Дон Андре's blog/

so true!!

I'm inexperienced with analogue photography. Currently I'm shooting with the "new" Zenit-E and the "older" Pentacon Six and I'm trying to find out some differences between the various films. With colour films my favourite so far is Fujifilm Velvia 50/100 (slide). I tried Fujifilm Sensia (slide) and Kodak Portra (negative) but I didn't like them a lot and none had richer colours and finer grain than Velvia. I've got a roll of Fujifilm Superia Reala that is currently being processed at the lab.

When it comes to black & white I'm still undecided and I can't tell the difference from FP4+ to Delta 100 or HP5+ to Delta 400. It's said that Delta has less contrast but finer grain, but I don't really know. Also I'm not developing for myself, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway. I also tried a roll of Ilford PanF+, but as I'm having next to no experience at all I can't tell if it's any good. I noticed that I could push the pictures quite a bit though, but okay ISO 50 film is expected to have fine grain.

I'm looking forward to devloping film for myself some day, but for now I'm just taking pictures, scan them and upload the better ones here.

Delta 100:

PanF+:

Delta 400:

HP5+:

Somehow they're all just B&W to me.. but considering colours, from what I've shot I dislike most of the photos but those shot with Velvia, which seems to be amazing in almost every case. And they also come out of the scanner almost exactly like they should. I had to tweak around Kodak Portra 160 VC last time to make it look any good.

Velvia 50:

Sensia 200:

Kodak Portra 160 VC:

Fujifilm Superia Reala 100:

I heard about them first several years ago at a university course where one student presented them in class. He showed some very interesting videos that I was just recently reminded of in a discussion regarding "life, the universe and everything" as Douglas Adams put it so nicely :-)

The inner functionality of these vehicles is quite simple. There is a light sensor that is linked to a motor. One example of a connection between these two could be: If more light is detected the motor will go faster, if less light is detected the motor will go slower.

If placed in an environment with light these vehicles exhibit very complex behaviour which we would interpret as love, fear, curiosity and various other emotional expressions. Braitenberg wanted to say how difficult it is to know about the internal structure and "thinking" of something when we can only observe how it acts and reacts.

There's a less fancy video, but showing the simplicity of the vehicle and it's reaction here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUVcI5Pw2o4

A more fancy video is that of a spider

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVEhEi6_zvk

So it happened once again: The mighty and seemingly random (yet knowing exactly when to hit you hardest) explorer crash (boooom!). Previous suspicion has circled around the dreaded and heinous desktop search that causes system instability to rise to levels never seen before. Microsoft may be aware, may be not, not doing anything or inable to cure the problem, but they must be getting a lot of error reports. I can only wish that mailboxes after mailboxes fill with those millions of explorer crashes and frustrating moments that must happen all over the world on every Vista computer out there.

The cause of this evil incarnation was yet again a seemingly innocent one: A file upload in Firefox! How simple and how puny, you're right to assume and the story unfolds exactly as if I was telling the story of Bambi: The file open dialog appears, I click to open the folder and navigate (how lovely traditional by double clicking millions of folders and how tedious decade after decade!) to the folder containing the file when all of a sudden and with the loud boom of another string of nerves that had been torn apart an error message flies before my face, crashes into the explorer and takes Firefox down with it to wherever unholy place it came from. Words cannot describe the feeling of hatred, frustration and anger that emerged within a millisecond of each other. Mixed with two tired eyes and a body that desperately longs for sleep the Vista has caused yet another notch in the cataclysm which, naive as I am, still like to call life.

At least we may hope for Windows 7 - the magic number and probably the cure for every single one of our problems is only a few years away. So far everything has only been getting better and honestly how much worse could it get?

ARGH!

Der große Eduard ist ein Aufschneider und einäugig noch dazu. In seinem Notizbuch steht: "Kleinigkeiten hindern mich daran großes zu tun. Ein Telefonanruf wegen einer Bagatelle hat mich soeben davon abgehalten ein E-Mail zu versenden."