I bid on this Canon F-1 on ebay, it was cheap, and I was expecting to be outbid because Canon F-1s are popular cameras on ebay. I forgot about it until I got an email that I won the bid seven days later. The camera looks rough with a lot of brassing, a few dents and a few dings, but it works great and the light meter is right on accurate. It has a motor drive, which is really cool — “chunka, chunka, chunka…” at five frames per second when I hold down the shutter release. Interestingly enough, the F-1 will not trip my studio flashes or modern flashes, but it has no trouble tripping my old Metz CT-60 flashes. I included four photos that are scans of negatives taken with the F-1.

I was downright domestic and quite handy all weekend. I made a double batch of pork roast with potatoes, carrots and celery to get some food stocked up in the freezer. I had a stark reminder about how busy we’ve been when I opened the door to discover I had more film than food in in the freezer — it was definitely time to do some cooking.

I also finished organizing the catio, and got the rest of the stuff out of the armory, and started preparing to build a darkroom. I ordered a walk-thru cylindrical revolving darkroom door, which should arrive in a couple of weeks, and started drawing lines on the carpet to mark out where the walls and cylindrical door will go.

The nature of remodeling projects is that I always have to deal with deferred maintenance as part of each remodeling project, so I repaired the roof on the armory, and then put re-purposed corrugated steel on the exterior, south-facing wall to cover up the deteriorating exterior wall board that’s been blasted by the sun for the past 24 years. I also covered up the window in the south wall, since I don’t need a window in the darkroom. The re-purposed corrugated steel gives the south wall of the armory a colorful, ghetto-like look between the white and silver pieces, and the rusty spots.