Han Solo?

Looks like it's time for some film puns...

Let's see what develops...

It can't see the light of day.

Maybe should have expected a negative reaction?

"I have a bad feeling about this"

Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, fly boy.

I expect Han felt very exposed.

Younger readers may not believe it, but before smartphones came along cameras used "film" - thin plastic ribbons coated in light-sensitive substances.

I know this is a joke, but it does make me feel rather old...

Grey beard icon -->

I don't have a grey beard, but I remember having to go to Boots with a disposable camera or a roll of 35mm (actually my first film camera was a disc format!) and handing it in, waiting days to get it back. Then digital cameras happened and I didn't bother with film.

Until 4 years ago, where I bought a cheap russian 35mm camera and a roll of Ilford XP2 (black and white, but can be developed with the colour process). I've not used a digital camera since for serious photography. Don't get me wrong, I whip my iPhone out to take a photo if I have to, but if I am on holiday or just fancy a day of taking photos, I will use film.

Why? The development of it. It's alchemy mixed with meditation. It provides excitement at the same time. Load the film in to the container, mix the developer, swirl it at set intervals (or just leave it for 1 hour for interesting results), stop bath, rinse, leave them to dry. Then stick them in the scanner while taking a sneak peak of your shots looking at the negatives. Only reason I scan them is because I don't have enough room for a dark room, but if I did I would probably do that as well.

On paper it's an awful process. It's time consuming. It's expensive. It's not instant. But given we live a life of being in a rush and having instant gratification, film photography offers something different. Like I said, it's like meditation. Plus, given you have 36 chances to get a photo right it forces you to look at something and decide if it's worth it. Before I got in to film again I would happily snap away on my digital camera and I would get maybe 1 good photo and the rest would be garbage. And would I even look at that one good photo again? No, it'd stay on the device to languish with the other photos I took in the heat of the moment that never get looked at again.

" stop bath, rinse, leave them to dry"

No fixer?

I too never used stop bath on film, only on prints. For (BW) film I'd do developer + agitation, rinse, fix, rinse thoroughly, squeegee.

My father, who is an avid photography enthusiast, told me when I got started that you can't go wrong with Tri-X film - the worst thing that can happen is that the emulsion itself cracks, and if it does it'll crack absolutely evenly and you'll get a cool graphical effect from it. Well, I proved him wrong when developing my first roll in the school lab one night. I did the last rinse in WAY too warm water, so when I went to dry it off, large swaths of the emulsion came off the substrate and stuck to the squeegee. It wasn't very even, but the resulting pictures were pretty ghostly and kind of cool anyway. So I guess half a point to dad for that one.

I can still remember the smell of Agfa's Rodinal developer combining with the 1:63 dilution of Kodak's Indicator Stop Bath. Fondly.

Bet you enjoy cleaning your vinyl before warming up your tube amp. Me, I'd rather not faff if I don't have to. If I want to meditate, I have a snooze and let my brain clear out the fluff.

Have you thought of wood turning? Great hobby for guys of a certain age.

I wouldn't equate liking film photography with being an audiophool. You can see that a decent photo is good, but a lot of audio nonsense is just hocus pocus woo-woo.

As a student in the 80s I worked in production engineering for a small electronics company. They did their visual aids by taking B&W photos of the assemblies then colouring in the relevant components in felt tip to highlight them. So if the VA was for RTVing a capacitor bank I'd take a before pic of the capacitor bank with someone holding the RTV gun in the right position, then take after pics of the finished assy. They had a darkroom on site so I learned to develop and print then I'd use felt-tip pens to colour the capacitors in blue, the tie-wraps in red and the RTV in yellow then write the instructions. The VAs looked really good and the colouring made the conmponents stand out really well.

waiting days to get it back.

... someday my prints will come ...

(Snow White. 1937)

I took a conscious step back a couple of years ago with digital photography. Like most people* I got into the habit of shooting lots of pics in the hope I'd get a good one rather than thinking about, and setting up, the shot carefully as I used to do when shooting expensive slide film. I've stayed with digital but tried to apply a film mindset if that makes sense.

The one thing I would go back to film photography for is B&W - for some reason digital monochrome, whether produced in-camera or post processed, just never has the same look.

*I met someone at the North Norfolk railway who shot absolutely everything on 4K video then spent days searching through for the few stills shots he wanted!

Like most people I got into the habit of shooting lots of pics in the hope I'd get a good one rather than thinking about, and setting up, the shot carefully as I used to do when shooting expensive slide film.

Aaron Johnson noted this phenomenon in his fantastic What The Duck comic strip (2006-2016). Forgive the links to the merch pages, but the comic archive search comes up with 0 hits.

- https://www.cafepress.com/mf/15360703/shoot-like-hell_mugs?productId=83198697

- https://www.cafepress.com/mf/36095082/2spray-and-pray-black_tshirt?productId=414186889

Han worked for a company that supplied Unix systems to a firm that processed photographs from film.

[1]It's a Unix system I know this

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

It's a Unix system....

HPUX from the shutdown command but I would think the root shell prompt would be '#' rather than '>' unless it was to indicate it was the backup server having taken over the production role :)

I always liked the BSD 'fake' shutdown option (-k) with 5 mins grace (to get the users off or avoid Han's mistake) followed with a real shutdown.

Or, $deity forbid, design systems such that the only way to test the output of a change is to actually deploy it in production.

Yes, such madness is far too common.

An old friend of mine shutdown the wrong server once. Nothing major, just the primary web server for NTL.com. An outage that, IIRC, was even mentioned on El Reg at the time. I never found out what happened, but he was looking for a new job very quickly after that..

When he arrived he confirmed with the manager on duty that staff were aware of what he was doing. A few staff were using the Backup/Test server, but he should be OK to shut it down in about 15 minutes.

Ok. He told them about the plan, they said this was good with them, even telling him that some people were using the backup/test server. Sure, he could have checked the number of active connections to the machine (confirm stuff - like when working on electrical installations: you check for yourself the fuse is out and secured against being turned on again), but the production machine could have keeled over "just then", basically when he shut down the test system. It would have been better to have both a backup and a test system, but who has the ressources for that... (I hope that manglement learned this lesson at least).

One of the most pathetic letter I received was from a film developement business. They had used to send ultra-glossy magazines, boasting the quality of their colors and their crisp detail. This one was a single black and white sheet of paper, acknowledging that they were mostly dying since everything was going digital, but that maybe we still had old films which we'd like more copies of, or perhaps even digital pictures to print, and they were fully ready to do the job. Like receiving a letter from your grandmother in the hospital saying that maybe you can visit her, whenever you have time, while there's still time...?

Sounds like a UX problem. There should have been a large blinking red light to indicate "live is currently down, using backup server".

I found about 10 old rolls of undeveloped film in boxes while having a clearout and decided to have them developed to negatives as I have a negative scanner packed away in another box.

They came back with a warning that because the films were old and may have been stored in less than ideal conditions they could be degraded. Some were, but I could make out what they were. Others were fine, and the latest ones that were ok were from my daughter's 4th birthday party - she's now 31!