Civic Center Tourists

I was at San Francisco's Civic Center almost all day today. For anyone who works there, they already know that a bunch of government buildings all did a coordinated fire drill. It may not sound that impressive, but there were around 4,000 government employees participating. And while it may not be glamorous, having the experience of stuff like this is very important, especially for a city like San Francisco that's constantly waiting for a huge earthquake to strike.

Anyway, there were all these people (mostly tourists, some crazy) milling about. These 5 folks, presumably here on business, drove up, double parked, hopped out, and proceeded to take turns getting their photo taken with City Hall in the background. The guy on the right is on his way to move the subject out of the way - they rotated through all 5 people in less than a minute, which makes them easily the most efficient sight-seeing group in history. Also, I just love how the subject is standing very stiffly, and each photographer has a different "camera stance."

Diff'rent Strokes

It has been a while since I've shot digital. I just got one of these:

Yes, its a speed graphic. Yes, it's a baby.

so I'm working almost entirely in film lately. However, I did get images from the first test shots after I brought this bad boy home:

Graflex Speed Graphic, Ilford FP4, 101mm f/4.5

CowboyStudio Remote Flash Trigger: Review

At the, uh, middle of this semester, I finally got around to selling my old textbooks from semesters past back to Amazon. With a couple hundred dollars in Amazon credit, I had some serious shopping to do.

I'd been reading David Hobby's Strobist blog for a while, and I figured it was time to give off-camera flash a shot. I knew I didn't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a set of PocketWizards, but maybe if there was something a little bit cheaper I could justify the expense.

There was: this. Cowboy Studio has a range of really cheap remote flashes. For less than a Canon lens hood (damnit, Canon, why don't they come with the lens?!), I bought a set.

New Camera

I bought a (used) Yashica 12 last week. I love it - the waistlevel finder changes everything. I had forgotten how much old cameras change things - until I developed my film and only got 6/12 images. Apparently, the mechanism that stops the crank is broken.Hopefully just being careful about not overwinding and stopping when the counter advances is accurate enough. We'll see when I develop the next roll.