Rattlebrained

Winter in the Swiss Jura mountains used to be either very sunny or very snowy, but in the last few years the altitude of the stratus clouds has raised and we are now underneath; or in them.

Today it is still Autumn, and although the first frost came this week, there was a time when it would probably have been a cold but brisk sunny day. Alas we woke up in the fog, like yesterday and probably tomorrow. You may not consider that special but fog was the one weather element we rarely saw here in the past…

The clouds moved higher during the day, my hopes of seeing the sun disappeared. So I went out and walked up behind the city instead.

Last Friday Swamp Train played on what turned into a very wet cruise; and the loss of two mixing tables…

Hot and humid while we set up, a short drizzle to cool things down, a great crowd, a boat going in circles and through the canal de la Broye – the lakes off limit due to the weather conditions, a short break with a beer, a storm breaking hell on the upper deck where we were playing, a water filled crosswind like a wave, a very wet crowd and stage, a blown mixing table but Gaël is not one to give up so easily, got some sound going again, the boat back at its dock where we played on until the police broke up the party at midnight!
All in all a memorable evening…

Looking back a few posts reminds me how little I’ve blogged these last years and how limited my subject matter is these days; my last post of any importance being about the 2013 edition of this great festival. However if this blog is to come back to the world of the living the Blues Rules festival seems as good a place as any to start; in fact better than most!

And start it did last Friday with Sarah Savoy’s Hell-Raising Hayride. She had already played in last years festival (and so did we – Swamp Train – you can read about it here: Blues Rules Heatwave) so I knew what this band puts out; and didn’t what to miss them!

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(Already September, sheesh, where does time go… I’ve been wanting to write about the one night I was able to attend of this years Blues Rules which took place last May, but insomnia and various other things have kept my bloging to a minimum; you may have noticed.

The first three editions of what is IMO one of Switzerland’s best blues festival took place on the grounds of the castle of Crissier, just outside of Lausanne. But it seems that didn’t work out this year so the festival’s two founders, Vincent Delsupexhe & Thomas Lecuyer, had a great idea: they organized 4 tour dates European tour for some of their American bluesmen friends instead!

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This is an update to last June’s Pinholed Nex5n post, so you may want to read that first.

At the beginning of July I found the Pinhole Shop on Ebay which not only sells pinhole cameras but also just the pinholes; and also has a very convenient chart as to what the distance between the film/sensor and pinhole should be. I ordered the smallest: 0.12mm (that they don’t seem to have for sale at the time I’m writing this), which if I remember correctly, should be place 13mm away from the film.

After receiving it and comparing it visually to the pinhole I had made – and the first one I had bought (Rising pinhole, 0.2mm) – I estimated mine as being around 0.15mm. So I replaced mine by the 0.12mm in my homemade lens after sanding of as much of the bodycap as I dared to prevent vignetting from the cap itself. I also made a second bodycap lens for mine, placing it at approximately 17mm from the sensor, as well as made one for the Rising lens, placing it at 30mm…

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A few pictures from last week’s La Roche Bluegrass Festival.

Although I’m not that big a consumer of recorded bluegrass music I truly do enjoy a warm summer evening, or two or three of it. This festival is really nice, as I wrote three years ago when I last went “…it is free, it lasts four days and if the groups on stage aren’t enough for you, many of the bands can be found playing in the streets or while sitting around a table at a local café…” There are masterclasses, square dance lessons, stands selling Americana tourist trap memorability and genepe green beer.

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Last year I rejoined the world of photography when I bought a used Sony Nex5n at a local camera shop. It came with a 18-55mm zoom (SEL1855) and since I had been using a Olympus C-8080 that I had bought – also used – some 9 years before, it was a whole new world. It seemed that it was probably time to give a decent burial to the old camera with its manual lens I still had in a shoe box somewhere, but since two of those were Zeiss as you would I wondered at the value – if any – and hit the search button.

I don’t remember exactly how but down the line I ended up reading an article about using old lens on cameras like the Nex with a special adapter. Three weeks later the needed C/Y to Nex adapter I had ordered came in the mail, but I have to admit that my first relationship with it was not that great. The difficulty in focusing, the extra weight and the fact that the pictures taken with my old lens weren’t all that impressive made me think twice about using them.

Still, I ended up reading through a few articles here and there…

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