My posting is inversely proportional to how much crap I have to take care of. Since I haven't been posting that much this week, I suppose this means I'm really really busy.

What I have been doing is getting myself all worked up about buying a new camera. I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that I'm getting a disposable digital camera. By disposable I mean that no matter how expensive or how new or how sophisticated it may be, much like my laptop, it'll already be obselete by the time I take it out of the box. It'll probably also get knocked down in price by $200 within 3 months. It won't last me 25 years. Newer better cheaper cameras will come out within 3 years. In 5 years my camera's value will be approximately 1/10th of my purchase price if I'm lucky. And I'm better off just taking the plunge now and being done with it.

To make up for that depressing reality, I'm also going to repair dad's old Pentax Spotmatic. It's built like a brick (bulletproof is one description I've heard), features really cheap screw mount lenses (M42's), and the optical quality of the lenses is fantastic, probably better then the new $1,100 beast I'm about to buy. Why? Because, as Dad put it, there were two color versions of the Spotmatic: black and silver. You kept 35mm film in one, and slide film in the other. And that's the key.

You see, 35mm film is fine (it's 25megapixel equivalent), but you're not going to be blowing up pictures that large with it (that's what medium and large format film is for). But slide film, slide film is going to get blown up to sizes measured in feet, not inches. Slide film is very unforgiving because of that, and thus you better have some fine fine lenses if you want to use slide film. So lenses were made with a great attention to detail back in ye olden days.

Anyhoo, I don't think I have the artist's eye like squeak does, but I'm getting all excited about putting some B&W film into that bad boy and seeing what I can do. Of course, getting to the repair shot today would be a good first step.