If its a girl......
A New Chapter
Well there couldn't be a better way to start of this new chapter by introducing little baby Monkey, expected around Christmas I met him/her toady at 1:30pm. She/he jumped around wiggled and showed it was full of life making the whole experience on see the baby for the first time so much more special. Well done my Tenbellies.
Edwin Land
Today his early cameras are sort after and used by photography enthusiasts, i too have one and debated selling it because of the high prices people will pay for it, but then i think about how iconic this camera is and realise keeping hold of a bit of history is much more important.
Happy St George's Day
Happy St George's Day one and all, i may have been alone in flying the flag and celebrating the patron saint of my beloved country but silent i was not.
Inspiration
3 Weeks Aged
I filtered my first sample of brew last night, its only aged by three weeks but patience is not my strongest attribute, however i will let this second one age much longer. I tried two different methods, one with fine oak shavings that had been mildly toasted and another where i boiled shavings and strips of oak in water for about 5 minutes. Im trying to gain a oak/vanilla smoothness to my brew and im fully aware that this takes years and masses of experience so my standard is obviously going to be way less but im sure i could create something drinkable.So the boiled technique brought out a very clear oaky aroma with a very light colour, too light for what i wanted and although the aroma is still detectable in the brew the taste is all that. Plus because the flavour and colour is in the water it meant cutting it with the brew and reducing its strength.
The oak shavings were placed straight in with brew after that had been toasted this had an almost immediate effect on the colour and within a day the brew had that deep rich brown colour exactly what i am looking for. The aroma has started to come through and has definitely gain flavour at 3 weeks so i decided to bite the bullet and filter this batch off and bottle. I filtered it of 4 time to ensure there was no oak shavings left in the brew.
I sampled a little glass afterwards and its made for a fine effort, there is still that kick there which im hoping to reduce through leaving the brew and the oak much longer with this batch. I will use the 3 week batch as i bench mark.
Kowa SE
I'm getting a little fanatical about cameras of late and i think iv said this before, no only do i like taking photos i love to use the camera. I cant help but get a little bit excited knowing how all the very finely crafted parts in these machines work and how they go together. I suppose that comes from my engineering days and still lingers there as i find myself buying old duff cameras and fixing them. One that i finished before Christmas was this Kowa SE with a fixed 50mm lens its a tidy bit of kit. When i bought it for a very reasonable price of 5 knicker its had a stuck shutter and unlike my last camera i couldn't find any guides for it anywhere until i found this guy on Flickr who has an immense collection of cameras and had a similar model he had dismantled and kindly sent me the sketches he made while putting it back together. This helped ALOT as when i opened this one up it totally blew my mind and took a good week before i figured it all out and fixed the problem, then came the task of putting it back together. Check out the pics. once it was don it was time to load it up with film and try it out. the first batch didn't turn out great and partly down to using dodgy chemicals so i tried again and the results were beyond what i had expected.
This was the sticky mirror action
This is the shutter, you cant imagine how complex this actually is and so very small.
This took me two whole nights at assembling the shutter back to the camera body, loads of little springs and alot of swearing. in fact i was half cut when i finally got it right.
Job done
A few shots using out of datefile thjat was crossed processed in work.
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Justified
The new series of Justified started this week, and the first episode hit the spot bang on target. Being English we have the shittest TV known to man, we very rarely make anything worth watching and so looking forward to my US series gives me a reason for having a TV (plus my xbox).
Makes you wanna shoot guns, drink Bourbon, eat fried chicken make moonshine and generally do man stuff all while wearing a cowboy hat............so ill see you at the weekend Thud.
Makes you wanna shoot guns, drink Bourbon, eat fried chicken make moonshine and generally do man stuff all while wearing a cowboy hat............so ill see you at the weekend Thud.
