Well it finally happened. The entire Midwest (possibly the entire world) has been destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake. I believe I may be the only survivor. I have already stockpiled food, supplies and weapons and have begun fortifying my home for the impending zombie attack I know will come with the setting of the sun today (zombies tend to take advantage of these types of world ending disasters). Above is a photo I took moments ago of me walking thru downtown West Salem, Ill with a kick ass stray dog I found.

I’m going to try to make my way to Effingham Ill. I’ll be on the boat dock at Lake Sara everyday at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there… if anyone is out there… I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there’s anybody out there… anybody… please. You are not alone.

Binary Solo Generator 3000

Been a long time without a post, so it’s time to kick start this bad boy again. I’ve revived an old hobby/obsession… chasing freight trains. I’ve always been fascinated by freight trains, walking the tracks, standing next to the cars, watching them speed by at an intersection. More so, I love the graffiti hitching a ride on the sides of trains as they traffic through the industrial arteries of America. So that’s what I’ve been up to, photographing trains and documenting freight graffiti when ever I get a spare moment from work… which has been abnormally hectic and busy since the new year.

check it all out over in my Flickr sets:
Trains
Old Freight Graffiti
New Freight Graffiti.

As discussed in the previous post, an important part of shooting TtV is building a usable contraption. The crucial purpose is simply to block the light (and thus any unwanted glare or reflections) when shooting between top and bottom cameras. There are many fine box or tube style contraptions out there for connecting to unmodified bottom cameras. To put one together you just have to find some kind of tube like material of approximately the right diameter to work with. I scrounged around for a while and came up with the idea to use cardboard postal shipping tubes. After trying out various ways for cutting and notching the tube to fit over my bottom camera I opted to go a completely different route (influenced by what people were doing over at the sPiNoFF! Group). Instead of keeping the bottom camera intact, I decided to remove the glass elements completely from the bottom camera, in this case a Kodak Duaflex IV and build a homebrew cannon style “lens” to hold them.

The idea was to get two different size postal tubes that would fit inside of each other, a 2 1/2″ and a 3″ diameter tube would do the trick. Then cut holes to mount the glass elements from the Duaflex in the plastic end caps that fit the tubes, so I could switch glass as easy as popping in a new end cap. The back element (bubble) pops into an end of the 2 1/2″ tube, the other end of this tube jams snugly into the lens hood that fits the pentax kit lens. Then the front element (objective lens) mounts into the 3″ tube, which slides over the 2 1/2″ tube. There would be a consistent 1/8″ gap between the tubes which I figured I would fill by wrapping black felt around the end of the inner tube to block light and tighten up the telescoping action.

But before we can get to all that, we have to dig the glass out of the Duaflex

Cracking open the Duaflex proved to be pretty easy, four screws per element and you’re in business. But before you actually start tearing the thing apart you need to measure to find the ideal focal distance for your camera. So throw down a ruler and position the face of your back camera’s lens at one end. Position the viewfinder of the bottom camera at the other end of the ruler. Move the viewfinder forward until your camera will no longer find focus, then step it back until it does again. This should give you the minimum distance which should also mean that the viewfinder is as big as possible in the frame.

Now it’s operation time. To get at the bubble, you undo the two screws that hold the flip-up viewfinder cover in place. Then there are two screws that hold the latch that the film door hooks into. Once those are out the top pulls off and the bubble is free.

Access to the front objective lenses is even more straight forward, just four screws at the corners of the faceplate.

There you have it, both glass elements from the Duaflex IV ready for a new life.

Now that the materials have been gathered, it’s time to cut the tubes to size. I have the size for the inner tube from the process of measuring the minimum focal distance. To figure the length of the outer tube I took a bit of a guess. I read in one of the posts for the sPiNoFF! pool that the ideal distance between bubble and objective is usually someplace around 2 1/2″. My design for this cannon is going to allow that distance to be manipulated by sliding the outer tube in or out over the inner tube. So what I needed was a range. I decided to go with a minimum distance (when the cannon is fully closed) of 2″ between the bubble and objective. The outer edge of my lens hood would act as a minimum position stop. From that I now had a length for the outer tube. Cutting the tubes to length was an easy task for a chop saw.

Once I had the tubes cut I thought it might be wise to test my measurements. So I put the end cap into the inner tube and attached it to my camera for a test focus.

Now to cut openings in the end caps to mount the elements. I traced the outline of the bubble on to one of the end caps. The corners of the bubble are rounded so I found a drill bit with roughly the same diameter. Then I drilled holes at the four corners. Once the corner points were drilled I simply cut along the lines between the hole to remove the rest of the plastic. That process worked pretty well so I did the same thing with the round hole for the objective lens I used a larger drill bit to remove most of the material then cleaned up the hole with a utility knife.

The glass then snaps into the cut holes. For now I’m just using tape to secure them into the holes in the end caps.

Now the end caps can be put into their respective tubes, the inner tube is wedged into the lens hood and I have the two parts completed.

Now for a bit of clever (?) engineering. The two tubes fit inside each other but not snugly. There is still about an 1/8″ gap which I had planned to fill in with bands of black felt or something, that is until I dug around and found something else. I had a spool of wire with a thick rubber shielding. The wire was exactly 1/8″ in diameter, I pulled the actual wire out of the shielding so it could compress a bit. Then I cut a length long enough to wrap around the inner tube 4 times to create a kind of primitive roller bearing for the tube to slide on.

When you pull the outer tube to extend the lens it rolls across the wire. The idea strikes me as kind of like using trees as rollers to move giant blocks of stone… so this guy has been official dubbed the Rapa Nui Cannon.

Now, with all the work done it’s time to see the results.

Check out the rest in my “through the homebrew lens” set on Flickr. I’ll be adding more as I take them

So yesterday while I was out and about I stopped in at a antique shop to see if I could find a TLR camera to put to use turning out my own TtV photos. I found two!

The first is an Argus 75, and it set me back a whole $2.

The second is a Kodak Duaflex IV. The Duaflex line seems to be a popular choice for shooting TtV, though the Dauflex II is more the preferred model because it lacks a popup shader to get in the way of things. The Duaflex IV set me back $7… yet one more example of how the middle class is being squeezed these day!

Both cameras came with these flash apparatuses that plug into the side of the cameras. But the Duaflex also had three super cool Sylvania flash bulbs. The filament inside of these bulbs looks like fine steal wool. And as I found out later, the Duaflex also had a used roll of film which I’m definitely going to get developed! Hopefully it’s not full of 30 year old home porn.

Now, since you’re actually holding your digital SLR about 8″~10″ inches away and focusing on the other camera’s viewfinder glass, glare and reflection are a serious issue. You need to put together what the kids in the know call a contraption, which is basically a tube between the two cameras to block out the stray light. I haven’t had time to work on that yet, what with this being Christmas eve and all. Just the same, there was no way I could wait to give the technique a try. Here’s my first test shots (one from each camera) taken of my 1950 Caddy, which makes the perfect model for this type of thing.

Yes, that IS the tv show Matt Houston they are recommending to me there in the screenshot Now Matt Houston is no Colt Seavers by any means. But it’s cool that TIOTI is spreading the word about these gems of early 80s television, just the same.

So, to explain the concept behind all of this, TIOTI is basically TV web2.0ified. It’s a mashup of episode guides and show summaries with downloads delivered via Bittorrent to create the souped up internet version of tivo. The whole thing is glued together with all of the “community” features that every web service needs to have now that MySpace is a household word. And of course then the whole thing was dipped in a bucket of AJaX functionality, which unfortunately seems to preform kind of slow at this point, but it is still in closed beta after all.

The idea is, you search for the tv shows you are interested in, adding your favorites to your, um “favorites list”. When you locate a show you can get a quick view of the episodes organized by season. If the episode is available for download somewhere, you click a link and start downloading it via Bittorrent. All the while the system gives suggestions of other shows that you might be interested in (think Last.fm for tv). Luckily you can click a “don’t show me this” link next to the suggestions so it never recommends “Caroline in the City” or that damn Britney and Kevin show to you again in the future. As you view the listed episodes for a show you have the option to participate in discussions about the episode, mark them viewed and rate them.

Now where all of this starts to really get useful is, your profile for each show creates a customized RSS feed. So when an episode that you haven’t marked as viewed turns up for download, it pops into the RSS feed. If you have your Bittorrent client setup to check that RSS feed, it can automatically start downloading the new episode for you to view later at your convenience. Of course there are already RSS feeds for tv shows out there that you can use in the same way, but TIOTI brings it all together in a slick package.

Once all the kinks are worked out and TIOTI opens to everybody, I think it could really challenge the traditional paradigms of tv broadcast and move us closer to the “content on demand” world hinted at for years… that is if, the shows are actually out there for download and the whole sha-bang isn’t sued out of existence, in a “The Future of Ideas” like fashion. TIOTI isn’t as cool as flying cars, but it’s a small step towards the future our technology has been promising us for a while. So get your hands on a TIOTI invite and unplug your tv.

I thought I had better try to get a few more photos added to my set to give anyone coming from the GM blogs something related to look at. So I added a couple older photos taken with the *istDL when I first got it this summer.

So, a big thanks to the GM folks for selecting the photo and for producing the many fine Cadillacs I’ve had the fortune to cruse around in.

I’ve always had problems trying to photograph my paintings. The colors tend to be super saturated and the surface shines like glass. I dread the day I have a need for slides of these works. So last night I just took photos of them like they any other object.

The moon was up before the sun was down and the sky was full of subtle gradients at dusk today.