Fear Complex

Merry 2010.

A couple of weekends ago I got to drive a JZX100 Chaser to Wellington. must say I was quite impressed with the car overall, and I’m currently in the middle of writing a little “review” of its merits, but in the meantime here’s the complete album of photos I took of the car on Sunday: flickr album

I’m quite pleased with the results from the venerable old OM-Zuiko 100mm, given that I was shooting in gale-force winds, manually focused of course, and the lighting/weather was a bit questionable. I guess that’s Welly for ya…

As for the car, I don’t think it’s quite convinced me to go modern, but as the story goes I’m a bitter, nostalgic bastard who can ignore certain shall we say quirks of older technology if it means the bigger picture is still acceptable.

Selective bias, if you will.

Another trackday done and dusted… and my poor little track car soldiers on without (too many) issues

however I do get the feeling that my $100 turbo is finally on its way out, judging from the amount of oil it’s starting to blow past the seals. Should I do the ’sensible’ thing before I replace it, and get my spare one (which cost me all of $60) reconditioned? Ah well, I got until 31st August to decide.

So. Trackday. I let Gar loose with my E-500 yesterday, here are some of the results:

and the full gallery is here.

meanwhile, Tom is off on an intrepid journey to Yurop and won’t be back until November. If he remembers to update his blog you can follow his travelogue here.

All this fuckin’ junk is.

also, half my plugins seem to be broken thanks to whoever tried to php-exploit the blog yesterday. Arrgghhh

why does Jaquie Brown deserve her own television show?

to make up for the lack of insightfulness around these parts as of late (both from GaR and myself) here are some shots from my recent excursion to the Wairakei geothermal power plant. I was sorely disappointed that Tom didn’t have a desk resembling that of Homer Simpson (complete with box of donuts), but that disappointment was greatly tempered by a guided tour around the facility.

Best viewed with the soundtrack from Fallout 2 playing for the right ambience, and no I’m not suggesting any sort of connection!

    

full Flickr album here.

speaking of Fallout, the third game in the series is set for an end of year release. That should more than make up for the lack of any seriously good PC games to come out this year so far. I’d probably rate my anticipation for it higher than Wrath of the Lich King – because let’s be honest, that’ll just be another epic timesink in the grand scheme of things.

oh, and on the way home from Taupo, a milk tanker made my car its bitch. there’s nothing quite like reflexively ducking for cover when a massive rock is headed straight for your face at about 80km/h. Luckily there happened to be a windscreen in the way.

note the careful usage of past tense grammar.

  

At least I didn’t get stranded in Mangakino.

P4199397 (wide) / taken 19 Apr 2008

sometimes I lament being such a short bastard – attempting to ’shoot over the crowd’ often creates some interesting dilemmas.

fortunately I was able to get away with some pretty aggressive cropping, thanks to the trusty ol’ telephoto lens.

But maybe I’ll bring a swappa crate to stand on next time. rest of photos here

took the DR30 sedan to a classic Japanese car meet today, but turns out I wasn’t very well organized.

first my digital ran out of battery (and I’d left my spare at home), so I switched to 35mm but ran out of film not long afterwards.

hilarity

   

my photostream is here, and other folks’ photos can be found at this link.

now I should be better organized for superlap tomorrow.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbo16vdohc

Just so happens that I’m now running out of space on my site, so I’ve slowly started transferring most of my photos over to my once-defunct flickr account. Address is above.

now maybe I’m just a noob and haven’t looked closely enough, but a gripe I’ve always had is the seemingly non-existent ability in flickr to sort photos on the main page of your profile by date of capture, rather than by date of upload.

OK fine, clicking on the image does show you when it was actually taken (‘additional info’ at bottom right), but I’m just a lousy pedantic bastard who likes to keep things in order…

ah, never mind.

On the flip side: during my sorting frenzies I’m discovering photos on my HDDs which have gone unpublished until now; for example, 100+ shots from the 2007 A1GP round in Taupo that never actually saw the light of day, apart from a couple of teasers/promos I stuck on various forums.

yeah, I been slack.

    

BTW, if you’re a WP (not WP.com) blogger who also happens to be a flickr user, this handy flickr-manager plugin is darn good. I’m sold on the lightbox support too.

’80s gadgets redux: Olympus OM-2n 35mm SLR.

as digital photography gets cheaper (and more gimmick-laden) with every passing week, more and more ordinary folks are getting rid of their oldschool film equipment in order to obtain the latest and greatest. For collectors/amateur noobographers like myself, this is a nice convenient way to get hold of decent 35mm systems for not very much moneys.

take my OM-2n (circa 1978) for example: working 2nd hand bodies, often equipped with the default 50mm 1:1.8 lenses, can be had for as little as $20 off trademe. Sometimes you’ll stumble across the odd telephoto lens kit in good condition, or perhaps a bunch of filters, macro extension tubes, or a tidy flash unit, all for under $100. (though I’ve noticed that people are cottoning on to the fact that you can actually use older lenses on d-SLR bodies with conversion rings, so prices are starting to rise again – a pity)

‘course, this is all offset by the fact you still need to buy and develop film, and the number of outlets around still willing to turn your little canister into a bunch of prints is shrinking at a rate proportional to the number of people making the jump to digital… sigh.

but anyway, as mentioned in a previous update, I recently scored an OM-10 (the consumer grade version of the OM-2) and a bunch of extra accessories at a reasonable price, so decided to outfit my ailing OM-2n with a much-needed replacement lens with rubber hood, a fresh polarizing filter, and a working T20 flash unit. End result: an old camera I can finally start using again.

I can definitely see why people love the convenience and quality of digital SLRs though, myself included. The things you take for granted with digital photography as opposed to film (and the things you end up forgetting once you make the switch) – it’s like going from playing C&C3 to Dune 2 and then wondering why you can’t use right-click to move.

Heck it took me 10 bloody minutes to load a canister of film into the OM, last time I tried. the shame

me = officially half-deaf again; hamtown smakdown was LOUD. Ruptured eardrum be damned…