I ordered the starter pack of PX color film from the Impossible Project, and I’ve been testing it out in my SX-70 camera. On the whole I like it, but I’m having a hard time with it being a low-ISO film that needs protection from light when it comes out of the camera. The combination seems a little silly, and I’m not eager to tape cardboard to my camera to make up for the top layer of the film chemistry not being opaque enough.

The results are pretty, though.

The technology/city conversations keep going—Tuesday’s PDC meeting followed up on questions about supporting user groups, startup funding, mentoring opportunities. There’s really a strong community-wide sentiment that we need a designated community space, a home for groups and events that will restore some of what was lost when Cubespace closed. I started a set of wiki pages to keep track of the data, questions, and discussion we have so far, since I think it’s important to make sure people on the edges of the conversation (which is most of you) can follow what’s going on and chime in.

I’d also really like to see more people do blog posts like this one by Amber Case that detail what sorts of outcomes you want to participate in. We’re quickly moving from “what problems do we need to address?” to “what are we going to do about it?” and I’m in favor of more voices helping answer that.

Also: don’t forget to sign up for WhereCampPDX. I’m planning to do some sort of session to talk about the local tech economy and how we see ourselves. There’s going to be a ton of other cool stuff going on too. I love that on year 3 it feels like we’ve worked out most of the event-planning kinks and the rest is just the execution. Less thinking about the same old questions, more doing.

On Thursday I took my Polaroid OneStep to the Timbers game (vs. Vancouver, a great win, go Ryan Pore).

Saturday we had the the CivicApps meetup. I took notes if you’re curious about what we discussed. The second half of the day, a few of us worked on a Food Cart Finder app—something I’ve been plotting for a while. The current food cart map is perpetually out of date, so I’ve been thinking of ways I could build a mobile web app to make it easy for people to report new food cart information, then integrate that into a food cart database and map. In ~4 hours we were able to get a prototype of the reporting functions up and running, and went out to record a few carts. The next step is to build the system for using reports to update food cart info, but I’ll probably put this on hold until I finish Party Bus and other things for my OSBridge presentation.

On Sunday I went up to my grandparents’ place in Trout Lake. They live across the road from a dairy farm, and several of the neighbors have livestock.

I posted this to Twitter while out walking around, and Steven Walling replied:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Llamas. Bringing Linux to the wilderness. Yep.

And speaking of things you can bring into the wilderness with you, the Summer Fieldbook is, as previously reported, now available for purchase. You wouldn’t want to find yourself at the end of the summer with no record of what you’ve been up to, would you?

Last week, to follow on from the discussion of atemporality, I started sort of an essay/rant about the future being a fictional construct, the non-linear nature of “progress”, and how making and remixing intersect. I haven’t felt inspired to shape it into something actually readable, so instead, how about some music and photos?

Above is a song I wrote with the KORG DS-10 cartridge on my Nintendo DS (RSS reader folks, click through to see it).

I also made something I’m calling an atemporal dance mix (my mom says it’s good for cheering yourself up, too).

To finish, here’s Mudshark reprising his role as a furry creature from beyond.

Things you don’t learn about photography when you only do digital: it’s sort of like Schrödinger’s Cat.

I’ve been getting some nice results with the Fade to Black film in my SX-70, though. And Lucas dug up a OneStep camera for me, so when they start making 600 film again I’ll have three different Polaroid cameras to play with.

It’s fun when it works.

A few minutes after taking the photos.

About an hour later.

The first photo, a day later. You can just barely see the remains of the image. This one is now taped inside a window, trying the suggestion that Fade to Black photos can be bleached out to reveal more of the image again.

The second photo, finished. This one I peeled open and let dry for about a day before taping it back together and scanning the image. The front image and the back foil don’t quite lay flat now, giving the image the appearance of depth. It’s a neat effect, and one I’d like to play with more. Maybe I could reassemble the photo with some sort of spacer keeping the layers apart?

I really love the colors of this film. It’s a bit more work to capture the result at any point in the development, and if you open the photo to stop the development process, that’s it, no going back. But I like that photography can still be this hands-on, messy thing, not completely measured and precise. It feels good to muck around and see what happens.

This is a sketch I made on my phone (using Brushes) at the pdx.rb meeting while Igal was talking about why he uses rcov. His code example involved kitties, so obviously kitties love rcov too.

This is a polaroid I took while walking around my neighborhood on … Thursday? I finished off the Artistic-TZ film pack I had in the SX-70, so next up is a pack of Fade to Black film, which does exactly what it sounds like, over a 24-hour period after the photo is taken. The scans I’ve seen online are pretty neat, so I’m excited to try it out for myself.

I also did a few things like go to the Open Source Bridge work session, and fix a couple of setup instructions in OpenConferenceWare that I found confusing. And I watched the Superbowl with friends, though honestly I’m a much bigger fan of Puppy Bowl. I think the mass appeal of watching puppies and kittens run around in circles must say something about human nature, or western civilization, or something like that. But I don’t know what.

2. Squint at the included directions for attaching your new Polaroid back to the Holga camera. Squint even more at the directions for loading the film. Make a guess as to what the photos are indicating, and fiddle with it until everything appears to be in place.

3. Take a picture of your cat in what you hope is bright enough light for the film ISO. Pull the photo out of the camera in a complicated process involving a little paper leader strip, and a film door that’s hard to pry open even with fingernails.

4. Remember that using peel-apart film probably means that there’s an optimal length of time to let it develop before opening, and fumble for the film box to find out what that is. Glance at the time. Try to guess how long it’s been since you removed the film from the camera. Give up and open it a minute later.

5. Wonder why there is no cat in this photo.

6. Decide that low light levels are probably the culprit, and sprint outside as soon as the gloomy winter weather breaks into sunshine.

7. Fail to pull the film out smoothly, feeding it instead into the little slot the paper tabs (which tell you what number print you’re on) are supposed to come out of. Open the camera to clear the jam, crossing your fingers you haven’t exposed the entire film pack to light.

8. Hope that aggressive cropping will be enough to keep the picture from being a complete waste.

9. Spend some time reading Flickr forum threads for tips. Decide that you’ll just try to get over the minimum development time and not worry after that, since it’s the only way you’re going to be able to take pictures outside (needing to let the opened prints dry flat on a clean surface is kinda limiting).

10. Go outside and take more pictures.

11. Conclude that no amount of wishful thinking will convert “bright overcast” into “direct sunlight”.

12. Watch the weather forecast anxiously, hoping for actual sunshine to occur.

13. Run outside during the next available sunbreak. Finish off the pack of film.

14. Admire the imperfect, unexpected results.

We had about fifteen people come out for Calagator‘s 2nd birthday party at Bailey’s on Friday night. Low-key, casual meetup, with brownies from Joe Cohen, lemon bars I made with the roadtrip lemons, plenty of beer, and food from the taqueria across the street. I’m sad that Igal, who has been instrumental in keeping Calagator going, was sick and couldn’t be there with us.

On Saturday, about 60 people met up at NedSpace for the first-ever CrisisCampPDX, a quickly-organized branch of a project that’s been bringing people together around the world to provide support for relief efforts in Haiti. This wasn’t just the regular Portland tech scene at work—we had a wide range of participants, from developers, to GIS specialists, to French and Creole speakers, to people who helped with data entry and sorting. I was really impressed with the energy and focus everyone brought to this work day. I helped with a hospital data project using Sahana, a disaster-management system. We hit a few bumps as people tried to get up to speed on different projects, but on the whole I was really impressed with how much we were able to do, for such a distributed set of projects.

And now for something completely different.

I have a small but growing collection of cameras, which has now expanded to include some Polaroid equipment. The middle of winter in the Pacific Northwest is not the best time to be running around shooting ISO 100 film, but I did manage to get a few shots off last week with my new SX-70 Sonar camera. (This is not the only new camera from the last couple of weeks, but you’ll have to wait to hear about the rest.)

You may be wondering, “didn’t Polaroid stop making instant film a while back? Why would you pick that up now?”. There’s a group known as The Impossible Project which has spent the last year and change developing new instant film for Polaroid camera formats, and they’re expected to release the results of that work next month. So I just have to pace myself with my existing film supply for a few weeks.

Last but not least, I updated the blog’s header with a new photo, from the road trip. Click through and have a look if you’re using an RSS reader to view this. I have a habit of leaving the header picture the same for long periods of time, but once in a while the blog design changes, and there’s often new links in the sidebar to check out, so it’s worth taking a peek.