jayneandmarty.com

Happy we sold it, but sad it’s gone.

Jayne says she’ll miss going down to the garage and finding me sitting in it, drinking a VB stubby, contemplating whether or not to put carpet in (or some such triviality).

It was all a bit quick - I was off sick from work today, a guy rang at 1.30pm saying he was keen to have a look but it’d have to be in the next 30 mins because he had to be on the 8pm Spirit of Tasmania, I said OK, he came over, he liked it and made me an offer, I accepted, he said he’d have to go fit a towbar (!), I was a bit confused by that, but he came back 2 hrs later, we did an EFT for the cash and he hitched it up and drove away.

So Muchacha will be zooming up and down the Derwent near ‘Obart from tomorrow onwards. I hope she behaves herself for the new owner (James).

And now our garage looks empty.

Jayne and Muchacha at Eildon last year

See ya Muchacha.

Clearly I’m hooked on the Polaroid photography right now, but good as the fixed focus 645CL is, I’ve wanted to buy one of these SX-70s for a while. They’re SLRs (folding, no less), and the quality of image is supposed to be far superior to the non-SLR Polaroid cameras like the 645CL.

I’ve been watching eBay like a hawk for one at the right price, and last week this one came up for $50, which is $40-$60 cheaper than the others I’ve seen. I’m not sure why it was cheaper, but I suspect it might be because the photo of the original box in the eBay listing was for a model 3 SX-70, which is less desirable because it’s not an SLR. I was almost certain, though, that the picture of the camera was of an earlier model - and I was right.

Here it is.

It is pretty amazing the way it folds down, and to be honest it’s a bit bigger than I thought it was going to be. Jayne reckons it looks like a cigar box or a hip flask. I tend to agree. One of Polaroid’s design goals was for it to fit inside a gentleman’s suit pocket. All we can say is, it’d have to be a big suit.

Being almost as old as me, and second (or even third, fourth or fifth) hand off eBay, I didn’t even know if it would work. And by “work”, I mean work in two ways:

• Would it load the film, take a picture and spit out the photo like it should?
• Would the images be horribly over-exposed without an ND filter? (see here)

Well, it took a moment or two for me to open the camera up, but it opened. Good start.

The focus wheel, exposure wheel and viewfinder all looked OK and worked fine. Keep going.

It accepted the 600 film cartridge fine too (I used an unwanted Polaroid to help slide it in). Good, good, good.

And with some whirs and clicks it ejected the blank card OK. Fantastic.

So it was time to take a picture. We set the exposure wheel all the way to ‘dark’ (there’s lots about this on the web - until we get an ND filter of some sort it’s what we’ll have to do), convinced Max to sit still for a moment and gave it a go.

Suffice to say that the first photo we took blew us away.

I’m not sure if the web does that justice, to be honest. The colours are truer than anything we’ve had from our digital cameras or the other Polaroid camera, and somehow the image manages to be amazingly clear and soft at the same time. Just brilliant. Can’t wait to take more.

Georgia and Lindsay came to stay on Saturday night. It was just a short stay this time, but we found time to take the boy to the beach for a swim. He’s strained the cruciate ligament in his right knee somehow (like footy players do), so we’re not supposed to walk him but we can swim him, so he’s been spoilt for the last few weeks with frisbee throwing/swimming in one of the channels near the bridge at Barwon Heads. Lucky boy.

Here are some Polaroids from that afternoon. They’re a bit dark but that’s my fault - I had the exposure setting on the camera set to dark.

Georgia throwing the frisbee.

I like Max’s face in this one. He is not amused.

Max fetching the frisbee for Lindsay.

The sun came out for this one.

A great one by Lindsay.

Max is not amused in this one either.

As usual the girls were very good. They even made their bed properly in the morning!

The Polaroid camera was broken for a while but unexpectedly started working again a few weeks ago. Here are some more shots.

There are others - I’m having a great time playing with the camera even though it’s very basic. Taking a picture with it is so instant and rewarding.

I’m pretty happy about this - back in late August I wrote an email to the editor of Surfing World titled “I love Surfing World, except for one thing”. It praised the magazine but condemned the number of typos, and to offer something constructive instead of just having a simple whinge, I offered to proof read the next issue for free. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but as it happened his old proofreader had just left, so he took me up on my offer.

Cool.

Even cooler was this little surprise when I was proofing the contents page. Look closely at the Editorial Contributors section:

Yeah!

It goes without saying that you all have to buy the next issue of Surfing World when it’s on the shelves in a few weeks. Just for posterity’s sake.

P.S. if any of you find a typo that I missed please don’t write into the editor.