Archive for March, 2009
del’s funky stimulus package!
It’s springtime, ohhh nine, and Bay area hip hop fans get a funky stimulus package with Del’s new album, Funk Man, which he’s releasing for free! It drops April 7th, but word on the street is that you can Get it Right nOW (and by word on the street I mean click on the link fool!). While you’re there, take a peak at Del’s Leak Packs (vol. 1 & 2). And check out Bukue One.
I’d take a pic of the del skate deck that I bought from Bukue, but I spent some time pulling weeds after work tonight and I’m exhausted (I’ll post a timelapse video of that tomorrow after work; it’s copying to the desktop right now…).
The shoeshine camera was made from a shoeshine box I picked up at a garage sale for three dollars. I cut the hole for the lens with a circular drill bit then used a Dremel to carve a slot for the film holder to fit. I sanded down the box, stained it then lacquered it. After it dried in the sun, I lined the inside with some black velvet. I took a Universal 35mm, f/2.7 Tricor lens (No. 66831) from an old Universal Mercury II camera that still had a nice and smooth manual aperture, then appropriated a viewfinder from another camera and mounted it on the side of the box.
I mounted the threaded insert that the lens was screwed into in it’s camera, so I could remove the lens and take pinhole shots as well. The Trees is a pinhole shot and the exposure was about a second. I loaded two 4×5 film holders each with 2 sheets of Fuji Velvia but three of the four sheets were over-exposed. I wanted to test it out before wasting a bunch more film and I only had a box of ten sheets.
It should be duly noted that the camera maintains the functional integrity of its original intended purpose: get your shoes shined while taking a picture.
¹ Can you guess what the engineering flaw is on the viewfinder mount?
I was down in LA over the weekend and on Saturday, when I woke up, it was a perfect (cloudy) day. Although most of the locals were complaining it was cold. So I grabbed my camera and headed over to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank-Gehry. It was my first trip to this beautiful building. The grounds are open to the public and you can trapse around the building through winding walkways, nooks and crannies. I took a few polaroids and will scan them later this week.
