Blogs > 37th Frame

Photography, notes, commentary and much more from Reporter Online Editor Chris Stanley.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Blimp

Flew over Lansdale at 4pm Monday.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Farrah wins


I posted two headlines on TheReporterOnline.com next to each other, equal size, similar wording. One was a link to a Michael Jackson photo gallery, the other a link to a Farrah Fawcett photo gallery.
The Farrah gallery got nearly 3 times as many hits on Friday. Perhaps everybody was overloaded on MJ news?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Around town: Lansdale

Whites Road Park

Deer crossing on Hancock Street near Line Street
(blurry because it was dark)

Monday, June 22, 2009

They're taking Kodachrome away


Kodak announced they are no longer producing Kodachrome film. A batch just completed will be the last. Only one commercial lab in the country still processes Kodachrome.
I shot some Kodachrome many moons ago when I was just a young photo pup, but moved to Ektachrome because I could easily process it myself (you could home-process Kodachrome with the K-14 kit, but it was difficult).
Photos my father took in the 50's and 60's with Kodachrome look as good now as they did back then. There is nothing in the world like Kodachrome 25 and it will be missed.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Ice cubes from the sky

Nature provided some ice cubes Monday afternoon during a thunder storm, in the form of hail.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Old TV


I'm sort of a TV geek, I guess. Before I left Friday for the long drive to Altoona to cover the North Penn HS state championship baseball game, I turned on an old, non-digital non-cable/satellite TV we have in our house to watch the death of analog TV. I saw channel 17 sign off, then channel 10 (which stayed on the air for a good 30 seconds after the engineer was shown hitting the switch).
Then as I started my trip, I listened to the audio of analog channel 6 on my car's FM radio as it disappeared forever.
We have a satellite dish, so we're not exactly losing anything in the DTV transition. Still, I felt some sense of loss for a technology which has served us well for the past 70 years or so. My family was an early adopter of cable TV (since my older brother worked at at cable TV station in the early 70's) so we didn't have too much trouble with reception even though were on the wrong side of a hill to get a good signal from the TV transmitters in New York City.
Now I get a perfect TV picture from outer space, except when it rains very hard. In 5 or 10 years, perhaps our signal will come over the Internet, or from a cell phone tower, or beamed directly into my head. Who knows?
On the way home from Altoona, after sun down, I flipped the radio up and down the AM dial, picking up stations as far away as Toronto, Atlanta and Boston. I enjoyed listening to the faraway voices between the static, in all it's analog glory, fading in and out with every turn.