I love boring you all to tears with my various non-adventures,
and this story should be no exception.
Saturday we ventured into Des Moines to buy a few doodads at the
camera stores (and to eat good Mexican food). Since I haven't
spent my wad yet, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe there
was something local to buy instead of sending my hard-earned
cash to the big store in NYC that always closes on Saturday.
There was a new Pentax 645N-II there (same prices as the big
store) along with Mamiya and Contax's greatest. They had just
sold the Toyo. Bummer. Anyway, we looked at the Pentax again
and I *ALMOST* bought it along with a zoom. While negotiating
the price (serious haggle efforts worked to at least make it as
good, if not slightly better than the "big store"), I had taken
the battery clip out of the camera. Looked it over and put it
back in. A few minutes later I pick up the camera and noticed
that the grip was a bit warm. Disturbingly warm. I removed the
clip (houses inside the grip) and one of the AA batteries was
smoldering! Somehow the battery was shorted out in the clip
(slightly strange design) and nearly took the thing into
meltdown.
Now, if I can just find a decently priced Toyo and some lenses.
I know I won't have battery problems with that!
Oh, I did spend some of my hard-earned cash on a StopClock Pro
and ZoneMaster II from RHDesigns. I'm looking forward to having
a really good timer and analyzer in the darkroom. I just hope
it doesn't take forever to get it here from the UK.
Oh #2, we went to the alternative camera store in town (really
small hole in the wall that never has anything or customers) to
see if there was anything worthy of my attention. I bought a
few pre-cut mattes and a couple packages of Ilford inkjet paper.
The price on the Gallery stuff was excellent and they also had
some 11x17 papers too. Really inexpensive to boot. Ends up
that the 11x17 is so old (pre-Gallery) that I cannot even find
any information on it. Oh well, it was cheep (and they've got
many more packages). It prints very well and stayed color
neutral. Didn't have to mess around with any settings on my
S9000 so I'm pretty happy. It was a hoot printing a bunch of 3R
prints on a single sheet. Cut my cost per print down a lot. If
the paper hold up ok, I might go back and buy out the rest of
the stock at .25 on the dollar so they can buy a case of current
stuff. I'm always looking for an excuse to use the printer.
The Mexican food was excellent.
AG-Schnozz
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