Ink in the Well & 120 Film Loaded
It’s been a strange month. My posting frequency for this website hasn’t been this low through all of the previous iterations – including Pigwork and the original Nortypig. But I’ve been busy… and procrastinating… and that stop / start has been driving me up the wall.
While I can procrastinate alongside the best in the business it’s never been something that I felt out of control. Until recently. Until I went back to uni after an eight month break pretty much doing whatever the hell I felt like doing – unemployed pays bad but it has it’s freedoms. At the same time, when I take that very first bite of a task I’m devouring it ravenously and throwing back the bone a fortnight later for the ogres to lick clean. I’m working hard when it’s on… but then I’m stalling. It’s something I can’t really explain.
What I have been up to is working on assignments for the Master of Journalism, Media and Communications unit ‘Investigative Journalism’. My teacher for that class is the awesome John Martinkus who has worked extensively through East Timor and the Middle East since the 1990s. At the moment I’m looking at doing a media review paper and then an investigative journalism feature on the Disability Support Pension. It does sound droll… but male DSP recipients have four times more chance of dying than achieving full time work so it’s kind of interesting and even a little important.
On the photography front things have slowed down a little. I had a bottleneck with learning to shoot with the Zenza Bronica ETRS because I had nowhere to store the negatives. That’s been solved but I have another problem in that my guestimations using the Sunny 16 Rule have tended to over-estimate stops of compensation for dramatically overcast Tasmanian wintery days. The last roll I shot had too many disappointments. So I’m on the lookout for a really affordable light meter. The problem with shooting with a Bronica ETRS, of course, is it has no light meter built into it – thus the challenge.
My other passtime is making booze and yes I still have five meads on the ferment in my office. I’ve wrapped them in jumpers because what should be a two month fermentation process has extended over the cold season to be five and six months… that’s just way too long to wait. It’s my fault, I should have been running the heater occasionally and leaving those wool jumpers to keep the yeast working at optimal performance.
My best meads came out of that slower process, too. I made a nice orange, cinnamon and raisin melomel and an apple and cinnamon melomel both using Tas Liquid Gold “forest” honey. They are very sweet, almost dessert, meads that I found particularly impressive to the taste straight out of the racking process. It improves tenfold with age by the three month mark, too.
I’ve made a number of pretty nice no-boil beer kits – several Coopers Dark Ales and a Cooper’s Irish Stout. Those are something I have a weakness for and the production line struggles to keep up with demand. Friends enjoy a beer or three.
While I haven’t been concentrating on the things I really want to be achieving, I think it’s been relatively smooth running once the wind gets under my sails. If I pick up a light meter then perhaps I can be more confident to attempt new things with that Bronica ETRS… it’s a romantic thought.
