Life as of late

I moved. Far away. But not as far as California or Tulum. My beautiful girlfriend, Allison May Kiphuth, convinced me to move to Dover, New Hampshire, since we closed the camera store back in May. For three months I looked for jobs while I sorted through three-plus years of materials and parts and pieces, piles of intended projects never completed. We found a place to live in July, and are here now — a fantastic small apartment on the Cocheco River. Last week Allie saw a Golden Eagle.

So I looked for a job for near to three months, while on unemployment. I could not find a single major bite in my field, and even applied for a position at the Children’s Museum, which is here in Dover. That interview went really well, but I didn’t get the position — that’s okay; they offered me a 2 week contract position instead, building both a mirror wall and a magnetic ball wall. I’ll post pics of the projects soon.

So we moved to Dover around September 1st. I got a call for an interview on the 3rd with a company I applied to nearly 2 weeks previous. I interviewed, got offered the job on the spot, and now work for a crazy, small company called Yogibo. We make very fine, fancy beanbag chairs (really!) and the company is growing like weeds. I am a Customer Service representative, mostly, and also do some ordering, marketing, sales, and I’ve helped load the delivery truck a few times. The place is fun, tight, insane, and I’m incredibly happy to be there. The only catch is a smallish one: it’s an hours drive to Nashua from Dover, but worth it as far as I’m concerned.

Which brings up an unrelated issue… but one that is peculiar and also sad. For over 7 years I’ve worked in photo retail. I liked it, I was good at it, and it fueled the fire that is my photographic tinkering. The demise of Stuyvesant Photo was evidence of the current state of small-shop photo retail: dying. In Portsmouth alone, two long-standing camera stores closed in the last year… it’s on the way out, in short. The point is, I can’t reliably look for work in this industry because there isn’t any. It’s time for a career change, and beautifulbeanbags is it.

Reading this blog? Check out yogibo.com for an idea as to how different a beanbag styled chair can really be… it’s fantastic.

As I unpack my office, I’ll be picking back up on some of the projects I left hanging when I started packing up in Cohoes. These include, but are not limited to:
– Polaroid battery conversions (see my etsy store)
– Polaroid Joycam modifications (proven)
– Polaroid Big Swinger adaptations (conceptual)
– Polaroid BigShot electronic shutter conversion (halfway done)
– Polaroid back mounted to an Ansco Buster Brown back (old skool)
– Polaroid SX67 project (super secret)
… and way too many more.

So that’s it. After I unpack, I’ll start them up again and most my progress and successes where applicable. I’ll also detail the build of my bananas mirror wall, and explain the process and what worked, and what didn’t. Stay chill, people — Fall is here.

Depth of Field Trends?

shallow depth of field

Just a thought, nothing really fanciful to show… Depth of field (DOF) is the effect in photography of part of an image having sharp focus and the rest showing gradual softness.  DOF and focus in general is generally distance based: the focus will be specific at let’s say 10 feet.  Anything closer or further away from that distance may appear softer the further away from the subject you look.  DOF is also dependent on some other factors, like the lens opening (aperture),  the focal length of the camera (angle of the lens), and the distance of the subject from the camera (1 foot away, 100 feet away).

As cameras get tinier, the obvious DOF kind of goes away.  You can find outstanding DOF effects in larger lenses for digital SLRs with very wide apertures, or f stops.  You can notice a little DOF effect on some expensive point-and-shoot models, like the Canon Powershot G series, but it’s much less obvious than on SLRs.  On common cameras like Kodaks or Nikons, however, you almost never see effective DOF… the same was true when we bought so many disposable film cameras over the last 15 years: almost everything is in focus all the time.

greater depth of field

Digital SLRs will ALL soon have the ability to shoot video.  This is a fantastic benefit for anyone wanting to achieve filmmaking results with a relatively low budget… all you need are a few nice lenses and you can make something on-par to a Hollywood film with something that fits into a lunchbox.  What this also brings, depending on the lenses, is fantastic DOF effect to video that has mostly appeared pretty flat as a rule.  Sure focus shifts when adjusted in a pocket-sized camcorder, but never dramatically enough to want to make a noir film or love story, etc.

Point is this: small cameras get worse, less effective depth of field, and DSLRs get better, more dramatic depth of field in video (as well as photos, of course).  If the trend is true that most photos taken these days are with cellphones, then true DOF almost goes away completely.  But for every video shot on a DSLR with even the most basic lens, the DOF returns to society and the public at large.  Someone figure out what it means and get back to me.  /Rant

The Monstrosity

THE BEAST AWAKENS!!

*I should preface this post: I don’t really take photos of things as I build them, because I usually don’t know how they’ll work out… it’s like being struck with an idea, and then scurrying around finding the parts to make it whole.  I may start with one piece and put it down in favor of another… in short, this is why there are only photos of the final product, and not of the assembly process.  Hopefully I’ll grow out of this some day, but I’m not worried, evidently. Also, these photos were taken with a Nikon P-A-S with a non-working LCD screen, because it’s all I had.  Hence, they are terrible photos.  Forgive me, Ansel.*

Amongst the ruins of the Ritz Camera former-equipment-dogpile, I located a former touch-screen kiosk.  The kiosk previously held a CRT monitor with a touch-screen faceplate, which is a very thin layer of glass embedded with capacitive sensors to detect pokey fingers.  CRT’s are not only heavy, but also power-consumptive and plain old annoying, so I yanked it out and put it in the to-be-recycled collection, along with it’s power control board.  What remained was a small-tv-sized, angular, steel shell with a big hole in the back.

I absconded with a flat LCD panel from another kiosk laid waste, and as it happens it JUST fit into the fascia of the steel shell.  Behind it I installed a motherboard from an old desktop computer I’d been saving for fancy projects, since it was in perfect health.  I screwed a used harddrive, Molex power splitter, and power supply to the interior roof of the thing, and wired it all up.  Since I needed to install an OS on the unit, I twist-tied a CD drive to the top (like an X-CARGO!), and got that sucker a fresh copy of Ubuntu!

I mounted the whole thing on top of an industrial MAJESTIC tripod Dad found me at a flea market… we think it was for surveying equipment, but boy was it heavy, perfect for my not-a-desktop.  Making sure not to short any pins on the bottom of the motherboard was tricky, but was negotiated — since then I have built a healthier collection of nuts’n'bolts for such purposes.

I had planned on reusing the touch-panel as a kind of Wacom tablet, something you could use on your lap to draw, etc, but I haven’t completed that project… yet.

The whole machine actually worked fairly well with a wireless card installed, but it was too ungainly for our shoddy crazy project-driven apartment… I had it set up next to the Joycam Counter, where I was rehabbing old Polaroids, but that project also fell aside, and the Monstrosity was eventually disassembled and scrapped for parts again.  It was a good project, and finished in an estimated 4 hours of scrambling.  Oh, so much to learn!

I like cardboard

Shelf skeleton

And I know you do too.  Back in May ’09, when I worked at the camera store, we carried long rolls of 107″ backdrop paper, which got shipped in either long cardboard boxes or long, sturdy tubes.  This day, we happened to have 4 very nice, long, tubes which were destined for the dumpster, which was a flat-out shame.  On this same day, we had some cardboard boxes from a Manfrotto shipment, which are double-thick, handsome, non-abused corrugated cardboard.  The puzzle pieces were there, I just had to assemble it all.

Three of a kind, woot!

So I stole home the long tubes, and the box and a few spares I had at home of similar double-corrugated cardboard from Walmart, and stopped by (reluctantly) Lowes on the way home and bought some 1×3″ pine.  Working on the theme of limitation and low/no budget, I measured out the length of the pine I had (maybe 24′ total?) and cut enough to make 3 shelves around 36×16″.  Then I skinned the shelves with the cardboard, taught enough so they didn’t have much budge to them, and with as few screws as possible without compromising strength.

The tubes are test-fit

The verticals, being 4 tall tubes, were each cut with 1/4 diameter notches to allow the corners of the shelves to wedge snuggly inside.  The weirdest part of the whole contraption was how unsure I was as to how to keep the whole ensemble together.  So I used rope and kind of lashed the thing together.  This is probably the least secure method to use for something intended to support lots of weight almost 8 feet in the air, but it’s held for close to three years, and that means it’s working out pretty well.

Weight-tested

All of my builds of a given size had to be able to support human weight.  I don’t know where this concept came from, but I figure if it can support upwards of 150 lbs, it should be able to hold up some cameras, or a television, or what have you.

This unit will be disassembled, the cardboard recycled and the wood either saved for future projects (picture frames?) or submitted for kindling.  Such is the life-cycle of home-built near-free furniture.

Laden!

From where I write

The blueprint for mayhem

This is also an older project, but this explains sort of how my building process works.When I build my personal furnishings, I work within a few constraints.

One, I’m generally poor, since I spend too much money on cameras or related ephemera, so I don’t want to go to Home Depot to buy piles of proper supplies for these projects.  Good projects, they deserve good materials.

Two, I try to use found materials, with the exception of screws or other hardware: those I buy once and reuse every time I move and build a new thing.  For example, the screws holding this desk together are the same that went into my first darkroom counter project back in Binghamton.  When I move from Cohoes, I’ll disassemble this, donate the wood to whomever wants it, and save the screws for the next project.

See the resemblance?

Three, I try to figure out what supplies I have, determine what I need for the project (hold a tv, general storage, support a cast-iron double-basin sink, etc), and then design the frame using those constraints.  On occasion I’ll pick up one piece of material, like for my tube-shelf, I bought 3: 2×1 8-footers, and made the shelf frames using those, and skinned them with free double-thick corrugated cardboard.

Tools generally used are a 15 year old Stanley Wood saw, a Japanese wood-workers saw (very sharp, double-sided piece of awesome), and a corded power drill.  If I’m feeling a little more particular, I’ll whip out the wood-plane and polish things up a little.  Oh, and for an added challenge, everything I build must support my own weight, whether it will need to regularly or not.  If it can’t support 160 lbs, it doesn’t deserve to exist.

And so, that’s how it goes.  A pile of wood and panels, a door, a bucket of woodscrews, and a little creativity.  VOILA! See more examples in the slideshow below.  I’ll never buy Sauder again.

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Assorted Projects Past

Found a few folders with some old projects in them, figured I’d better add them to the portfolio, as it were. *Graflex photos taken by Hem; terrible Polaroid photos taken by this turkey.

ANY LENS WILL DO

My good friend Hem bought a Crown Graphic large-format camera.  These models used 4×5 sheets of film and were commonly found in the hands of press and war photographers.  Hem is saving for a Petzfalt lens I guess, but in the meantime he wanted to play a little with it, so he asked if I could wing something.  I snagged a lensboard and shutter off of a Polaroid 800 instant camera, built back in the 50′s and now rendered heavy pieces of useless junk due to unavailability of THAT kind of film… for years.  I headed home to see good ol’ Dad, and he helped me build a lens-board for it.  I cut the thing down to fit just-so, and I went home with the remaining challenge of mounting the shutter and lens to the aluminum plate.  The camera hasn’t been tested properly yet, but quick samples I did with a Polaroid Packfilm back showed promise… or at least proved that it worked.

THE THEATER PROP

A young lady came into the store and was looking for a Polaroid camera as a prop for her theater company, Capital Repertory in Albany.  Being the Polanerd that I am, I told her the whole deal about Polaroid films and models and all the other assorted nonsense the company has experienced in producing instant films.  The catch with her particular need was that it should be classic looking, for a play about the early 60′s called The Marvelous Wonderettes.  The other catch was that it should take an actual picture which would be given away to a patron after the show.

When these older models were used in poor light, as today, a flash was needed.  Since electronic flashes weren’t a common product, most cameras used disposable flash bulbs, which were cheap and easy to acquire, 40 years ago or more.  Nobody produces these bulbs anymore, and while you can still find them, they’re hard to locate easily and readily.  My bright idea has been, and will continue to be, to figure out a reusable replacement for flash-bulbs.  For this project, I built a one-off electronic, classically-styled flash that would integrate with the model as it was originally intended.

It works, but needs ironing out.  I added a switch to the top so it could be shut off from the battery power, which is built into the base.  The flash itself comes from a disposable camera, referred to in the industry as an OTUC (one-time-use camera).  You’ll see more of this as it develops, no pun intended.

Fan-tastic Innovation?

Where's Darwin to explain this?

When I worked for Ritz Camera, the regional repair guy was headquartered in our shop, so we saw him often and housed tons of unused discarded parts and computers and other madness.  One day I was instructed to throw out a pile of old equipment, which seemed so wasteful and irresponsible, so I piled it into my car and took most of it to be recycled.  I kept a number of components to try to salvage, however, including a glass touch-screen panel, a large one-piece kiosk (like those old fat iMacs), and a Dell LCD flat-panel with no legs, which purported “smoked” at random.

The last first:  the flat-panel LCD screen worked almost perfectly, except for the lack of a stand to hold it up.  If you’ve ever taken notice of the legs your flat-panels stand on, they tend to tuck underneath the screen itself to proper support the weight, and sit wide to provide balance for the display.  WHAT ON EARTH looks like such a thing?  HMMMM, we’ve been using them for years, we all grew up with one or more, they’ve kept the same design shape for nearly 100 years… How about an oscillating fan?

One short trip to Salvation Army yielded exactly what I needed.  I snagged the fan for $6, the LCD for 0$, and after disassembling both units I was able to adapt a method of getting the two pieces together with minimal fuss and maximum Dremel-ing.  The unit allowed for clearance of the cables, and while it no longer oscillated, it looked pretty darn snappy.  Eventually it went to Stuyvesant Photo, where it wowed anyone who took the moment to notice how ridiculous (and creative — their words, not mine!) it was.

Sadly, it met its doom during the move out of Stuy Photo, and the display was salvaged yet again… $10 at a thrift shop for a hardware-less wall mount display bracket.  It will find a home working with the new more-permanent arrangement for the Makerbot in the near future.