I captured the Finch Connection after I noticed Spunk looking out the window, watching the finches that were flitting around the branches and pulling seeds out of the many pods hanging from the leafless trumpet vine.
Month: November 2014
Cranes Close Up
Lots and lots of Sandhill Crane are flying over our house every day. Many of them are staying in the area and hanging around in the orchards and along the river.
Speed Graphic
Continuing my adventures in film, I purchased a 4X5 Speed Graphic, Press Camera with money I got for my birthday. I wanted a 4X5 that was more portable, but since field cameras are still pricey, I started looking at press cameras, and decided I liked having the choice of using either the leaf shutter in the lens or the focal plane shutter in the body, and having the option to hand hold the camera.
I ended up with this particular camera because the seller guaranteed that everything worked, and he accepted my offer for the amount of the money I received for my birthday. I got it Wednesday, checked the shutters, the movements, the rangefinders, and indeed everything worked. It was pretty dirty, including the lens, so I took the camera and lens apart, and cleaned everything inside and out. Spunk helped and then participated when I photographed the camera — he wanted to point out the camera’s features and how it works. I looked up the serial numbers on the lens and the camera and it’s a Wartime model produced in 1945.
Thursday morning I went out and took four photos, processed them, and then printed two of the negatives before we went to Thanksgiving dinner at Laurie’s parent’s house in the early afternoon. I used Kodak Tri-X 320, but had the light meter set at ISO 400 and processed the film at ISO 400. I used the leaf shutter in the lens set at 1/400 sec and hand held the camera for the shots. The lens, at 127mm, is fairly wide-angle for a 4X5, therefore, in each photo I was trying to get as close to a group of cranes, and then a group of ducks as possible. The cranes and ducks flew so I snapped the photos of them taking flight, producing my first 4×5, hand-held actions shots.
Gobble Gobble
Happy Thanksgiving!
Another Annoying Cat Photo
Another blogger asked for input on what annoys people. One person said people who post photos of cats on their blogs. So here is another annoying photo of a cat in my long tradition of being annoying and posting photos of cats on my blog. This particularly annoying photo is of Laurie carrying Guildenstern around the garden.
Miss Star Dust
This composite photo includes a selfie of me with Rosencrantz on my lap and my Macbook Pro over a photo of my dad (under my hand) during WWII in England. He was clowning around with another serviceman by the shark mouth nose art on a B24 Bomber named Miss Star Dust.
Red Dawn, Pink Dusk
Despite the beautiful display of morning and evening colors, the rest of yesterday was not good. A cold, strong wind blew all day, and one of Tristan’s tenants put regular dish soap in the dishwasher, and that drove the final nail into the coffin of the dishwasher that Tristan had been nursing along, hoping to get more life out of it. Since we don’t use our dishwasher, I pulled it out from under the counter, disconnected everything, loaded it in the truck and drove it Tristan’s — that was after I coaxed, or more like tricked, the truck into starting. It does not like to start in the cold. One would think pulling a dishwasher out should be a relatively simple task, but no, it wasn’t, and the beast fought me every step of the way. Fortunately, I had lots of help from Spunk and Laurie which made things a little easier.
Murphy’s Law was in top form when I started working on replacing dishwashers at Tristan’s. When I looked under the kitchen sink for the shutoff valve to the water supply, everything was wet. There were two leaky lines that had been dripping for who knows how long. After I got the replacement dishwasher hooked up, the water connection at the dishwasher was now dripping as well. The old copper compression gasket wasn’t seating properly to the new connection. I made a run to Home Depot, where I learned that I couldn’t buy compression gaskets, because we are not supposed use 3/8 copper supply lines anymore. So I had to buy a dishwasher kit with a new flexible supply line (better) but it was just barely long enough, and it included a bunch of parts I didn’t need.
Replacing the supply line to the dishwasher fixed one of the leaks under the sink, but the other one was at a plastic connector that the tech who installed a water filtration system in the house used to connect the cold water to the filter. The copper wasn’t playing well with the plastic and it hadn’t seated properly. I pulled hard on the copper tubing like I was trying to pull it out of the plastic connector. That seemed to finally seat the copper better with the plastic, because it stopped leaking; however, bumping something against the connector might make it start leaking again.
As the French say “les choses sont contre nous”, and everything seemed against us today. At least the the beautiful colors of dawn and dusk were a good reminder that things are not really all that bad.
Sniping for Cows
The Pitcher
The top pitcher in spider ball.
Open, Aliens
Albuquerque’s Nob Hill on Route 66 has a variety of specialty shops that have a little something for everyone — lonely aliens can buy blow-up dolls, there’s robofu…, and what about those jelly rings?
Off Center & Not Even 