Scattered Thoughts . . .

T his morning, I noticed that the weather was unusually nice so I decided it would finally be a good day to do a little more work on my large scale steam locomotive and the trolley.  I had painted and weathered both of them but I never got around to sealing all my work with a matte UV resistant sealer.  This is something I would prefer to do outside since I would be applying this sealer from a spray can and it appears as though today would be a good day. My plan was to go outside to grab a couple of sawhorses and a piece of plywood so I could make a utilitarian table where I could safely place my big steam locomotive and trolley.  We've had bears and skunks in our yard quite often lately so I've been very vigilant about scanning the area before I step too far away from our door.  I stepped outside...  no bears...  no skunks...  then headed to behind the house where I left my sawhorses. As I was about to place my right foot back behind the sawhorses so I could more easily lift t

J ust this past week, I picked up a used anamorphic lens adapter.  This adapter allows me to convert a useful selection of my lenses to be used to create cinematic wide screen videos with most of the characteristics of far more expensive cine lenses.   True cine lenses are both huge in size and exhorbitantly expensive when compared to typical camera lenses used for still photography.  These anamorphic lenses are used mostly by filmmakers because this type of lens is actually designed to fit wide-screen cinematic video on smaller film and digital sensors. Back in the 1950s, movie studios were filming on 35mm film.  Some studios were probably still using 16mm film too but major productions were using 35mm film.  By comparison, home movies were being filmed on 8mm film.  I was very well versed on 8mm film through the 1960s and 1970s as that is the format my family used for all our home movies.   By the time I was in high school in the mid-1970s, I was cutting and splicing 8mm film to cre