Normality

We’re living through very strange times indeed. For me it isn’t really anything new to be stuck inside because of some health crisis. Normally these are my own health problems though and everyone else just carries on as if nothing happened. However, for once we’re all stuck inside at the same time, which is rather strange for me!

You’d think that someone like me would know how to keep herself busy and for the most part you’d be right. However, being at risk like I am definitely made it hard to concentrate for a while. After more than 6 weeks in lockdown it was slowly getting better though, which is why I finally decided to make another video and show you some new photos from a recent trip to Bilbao. Editing the video was somewhat therapeutic, since by now I’m craving a bit of normality. When we went to Bilbao in January 2020, everything was still “normal” in Europe and I really quite enjoyed looking through the point of view footage. People without masks, everyone carefree. It was calming somehow. I don’t know, maybe you feel the same way.

If you enjoyed the video, please consider subscribing to my channel if you haven’t done so already since that would really help me out a lot. I’m still trying to reach 1000 subscribers, since YouTube seems to provide better video codec quality for bigger channels like that. After all, once the lockdown is slightly less strict I’ll mostly be going to the forest for the foreseeable future – going near people is just too risky for me – and the lower quality YT codec really does a number on anything to do with trees!

That being said, it seems like it’s still going to be a while until I can even go to the forest, so I’m just doing stuff around the studio for now. The last few days I spent most of my time with my 3D printer, upgrading the extruder, taking it apart to see whether I can replace the fans and motor drivers, printing different designs in flexible filament and preparing for some experiments with different kinds of black filament that I ordered to see whether it’s going to be opaque enough for printing cameras. The pieces involved when printing cameras are usually also quite big, which is why I’ve been looking into upgrading the fans and motor drivers. Right now the printer is a bit too loud to be working in the same room and when it’s going to be printing for 6-10h it would render my studio somewhat unusable. After taking the printer apart and putting it back together I now know that it can definitely be done and I already ordered the parts for the upgrade, which means that I’ll be printing my first camera soon! I also ordered all the nuts and screws for the first design I want to print and I’m very much looking forward to that big adventure. The camera I want to print first is the Goodman Zone, which is a design that uses Mamiya Press lenses, the very same ones I’ve been testing in the last couple of blog entries.

That being said, the first thing I’m going to print – once I find a filament that is opaque enough – are masks for my Mamiya Universal multi-format back though. A kind soul indeed managed to provide me with all the measurements I need to design a replacement mask and this will make my Mamiya Universal even more universal! More about this once I have finished the design though!

For now, let’s just get to the pictures from the first day of our Bilbao trip in January before I get completely sidetracked and tell you way more about 3D printers than you really want to know! As always there are a couple bonus shots that I didn’t put in the video.

In any case, I hope you and your family are doing well and staying safe wherever you are! Hang in there!

All pictures taken with: Leica M6, Voigtländer Nokton 35mm f/1.2, HP5+, HC-110.