I scanned another roll of negatives from the Olympus Pen half frame camera, this time using old expired black and white film that I found at a thrift store. It was cheap so I thought I’d try it and get that cheap old expired black and white thrift store film look.
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I updated my iPhone astronomy app, “My Messier”. Check it out.
The text size can now be adjusted, and it supports the iPhone X screen size. I read somewhere that you can determine a person’s age pretty accurately by the distance at which their eyes can focus. The lens of a person’s eye hardens as they age, a condition called presbyopia. This is in addition to all kinds of eye conditions people are born with or acquire, so it helps to allow text size in apps to be enlarged for easier reading.
The actor Kirk Douglas is one hundred and one years old today and reportedly doing great. This year I read his autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son”. It was another of my parent’s old books, a yellowing paperback that had been on a shelf for years and after Douglas’ 100th birthday last year I resolved to read it. I’m glad I did. It’s a great read if you like movies. Or life. Autobiographies let you to live other’s lives, learn (or be entertained) by their mistakes and they can have stories better than a contrived plot.
I finished reading the book “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck.
It’s about a family struggling to survive, leaving Oklahoma during the Dustbowl and Great Depression and their journey to California. I’m not writing a book report or book review here, just some thoughts about books. I will say The Grapes of Wrath is a great book. It stays with you. It’s very human and relevant to today.
I still shoot on film, and I recently scanned my own negatives for the first time. I use an Olympus Pen FT single lens reflex camera, which takes photos in half-frame format. Using a roll of 135 format 35mm film, the FT takes pictures half the standard size to get 48 exposures on a 24 exposure roll, or 72 with a 36 exposure roll. The cameras were sometimes marketed as “single frame” since they used the same size as a single frame of 35mm motion picture film.
I released my first app. Check it out.
It’s an astronomy quick reference, called “My Messier”, for iPhone and Apple Watch.
When Apple Watch was announced, I thought I’d write an app for it (as an excuse for getting one.) With a new mobile device, people would want new apps for it. I needed to make an iPhone app too because the iPhone launches the watch app. I wanted to make something simple but useful. I love astronomy so it would be great if the app were useful to me as well as others with the hobby.
I wore out a pair of hiking boots and have to say goodbye to them. I know I shouldn’t get attached to things, but I keep thinking of all the places they took me.
I recently inherited a camera, a 1936 Roland Kleinbild made by Plasmat in Germany. It uses medium format 120 film in a 645 ratio with a 70mm f2.7 lens. The shutter appeared to be working so I was eager to put in a roll and see what this 80 year old camera could do.
I bought a book of Japanese poems, Rainbows on Eyelashes (睫毛の虹), by Misuzu Kaneko. The book has the poems in Japanese characters along with English translations and beautiful watercolor illustrations by Midori Yoshida. It is children’s poetry, really, but at my level of Japanese it’s something easy enough to remember and still learn from.
Last week I went to Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition. I have seen his movies many times and own most of them. What can one say about his movies– they have style. And impact. It was really thrilling for me to see actual props and artifacts from his films (although there were some replicas.) Fortunately they allowed photography (no flash) at the exhibition and I did not forget my cameras.
Kirk's Universe 