The Big Black Camera of Doom is now Frankencamera. I know I am going to get asked questions about this when I use it at the club on Saturday. I've got two new gizmos, one of which is home-made.

Gizmo #1 is a right-angle view finder. The typical use for this is for getting low, awkward macro shots, which, as you might expect of me, has nothing to do with why I got it. My purpose for this is to make it easier to shoot from (my) chest-height without stooping. On a typical photo-booth night I spend 5-6 hours with my knees half-bent and my back bent and the next day my knees and lower back have something to say about it. No more (hopefully). Perhaps not the most useful gadget in the world, but I had some store-credit to burn up, so...

Gizmo #2 is more interesting and more useful. More than a few times when using a slave-flash or strobe triggered with my radio trigger I've wound up using the nasty little pop-up flash for some extra fill because the radio trigger was occupying the hot shoe and the camera has no PC sync socket. A hot-shoe safe-sync adaptor was an option but not the greatest because the I'd lose the TTL functions of the flash and the assistance it provides to the auto-focus. What I have made here is a Y-adaptor so that the cable still attaches to the flash-bracket with full functionality but I also have a second simple hot-shoe to for the radio trigger. I considered taking in-progress photos for a tutorial, but the honest truth is that what is going on inside that little black box with the two wires coming out the top is probably the ugliest soldering job I have ever done and not fit for sharing. But it works. The flash on the bracket has full communication with camera and the radio trigger trips without fail. This is going to save me needing to set up two strobes for my photo booth and still retain the reliability of the the radio trigger for the strobe. I just need to come up with something better than Velcro dots to hold the second hot-shoe in place

All together it looks absurd - but it's not what the camera looks like that matters, it's what it sees.

The second, matching lens I was waiting for arrived today. Using my flash bracket for a mount, I rigged the two identical cameras up in tandem for a test shot. They both trigger with the remote quite nicely, although, as I expected, the synch is nowhere near perfect. I could hear the shutters closing about a quarter second apart. That's not good enough for anything in motion - that's where the Stereo Realist will continue to be useful - but plenty good enough for this sort of thing and anything else where there isn't too much motion. Note that in the test Tharsis is sitting next to me. I've never managed to get a clear shot of a cat using the slide technique (taking two pictures with the same camera), so this is a definite improvement over that.

Who doesn't like looking at pictures from a century ago? A lot changes in a hundred years and it is fascinating to have that glimpse back. In a hundred years what will there be to look back on? With the ubiquity of the digital camera there is more visual documentation of these early years of the 21^st century than any previous period in history. But what will happen to all those billions of digital pictures? In a hundred years there will be no-one finding shoe boxes of their ancestors' holidays.

"Yeah, but they'll be finding my old CD's and DVD's" you say? Perhaps that's true, but will they be able to do anything with them? Changes in technology notwithstanding (I have, as I write this, data on 5¼" floppies and ¾" professional VHS tapes, hell, I might even still have some 8-track tapes in a box somewhere) chances are that those discs will not be readable even if the hardware and software is available. The perception is out-there that once something is on a CD or DVD it is archived forever and that is regretably false.

The problem with writable CD's and DVD's is in the reflective layer. Most of the discs out there use silver because it is relatively inexpensive and highly reflective - for a while. Silver tarnishes. As the illustration to the right shows, this doesn't take long. A recordable DVD can become unreadable inside a year and a CD can "rot" in as little as two or three years. How many graduations, weddings, vacations, memories and artworks are already lost? What can you do?

For some time now I have only been buying gold-foil CD's - ever since I had a CD of photographs become unreadable. Gold does not tarnish. Certainly it is more expensive, a gold CD-R is about twice as much as an ordinary silver one, but the data is going to stay intact for two or three centuries rather than years. Twice the price is a good bargain for one hundred times the lifespan.

Lately the CD's have been proving inadequate on another level, though. Now that I am regularly using 2 GB and 4 GB cards in my cameras  I'm quite literally burning through at least one CD every time I have a shoot. It's easy enough to burn the two or three CD's necessary, and the expense isn't worth mentioning, especially in comparison to what I spend when I shoot film or I'm doing a painting. It's the storage space and retrieval that is becoming cumbersome, so getting nearly five times that capacity from a DVD in the same physical space is compelling.

Earlier this week I went looking for archival quality (i.e. gold) DVD's. I couldn't find any anywhere nearby. Outfits like Staples, London Drugs, etc. don't carry gold DVD's. I presume that is because at a cost (taxes and levy in) of about $3.50 per disc people who are not aware that what they put on a regular DVD could be gone in a year aren't buying the 100-year discs.

Shelling out $350 for a spindle of 100 gave me pause, I'll admit. However, archival DVD storage works out to only 0.072¢/MB compared to 0.139¢/MB for the archival CD's. In terms of price/MB/year the CD's are still a better deal with their 300 year lifespan compared to the century the DVD's are good for, but I'm willing to trade one fifth the physical space requirements against three times the archival longevity. I expect that when the DVD's pass to my heirs they'll likely copy them to whatever new media the late 21^st century will have to offer anyway.

Behold my "new" and wholly awesome camera. The cheese-factor on this is positively lunar. There is no memory card, images are stored on 3½" floppies.

I scored. I mean really - these things go for over $10 on eBay ;-p

The CCD is a whopping 850,000 pixels of glory.

Features include the blindingly awful flash common to early digital cameras and such amazingly useless "artistic" modes like "Negative" - because pressing CTRL-I in Photoshop is HARD.

So what possible use could I have for this lovely bit of 90's fromage? My first thoughts mostly revolved around dissecting it for various purposes, but it turns out that there is a niche where this camera excels. It can focus on things less than a centimetre from the lens. Behold a circuit-board landscape:

With the right lighting the ability of this thing to get up close is stunning.

This is the Inlet Theatre at Port Moody City Hall. The theatre crew is setting up a runway in the main galleria for the Wearable Art Awards today and these forms will be used to display previous year's entries. I'll be photographing the show tomorrow night. It's of course too late to enter this year's event, but I can think of more than a couple people in our circle that would do well at this event.

Doors tomorrow are at 7:30 p.m. and there are still standing-room tickets available at the door for $25.