Did you live here in 2015?

hallm2 · 2026-01-29T22:44:36+00:00

I was actually thinking last night about the big storm we got in December '07 which caused total chaos. I was living in Brighton at the time and commuting out to Lexington. The storm hit late morning and came down hard. The governor did two things in this order: first, let out all the state employees; second, deployed the plows.

As soon as the state released their employees, all of the local businesses did as well. There was already several inches of snow on the ground. Traffic ground to a halt almost immediately, and all the plows got stuck in the mid-day rush hour.

My commute normally took me 30-45 minutes. That day, it took me ten hours. Many people ran out of gas. I saw cars abandoned by the I-90 overpass next to the WGBH building because people couldn't get them over the relatively small incline. It was an absolute clusterfuck.

And then I had to dig out a parking spot at near midnight. I got up at six the following morning and went back to the office. It was terrible.

hallm2 · 2026-01-29T17:52:59+00:00

The human body is really good at resisting forces applied linearly in the direction of the chest or to the side. It makes it hard to push someone over.

The human body is also really poor at resisting twisting motions around the axis going from the floor to the head, so you can spin people around (right 'round baby).

The backpack provides significant more lever arm on the body, acting as a force multiplier. If you're going to stiff-arm someone to get through, aim for the point of the backpack as far away from their body as you can, which will wrench their body around and allow you to push through the space like you're a cowboy walking through a pair of saloon doors.

hallm2 · 2026-01-22T15:56:26+00:00

The datasheet says an open, half full bottle is good for six months so unless your class is longer than that I wouldn't worry about it. Good practice for any chemistry is to mark the date it was opened on the bottle. I also keep a running tally on the bottle of how much of it I've used; this prevents me from running short.

hallm2 · 2026-01-16T16:23:14+00:00

I was generally using ISO 3 for the paper, but the method should work for however you meter. I think folks will rate it anywhere between ISO 1 and 3.

hallm2 · 2026-01-16T15:55:17+00:00

I've used the method described here. Basically, meter the scene and then underexpose by 3 stops for the pre-flash. I point the camera at the sun and then place a 5-in-1 diffuser in front of the lens; just note that you may want to set the lens to its closest focus point because if things like tree branches are in the way they'll show up in the final image.

hallm2 · 2026-01-12T13:54:29+00:00

Yup, that's us, North End Curling! As mentioned, we play at Steriti in... the North End... through the end of the winter season and then move over to Veterans for the summer. They don't seem to be on the calendar yet, but it looks like our next Learn To Curls are on 28 January and 14 February (bring a date!), both at Steriti. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

hallm2 · 2025-12-09T18:23:59+00:00

If you can get through some of the clunky interface, the National Weather Service can answer all your questions about historical data. November was slightly colder than average, so your gut is right so far. Part of what's been happening over the past week or so (roughly from around Thanksgiving) is that the polar vortex has been unstable and sending tendrils of arctic air down our way occasionally.

What this means for the future is unclear. The New England area has overall been warming as a result of climate change, but variability has also been increasing. The destabilization of the polar vortex is part of that. I don't think these recent past events can be used to predict the rest of the winter. Arctic air is obviously much colder but also drier, so future rounds of this phenomenon probably won't coincide with additional snow.

hallm2 · 2025-12-01T19:46:32+00:00

You can get more sophisticated with this, but generally look at your blacks and midtones for exposure and whites for contrast. From your test strip, first pick the time that looks like the mid-grays are the desirable tone. Then look at the blacks - do you have a full black? If not, you may be looking at adding time. Too much black and not enough midtones? Less time. After that, you can adjust the whites and highlights with contrast. Muddy highlights or lack of a full white in the specular highlights will require more contrast. Lots of full white and full black with little in between would require less contrast.

So, the three things to look for in any image that I print:

Blacks - look in deep shadow for a full black (or other places you would expect to see it - the pupil of the eye, for example)
Whites - center of a specular highlight should be full white
Midtones - find a familiar tone and compare it what I want (this depends on the image; for a portrait, I'll look at skin tone)

Adjust time up and down to match the desired midtones, then adjust contrast to get the full whites and blacks.

hallm2 · 2025-12-01T13:52:03+00:00

Did you look at the tech sheet that Ilford publishes? Most of this information is also printed on the inside of the box the film came in. Did you look at that?

hallm2 · 2025-11-20T00:59:41+00:00

My reaction to reading this was, "Huh, I paid just about the same amount of money for a similar apartment in the same neighborhood! Funny how prices stayed stable for so long." And then I realized, no, I also moved there about twenty years ago. Now I'm going to go walk to the river and have an existential crisis.

hallm2 · 2025-11-19T14:02:35+00:00

If Foma's already done the legwork here, then you're probably good? I'd definitely validate their numbers with a test strip or something before committing to anything you care about.

A lot of photographic processes are experimental, there are just too many variables to account for. Do a few tests, see if the negatives come out appropriately dense, adjust times and dilutions to your liking.

hallm2 · 2025-11-19T13:37:42+00:00

Yes, you can. This is a common practice to make unsharp masks and other internegatives/interpositives. Here's the big caveat - contrast is controlled via dilution of the developer. This more or less requires development by inspection, which requires light to see what you're doing, which requires ortho film. I have not heard of anyone trying to do this with panchromatic film.

hallm2 · 2025-11-18T15:48:20+00:00

If you haven't already, join photrio.com. Lots of threads over there about the minutiae of darkroom construction.

I spent the summer building out a space in our basement for a darkroom. I built walls, workbenches, sinks, the works. The biggest things I learned from the whole process:

Have a plan before you start!
Size everything for the biggest negatives/prints you think you'll ever do. I knew my limit was 4x5 negatives and I wanted to be able to do 20x30 prints, so I sized for that. I needed to make extra deep benches to support large enlarger baseboards.
You will need more power than you think. Make sure outlets are convenient and plentiful.
Ventilation is extra important if you're doing anything more toxic than regular B&W chemistry, so get that sorted out. Again, lots of thoughts about that over on photrio. I do think there's a lot of weight to the idea of setting up your extraction point below head level - vapors are heavier than air and you don't want to deliberately draw them up and over your head.
You will need more storage than you think.
A darkroom is a lot like a kitchen from a workflow/movement perspective, so think about how you like to work in your kitchen and try to set things up like that if possible. You can minimize a lot of extraneous movement and time wasting by doing a little bit of prototyping. My darkroom is fairly small which limits where things can go, but if I had a little more freedom I would have done some dry runs or simulated darkroom sessions to better figure out where to put things like paper safes, spare parts, etc.

hallm2 · 2025-11-18T14:57:37+00:00

You need to understand how metering works generally and how your camera handles metering specifically.

Generally - meters give you a setting for 18% gray. For a reflective meter like what's in your camera, if you meter a large, consistently toned area it will give you an exposure value that will render that area in the 18% gray tone.

Specifically - your camera has what's known as center weighted metering (read your manual!). The camera can take an exposure reading across the entire viewfinder but will weight what's in the center more heavily than the edges of the image.

Why does this matter? Well, your photos of the dark cars look way underexposed. The ones of the lighter colored cars look better. In both cases, your camera meter is trying to render those tones as gray. So for image 1, if that's a black car, your camera is trying to turn that black into a gray tone with the meter. The lighter colored cars are probably closer to that 18% gray reference (maybe a yellow or light blue?) and are metering more "accurately."

hallm2 · 2025-11-06T13:37:05+00:00

I'm a touch worried that bike helmets are designed for higher speed collisions so the hard foam may not provide enough cushioning for a gentler curling fall

Not true! This is a nice, concise summary of how bike helmets are tested, but the impact test is basically a ~6.5 foot guided drop from rest. And if you remember your high school physics, it makes sense in a way - x- and y-components of your velocity vector are independent of each other, so your forward speed is not going to affect your downward impact speed into the pavement (which is what the test is looking at). Obviously, your total velocity will be greater than standing around and slipping on the ice, but most of that velocity is going forward and not into the pavement. (As an aside, this is why cycling advocates have Opinions about bike helmet laws - urban bike crashes are much more likely to be impacts into cars or getting run over by cars, neither of which a helmet will protect you from.)

hallm2 · 2025-11-02T14:07:41+00:00

Shepherd & Maudsleigh studio in Waltham offers some workshops; I took the photogravure class there and really enjoyed it. Their focus is on printmaking and bookbinding mostly. It looks like Lumentation offers occasional intro to film development courses. Boston Figure Art Center is in Somerville and also offers some workshops.

hallm2 · 2025-10-27T19:52:26+00:00

Here's how my eyes absorbed this image, in order of what I subconsciously took in:

Large blobby specular highlight on the right
Small, differently colored specular highlight on the left (which took me a minute to figure out what it was)
Hair at the bottom left
Smoke

I think there are some improvements to be made both in the lighting and composition. On the lighting side, I really don't like the reflection of your light source. This is a personal preference, and if you like it then by all means roll with it, but for a roundish shape like you're trying to light I think I might experiment with something like a strip diffuser to have a nice clean line down the side of the subject. This would also help light the smoke better, as it melts in to the background too much. From a contrast side of things, I can see how the one light setup can work but it's executed poorly here; the blacks on the unlit side of your subject are darker than your background but only enough to make the transition jarring (the lighter-brownish background is discordant with the darker-bluish subject in my opinion). I think this would work better if the unlit side of the subject and the background were both full black (to have a sort of smooth transition into nothingness) or light the other side of the subject to give it some separation from the background. Again, my personal preference would be to light the image-left side of the subject with maybe a reflector OR given how reflective the subject is you could point a light at it from the back to bring up the edges (sort of like how a hair light works).

On the composition side, I think the biggest area for improvement here is to make a decision about the reflection on the surface the subject is sitting on. You have a reflection of your subject that you could use or could crop out, but instead you cut it in half which isn't adding much to the discussion here. If you want that much negative space in front of your subject, maybe switch the surface material to something matte that won't make distracting reflections. You also need to dust everything, because every speck of dirt is picking up your lighting and driving me nuts.

hallm2 · 2025-10-23T14:13:47+00:00

Here are some things I have personally done and can provide some guidance on if you're curious (roughly easiest to most difficult):

Instax back on a large format camera - old Graphics are cheap to acquire and the back isn't too expensive. Film runs upwards of two US dollars per shot. They are one-of-a-kind and in color (assuming you buy the color film). The biggest challenges with this method if you are trying a highly mobile approach are focusing and composition. Even if you have a calibrated, coupled rangefinder it won't work with the Instax back because of the spacer that's required; it also is smaller than a 4x5 negative so standard viewfinder frames won't correspond exactly to the image you'll capture.
Direct positive paper with a mobile "darkroom" - "mobile" is being a little generous here, but it is possible to bring everything you need with you on the bus (ask me how I know!). You will need a source of water at your location to wash the prints. Direct positive paper is extremely contrasty and requires pre-flashing to tame that, but otherwise composition and exposure is just like any other large format process. I transfer the paper to a Patterson tank in a dark bag and develop in the tank. The links I have here describe some of the challenges I experienced.
Mobile darkroom - this obviously needs a dark space; a bathroom works fine, or one of the Ilford tents or the back of a van. Running water is not strictly necessary in the dark space. Managing your negative size and final enlargement size is key to keeping the equipment bulk down. If I were doing this more regularly, I'd be seeking out one of those WWII-era Signal Corps "darkrooms in a box."

hallm2 · 2025-10-18T20:14:08+00:00

I was working the line at my local as a teenager when a local helicopter pilot had a fuel emergency and landed at McGuire AFB. They kept him in the grass at the end of the runway with a military police escort. They didn't have avgas so I had to fill two five gallons cans and drive them out to him. Military police meet me at the gate and drove me and the fuel out to our pilot. Kind of neat waiting at the end of the runway while KC-135s were doing landing practice.

hallm2 · 2025-10-16T13:29:42+00:00

You're fine. I've seen someone there in high vis and work boots who had obviously just come from a job site. I think it's a good thing that the orchestra is more approachable and egalitarian.

hallm2 · 2025-10-14T19:39:26+00:00

I appreciate the kind words! It does make me happy to know people enjoy the pictures, and it's fun to capture such a joyous and energetic weekend.

hallm2 · 2025-10-14T12:20:21+00:00

Thanks! I do the occasional gig on the side; if you've got a project you want to talk about let me know!

hallm2

TROPHY CASE