Hole - Live Through This

Live though this is a pritty intresting album and often overlooked in favour of Celebrity Skin worth a listen if your in the mood for some mid 90s grunge.

Millenclion - Pennybridge Pioneers

More album fun next week  and as for this post; better late than never.

My Vitriol - Cast In Amber

Nice live album great band, unfortunately I wont be holding my breath for the release of their next album since its been in production for about a decade.

This week I have ska punkers [Spunge] for you:

spunge - Room For Abuse

Its a great album with an amazing cover of No Woman, No Cry can you ask for more? Probably in that case I have somthing for you:

QOTSA - Go With the Flow (UNKLE Mix)

This UNKLE remix was a nice midweek find i found after listening to some soulwax stuff, enjoy.

First album of the weekend Is:

Guttermouth Gusto

Admittidly its a rather strange album but I like it and yes, all the reviews are going to be this short.

Super Richoflex

I was after a 6×6 Medium format camera where I could compose the shots to some reasonable degree also it needed to be cheap at the time I was getting a bit tired of the dianas shoot and hope for the best aproach. Enter the super richoflex a TLR camera from the 1950’s. Whats great about this camera is you can look though the top and get a really bright preview of your shot, whats not so great is that its in reverse this is a real problem if you use another camera then switch to the Richoflex. See below for a look at how it works

TLR In action

Im taking it slow on the medium format these days so Ive only taken 1 full films worth and comming up to complete on the second but so far the ricoflex seems so be pritty forgiving in terms photos actualy coming out even in not so great light if anything I ended up sligtly over exposing a lot of the shots on the first film.

Nikon D40

Ive wanted a digital SLR for a long and I finaly ended up getting one for my birthday in may. I think the problem with digital SLR’s Is that its a crazy world of features, features you have to sort through and decide what you need also things you woudlent thing of as too imporant at face value eg how good the menu system is can lead to massive frustration when when actualy using the camera. Oh and megapixes dont mean shit

I wont go into the pros and cons of things here but suffice to say in my research there where some things that stood out the D60 for instance has higher MP sensor than the D40 but its base sensitivity (ISO) is actualy worse the only thing thats better is its self cleaning. In the end I opted for a D40 with 2 lenses which with some discounts came to about 300 quid. The nikon came with a Nikkor 18-55mm a great general purpose and fairly light weight lense which is good for landscape and genral use. The second lense was a Tamron 70-300mm zoom I got this for wildlife shots, it also has a macro function thats quite fun to play about with.

Shooting on a digital turned out to be quite fun becuase your not really forced to wait for the perfect shot anything rubish you can discard which makes it great for shooting when theres lots of stuff going on. This is both a blessing and a curse in some ways becuase you can end up just shooting wildly hoping somthing that might be a good shot comes out rarther than looking for it…

The fear is a strange beast its caused by taking pictures in low light with a diana. Basically the diana is terrible in low light so much so you fear that your entire film will come back blank a few months back i got 3/12 back, I didn’t want to take another film in low light for weeks after that. So the answer to this I surmised was to get a 35mm camera the film is cheaper and you get more shots per roll best of all I would go for a camera with a lens that wasn’t photo-phobic.

Some quick hunting around for second hand places my friend had recently picked up a olympus XA from a  place in town described as “A small room full of cameras you have to get buzzed into”.  Classic Photographics is what you imagine an independent second hand camera shop should be, the guy persumably the owner was great help managing to give me a few cameras to choose from that met the criteria “35mm rangefinder that was interesting”. After a bit of haggling i was the proud owner of of a FED-4 and paid in cash. Of course they didn’t accept anything else…

Shooting

The FED-4 is a russian rangefinder loosly based on the leica cameras of the time. It looks amazing everything is mechanical bar the light meter that runs on science and it weighs about as much as a fully loaded 4 door  family saloon. Oh and it came with a lovley (matching) leather case at no extra charge!

For my first roll I decided to go for some ISO 400 fim because ISO 400 was what I was used to and mainly because I had ‘The Fear’ having no idea how the camera would perform. The best part was the light meter only going upto ISO 320 so i had to kinda gustimate the calibration.

But as luck would have it  I manged to shoot some passible shots in daylight and some blurry stuff at a gig not too terrible considering I was expecting 100% of the gig shots to come back blank.

Camera Manual Links

If you have a FED-4 you might find the following handy:

http://www.cameramanuals.org/russian_pdf/fed_4.pdf
http://www.marriottcameras.co.uk/instruct3/fed4/with_pictures.htm

The plugin reached its first milestone and has been released here; http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/plugins-47/flicked-flickr-plugin-mediaportal-53103/

Currently im awaiting the release of media portal 1.0.1 before moving on with development due to the plugin/skin revamp.