Gotbadger

I’m still enjoying taking photos and still wincing everytime I get the bill for processing a roll. The diana is great but in a lot of ways your limited to what you can do especialy when you get the fear.

The fear is a strange beast its caused by taking pictures in low light with a diana. Basically the diana is terrible in low light so much so you fear that your entire film will come back blank a few months back i got 3/12 back, I didn’t want to take another film in low light for weeks after that. So the answer to this I surmised was to get a 35mm camera the film is cheaper and you get more shots per roll best of all I would go for a camera with a lens that wasn’t photo-phobic.

Some quick hunting around for second hand places my friend had recently picked up a olympus XA from a  place in town described as “A small room full of cameras you have to get buzzed into”.  Classic Photographics is what you imagine an independent second hand camera shop should be, the guy persumably the owner was great help managing to give me a few cameras to choose from that met the criteria “35mm rangefinder that was interesting”. After a bit of haggling i was the proud owner of of a FED-4 and paid in cash. Of course they didn’t accept anything else…

Shooting

The FED-4 is a russian rangefinder loosly based on the leica cameras of the time. It looks amazing everything is mechanical bar the light meter that runs on science and it weighs about as much as a fully loaded 4 door  family saloon. Oh and it came with a lovley (matching) leather case at no extra charge!

For my first roll I decided to go for some ISO 400 fim because ISO 400 was what I was used to and mainly because I had ‘The Fear’ having no idea how the camera would perform. The best part was the light meter only going upto ISO 320 so i had to kinda gustimate the calibration.

But as luck would have it  I manged to shoot some passible shots in daylight and some blurry stuff at a gig not too terrible considering I was expecting 100% of the gig shots to come back blank.

Camera Manual Links

If you have a FED-4 you might find the following handy:

http://www.cameramanuals.org/russian_pdf/fed_4.pdf
http://www.marriottcameras.co.uk/instruct3/fed4/with_pictures.htm

Meant to post infos about this a few weeks ago.  Its a plugin for media portal that lets you view all your photos, groups and contacts just as you would on your flicker homepage. This plugin also uses the flickr api so any photos you have marked private etc will be viewable though this plugin.

The plugin reached its first milestone and has been released here; http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/plugins-47/flicked-flickr-plugin-mediaportal-53103/

Currently im awaiting the release of media portal 1.0.1 before moving on with development due to the plugin/skin revamp.

Ive recently setup a nice media pc PVR type thing. It took some digging but eventualy I decided to settle on the sublime media portal its a great program, open source with good comunity and half decent documentation. I had a couple problems that I thought I should post a solution to

Soft subs

I watch a bit of anime now and again a needed to use softsubs however media portal dosent really support this out of box. Bit of searching I came across this thread even though its for an older version the solution still works.

DVB-T EPG

This really annoyed me because I was stuck for so long and the solution was so simple! I was getting absolutly no information in my program guide  everything appeared to be setup to get the guide from DVB-T, the answer was to simply disable any encypted channels in the channel list in the TV (wiki link).

I bought a diana+ some time ago from the Baltic in Newcastle not a remarkable event but its led to some of the most rewarding photography Ive done in quite some time.

It all started about a month ago Ive been happy for quite some time with my trusty Sony Ericsson taking some fairly nice pictures but being nocked about every day for months on end was starting to take its toll and I ended up with some dust inside the camera somewhere that I couldn’t remove easily. As some of you might know I usually like to take a few snaps at Leeds festival but with my camera out of action I began to look at some kind of alternative and having seen a few pictures my mate took on a disposable the previous year I thought that might be the route to go down.

Now the reason I thought the disposable might be a good was the feel of my friends photos they had a certain softness to them which was similar to the effects of my k600i in low light. The reason I like this softness is that reality is rarely perfect when you remember things you remember the composition and forget the imperfections of a scene. With a digital camera you get outstanding detail but unless your lucky or very talented the shot tends to be as good as the time you invest in it, this means you can end up with shots that don’t capture the mood or feel very static.

I happened to be talking to one of the guys at work about this and he asked if I had ever heard of lomography and what he went on to describe basically the things I was looking to see In photos I took. I made the decision the same day to go and get a diana+.

My first film was somewhat nerve-wracking, the diana+ shoots 120mm medium format films that are in themselves quite hard to get hold of let alone develop but as luck would have it one of the best pro shops outside of London spectrum imaging happens to be on my doorstep. Having not shot film in about 10 years it was something of a shock to go back to and because I really don’t know what im doing when it comes to the science of photography a lot of my first film was complete guesswork. I’d also decided to go with iso400 film as I had read the diana+ would under expose iso100 a lot of the time however having never shot anything on iso100 either I was both terified of overexposting or underexposing everything. In the end I decided to just guess and try and follow the rules

The first film was an experiment, I just went out into Newcastle and took photos of things and tried as many different ways to use the camera as I could think of. Removing the first roll of film from the back of the camera was strangely satisfying the images that it had captured and the results it might produce an interesting and mysterious prospect. By the following day I had resigned myself to failure I expected If I was lucky I might get 2 or 3 good photos with the rest of the images unusable. Thankfully I was mistaken.

After the first experiential roll I had no longer had as much fear of taking pictures and when the time for the festival came round I just shot whatever I felt like trusting in the camera. Leeds was a fun place to shoot lots going on lots of great moments to capture I even met a fellow lomographer at Leeds and we had a little chat and he suggested I invest in some slide film and get it cross processed for some really interesting shots. Now with the photos back I cant wait for an excuse to get out there and take some more

I made a video of some of the recent goings on with statecorp.

You can snag the video (31mb) from eve-files here:

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0803/qcwa-battle1-3-08.mkv

To play mkv files you need either the codec pack for windows media player:
http://www.cccp-project.net/
or VLC player:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Personaly I use VLC for everything as its awesome

Over the last few weeks Ive neglected gotbadger somewhat due to some other pressing issues mainly realting to getting made redundant. But have no fear Ive just secured a new job so its all worked out for the best

First pictures from goldstone:

Images from here

I wounder whats going to happen with this the people at http://www.tu24.org have a few ideas, perhaps more concerning is the background here. But hey 1.4L should be enough make it to the 30th

Edit: Be sure to check out close approaches here! Another intresting site is http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/

After my story of woe I decided to try out some different things to try and get it to work. Since the punkbuster files live in C:\WINDOWS\system32 I tried running pbsvc.exe (the install program) from there also. By some miracle this actually worked everything installed correctly and punkbuster is behaving properly again… For now

Windows its shit but you have to use it to play PC games really don’t you, disagree all you like but today I will regale you with two astonishing gems of windows gaming or perhaps more accurately non-gaming.

The evening started well after a hard day at work I was looking forward to a quick frag fest on the strangely enjoyable Call of Duty 4, even better my new mouse (a razer copperhead no less) had arrived to replace my ailing 10 year old MS intelli mouse. After booting up the computer I unplugged my old mouse and put in the new one following the instructions no less. Everything appeared to be going to plan windows detected the device right name and everything finished installing and then promptly told me in no uncertain terms it wasn’t working. Now USB stuff normally works but not being unused to this kind of activity i decided to take it out and plug in my old one and have a search on Google, only that didn’t work either…

Some time later after trying to reinstall a MS intelli mouse and being told it cant find the drivers I start to wounder whats going on looking in the manual add/remove hardware and using the option to specify the drivers reveals the interesting fact i have NONE whatsoever on my system. After panicking somewhat and ringing my friend James we decide a rollback to yesterday is the best option while praying that I actually have it turned on like a coward and haven’t disabled it in a fit of balls out bravado I find I have at-least a tiny bit of luck and rollback to Sunday evening. Mouse works all is good.

Or so I thought even now I’m unsure if these events are related CoD4 was working at the weekend but now it seems it is not. The Antichrist of anti-cheat software long lamented among geeks as an abomination had finally decided to strike with a strange episode of self abuse and stop working. My first indication of the terror was a warning telling me something called PnkBstrB.exe was not talking to the server. After some digging I found a program that apparently could check the status and reinstall to solve any problems. Even later I discovered that that Satan corp (evenballance) was lying and infact there installer did nothing except tell me thinks where not working.

It comes down to this, there are two programs punkbusterA and punkbusterB, A runs all the time as a service and starts B when you play a punkbuster game, as such they should both be in the services bit of administrative tools. Unfortunately for me only A is there no B its like they had some kind of falling out and now when A calls B wont answer. Re-installing with the helpful installer tells me that its installing B but then it wont run since is not appearing in the services bit I conclude its outright lying since the service isn’t even there to run. While googling for this information I came across lots of nice information about the punkbuster support tickets and how people had been waiting weeks or even months for responses. One hopeless soul with a problem similar to mine got the answer read the FAQs after 3 weeks… looks like Satan corp is really into kicking people when there down. Brilliant!

All in all an evening of my life wasted and in a way cant help think its problems like these that drive people to the excrement munching depravity of consoles. Oh well looks like I’m reinstalling windows again this weekend…

Update:
mouse installs/works fine on girlfriends laptop. Lovely.