to use a flash. So the Sunny 16 rule as set by Kodak, based in Rochester, NY, at latitude 43°N, goes like this. Set the shutter speed of the camera to match the ISO rating of the film. For example, if you are using Fomapan's 200 ISO Creative film, set the shutter to 1/200s.  Look at the sky. If the sun is shining brightly in a clear blue sky, set the lens apertur

 I recently restarted a long-running Dungeons and Dragons game that I started as Dungeon Master back in the days of lockdown during the Covid-19 crisis. We started it on Zoom and I've kept it that way as it allows the far flung family and some pals to join in. It's a great way to spend an evening every month catching up and creating a story together. Being online, I've come up with a few ways to try and compensate for the lack of the full tabletop experience. One of the tricks is to create token graphics for the characters and place them on a map in a graphics program. You need a lightweight but capable program to run alongside Zoom while you share your screen and I've found that Affinity Designer works pretty well. However the upgrade deal to the new version is not very good. So I might try something opensource instead. A vector program works well because you can mask out parts of the map that have not yet been visited and then reveal them as you go. You need the layer

 I thought I'd better post these photos from January before February is out. As usual there are more on my lomography site. This last one features a story on a mug from Shoreline of Infinity .

I've finally got round to developing and having developed a few films that I shot over the Christmas holidays. I was putting some Agent Shadow from  Kosmofoto  through its paces, push processed to 1600 ISO, and some Santacolor 100 from  Santa 1000 , an ideal colour film for the Christmas period. I picked up both of these from the crowdfunders that got them started. The Agent Shadow pushes to some great speeds for flash-free photography in the Scottish winter and these shots were take with a Minolta Dynax 404si. The Santacolor needs a bit more light but this aerial survey film picks out great colours in the Christmas lights. This time I loaded a Minolta Dynax 4 with the film.