Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« X.5 Quartz Composer Notes • Main • State elections »

Repairs & Prints¶

A bit of a disaster happened to my bike to Tuesday: The back tyre broke. Now that’s a situation I loathe. Not just because I quite dislike fiddling with the bike and getting my fingers dirty but because it’s quite an effort to actually disassemble a Dutch-style bike like mine sufficiently to replace the back tyre. Upon closer inspection I realised that the inner tube of the tyre had broken because the outer part was damaged. Essentially it had worn thin on one side. Which, in turn I think happened because the back wheel wasn’t perfectly centred recently – which may or may not have been a consequence of my own repair attempts for some other issue last summer. All this, put me off even more. But as it usually takes a week or so to get an appointment for fixing a bike at my favourite bike shop, I grumbled, decided to buy the new parts and try to fix things myself.

And just in case I asked whether they could perhaps install those for me soon. Which, surprisingly, they could. Which in turn meant I could just drop the bike off there this morning and pick it up to go home with the new tyre and the lighting and some other issue fixed as well. That, in turn left me with plenty of time to go to the photo lab where many prints were made.

Having my newly developed medium format films with me – the second round came out quite well – I did some contact prints for those. What’s great for that is the 150m roll of 8cm wide paper. And I am more and more in love with that medium format thing. Even at contact print size you can actually recognise stuff in the prints. And the square format really is an interesting thing as well. I like it.

While I was at it, I made some contact prints of that really scratched and torn film from the Box camera as well. Those are 6cm×9cm format which is even larger. And they have those lovely rounded corners which look quite cool.