Rain Against My Window (And in the basement)

In the several months since I last posted, a few things have changed. I mentioned previously that I’d started to digitize my negatives.  Well, OK, I’d made a false start in 2021.  In February-ish, I started again and this time, I got through the entire 222 archival sheets of negatives.  About a third of the way through, my ancient Minolta Dimage Scan Multi 2 film scanner started giving warnings that bulb failure was imminent.  This is a (mostly) irreplaceable part.  I did find a thread on photo.net that discussed building one and even provided the source for the CFL tube.

At that point, I wasn’t too comfortable with the idea of possibly shorting or frying something with my seriously rusty electronics soldering skills*.  Nor did I love that the bulb site provided moneygram, western union or a Paypal transfer address options instead of a proper purchasing route.  So I opted to hold off and see if the bulb survived the project.  In retrospect though this may have been self-sabotage.

(*Skills I got to dust off soon afterwards when the subwoofer for our 16ish year old stereo in the living room decided to give up the ghost.  I found information online about what commonly fails in this model and which capacitors I needed to replace.  That was a seriously scary replacement because I haven’t historically done a lot of circuit board soldering and this was not an easily replaceable sub.  I got it done though and the bass is beautiful. 🙂 )

Naturally, racing the light bulb clock caused no small measure of stress.  Would I make it before it failed completely?  Knowing I was most likely to lose the bulb when powering the scanner up, I accelerated the timeline and put that poor scanner through 14+ hour days.  What I’d planned to do over the course of the year was now going to be a <2 month project.  I had the (quiet) air compressor up here and I listened to the scanner making all of its various obnoxiously loud noises all day, every day for almost 2 months straight. At around 3 – 5 minutes per negative and over 5000 negatives.  I received 3 more warnings of imminent failure but it made it to the end.  And you know what?

I didn’t like the quality I was getting from the 20+year old scanner.  The dynamic range was poor and the focus sometimes seemed off.  Or else I was a far worse photographer than I’d thought.  Yeah, my imposter syndrome was in full swing.   At the beginning of July – yes seriously months after I finished the scanning project – and months after starting the project below – I thought “but, what if it was partially the bulb?”  It could have been inconsistently lighting (as fluorescent lights  often do when they’re starting to fail) and causing some of the issues with the dynamic range and even affecting the focus to some degree.  Because I know there was more dynamic range than the scanner was picking up and I also know that I’ve had better results from this scanner in the past. That said, I’m not going to order the bulb at the moment and make another pass at these negatives.  I just can’t see listening to all that noise again and waiting literally 100s of hours again.

But, how do I know there’s more dynamic range? You can light the negatives and photograph them with a digital camera.  There are lots of articles all over the Internet and lots of videos on YouTube of folks doing exactly this.  So I gave it a try.  The difference in some of the scans vs “copy negs” was unreal. Scan on the right and copy neg on the left.  Click on the image to make it bigger but the most noticeable differences are in the dark areas.  Look at the detail in the rocks at the top of the waterfall for instance.

This was just with my (marginally younger than the scanner) Canon 40D.  This gear wasn’t really fit for purpose though. This camera – while very capable for lots of other things I’ve used it for – is 10.1 megapixels and  I couldn’t get a decent 1:1 image of the negs using the kit lenses I’ve had since I used to shoot film regularly on my Elan2, so in cropping I was getting about a 3.5-6 MP image.  Most 35mm negatives contain around 24MP of raw data. My 120 medium format negatives even more.  I’d be leaving 75-85% of the details behind.  Hardly archival quality and I wasn’t about to do this a third time.  If I could fill the digital camera’s frame with the negatives, I should be able to get about as much information as I could possibly hope to with those 24MP.  The 120 would likely be “close enough” at 24MP – 30MP.

So I decided to borrow a more modern dslr.  The thing is, I knew the project would require a lot of shutter actuations while I figured out the process and then archived all of the negatives and cameras are finite in this capacity.  The last thing I wanted to do was “use up” a not insignificant portion of the life of a friend’s camera.

A Canon 5d Mk4 for instance is good for 200,000 shutter clicks before it may need a shutter replacement.  A mirrorless camera like a Canon R6 Mk2 is 300,000 before replacement. My older 40D?  100,000.

Nor do I generally feel comfortable with borrowed objects.  So, after proving that this was possible with the borrowed equipment, one thing lead to another and I started researching what the replacement for my 40D should be.

I made a short laundry list of what I wanted in a body:

Had to have:

• Full frame
• At least 24 megapixels
• Tethered shooting for this project specifically
• Very good dynamic range
• A natural feel in my hand

Nice to have:

• Image stabilization in at least the lenses but in body stabilization would be even better.  That hopefully would let me shoot without a tripod even on slightly less steady days.
• Ideally easy to get memory cards.  The 40D uses Compact Flash cards which are more expensive because they’re less common.
• Redundant writing to multiple cards would also be nice
• Staying in the same ecosystem as I already was (Canon) certainly was attractive because I already understand their menus and their cameras fit my hand which is the most important feature for me.

This was all before considering what lenses I would need to do this project and to replace the lenses with the 40D and the Elan2.  It seemed a shame to find a modern professional camera body and match it up to 20+ year old inexpensive kit lenses.

I landed on the Canon R6 Mk2 I mentioned above. Once I held it in my hands, I knew it was right.  It just fit.  The button locations made sense to me.  The menus made sense.   It’s still had a huge learning curve but shorter than if I’d changed brands.  Better still, I can still use some of my Elan 2 accessories (Flashes, Cable release, Filters, etc.) and the new lenses work with my Elan 2 because while I will find the 40D a new home, the Elan 2 stays with me forever.

What I forgot to include in the laundry list though was the file format it writes the raw files in.  In choosing a very current model, it forces you into the absolute bleeding edge editing programs as well.

It soon became apparent that I would have to make some changes if I was going to be able to afford what was quickly becoming more camera than I’ve ever had or contemplated having. The plan was to get the R6 Mk2 new and used lenses that were fit for purpose from a local camera shop.

Sooooo,….. I sold a few sewing machines (including the Janome MC8200QCP SE) and my motorcycle and a few other items around the house and funded my purchase.  As of this writing, I’ve paid for the camera and I still have a few things in the local buy and sell and a few sewing machines earmarked to find new homes where they’ll be used.

I have been making time to shoot photos for the first time in about 9 years and I’m enjoying it again. I used to shoot several rolls a month with my Elan 2.  Even the 40D came out semi-regularly until it didn’t.  (And it took perfectly good shots!)  Some of our best memories are from photo trips.

Some of that timeline though coincides with having lost Chappy, Dax and Shadow and the beginning of Stormi’s kidney disease diagnosis.  (We’d lost Gizmo prior to me losing my photography mojo)  I lost interest around then and only recently realized I’d missed it.

As for the copy neg project (or the “Great Film Scanning of 2023, part 2”)? It’s on hold for moment.  The torrential rains we had at the end of June have partially found their way into the storage/lathe room so that became top priority to deal with. The room had been dried out and the landscaping, driveway replacement and back step removal that would fix it was being quoted on by early July.

All this after just completing a tub to shower conversion in the bathroom too.  That was also a necessary reno as we had a little water issue there too.  This is a photo before we repaint and change out the mirror, vanity, medicine cabinet, baseboards, etc. (and maybe flooring).  I’m completely stuck on paint colours at the moment though so that part is stalled.  The most important part was to stop the water issue.

We’d just about made the commitment to the landscaping when disaster hit again.  July 6-7th, I was playing night owl and when I finally went to get ready for bed, I couldn’t get any hot water for my night guard.  Went downstairs and found that the hot water tank had let go and been running for probably a few hours.  The floor drain was completely dry and the water was running toward the hallway and the lathe room and the studio because of course it was.

Thankfully I found it then though instead of in the morning.  As it was, we had to tear up 2/3s of the basement to evaluate and dry things out.  We didn’t actually speak with someone at the ins company before the weekend and we started the cleanup on our own because there was no way I was leaving water in the basement over the weekend! Of course, they won’t do anything because they couldn’t document the damage before we started cleaning up. That took almost 3 weeks. My knees that haven’t been the same since the roof in 2014 haven’t stopped complaining since!

Honestly, I’m really close to saying no water in or near the house anymore.  The outhouse will sure suck in the winter though.

Does it seem like a lot of stuff broke in the last few months?  Yeah, it does to me too.  That’s even without mentioning the giant chunk of ice that hit the car and put a trail of dents in it, tires and windshields on vehicles or things I just fixed and moved on.  I’m seriously ready for a boring life.

There’s also my thyroid that’s misbehaving but that’s 100% my fault.  It’s been normal for 2.5 years while I followed a low iodine diet.  Around 2 – 3 months ago, I apparently forgot what the sources of iodine were, decided to ignore my early symptoms (chronic pain disappearing, migraines returning, seriously disturbed sleep schedule, constant over-tiredness, brain turning to mush) and kept eating seafood, salted nuts, raisins, and other healthy foods.  Then I saw the quarterly bloodwork and realized what I’d done.  You know you did a good job on your thyroid when you take yourself from well into the normal range to well into the abnormal range within a couple of months.  The first time my thyroid went bananas (pre-diagnosis) it took a couple of years.  So, the plan is to cut that out and retest semi-regularly for a bit to see which way it trends.  The stress of the last month and the very irregular hours and hard schedule hasn’t helped.  Graves Disease really hates stress.  My resting heart rate is already a tiny bit improved though since the renos ended and that’s usually an indicator of what my thyroid is up to.  It ramps up heart rate early on when I feed it too much fuel or get really stressed out.  That means energy and motivation should start to return soon too.

The other thing the scanning project has done is sparked an interest in learning to repair cameras.  When I started pulling the cameras out again, my Elan 2 came out of storage with a sticky mirror.  The Canonet QL19 came out with a sticky shutter.  The Bronica ETRS spontaneously ejected the film back into my lap.  It’s time to do some learning so I’ve been consuming all relevant parts of YouTube in the wee hours of the nights and pulled out all of the cameras I’ve been collecting over the last several years. Vintage film cameras go for a song these days and you can do a little cleaning and adjusting on them and learn so much!

Throughout the renos, I did manage to keep up my spinning.  That likely wouldn’t have happened though if the Tour de Fleece wasn’t underway when it happened.  I had 2 finishes of projects that were in progress and some progress on 2 other spins and one start.  I have no idea of mileage but this year, I really don’t care about that.

This was the progress as of July 23 – there’s been more progress since on the purple and the red spins.

A couple of first photos from the R6 Mk2 all heavily cropped: