B&H Order and 4x5 KAP is on its way!

I placed my order with B&H on Sunday, and I got notice it shipped Monday. So fifty sheets of TMax 100 and all the chemicals necessary to develop it are on their way! I also picked up all the aircraft plywood and basswood I need to build the camera body. I spent the better part of the afternoon Sunday measuring up my 150mm Fujinon and its lens board, and a Fidelity Elite film holder. They're in CAD, and are spaced to the correct spacing to get good focus at about 300'. The 4x5 KAP camera is on its way!

I hope to have the design finalized by the end of the week so I can start construction this weekend. The supplies should be here by Friday, but I figure an outing with the Bender and a tripod with a handful of loaded film holders would probably do me a world of good. I doubt I'll be ready to do 4x5 KAP for at least another month.

On another note, I'm almost done rebuilding my Linux machine, vix. A few months ago I let my DNS paranoia slide, and someone in California wound up taking my name from me. I'd had it for over ten years, so this was a little traumatic. In an act of self-retaliation I registered a new domain, paid up well in advance, and set it up to automatically renew when necessary. No more lost names! The new machine is a wonderful AMD dual-core 64-bit beast with 2GB of RAM, 250GB of SATA disk, and nothing else! No CD, no DVD, no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. It's a server plain 'n simple.

I'm planning on using it for photography as well. I'm working on the data pipeline, and should have it done by the end of the week as well. Here's The Plan:

• Have a place on disk I can dump image files as they come off the camera. JPG for the 5600, RAW for the 20D, and hopefully CHDK RAW for the A650IS when I can afford it.
• Have a cron job look for new files every few minutes, and when it finds them have it dump them into a working area and produce a composite image of a color version, a B&W version, and a nine-tile 1:1 closeup of the image so I can see if there's any image blur. This is a big problem with KAP.
• Set all of these up in a web-based slide show with a big button at the bottom: Keep. Keepers get their original file shunted off to a new working area so I can pull them into Photoshop or GIMP. At this point all the original images are archived and cleared from working disk.
• Now I get to do the digital darkroom thing, and come up with final images.
• At this point it'll crank out a 1024 max-dimension image for Flickr (and upload it!), a full-sized image for Imagekind (and upload it, I hope!) and dump a copy to the screen saver on my laptop so it goes into rotation.
• Done!

That's the plan, anyway. We'll have to see how it works out in practice. But it would certainly help with work flow. (A better solution would probably to use Lightroom, but I don't currently have a license.)

So all in all it was a good weekend. Can't wait to start doing 4x5 again.

Tom