I brought home a 30-year old film camera – Praktica MTL3. My father bought it after I was born and used it for years, first shooting black-and-white film and then color slide film. He used to develop all photos himself in a dark room he set up in our washroom. We still have the photos – I scanned most of them last year.
Praktica MTL3 was made in German Democratic Republic. It’s a mechanical camera with a metal curtain shutter. Focus is manual – set with a help of metering wedges and micro-prism screen. Light meter needs a battery and helps to set the correct exposure. The included lens is a multi-coated Pentacon auto 50mm f/1.8. I even found the manual online.
I will be taking it for a spin after I buy a new battery and a few rolls of film.
Few weeks ago I was reading about TheBestCamera iPhone application and I bought it. I like how photographer Chase Jarvis conceptualized taking pictures with the iPhone. I can either snap a new photo or choose one from the library and apply pre-defined filters which can be stacked to achieve different effects. The photos can be uploaded to twitter, facebook, email, and the application’s website. I uploaded few photos already which first show up on the first page and are accessible from my profile. Take a look!
I bought a new hard drive for my MacBook because I was running low on space. Actually, I had around only 16GB left. Taking picture at the rate I’m taking them now would eat that space in few months and the upgrade was inevitable. But what pushed me to make a purchase was the fact that I needed space when I was converting a DVD from NTSC to PAL for my parents. I ended up using a remote share for the 45GB DV stream file – slow and inconvenient. So I bought WD 320GB 7200 rpm drive.
The big question was how to transfer the data to the new drive. There are two options: use the installation DVD and restore from Time Machine backup or clone the disk using either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! My Time Machine backup did not have the entire disk content backed up and I would have to create a new backup. Since my TM disk is small it would take some time. I ended up cloning the drive.
I restarted the system and avoided starting any programs, opened only Carbon Copy Cloner and copied the internal drive to the new drive connected to USB port (in external enclosure I bought for the old drive). It took few hours (I don’t know exactly how long because I left it running and left the house for 5 hours). After that, I opened the laptop, placed the new drive inside. The system booted without any problems.
The nice side effect of the whole exercise is that the system is much much snappier than before. It might be due to having a faster drive with more cache, but I think the fragmentation of the old drive made the system sluggish. They say that Mac’s don’t need to be defragmented, but I think that when the space is scare the system cannot save files in contiguous segments anymore – I have to research that.