Saturday no.4

It's another Saturday evening on board the ship. Half way into week no. 4 of the trip, which should mean I've only got two and a half more weeks of duty until I'm hopefully on my way home. Looks like I need to stay an extra day before I can get on the plane this time, as I need to go to the Federales to get my Visa sorted for another period. They don't play around with their work visas down here, that's for sure! I will not even start to try explaining all the stuff you need to go through to get one, and I don't even remember everything, so I better just skip it all together. It's a lot of hard work and quite some time wasted around offices you never thought you were going to. But they get the job done in the end, and you get out of there with black hands full of ink and straight to the airport and home. It's a wonder we don't get arrested at the airport due to suspicious looking fingertips! Sure, they still use ink to take your fingerprints and hand print over here. When looking at the mess they get on the paper you really start wondering if this is the sort of evidence they convict people by... because any print seems to look more or less exactly like the next one. Well, you know what I mean. 

The Cromarty Lighthouse is a lovely little light I have seen many a time when entering Cromarty Firth in Scotland with the ship. We used to pass it quite a lot back in the days on our way in and out of Invergordon for mobilizing the vessel. Then we were off, heading north and out to the oil fields west of Shetland again. Those were the days. 

I sort of like this snap, so I will have to print it in one or two versions I think. It was snapped last autumn on our trip around the northern parts of Scotland using the black rangefinder with a 35mm lens attached. Sorry about the sloppy scanning and the even sloppier cropping of black borders. I don't like to sit for too long at the computer you should know by now.

Our house back home just went on the market, so if anyone out there have been thinking about buying a house with a beautiful view and a huge basement area for a potentially extremely large darkroom, we got one of those for sale at the moment. The darkroom itself was never built though, so you will need to get that done yourself. Water and electricity is more or less ready. 
We put our names on a list a few years ago when they started the planning of some new apartments on a tiny island at the coast outside our town, but there has been so much going on in the background of that project that I actually at one point gave up the hope it would ever be built. 
But for some reason they actually finally started last summer, and now it's in the process of coming together. They keep on telling us we will be in some time in August, so no time to loose then. Get rid of the old house and get ready to move a few things over to the new place. It will be a great day when all this is over to be honest. Moving out is a big job for sure!

We found this beach on our travel along the northern coast of Scotland. It's facing the Pentland Firth, the most horrible passage you can possibly imagine when the weather is less than great. OK, the Mince is not a good place to be either on such a day, but they are sort of connected the two of them. Terrible currents and standing waves and all sorts of nasty stuff out there. Not on this day though, as you can clearly see. And the beach was really nice even though it ended quite abrupt, as you might see. Yeah, we like beaches!

I went looking around the web for some good old Fuji FP-100 instant film the other day. I know it's been discontinued for a while, but my hope was that someone might would have a few boxes for sale. Found a guy in my hometown who had 10 boxes he wanted to get rid of, but the price were at a level you will not believe. I am seriously NOT paying the equivalent to 40 GBP for 10 polaroid pictures. No way! I love to use instant film at times, but there has to be other ways than buying this stuff anymore for sure! 
I got an idea, but I'm not sure it's possible to get the deed done. We shall see...
First of all I need to end my project with the enlarger (conversion to LED and at the same time building a new f/stop timer). The timer is done and tested, and also the LED insert was briefly tested (but not inside the enlarger) just before I had to run to catch the plane for Brazil. I'm so looking forward to move into the darkroom and make some prints again. I really hope the LED conversion works as it should, as I'm not too keen on buying new condensers for the enlarger. They show up on the huge auction site at times, but very rarely and people seems to know their value. Sometimes you would think they are selling gold, not glass. 

We found this as well, on our way down to a different beach to the one above. This beach was huge in comparison, and there were rocks and other stuff in between all the sand to walk on and to look at. I liked this beach as well, and so did my wife. No surprise there, in other words. We had a long and extremely fresh walk in the quite strong wind. Anyway, it's always windy in these parts of the world so no surprise in that respect either. I liked the lines here, so picked up the camera and snapped the thing duly up. It's from the rangefinder again. I think I only brought that one and probably the other as well for this trip. Maybe I also took the little half frame Olympus, but I can't remember that very well right now. It's been a while, don't you know...

Well, that's it for today. It's late, and even though tomorrow is Sunday it's as good as any other day on board a ship. People need water, working toilets, power for propulsion and charging their phones and all sorts of stuff, so it's up and off to work again in the morning. 
Take care!!