Jonathan's blog

Recently, I would say that photography is my favourite hobby. But it wasn’t always that way.

Throughout my childhood, I’ve taken pictures of important occasions on single-use cameras. My parents would always buy me a single-use camera before a family holiday, for example. I wasn’t interested in the camera, though.

A few years ago (2005, I think) I lived in hall of residence with a guy who had a “fancy camera”. I was so uninterested in it that I have no idea what it actually was. It was digital, and it had a big lens on it. This just goes to show that I didn’t care about photography at the time.

More recently, in 2007, I had a Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone. For a phone, it had an extremely decent camera and could compete with some of the entry-level digital compacts available at the time. But I still only really used it for taking photos of things that were happening around me.

But then, my colleague Paul starting doing his photo-a-day in 2008. I became a keen follower of his photo blog, and started to take “arty” shots on my phone. I enjoyed it so much that I quickly ran into the limitations of my phone and started wondering about buying a “real” camera.

There was a decent superzoom “bridge” camera in the office so I borrowed this for a few days and had great fun with it. Then unfortunately I was involved in an accident and dislocated my shoulder. Stuck at home, bored, I bought a camera. It was a bridge camera, one mark up on the one I’d borrowed from work. I bought it primarily as a high-tech toy, and with not much interest in the art of photography.

This was the stimulus I needed, and with a powerful and versatile camera I tried all sorts of photography. Gradually I became interested in the art of taking photos, and I now try to take photos that are nice to look at, as well as fun to take.

In 2009, I was given an unwanted 35mm SLR. At first I was sceptical – how useful could film be? I bought some film and had a go. I really enjoyed using an SLR for the first time and immediately wanted a DSLR.

In 2010, I caved in and bought a DSLR. I also continued shooting film and I now have a collection of around ten cameras – all film except for the DSLR. I’m still more interested in the cameras and the techniques in using them, but I hope that my work is also pleasing to look at. Make up your own mind.

I’ve had a server at home for years now, and I’ve also been a professional sysadmin for at least three years. I know my way around Linux pretty well and for some time I’ve run my own web server and also other services.

But one thing I’ve steered clear of until now is running my own email server.

I’ve always thought it would be fairly easy to set up, but much harder to make secure. I don’t want to receive tonnes of spam and I don’t want spammers using my SMTP server as an open relay. In the past I’ve read about building SMTP servers with sendmail, postfix and exim but there was all sorts of conflicting information when it came to integrating milters and so on. Different guides all seemed to give contradictory advice and require all sorts of strange configuration steps that I couldn’t understand.

But all that changed when I heard about ClearOS. In short, it’s a spin of CentOS which uses a custom web interface to configure various software “modules”, including things like web server, email server, firewall gateway, database server, and so on.

I installed it on a virtual machine and after only a few clicks I was running a mail server: an MX for receiving mail for my domains, an authenticated SMTP server for personal outgoing mail, and a secure IMAP server for storing and accessing my mail. The frontend sets up postfix and cyrus to do its dirty work.

For ultimate ease, users (just me, in this case) are authenticated using a local LDAP directory, rather than by using system accounts. All SSL certificates for IMAPS and HTTPS were added automatically. Email antivirus scanning is done by Amavis and spam filtering is done by Spamassassin.

I had a little bit of trouble setting up Horde to access webmail and a web interface for configuring sieve rules. By “trouble” I mean the default Apache virtual host declarations needed some changing around and some aliases adding. If you’re familiar with Apache this won’t be a problem.

There are some aspects of ClearOS I don’t like so much, and I would prefer to use CentOS. But now ClearOS has written out all my configs it should be trivial to move my new mail setup to a plain old CentOS installation, where I already run my websites from. I have definitely learnt a lot about how email works by simply reading and understanding the config files written by the frontend.

So if you want to build an email server but don’t know where to start – try ClearOS. It’s a great introduction to the “scary” parts of setting up an email server, like milters and certificates.

A while back, I bought a Conway Synchronised box camera which came with a Coro Flash included. More recently I managed to get hold of some flash bulbs for it, but had trouble using them.

Using a multimeter and some paperclips I tested each stage of the flashgun and the synchronised trigger mechanism in the camera and found that each stage of the system worked in isolation, but still no joy taking photographs with a flash. I think some of the connections were a bit loose due to corrosion.

I took the (very simple) flashgun apart and washed all of its copper connectors in spirit vinegar to make them red and shiny again. Most importantly, I found it was necessary to scratch the corrosion off the contacts of each bulb before use, using the handle of a teaspoon or similar.

Now I can enjoy reasonably reliable retro flash photography, using Philips Photoflux PF1b flashbulbs. They’re quite expensive but I bought 15 bulbs from eBay for about a tenner. They’re good fun to simulate “proper” retro photography.

A note to anyone who is old enough to remember this stuff from first time round: Sorry for being so excited about obsolete technology. I’m just discovering this stuff for myself and I think it’s great!

If there’s one phrase I hate, it’s any phrase starting with “I’m just…”. Worse yet, “But I’m just…”.

It particularly annoys me how many people think that using a phrase including the word just is sufficient to get around rules, or to allow for special dispensation.

“I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to use your phone in here.”
“But I’m just calling someone.”

“Can you call me back later? I’m a bit busy right now.”
“But I just wanted to say…”

The same rules apply to all of us in most circumstances. If I can obey convention by not using my phone in the library, not pestering people when they are busy, and not breaking the rules of the road when it suits me, why can’t everyone else?

I would like to conclude this blog post in the same way my mother used to cut short my childhood whines.

“But I just…”
“But nothing.”

</rant>

I heard about Audioboo – a sort of Youtube for audio clips – the other day on BBC Click. I decided to give it a go, since I fairly often embed audio clips in my blog, simply by hosting and linking to MP3s and letting the user’s browser handle the playback. This doesn’t always work out for the best.

So here’s my first attempt at uploading content to Audioboo and embedding it in my blog.

The other day I was knocked off my bike deliberately by an impatient driver.

I was cycling along a stretch of road where there were no parked cars. I was probably doing around 20mph, which is a fairly typical speed for a city cyclist on a flat road. Ahead, there was a line of parked cars on the left hand side. I checked over my shoulder, saw that there was a decent gap, gave a brief arm signal, and moved away from the kerb to pass the cars with a foot or two’s clearance.

With the oncoming traffic in the other direction, there was no room for me to be overtaken. However, “the idiot” (marked on the diagram in red) attempted to overtake me anyway. He came extremely close to either hitting me, or crushing me against the parked cars. I managed to twist my shoulders and squeeze myself between the wingmirror of his car and that of the parked car without touching any vehicle.

Dangerous overtaking

His window was open, so I shouted “OI, TOO CLOSE!”. I thought no more of it, and waited for him to continue the very tight overtaking manoeuvre, assuming that we would both continue with our journeys. But the second he got past me, he abruptly moved in front of me, and jammed his brakes on. I know it was deliberate because we made eye contact in his rear view mirror, and his middle finger was up.

With the back of his car stationary, less than 2-3 feet in front of me, I slammed straight into it. I think I touched my brakes but there was no chance of stopping. I rolled over the boot. I don’t remember what else happened, other than that I think I avoided banging my head by bracing myself against the rear window with my arms.

He watched me hit his car and fall onto the road, and then drove off hard. I was lying in the road, several paces from my bike. The driver behind me waited patiently but nobody offered any help.

As it happens, I wasn’t seriously injured and I was able to get up and push my bike home. I have many bruises: on my arms, legs and ribs, and I’m still sore two days on. But it could so easily have been much more serious.

As for my bike, the rear wheel is buckled and the rear derailleur is bent, so changing gears doesn’t really work properly. The brake cables are stretched, so I must have hit the brakes really hard. It’s going to cost a bit to have that mended. That’s going to have to come out of my pocket, since I have no idea who the guy was. He’s clearly an unpleasant character if he’s willing to risk damage to his own car just to bring down a cyclist who pointed out his mistake.

It really gets to me how there’s nothing I could have done then, and that he got away with it without any trouble or any expense. Meanwhile I’m injured and pushing my broken bike home.

There’s also nothing I can do now. I’ve reported it to the police but they don’t care that a person I can’t name gave me some bruises. I’d never know if I saw him again so there’s no hope of identifying him or his car.

All I can do is hope he doesn’t continue behaving in this ridiculous manner until he injures or kills another cyclist (or pedestrian or driver).

This week I borrowed a Kodak Six-20 Brownie from Hana’s dad. It’s the least I can do to quickly scan the user manual in in case it’s useful to someone.

Kodak Six-20 Brownie manual

I’ve been on a bit of a rampage with vintage cameras lately. Not content with three “boring” Canon 35mm SLRs, I recently acquired a late 1950s Paxette point’n'shoot and a mid 1950s Conway box camera.

The Conway was my first foray into the world of medium format, and I like it. Only days after developing the first couple of rolls of film from it, my Hana’s dad lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. This takes a slightly different format film: 620 instead of 120 (but that’s a different story).

But I digress. Today Hana and I went to a car boot sale, and I spotted a LOMO Lubitel 166.  (cyrillic: ЛОМО Любитель. Means amateur in Russian). I’ve been looking at the Lubitel range and other inexpensive TLRs on eBay for some time, so I snapped it up. Yay for my sixth camera.

Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal

It’s in extremely good condition, albeit without the neck strap, lens cap or any other accessories. The glass is scratch-free and shows no signs of fungus. All of the mechanisms appear to work correctly, apart from the self-timer (which counts down, but fails to fire the shutter).

There’s not really much more I can add at this stage, except to say that I plan to get film in it as soon as possible, and the results will be on my photo blog when I’ve found a better method of digitising 120-format negatives than the one I used here..

Recently I was lent a Kodak Six-20 Brownie box camera. Rather than the 120 medium format film I’ve used in the past, it takes 620 film.

The film stock is identical; only the spools differ. The 620 spool has a thinner axle, the end caps have a smaller diameter by about 2mm, and  the overall length of the entire spool is about 2mm shorter.

Original 120, 620 and modern 120 film spools with modern 120 film

120 film is still readily available but 620 film is very hard to find. There are two options:

• Buy some empty 620 spools, and respool the 120 film in a darkroom
• Modify the 120 spool of each new film by filing it down

I find roll film quite frustrating to work with in a darkroom and I didn’t fancy respooling it unless there was no other choice. So I decided to have a go at butchering a roll of 120. Even if it went wrong, I’d only have ruined £4 of film.

With the film still on the roll as new, I filed down the fatness of the end caps and then filed down their diameter. Fortunately I had one empty 620 spool to use as a template for my hack. It took only about ten minutes, but obviously filing away plastic left a lot of dust, so I had to make sure the film was extremely clean before putting it in the camera. I brushed it, and sprayed it with a can of compressed air.

The film now fits nicely into the Brownie, and I look forward to shooting with it.

Whenever I buy old or hard-to-find things from the Internet I often like to look at the user manuals first. But it can often be hard to find them, and I’m grateful when other people take the time to scan or type out their product literature.

I recently bought a Conway box camera, dating back to the late 1950s. It came with a user manual, so it’s the least I can do to scan and reproduce it here. Hopefully it will be useful to somebody.

I’ve also linked the manual on camerapedia.org – a great resource for finding out about vintage cameras.

Coronet Conway manual