New Drone

 The minute I sold my old drone this past summer I missed it. I wasn’t using it very much at the time so I thought I could do without it. A couple of weeks ago I tried replacing it with a cheap drone from Temu  and what I should have done with the money I spent on that was throw it out into the middle of the street. That’s what a waste it was. When launched it was basically uncontrollable with the controller it comes with. So I boxed it up and put it in my electronics archive bin (honestly I don’t know why I just didn’t throw it out) and went on eBay and purchased a DJI Mini 3 combo drone. It came two days ago and man what a difference. There is probably a reason why DJI leads the hobby drone market. Had it up in the air yesterday morning at sunrise to shoot the moon setting over Portland, ME.

After the storm…

 Woke up a couple of nights ago to a lot of wind and rain and by 9 am the next day that storm had blown through. The temps were in the 50’s and I definitely overdressed for my walk. The view and the waves were awesome to see under a very animated sky.

December sky after a storm

Something Completely Different

 As I was finishing up lunch yesterday, I was taking my dishes to the kitchen and as I picked up my glass I got this idea to try it as a filter. I held up the glass to my iPhone oriented it towards my living room window and took this shot. Kind of kool the way it turned out. May put a different glass in my camera bag in the future to see what interesting results I can get at the cove.

Headed South

Headed South for the holidays. Yesterday, today and tomorrow were and will be long travel days.Drove through a blizzard in PA this morning. Just awful conditions on I-81; blowing snow, white out and slippery road conditions. Trucks roared by me (I was following the reduced speed limit warnings) as if it were a sunny day and I was holding them up. Passed numerous cars off the road. What a difference 400 miles further South makes. In NC it is 57F and sunny. My kind of weather.

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On A Walk

Yesterday the weather finally broke enough to be able to take a walk. I woke up to a light coating of snow on the lawn but the temperature moderate later in the morning and it all went away with the rain that followed. Reports from friends in NH noted 5-8" of wet heavy snow.

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Keep forgetting

I keep forgetting to make an entry here. Sheesh! Must be that holiday time of year. I have been focussing so hard on trying to, no- willing, to make the $25 Minolta XD5 35mm eBay film camera work, that I have done so at the expense of everything else. But it has paid off. I finally figured out that it will work and I can get acceptable results developing the film so that I can take it with me on my trip south for Christmas. I guess I should have read all the manuals at the beginning, but then I am a visual, trial and error kind of guy.

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Totally Absent

Have neglected posting lately. Been focusing on learning how to use a new camera. The first roll I shot with my new to me Minolta XD5 was utter failure. The film didn't stay attached on the take-up reel so I spent 3 hours shooting photos that would never be. All that time and chemistry wasted. Yesterday I repeated the process shooting and developing another roll. Here is one picture from that roll. 

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Dissapointment

I was so disappointed by that last roll of film so I went for a long walk yesterday and shot another roll of my old standby Ilford HP5. Tried some different metering techniques with the app on my phone, using both incident and reflective light readings. When I got back I developed the roll. After dinner, when the negatives were dry I scanned them. The metering app is ok but not sure that it is the solution. I will probably have to invest in a proper meter. Going to try a roll today with an analog meter made by Sekonic and see if that works any better.

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Another from the Roll

Finding a few marginally better photos from a roll of FOMAPAN Creative 200, medium format film that I shot. In researching this on line, I think the time I used to develop the film was possible. The developer was probably much cooler than the 72 degrees than I estimated. It was more like 68 degrees or cooler which would have extend the developing time by 1min 45sec. So I will work on  making sure that I consider the temperature of the developer a little more accurately. Also reading the spec. on the fill I probably should have rinsed it a little longer. Live and learn. 

Here's today's post-

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Took Turkey Day Off

As the title of this post implies I took Thanksgiving day to kind of chill from being a creative and other than posting on IG, I spent the day watching the parade and then a couple of movies. There were also calls with family and an afternoon of cooking the holiday dinner. I like to cook and don't often take the time to do it anymore. So it was fun to get back into it. Here is yesterday's IG post, and following that, today's post as well. Focusing still on salvaging bad color photos by turning them into black and white photos.

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Missed Posting Yesterday

Was off the island yesterday and that got me all twisted around in my usual daily routine. I got a lot of chores done, though, as well as grabbing a huge load of groceries. Lots of foodstuffs not available at the market on the island. 

Still trying more experiments with black and white photography. Yesterday's post would have again been about how black and white photography saved another otherwise useless, normal touristy kind of color photo. Here is the post:

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Here is what the color photo looked like:

Taken down by Damillos Restaurant

Here is today's IG post before I forget.

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Today's IG Post

I love black and white!

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Perfect Example

Here is a perfect example of what I had to go through to post a panorama on IG. Because Instagram is set up to use a 4:5 or square format in its posts, I had to use Unfold for iOS to format my post in such a way that people could appreciate the beauty of the photos used in the panorama. The images were created by my drone which was flying at an altitude of about 350' and at sunrise. 

I used a feature of the drone camera that allows you to take a panorama of 9 photos. It does this automatically by rotating the camera on its gimbal, take 3 rows of 3 photos/row. It then stitches the photos together while processing the image. Individual images of the panorama are also stored separately on its sd card. I took two of these panoramas and stitched those together into an 18 photo panorama using this software for MacOS.

Here is the post on IG:

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Here area the component photos:

Left side 9 photo

Right side 9 photo

Composite panorama