So I return from that film dev workshop that we held in Braunschweig, home of Rollei and Voigtländer, and I had completely forgotten about that one incident.

Until just now.

Rewind. Imagine a group of photographers experimenting with different developers, fighting about water of the right temperature, stepping on each others' toes (in a nice way of course) and then imagine me standing in the middle of this, thinking "why don't I develop that roll of Efke 50 in T-Max developer?", then elbowing my way to the basin and mixing the developer.

According to the Massive Dev Chart development should have been 6 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius. Turns out amidst all the chaos I ended up with 26 degrees (don't ask), and I didn't notice until it was already in the development tank. Oh well, no harm done, higher temperature can be somewhat evened out by shorter dev time. Didn't have a formula though, and I'm a sucker for strong contrasts, so I went with what my gut told me: "shorten it, but not too much. Maybe down to 5 minutes", which is what I ended up doing.

After the full cycle of developing and fixing the film, I got a bit of a shock when I opened the tank. The film looked like it wasn't fixed. Brownish in nature and the bits that should be transparent didn't look very transparent. Luckily film is pretty much light proof after only a short time of fixing it, so you can always fix some more if you need to. 10 minutes of fixing later the film still didn't look right. It looked pretty much half fixed. Bummer. I asked my favorite film photography expert Michael of Spürsinn on what to do and he finally resorted to bathing the film in undiluted fixer for a minute, just to see if that would do something.

But it didn't.

We rinsed the film, pulled it out of the spiral and lo and behold, it was transparent, just with a pretty strong tint that looked opaque from certain angles. Super weird.

I forgot about the experiment until a few minutes ago, when I began scanning some of the pictures.

Turns out the Efke 50 / T-Max developer combination produces great contrast that still leaves enough room to work on in the (digital or analog) darkroom.

Here's a negative scan straight from the scanner, uncorrected:

And here it is with just a slight black point adjustment and a tiny raise in exposure level:

I love it when the photos are 80% where I want them straight from the camera and they still give me enough headroom to play with. I'll file this film/dev combination under B as in BINGO!

What's your favorite combination?

To get to finish a project, it's sometimes important to get started with it in the first place, even if you don't have an exact idea about how all the details are going to work out. Or if you're going to be able to finish it at all.

Some call that "jumping off a cliff and building your wings on your way down" (I like that a lot!) and I call it "lighting the fuse". Once it's burning, there's no easy way back, which in turn puts enough pressure on you to keep working on it.

One of those projects has been going on for years. Not always at full speed, but with constant progress.

I'm not at liberty to talk too much about it yet ($%^# NDA), but the lifting of the curtain is not too far in the future now.

In the meanwhile, let me give you this:

» www.theinvisiblecamera.com

The next Himalayan Workshop is getting closer, a bit over one more month and we'll meet Jon and the new group of photographers and trekkers in Kathmandu, and not only does that mean I'm in the middle of shaping up a bit, it also means that I'm in the process of figuring out how to stay in touch while in Tibet.

Tibet is in China, and as you know there's the infamous Chinese Firewall that makes some forms of online communication rather tricky. Last year the most reliable way seems to have been via mobile data, so I've been looking into plans and options to at least be able to send out the odd tweet or email.

Only issue with mobile data is that, as you know, it's super expensive, especially if you try to use your plan on a different continent. The cheapest option for me seems to be a package that gives me 50MB for roughly 25 Euro. Each 100KB on top of that will cost me 0,79 EUR, that's 7,90 EUR per effing megabyte or 395 EUR for another 50MB. Believe me, you don't want me to elaborate on how I feel about the whole mobile data roaming cost issue, so I better not write about that here.

Long story short, in order to squeeze the last bit of usage out of those 50MB, and in order to not step into any financial traps, my iPhone will have to go on a serious diet, so here's the plan:

Switch off: First of all there are a lot of tiny little background processes (aka daemons) constantly running on an iPhone, and some of them use data. As a result I'll have to switch off everything that potentially might call home in the background, such as automatic mail checking, push notifications, calendar syncs, etc.

No really, SWITCH OFF: Simply switching those services off might do the trick, but having worked on Unix-based systems for over 20 years (and the iPhone is a Unix-based system), I don't really trust the peace. In fact, having my iPhone just sit there with push switched off and without it checking emails seems to use up some small trickle of data that might sum up to something bigger over time. Remember, 50MB is not really a lot in today's times where a single web page can very easily exceed one MB. So to be on the safe side, I'll have the iPhone in airplane mode whenever I don't use it to communicate.

Identify data sources: I have identified two must-haves and one nice-to-have. Sending tweets is on the must-have side, email for emergencies is too (I run a business and need to be able to communicate, even though I don't really plan to, it's just a safety net). Receiving tweets would be nice, but if data usage dictates it, I should be okay with the send-only option while we're in Tibet.

Counting bits: Important question: how reliable is the iPhone's built-in byte counter? I couldn't find a lot of good information about that other than Leo Laporte's story about it not being accurate (he had to pay quite a bit extra after a trip abroad) but it's the best option I have for now. Other options include apps that check on T-Mobile Germany's network, which means they'll cause more data usage and I don't even know how up-to-date their data is. So it's the iPhone's built-in counter and a bit of a safety margin for now I guess.

Twitter: Twitter's own iPhone client uses up too much data. Not only does it send tweets, it also reads them, updates several timelines, checks periodically. I don't have exact numbers, but a quick check shows that simply starting the Twitter app and letting it do its initial sync used up 76KB, and that's just starting it. Subsequent tests showed 91KB and 105KB on startup, and sometimes even more, which probably has to do with the length of the timelines it has to download.

mobile.twitter.com: Twitter has a mobile web page, which I thought might to the trick. It doesn't. Loading it uses up a whopping 458KB of traffic in my case. That's almost half a megabyte.

Birdhouse: Next I tested two Twitter clients that only send tweets, they won't use any data to receive tweets, they won't update any timelines, they'll use the Twitter API and send one tweet at a time. The first one is Birdhouse. It's a nice client because it lets me save tweets in a list, then send them out later. This functionality has by now been incorporated into the official Twitter client, so I don't use it that much anymore, but it's still nice to have around. Even though it only sends out data, it still uses up a little data every time it you start it, probably from checking connection to the server. The iPhone's built-in bit counter tells me Birdhouse uses up 15KB per start. Not too bad, we're getting somewhere here.

Chirpie: I was almost going to settle on Birdhouse, when @schlingel suggested Chirpie. It's also a tweet only client, it does one thing: it lets you send a tweet. And even though it didn't consistently clock in with the exact same data usage, I got it to start up with an average of about 6KB of data usage. I sent a tweet with almost 140 characters and the entire process clocked in at 17KB. If I didn't use any other data, this would allow me for about 3000 tweets. Guess that covers the Twitter side. Write-only for me, but anything that also reads will significantly inflate data usage, so I'll stick with it.

E-Mail: e-mail will be tougher. Even if I had an iPhone client that would allow me to only download the mail headers via POP3 (is there such a client?) that would be significantly more data and probably squeeze the life of that data plan. A quick fact check: the iOS mail app uses about 6KB to check my two mail accounts if there's no new mail. With new mail it seems to download the headers first. In a test case that I just did that ended up being about 35KB worth of data. Tapping on the mail then downloaded the rest of the mail (a Flickr status mail, HTML body, two small pictures that you can't disable on the iPhone) and that alone drove data usage up to 304KB. And that wasn't even a big mail and it didn't have any attachments. Half a megabyte for ONE mail.. that would allow me to read 100 mails on the 50MB plan. Or I wait until I'm near Wifi when we are back in Kathmandu. Guess I'll scratch mobile mail for now then.

Conclusion: I'm pretty glad that I used to be in system and network adminstration in one of my former lives and that I know a bit about Unix. Chances are I'll survive the trek on a 50MB international plan while still being able to keep everyone at home in the loop.

I still have a few open questions:

1.) Is there an iOS app that counts data usage more reliable than the counter that is built into the iPhone? (or is it reliable enough?)

2.) guess I have the Twitter side figure out, but do you have any suggestions with regards to very-low-data emailing?

I have a brother, his name is Peter. He was born in the early 80s and he's the graphic designer responsible for the look of PocketChris. In his spare time he makes music.

I'm in the lucky position to have seen and listened to his musical development right from the start.

Peters music is highly influenced by video games, by the 8-bit world, by trackers, by the demo scene, but still managed to keep a very clean and modern overall feel. I like it a lot, I even used some of his music on earlier episodes of Tips from the Top Floor. I also happen to like Karl Bartos and Kraftwerk.

After unofficially having released years and years worth of music to the public, Peter aka lastfuture has now released his first official album Reverse Kill and you can officially buy it on iTunes.

If the flight scene in 2nd Reality needed a new soundtrack, I'd vote for the title Enigma as a worthy successor, I like Jet Car because its seemingly simple structure is interrupted by some quite intricate play with the rhythms, the first chords of Rude remind me of some of the sound effects of Stalker, the title Rubber, Bacon, Rock & Roll is a homage to some of the German bands from the 70s, and some of the other titles make me think of some of the epic computer games and overall it's fun to realize how many influences have helped shape this album.

If there is anything that I don't like about Reverse Kill, it would be that it only has eight songs. I would love it to be longer, I want more of it. Is that a reason not to buy it? Hell no!

Let's hope this isn't the last we'll hear from lastfuture's musical side.

» Official announcement by lastfuture
» Buy it on iTunes

Introducing the Marquardt Mini Pinhole (MMP) f/10 9mm. Who needs large format f/200 pinhole cameras that take sharp-ish pictures at crazy long 2-minute exposure times?! (hint: I do). Making pinhole cameras from matchboxes is not new (I took my inspiration from this video on YouTube) but I wanted to build one of those at least once. Perfect project for a Sunday early afternoon. Building this takes about half an hour.

Due to lack of black tape, I used a light-proof metal-based tape that is normally used to tape pictures into picture frames. Not ideal, as it's reflective, but it should still do the trick. Might end up with some light spills inside the cam though.

I used a matchbox and two rolls of film, an APX to shoot on and a cheap Lucky SHD to dump in order to get the empty film roll. Note to self: next time don't dump all the empty film rolls, so you won't have to sacrifice a film for this.

There's something strangely satisfying in pulling out a perfectly good roll of film during daytime. 1.99 € down the drain. The things you do on a Sunday afternoon...

I cut a hole into the matchbox drawer. This will hold the film in place and provide for an unexposed frame around the picture.

Empty roll of lucky to the right (the exposed film will go into this) and full roll of Agfa APX to the left.

This is how the film will go behind the drawer inside the matchbox.

And this is how it'll look after it is put together.

But first, the matchbox needs a hole for the "lens".

Here's the pinhole. I used the same metal-based tape for this as it sticks nicely. The hole turned out a bit too large, so I can expect nice and short shutter speeds, but probably quite a bit of lack of sharpness. Focal length of the camera is the distance between hole and film plane, in this case 9mm.

Attached the film to the empty spool...

...and put the spool back into the cartridge. That's one of the reasons I used a Lucky SHD film: the film cartridges are easy to pull apart and put back together without tools. The film will be transported by turning the spool on the receiving side and winging it by gut feel. Some of the pics might overlap, some might have bigger space in between them. Oh well.

Using more of the light-tight tape to seal the camera from the rays of the evil day glow ball in the sky.

More sealing

Sealed all around (hopefully). Erm.. let's call the design functional. But then, did I mention it's a disposable cam? It will be destroyed at the end of the process anyway.

The camera needs a shutter now. I cut this out of the adhesive light-proof tape so only the sides stick.

A black strip of paper acts as the shutter. Just pull it up to expose and push it back down to finish exposure. It'll be difficult to time though, my little pinhole calculator tells me that the exposure time at this focal length and aperture is less than a second, so forget about precision. I have decided that I'll be happy if only two or three pictures on the film will come out alright ;)

This is what it looks like with the shutter open. Say CHEESE!

» Insert frantic picture taking activity here «

Removing the film in a changing bag and putting it into a development tank basically means destroying the camera. Bye bye little MMP.

And now (cue drum roll) presenting the first and only pictures that have ever been taken and will ever be taken with the Marquardt Mini Pinhole:

Here's the first official test of the homebrew International Pinhole, complete with proper exposure times (I hope), taking reciprocity into account, even including me freezing off my fingers, as a tough photographer should do (the other choice would be to throw myself on the ground, but that was even colder).

» see how this camera was made

Some background info: aperture of the pinhole is f/200, focal length of the camera is 60mm, it accepts international (graflok) backs, which includes 4x5" film cassettes, Polaroid backs, roll film backs and more. To be installed: mechanism to hold the backs in place, soon to come.

Next up: develop and scan the pics. And post if they're any good..