The New Year break is traditionally a good time for sysadmins to do all those server upgrades/reinstalls they couldn't quite get time to do for the rest of the year, and so I've been busy with that both at work and home. Very busy. The home server's now on OpenSolaris rather than Solaris Express), and has a pair of shiny new 1.5TB drives to hold all my stuff. It's been working well in general (providing you don't compile your own snmpd and tell it to log to /dev/null - can you guess what happens?). But it's all done now. Hopefully I can find some time to go shooting with this:

There are a few things I want to do this year, in terms of photography and learning more about it (I have much to learn. Shooting film's made me learn much more than digital ever did). One of these is to develop my own black & white film at home - having just bought an Epson V700 scanner recently, I can "own" the whole process, so to speak. But I'll get to that later. Another one was to get some kind of medium format camera, just to see if it "worked" for me. I figured the easiest entry point would just be to go and buy a plasticky thing like a Diana or a Holga, but then a fellow flickrite was getting rid of some excess camera gear and I saw a chance to try something rather different. From looking at the Cameraquest page about the Zeiss Super Ikonta BX, my one must be a wartime model (as opposed to post-war), since the shutter speed tops out at 1/400 seconds rather than 1/500. I'm told it's a bit closer to 1/300, more likely, though I'll be surprised if I can tell, to be honest. We'll see. I only wasted about half a roll (I think!) loading my very first roll of 120 film, but the main problem's going to be learning how to meter properly. I guess we'll see how it goes! I wonder if I'll get used to thinking in squares.

At the same time, I've noticed my beloved Canonet has sprung a problem with its shutter speed ring - it feels very loose, and I can only wind it over to about 1/15, no more. The meter appears to change in response to changing the shutter speed, but a bunch of blurry shots I took yesterday evening prove that the shutter speed I thought I had wasn't right. Hopefully it's fixable - it's a lovely camera, and it'd be a shame to lose it so quickly - I've had it less than 6 months.