The borough of Somerville is 24 kilometres (about 35 minutes in the car) from my home and is the county seat for Somerset County. Like most of New Jersey, it was settled in colonial times (18th century) primarily by the Dutch, who purchased land from the English. Most of the "action" in Somerville happens on the strip of Main Street between North Gaston Avenue and the circle between County Route 202 and County Route 206.
Downtown Somerville is mostly pubs and restaurants, and boutique shops. Some time ago, a section of Division Street between North Main Street and South Street was closed to vehicular traffic and turned into an outdoor mall. Bhavna and I wanted to complete our Summer Sip and See passports with visits to Village Brewing and Jersey Cyclone Brewing. We had our passports stamped at Flounder Brewing, Bellemara Distillery, and Burnt Hills Cider earlier in the summer. We used the opportunity to walk around this part of the main street.
I loaded a 36-exposure roll of Lomography Colour 100 into my Minolta X-700 with MD Rokkor-X 45mm f/2 lens. The results are not what I expected. I suspect that I underexpose each frame.
I sold my car, and I am seriously considering an electric bicycle as a replacement.
Over a decade ago, while sitting at work on a hot summer day, I looked out my office at my 2006 Honda Accord EX-L V6 sitting in the hot sun in the parking lot. I commented to my co-worker who sat in the workspace next to time that owning a car was a waste of money. I talked about how they are so expensive that most of us have to take out multi-year loans to buy them. I was paying thousands of dollars a year to insure this thing that I used only during the week and only to commute the
Bhavna commutes five miles roundtrip to her office. This summer, as I watched the price of gasoline almost double, I was happy that we only needed to fill the tank on Bhavna’s car.
I had some medical issues in 2019, right before the global pandemic, which required high-dose steroids for treatment. I gained a little weight. Then the pandemic hit, and after two years of being locked inside, I became so inactive that I gained 25 pounds.
Inspired by Jim Grey's bicycle+camera blog posts blog posts, I attempted to fix the issue this summer. I thought, "It would be great to ride a bicycle to nearby towns, stop for a bite, and maybe photograph some bicycles". So I dusted off my daughter's bicycle and tried to ride around my neighbourhood. I didn’t get too far. My 55-year-old knees are shit. After about ten minutes on the bike, I can barely move them.
Pre-pandemic, I worked from home two days a week. I worked home five days a week when the USA went into its two-year pandemic lockdown in March 2020. I put my car in my garage, and except for the occasional mid-week trip to Source Brewing, it sat in the garage, unused. After the "great re-opening," I continued working remotely1. My car has sat unused for the last two years. My 16-year-old Honda has sat mostly unused in the garage for over two years. A few weeks ago, I sold it.
On Sunday, I used the money from that sale to purchase a Lectric Bikes X Premium electric bicycle. Over the last few months, before I sold my Honda, I read a lot of articles about electric bicycles. After much reading, I knew that I wanted an electric bicycle with pedal assist, at least sixty-five kilometres of range, disc brakes, and a mid-drive motor. I poured over every review and narrowed my choices down to the Lectric X Premium. I hope that the power assists in this mid-drive electric bike will allow me to get some exercise while reducing the impact on my knees. I have dreams of riding the Delaware & Raritan Canal Park trail into Princeton, Griggstown, Manville and other towns along the canal.
Kopp's Cycle Shop was established in 1891 by E.C. Kopp and is the oldest continually running bicycle shop in the Americas and the second most continually running bicycle shop worldwide. Kopp’s has very few electric bicycles. They sell primarily traditional bikes and focus on serving leisure and enthusiast cyclists. I hope they pivot soon.
I am an independent consultant. My contracts usually start at six months but sometimes get extended for two or more years. I started a new contract in 2021. ↩
One of my frustrations with 35mm film photography is the effort involved in compensation for the lack of metadata. This week, I spent a lot of time learning to read 35mm film strip edge DX bar codes. The photographs are all from around Palmer Square.
One of my frustrations with 35mm film photography is the effort involved in compensation for the lack of metadata. I tried using apps to track the information about each frame, but the process has inherent limitations. When I load the 35mm film cartridge into the camera body, I can record the film stock, type, ISO, camera make and model, and lens make and model in the app. With some effort, and assuming I expose each frame without the use of aperture priority or shutter priority, I can record the aperture and shutter speed. The action of manually documenting this information for each frame gets in the way of concentrating on the making of the photograph. I have given up on tracking the minutiae of each frame. I do the bare minimum by recording the camera, lens, film stock information, and the date the film was loaded into the camera.
When I send my film off for development, I usually use Boutique Film Lab, which lets me put a note with each order. I put information about the camera, lens, film stock, and the date the film was loaded into the camera. Just in case I forget to make an entry, I rely on the information on the film strip to identify the film stock. The process has worked well enough.
However, the entire process is easily subject to failure. I had one such recent loss. I exposed the film and wrote down the information on paper. I wanted a faster development turnaround time, so I sent the 35m film cartridge to Bleeker Digital Solutions, a lab in New York City. Bleeker’s interface does not have an area to input notes. I expected that I would rely on the information on the paper. But before the negatives were returned, I lost the paper with my notes. I then hoped that I could rely on the information on the negatives. When the negatives were returned, I stuck them in a drawer and waited for when I had time to scan them in.
Yesterday when I looked at the film strip, I realised I had made an error. There was nothing human-readable to help me identify the film stock. So now what? I had read that on some film stock, the information is DX encoded on the film strip. I spent hours last night searching the internet, learning to decode the binary code on the film strip. I combined the information I found on the post, Decoding 35mm DX Film Edge Barcodes, the Wikipedia entry for DX encoding, then converted the bar code to binary, then used a binary to decimal converter, and a DX codes lookup table. All that effort to find out that I had exposed a 36 exposure roll of Kodak Ektar 100 Color Negative Film. Whew!
I had a lot of challenges with scanning. I used VueScan Preview to line up the border around each frame. However, after scanning, the images were scanned off-axis. I watched the negative twice, but the results were the same. I cropped the imported images. I also had a challenge getting the white balance. I used the same technique I always use. I used the white balance dropper in Adobe Lightroom.
All in all, my experience with Kodak Ektar 100 was dismal. After I expose that roll, I will be done with Kodak Ektar.
Most of the frames were exposed in downtown Princeton around Palmer Square and Witherspoon Street.
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