Hoarding all my favorites…

During the lockdown in April 2020 when so many items were unobtanium, I couldn’t find my favorite teas anywhere.  When everything did become available again I made sure to have multiple boxes of everything.  It’s only grown since late May when I took this:

So my favorite teas are:
Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat
St. Dalfour Earl Grey
Taylor’s of Harrogate Yorkshire Gold
Taylor’s of Harrogate Scottish Breakfast (not pictured)
Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice
Bigelow Chamomile (not pictured)

Old Bronco

…which has evidently seen better days but is still in pretty good shape all things considered!  It belongs to a neighbor of mine.

If this vehicle were in Ohio it would be 95% rust…as it is it’s a lot less than that but what’s there tells me it didn’t spend its whole life in the dry air of Colorado.  I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been anticipating the new 2021 Ford Bronco and from what I’ve seen it looks interesting, but I think I’d have more fun driving this.

Workflow adjustments and Fall colors

It’s a time of change for me: I’m examining workflow which has been stilted since COVID started; I haven’t even edited any photos in almost a year now but there’s been such a backlog it hasn’t been a problem.  My old way was to scan everything on the Pakon, export to TIFF and stick it on a flash drive, then take it down to school the next time I was there and use their computers and copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 to adjust contrast/exposure until I got what I wanted.  Now with color negative there wasn’t a whole lot to do, the Pakon’s color profiles are fantastic, so I’d generally accept the JPG output, resize it, watermark it, and call it a day.

With the lockdown and finishing up of all photo classes I haven’t been down there, and the only option I had was to use Photoshop 7 that was installed on my WinXP machine I use hooked up to the Pakon.  I have a Win7 laptop but its display is a bit off as is the monitor on the WinXP machine; I have a few rolls of black & white that I’ve had developed and didn’t want to do anything with them until I had a chance to really set everything correctly, but I finally scanned 3 rolls of color negative and would have just posted them straight from the Pakon.  It would have been fine and they would have looked like this:

(that’s the old original watermark which is the only one I happened to have on my WinXP machine at the time)

However, thanks to being blessed with a new (to me) laptop, I feel comfortable with editing photos at home; this is a big change for me! It’s more powerful and seems to be pretty well calibrated in the screen department so I’m planning to dedicate this machine primarily to photo editing purposes.  I’m not about to pay money on a monthly basis to Adobe for a program that I can’t own so I’ve been exploring Photoshop alternatives.  Currently I’m using a free trial version of Affinity Photo which seems to be not too dissimilar.  It’s allowed me to tweak the levels, etc, while still keeping a very similar workflow.  Here are the results so far:

So a bit more contrast, somewhat darker, and I’m playing around with a few different watermarks: I think this is the new look of The Resurrected Camera.

This is Kodak Gold 200 exposed at ASA100 in 3 different Nikon bodies I picked up last year, I wanted to check out the 1/1000 shutter speeds to make sure that the shutter curtains were in sync.  I used an expired roll of film I bought years ago and color negative is the cheapest to develop; around $4.00 at my local camera store.  This also happened to coincide with the leaves changing in Fall so I ended up shooting several rolls of color around the end of September/beginning of October.  I generally don’t do much on the post-side of things, just adjust the curves to get proper contrast and light levels; I gave a general idea of this here.

In the family way 4×5

This is a bit of a change for me, family portraits: my brother, our mom, his wife, and her mom.  My brother doesn’t like getting his picture taken and hates sitting still for it even more so I suppose this tried his patience the most considering the slow workflow of large format, but I think I got what I wanted and hopefully the rest of the family did too.  I printed two of these and gave them as presents so I see them in person rather often.

The big news was that my sister-in-law and brother were expecting their first baby; the poses were all her idea (I suppose she saw them online somewhere and because it was cold outside we used the big bay window in my mom’s upstairs living room.  Looking at them now I think that the background might be a bit busy but it was the best room in the house for it.

This was me still learning development techniques and you can see it around the edges of the frame, I think this would have been Thanksgiving of ’19 but I’m no longer sure.

After surviving 2020 we all deserve a drink…

…so here are most of the pics on my blog of people drinking/celebrating, or are otherwise alcohol-related.  No particular order, just whenever I happened to remember another shot I added it to the bottom.  It turned out to be quite a few posts over the last 7 years and I’m sure I still missed some!

Here’s hoping that 2021 is the year we can get back to drinking together.

(Another reason to celebrate…this is post #400 for me, and first since my 7th Anniversary!)