I absolutely love film photography. From the moment I was first given a hand-me-down Nikon SLR in the early 2000s until today, the process of loading a fresh role of film into a camera excites me. Much like most working professionals I spend much of my day staring at a computer screen, and so digital photography lost its luster to me long ago because it ended up just being another screen based activity. Today's video on John Builds Things is about my latest project creating a custom print exposure timer for my darkroom.
A few weeks ago, I came across an intriguing article on IEEE Spectrum featuring a Raspberry Pi sky time-lapse project. The project utilized the standard Raspberry Pi HQ camera with a wide-angle lens, running an open-source program called AllSky to control and export time-lapse videos. Being fascinated by the intersection of cameras and astronomy, I couldn't resist taking on this project.
What’s the best way to overcomplicate grilling? Make a meat thermometer that logs temperatures to your computer. This helps me track and understand how different cuts and types of meat behave throughout the smoke. Smoking and grilling meat is one of my many hobbies and I'm constantly searching for ways to improve. With my longer cooks like brisket, I want to be able to go back and review temperatures over the whole cook for different cuts. Building something like GrillBot allows me to capture that data in an easily digested format for later review.
Developing is just subjecting exposed film or paper to a series of chemical reactions. It involves "developing" which brings out the exposed image, "stopping" which halts the chemical reaction of developing to freeze the image, and "fixing" which removes light sensitivity from the medium so it can be viewed in normal light. All chemical reactions are sensitive to quantity, temperature, and time, and different films and developers have different developing time requirements. Develop for too long or too short a time and it changes the quality of the image.