A film, some film, a Hopcast
It has not been fun, but I think I'm done tinkering with the new web home. It's like a tiny home on a forgotten sidestreet on the information superhighway. And that's just fine.
I'd prefer that the blog scroll in a single column, but we're in Operation Market Garden territory here. Don't be greedy, Scott. The site works, it loads.
A film
Segue. Have you seen Blade Runner? There's a test the Blade Runners administer to determine if a person is human. I forget the name of the test, but I can recommend a better one. One simple question. Do you forget to cancel things after the free trial?
I cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime after I'd given them more money than I intended. There are silver linings. Babylon Berlin.
I forgot about HBO Max. Tonight I fired up Harley Quinn Birds of Prey. I almost gave up on it. The intro is an overly long montage of narrated starts, stops, and rewinds. I pressed on, because what the hell else am I going to do. I ended up enjoying it.
Women are clearly the main characters, and they know they're the main characters. Good stuff.
Margot Robbie turns in a great performance. Fine line they play with Harley Quinn. Criminal mastermind, violent sociopath, but also occasionally capable of tenderness.
That's tough to pull off. They did it pretty well on one of my favorite shows, Firefly. Mal and his band of rebels took to a life of crime to evade the evil empire. Their crimes conveniently never really hurt anyone.
(Mom and dad, you'd hate it.)
A Hopcast
Before I start rambling really bad - the point of this post was to test the audio features. I aim to keep audio (for now) under 20 minutes.
Some film
I pushed my luck developing some Cinestill BWxx last night with some aging Cinestill monobath. Cinestill says it can be used for two months after opening or X# of uses (I forget the number). My bottle of it might have been older than two months. It worked ok. Skilled developers might say the tones are off, but that's the least of my worries. I haven't got a great Sunny 16 eye for metering. (If you develop at home, give Cinestill's monobath for black and white a try. Everything in one bottle.)
I took these photos over the past month or so. Nothing special, just meandering around Capitol Hill and Seattle. I struggled a bit scanning them. When the Epson V800 doesn't accurately identify the images, it can be a pain in the ass. I ran one set through the Silverfast scanning software. Haven't used that in a while. That has its own challenges. I'd say it's a little easier to set the negative outlines with the Silverfast than it is with the Epson software.
Good scanning is skilled work. I'm not a good scanner. If I wanted to be proficient I think I'd have to get a big monitor. A couple of years ago my left eye started going a little wonky. The small images used in the scanning software don't make things easy. I'm sure there are workarounds. If you get the borders of the negative wrong it can affect how the scanner calculates exposures. I think.
A bigger monitor would help, but just knowing the ins and outs of the software, keeping an area completely dust free, knowing how various films should look. I'm not surprised that pro photographers will find pro scanners and stick with them.
The following two images are from the same negative. One was scanned with the Epson software, the other with the Silverfast. I can't remember which is which. I would like to get better at scanning, so I'll have to take better notes. I think the second is Silverfast. I made some slight adjustments to them in Lightroom, but they definitely looked different from the start.
These are some digitals from last night. Hang in there everyone!
