new camera

I received my new used GA645Zi this week. I was pleasantly surprised that the shot counter had only 400 shots on it and the previous owner was the first! Cosmetically the camera looks great, but the lens sensor and bar code reader might not work. To test everything else, I went on a small photo safari with Mark around the Bastille and then neat the col de Clemenciere and pont de Vence. I shot two rolls, and ended up knee deep in snow trying to setup some semi interesting compositions. Normally I wouldnt shoot two rolls of film in a day, but I wanted to test everything. Amazingly, Phox photo now takes three days to process a roll of E6 film (This should take 2 hours in non third world countries.)

snow in grenoble

again! Bucket loads of snow are coming down

Serre Che

We went to Serre Che with Amy and her sister, but took the worst possible route there (my fault, in combination with a road being closed) through the Frejus tunnel and past Briancon. Apparently they havent had new snow since the end of January. In spite of their web site which states that they have a meter of snow, most runs were bare and the runs that were open were covered in patches of ice and rocks! We went back through the col de Lautarec (sp?) and by the legendary La Grave/La Meije:

dentures

I heard back from our insurance provider and happily they will be able to cover 80% of the cost of my fillings being ripped out and replaced with ceramic ones. The bad news is that they apparently consider these "dentures", which hopefully means something else in french. But hey, for 1400 euros they can call them what ever the hell they want to.

boarding

I had a great day boarding with dave at 7 laux. Waist high powder and endless off piste.
on the lift:

first tracks from the ridge

hiking the ridge

halfway down


from the base

teeth

the dentists appointment turned out to just be a consulatation. He explained that all of my amalgam fillings have cracked my teeth, causing cavities. They need to be replaced (nine of them!) which i'm so completeley psyched about that its hard to articulate. Before I do it, I need to make sure my insurance company agrees to it, because it will cost 1800 euro!!! Somehow I never realized that fillings have a limited lifetime.

boarding

Went out for my second and chloes first day of boarding of the year. There wasnt any powder at all; not even the heavy stuff that we usually get around here, which made for sore knees at the end of the day. Here's chloe looking very cold:


Theyve built an impressive park on the other side of the mountain:

They look well built, but are the most intimidating jumps I have ever seen, and I have been to a lot of board parks before. It might have something to do with the abruptness at which you will be chucked into the air. Usually with a jump like the one on the left, you see a group of kids uphill from it, trying not to look scared and steeling themselves for the inevitable painful crash. Every once and a while one of them will start boarding down to it, make some last minute turns to slow down, hit the jump with no speed, and land flat on their backs. I know this because I was frequently one of those kids. Then you have the fearless mini-kids with helmets, who pull up to the group, cast a scornful sideways look at the group, then bear down at full speed and huck themselves off for a perfect landing.

Pinhole

Last week I finally got back into pinhole photography. I started off with a 24 cm x 18 cm paper negative camera with a fairly large field of view, and by the saturday afternoon I had built three cameras of varying focal length. A guy at work had kindly drilled the .5 mm pinhole for me, and I subsequently made the .4 and .3 myself out of a swatch of aluminum can. Hypodermic needles and an emery board gave me a decent pinhole under a stereo microscope, and the images are decent. The Electron Microscope guy gave me a lot of 24 cm x 18 cm Ilfospeed paper, which I have been using as negeatives. Our darkroom has some stocks of Kodak X-ray film developer, which is not ideal but works well enough! Here are some of the images: