Growing up in Annapolis, we took a fair number of school field trips to DC museums, and particularly the Natural History Museum. The two things I really remember were the Hope Diamond and the cafeteria. The cafeteria at Natural History was one of my favorite places to eat.
I’ve wondered a bit about that as an adult – it can NOT have been all that great, objectively.
But it was the first time in my life (3rd grade) when I was given money for food but had no parental supervision. So it wasn’t that the food was objectively good – it was that I could choose anything I wanted.
I haven’t eaten at Natural History as an adult for various reasons, but the most important is that I don’t want to ruin the memory.
Since I got the F5, I’ve unsurprisingly been shooting more film. I just shot a roll of Cinestill, which is motion picture film that they’ve done something to so you can shoot it in a film camera and develop it C41, which is the standard developing process for color film since forever.
Cinestill has some troubling corporate tendencies. I am not dismissing these, but when I bought the roll of film I was not really aware of them. I’m probably not going to shoot any more of their film, but I am ALSO not that interested in discussing the company.
I recently picked up a used Valoi Easy35 from someone on the Dupont Photo Walk and I’ve been using that to scan film. It’s great for scanning my dad’s and my grandfather’s old stuff, but I’m struggling a bit to get results I’m happy with for my just-shot film.
So here’s a shot from that roll processed with negpy, a really nice piece of software focused on taking DSLR-scanned negatives and making nice positives out of them.
And here’s the same RAW file converted using DarkTable. DarkTable has about a billion more features than negpy but it also requires you to know how to use those features, which I largely do not.
I really want something in between these two. I want the pop from the negpy image with the detail from the darktable image. I get that sometimes you have to choose one or the other and that’s ok, but I feel like these are both the extremes and what I want is in between and it seems reasonable that I should be able to get that.
What I really need to do is learn how to use DarkTable, but the documentation is meh and that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So lazy.
Since this blog uses the ActivityPub plugin and you can follow it on your ActivityPub client of choice, I’ve been trying to figure out how to alt-text images without editing the raw HTML, which is annoying.
So here is a door in Barcelona that you can enjoy even if I don’t get the alt-text working as desired.
I’m really impressed by this group. Super welcoming, people who just love photography and want to share it with others. I didn’t get many shots I was that happy with, but it was a good day of being outside with other humans.
I didn’t mean to get this woman running in my photo but I like how it turned out
