Rolling Stock

 June 2010, Chicago, Illinois (Canon 40D / 17-40mm f4.0 L / 1/250 @ f4)

Not much bicyling-relating posting of late. I don't even have a decent excuse, as it has been an unusually mild winter this year. Will have to shake the dust off of my bone shakers and get back on the bike soon.

Definitely Not Harry Potter

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well written and unique take on the "school for young magicians" idea. I immediately got the sequel to read, so that must say something. But the main characters are often very difficult to like - self-indulgent, selfish, over-privileged and entitled. A big thread through the book is how hard - so very, very hard - it is to actually get everything that you want. (Maybe so, but I would be willing to try it out and report back.)

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"Destination" Photography

K and I stayed at home over the Labor Day holiday, and I took the opportunity of the extended lazy weekend to cross of few items on the "Honey-Do" list - and - to go on a couple of "expedition" photo shoots.  Now, of course, this was not the equivalent of an extended photographic vacation to Venice or a photo-safari in the Congo, but I did get to do some aimless wandering in Chicago's Northwest suburbs and actually voluntarily got up before the sunrise to take some photos of a couple of city locations that have been on my short list of locations to explore with a camera.  One shoot was an exercise in deliberate surprise, one a specific self-assigned project.

"At Play"
(Chicago Lakefront, September 2010, Polaroid Land 250, expired 669)

None of it, however, was shot digital.  As the recent spate of posts can attest, my photographic funk has definitely broken.  For better or worse, however, almost all my recent photography has been shot analog.  This is fine by me - although K did recently say that I needed to shoot some "real" photos - but the analog world definitely does not have the turnaround time that blesses digital.

To Come: The Wilds of Suburbia,

The result of these "destination" shoots was a couple dozen Polaroids and a large batch 35mm roll film that is now winding its way through one of the local pro photo labs.  I had a couple of straight color negative rolls that I would usually take to the nearest Walgreens where I just get the roll developed and take home the uncut strip to scan (no prints = fast and cheap), but I also had several rolls of slide film that I wanted cross processed, a roll of straight slide film and another bunch of black and white rolls, so I tossed the whole batch together and took it to someone who (hopefully) knows more about developing film than "insert cartridge into slot and push red button."

The Clarity Of First Light,

The color and cross process negatives should be ready later this week, but the rest will take probably another week at least. Even this lab, which did not bat an eye at my cross-processing requests, does not do its own black and white or slide developing.

And A Subject Worthy Of The Weekend

So expect to see posts of Labor Day Weekend photos trickle in as they become available over the next couple of weeks.  Not only does analog just take a little longer, but I am afraid I was a bit giddy with the shutter this last weekend and there is a lot of frames to go through with, hopefully, a proportionate share of keepers.