“Why should you be excited about food trucks? Because they allow creative chefs […] without a lot of money to start creating and selling their stuff, introducing themselves to the world without having to gather up a million dollars or credulous partners. And they’re affordable. They’re democratic. And they are faster, better, and infinitely preferable to fast food like the king and the clown and the colonel.” —Anthony Bourdain
“Stocks with good dividends that you reinvest over time are the single best way to generate wealth in this country.” — Jim Cramer
“I love churches, and also the music of J.S. Bach, and many other side-effects of the experience of faith, even though that experience is foreign to me; just can’t get around certain habits of thought involving reproducible evidence and Occam’s razor.”
—Tim Bray

I just stumbled across the above image in the home office today. That’s the ticket to the Sean Lennon show at Gypsy Tea Room. I think it was the last show at that classic venue—or at least one of the last few shows. We left early because Enzo’s in utero fondness for music made his mom feel ill.
Some links I have collected recently on the topic of full manual photography. No autofocus and no light meters here.
- The New Yashica TLR FAQ: Yashica TLRs seem to be a popular choice for getting into medium format photography, and this seems like a good breakdown of the various models.
- Hasselblad Historical: Hasselblad cameras are known as some of the better medium format cameras. This site has more information about them than any one person could possibly need.
- Color Film Chart: A brief summary of the properties of various color films.
- Really Right Stuff: Tripods, Ball Heads, and Panorama Gear.
- The Ultimate Exposure Computer: An invaluable resource when using cameras without meters.
- Exposure Calculator: A quick, simple tool for exposure calculations.
Lately I have been spending less time gazing at digital cameras and the resulting pictures and instead have been more interested in the analog counterparts. In my hours of browsing through flickr, I continuously notice that a lot of people are creating beautiful images with toy cameras. Last night, I remembered that several years ago, I was given the camera pictured here. It’s an Ansco Pix Panorama. It’s 100% plastic and is completely fixed — fixed focal length, fixed focus, fixed shutter speed, fixed aperture. There is no way to make any sort of adjustment other than the placement of the camera.
Here are the specs:
- 28mm lens
- fixed focus
- 1/125
- f/11
- 35mm film
- 13x36mm panorama mask
This camera was new when I received it, and I think I have only run one roll of film through it since. I just wasn’t that interested in it when I received it. Things are different today. I’m hoping to grab a roll of film on the way home from work today to try it out.
Some Ansco Pix Panorama photos on flickr:
Why is Twitter’s SSL certificate not trusted by the iPhone? Because of this, I can’t log in via Safari. Sure, Tweetie has eliminated my need for logging in this way, but I’m still a bit surprised that this hasn’t been fixed.