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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Jayne the DIY guru is at it again

To get the crapness out of the way first, it didn’t really hit me how much I wanted to be out there running until I went into the MCG at about 8.45am and saw all the half-marathon competitors successfully finishing. (Their start was 7am) They’d reached their goal and I hadn’t. Nuff said.

But Jayne had fun, so let’s talk about her.

We’d arranged to stay at a friend’s house in Alphington the night before, so we had the luxury of a semi-lie in and a small breakfast before driving down Hoddle St to park in East Melbourne. We found a spot at the top of Fitzroy Gardens, which gave us a nice shady walk through them towards the G. That took around 10 minutes and soon after reaching the ground we found the competitor section and the spectator section, then met up with the work friend Jayne has been training with.

Jayne outside the G

The starting line was across the footbridge down by the Yarra, and walking over there it quickly became clear that there were loads more people around than the Nike+ race last month. Plenty of bods stretching, hydrating and eating bananas.

Jayne near the start line

The start was pretty chaotic. Your personal time doesn’t start until you run under the starting arch (you get an electronic timing thing to attach to your shoe), so the entrants who planned to walk the 10km could have done the right thing and started at the back. But no. Selfishness or perhaps just plain stupidity saw plenty of walkers right at the front of the 7,000-strong field walking 3 abreast and not caring one bit who they were holding up. The organisers could have arranged that a little better, no doubt, but there’s no substitute for actually using your brain.

A section of the entrants at the start

This guy fair dinkum sprinted the first 100m - clearly he wanted to be able to say he led the field at the start

Notice the Warwick Capper lookalikes not far behind him. And not far behind them were the first of the thicko walkers

Back to Jayne. Her route took her up to Fed Square, down St Kilda Rd and along The Tan in reverse to the top of the Anderson St hill, then back along the same route to the southern bank of the Yarra, along it and across the Anderson St bridge, back up to the tennis centre and then to the G, where all runners completed a lap before crossing the finish line. And when I say The Tan in reverse, I don’t mean she had to run it backwards, Rob and Kate.

Running under the Swan St bridge, about 6.5km in

Jayne crossing the line

Ignore the empty MCG stands in the background - where I was sitting was chockers. Probably 5,000 spectators.

In that last photo the clock says 1:13:33, but that’s the gun time. Her actual time (i.e. from when she crossed the start line to the finish line) was somewhere around 1:09:30, which is a PB by two minutes. I reckon that’s fantastic given how slow and congested the start was, but she’s disappointed she didn’t break 1:05! Clearly she’s hooked on the running.

After the race with her finisher’s medal

All up it was a great day out. She’s already talking about a 15km event at the end of November and we’ve been looking at race calendars to find other events we can be a part of. I don’t see running becoming a huge part of our lives but we both enjoy it, it’s (mostly) free, it feels good after a run (even just a short training run), our fitness is improving (especially Jayne’s - three months ago she found it tough completing 2km), and there’s a strong sense of camaraderie at the events, so we’re both hooked for now.

And this one is typical of the start of every walk. Hurry up Dad!

I’ve been wanting to experiment with a Polaroid for a few months now, and a few weeks ago Jayne dug out her old Polaroid 645CL, which isn’t quite as sophisticated as the SX-70 folding SLRs that I’ve been watching on eBay, but it looks totally retro and promised to be a good experiment, at worst.

Today I rang some camera places in town to see if they stocked 600 film and got an affirmative from Camera House, so I went down this afternoon and bought some. The film is astronomically expensive compared to the negligible cost of digital (it was $43 for 20 shots) and I didn’t even know if the camera still worked, but I figured it was worth a try. While I was there I bought a roll of 35mm film too for my old Lomo Action Sampler. Clearly I’m in a pre-digital mood.

But back to the Polaroid. Jayne couldn’t remember which way up the film cartridge went in, but we experimented a bit and eventually almost forced it into its slot. Some proper-sounding whirrs and clicks suggested it was in OK, so I went to find some sunlight and a subject (Max), and took my first ever Polaroid. Here it is.

Jayne laughed her head off watching me as I watched it develop. I thought it was broken at first but of course it just takes a few minutes for the photo to start showing. Then as it started to come through I was beside myself with excitement. Like a little kid, seriously. It was magical watching it develop in front of me.

She took one too. Hers is a bit out of focus in the centre - she had it on the macro setting (!!!! - that’s a piece of plastic that slides across the lens) but must have been too close. Still cool though. I love the colour of the sky in hers.

I love it. I’ll be flat broke in 6 months but I think it’ll help me become a better photographer. My theory is that because I have to select a shot and compose it more carefully (because of the high cost of the film), the photos will be a bit more considered. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to taking it to the beach. Should get some great shots down there.

Here’s a (digital) shot of the retro goodies.

Chateau Young