And the cold, and the rain, and it means nothing. There is so little of weather in malaise. A haircut and a shave, a new bed and some tools. But fingernails still grow and there is no satisfying quiet.

I haven’t put up many pictures yet demonstrating the MC Zenitar 16mm lens I bought for the Fujica last autumn. It provides interesting shots if you’re unfamiliar with fisheyes, but the gimmick of the distortion is a bit of a handicap; it can easily destroy a shot. Another element to manipulate.

So all of the blog-synching and photo-adjusting madness is finished. As you’d expect, going through and touching up hundreds of Venetian photographs was as monotonous and stressful as scanning them. I could very well have made many more interesting photographs out of the material with the right adjustments, but in the end it was too repetitive and too much tedium. In any case, a so-so batch of seventy-nine shots are in the gallery.

Here is the equally dry set of journal entries from the second leg of my European trip, mostly for record-keeping purposes:

Ah, Venice
Uneventful
Old, new, and always the music
The islands
Stalling
A little bit of everything
Pensive; tea
Phony
Picky
Recap
In Soviet Russia, beard grows you
In Soviet Russia, security go through you

Tonight I finally finished scanning all of my film from last month’s European vacation. I haven’t run through the dust-and-scratches phase of Venice yet, but Vienna is complete, so now you can check out the photographs. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of variety in the material, you may very well give up half way through the album. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I still haven’t eaten dinner so a detailed analysis will have to come later. For now, here’s a summary of the blog posts from the first half of the trip.

In Soviet Russia, plane boards you
In Soviet Russia, drink consumes you
In Soviet Russia, subtitle reads you
In Soviet Russia, baggage check you
Vienna smells of autumn
Wet and the colds
Memories
Quest for the Crown

Though I haven’t had much time to do hardly any kind of non-programming task the last several months, my propensity for attracting vintage technology has not waned. One of my friends who worked in a care facility for the elderly inherited a mid 70s Fujica SLR some time ago, and my reputation as a connoisseur of things optic opened the doorway to its acquisition.

The Fujica ST801 was the world’s first SLR camera to have LEDs in the viewfinder for exposure readings (very useful in poor lighting conditions). It’s also a solidly built M42 screw mount with a decent 55mm 1.8 lens. The camera appears to be more or less unused. None of the usual signs of wear, scratches on the body and abrasion of the indicator paint, are present. There are a few tiny spots of mold inside the lens, however these are almost unavoidable due to normal humidity fluctuations over the course of 35 years. As far as I can tell the only significant cause for concern is the complete disintegration of all foam seals around the body orifices.

I’m just about done a test roll of Centuria, and in retrospect using my precious discontinued film wasn’t probably the smartest thing to do as the metering system could be shot to hell and all the whole roll could come out ridiculously overexposed.

But like George Michael says, “you gotta have faith.”