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Sara Cammeresi

Large format humour —

Today and yesterday, I've made a fairly concerted effort at shooting 11x14 at Allerton Park. Yesterday was a nice day, and a fair number of people were out at the park, so I got the expected quota of questions about the strange contraption with which I was fiddling.

I'd just finished my fourth and final exposure and was packing up my gear to wheel it back to my car when two gentlemen approached who were curious about what I was doing. I answered some of the usual questions about my camera, and then, they asked why I was doing this.

I answered, `Oh, this is just what I do for fun. I'm a little bit crazy.'

The gentleman rejoined, `This isn't crazy. I collect bricks.'

I had a hard time arguing with that.

posted by Sid at 21.14 / 135 in Large Format     [ Comments: 0 ]

Monticello grain elevators —

I had some copy slides made of the photograph I printed a while ago while testing some new paper, and I finally got round to scanning one of them. Obviously, the original print looks different from a scan of a copy slide made therefrom, but this should give you a rough idea of what the print looks like.

Weathered Silos, 8x10 Copyright © 2004 Sidney Cammeresi

I found these grain elevators by downtown Monticello, Illinois, by which I mean that they were two blocks from the town square. They appeared to still be in use, and they had a most interesting weathered, somewhat harsh look to them.

The 11x14 negative was made with my Nikkor-M 300/9 lens, a moderate wide angle in that format, using a yellow filter, on (discontinued) Ektapan film, rated at 50, given N+2 development in PMK Pyro. I recall the exposure being f/128 for 2 seconds, hence the small amount of motion visible in the black flappy thing. The 8x10 print is on Bergger Prestige Grade 2, developed in Ilford MG, toned in selenium.

The appearance of this photograph is due to the fact that after having spent eight hours this past weekend in the dark developing film, I am sick of it, so I spent some time this evening doing something about which I usually don't care at all: putting my photographs on the web. To this end, I revamped my image display codes a bit in an attempt to move toward a future photographic gallery and wrote some behind-the-scenes fanciness to make it easy for me to stick my photos into my blog. (This gallery is not yet extant, and it will remain so until it has a substantial amount of content.)

posted by Sid at 22.19 / 180 in Photographs     [ Comments: 0 ]

Blog refactorisations —

I have resurrected the topic codes, and in addition to topiced posts displaying something to that effect at their bottom, I stuck a box on the side with a couple of my favourite topics in it, and I retired the gaming stats box for now. Some link rotation has also occurred: we retired one link, and we added a link to Mr Turingan's photographs.

posted by Sid at 18.54 / 037 in Administrivia     [ Comments: 0 ]

Politics as usual —

Mr John Kerry has hit the campaign trail and has offered a few choice words on Iraq with regard to Mr Bush's plan for handing over power to an Iraqi government by 30 June:

`I have always said consistently that it is a mistake to set an arbitrary date, and I hope that date has nothing to do with the election here in the United States,' Kerry told reporters in Ohio, where he talked about his plan to revitalize the economy. `The test of a turnover of sovereignty is the stability of Iraq, not an arbitrary date.'

Bear in mind that if Mr Bush had said those words, Mr Kerry would be instead be complaining about how Mr Bush plans to make Iraq the 51st state, how he never intends our forces to leave, how a firm deadline should be set for giving power to a representative government in Iraq, etc. Must be nice to have your cake and eat it, too.

posted by Sid at 19.15 / 052 in War on Terror     [ Comments: 2 ]

VOIP addendum —

I was talking to my girlfriend last night, and the VOIP stuff got into some kind of weird state where I could hear her, but she couldn't hear me. Grrr. Fortunately, she is understanding since she's a geek herself.

posted by Sid at 08.34 / 607 in Reviews     [ Comments: 3 ]

War ridiculousness —

Regarding the recent return and emanations of The Noumenon, I'm not sure whether I agree with all of his specifics, but I share his general frustration with our poor effort at fighting the war in the Middle East.

What in hell are our military thinking when they agree to negotiate with an armed rebellion against our occupation of Iraq instead of arranging for their unconditional surrender? Scroll about two-thirds of the way down that page. When we put Saddam and his captured deputies on television, people whined about us breaking the Geneva Convention. Now Iraqi resistance televise their Japanese hostages, and what do we hear of the Geneva Convention? NOTHING. (I'm pointing out the contradiction; I'm not saying we're categorically bound to follow it.)

The time has come to remove the shackles from our military and let it fight this war properly. A good start would be to stop sacrificing our own troops to preserve civilians surrounding the enemy and to throw out the Geneva Convention when dealing with savages who will not abide by it themselves, fighting them as the sub-human animals they are.

posted by Sid at 18.23 / 016 in War on Terror     [ Comments: 1 ]