Through the Viewfinder

Great... thanks to Jim Neill over at Life in the NohoDome I find myself compelled to do something else, Through the Viewfinder photography. That is, shooting with a modern digital camera through the viewfinder of an old school camera like the Duaflex II with a viewfinder on top. I was sitting here this morning looking at old photos and I read his blog about picking up a Duaflex and experimenting with it and a digital camera. Since I had one downstairs, I broke it out, got my Canon and macro lens, and started shooting.



The first thing I noticed was how difficult it is to hold the heavy Canon and the Kodak... Because the macro lens is manual and fixed, I have to focus by moving the two cameras toward or away from each other, all while framing the shot.

The second thing I noticed was how filthy the Duaflex was inside.



So I took it apart and cleaned it.

There's nothing like using a $800 macro lens to shoot photos that look like they came from the pinhole camera you built as a science fair project in 5th grade.

Idiot

I bought my iMac in 2004. Since then I have experienced exactly two problems with it, outlined here. Customer service has been a dream.

I very rarely turn it off... I know... as much as I'm becoming conscious of energy conservation, this is horrible. As a matter of fact, other than the time we moved into our new house, I can count on one hand the number of times it's been turned off just to turn it off.

So when we went to Florida last month, against my normal instinct, I turned it off. When I came back a week later I turned it on and noticed that the wireless connection wasn't working. So I power cycled it to see if it would connect.

Then... nothing... except a sickening sound from the hard drive. As if the stylus was making like Jackson Pollack on the disk. And this...



I already knew the hard drive was dead, but I took it to the Genius Bar anyway. They confirmed my diagnosis and told me that they would replace the hard drive for $90. This was the first hard drive failure I have ever experienced after using more computers than I can recall.

The thing that really sucked? I hadn't backed up the computer since January when I took it in last. I have two 350 GB external drives, Butch and Sundance, that I made double redundancy backups on. But somehow I neglected to do it before leaving for Florida.

So now I had to explain to my wife how we had lost the majority of our photos from the end of January to July. Luckily I'd posted a number from special occasions on Picasa.

So I went back to the Genius Bar last Thursday to drop it off and have the hard drive replaced. I asked the guy if I could have a larger drive installed and he said no. In fact, he said I was better off going to Beelzebub (Best Buy) and purchase a hard drive there, as it would be cheaper and have a longer warranty. So I went over there and picked out a 500 GB Seagate... never mind the fact that I went to the Geek Squad to confirm that it would work. The idiot over there told me that the G5 iMac required a laptop drive, which I knew was wrong, so I bought it anyway. (PSA time here... don't take your computer to Geek Squad at the Best Buy in Holyoke... you're just asking for trouble). When I went back to the Apple Store to pick up my computer, I told the guy that I felt like I'd sold my soul to the devil and thanked him for his help.

I went home and installed the new drive. Three screws to open the case... three screws to remove the hard drive. I love this computer. I formatted the drive and reinstalled OS X. Over the last couple of days I've been reimporting my pictures and music from Butch. Today I decided to sync my iPod and discovered that I'd saved all of my photos on it. The ones that I'd lost too. I couldn't believe how fortunate I was.

That's when it started syncing with iPhoto and deleted them all. Again.

Needless to say, I now have OS X Leopard installed and it is doing automated backups to Sundance.