I attended the New Jersey Vintage Computer Festival a few months ago. I was only able to make it on the final day of the three-day event, and ended up getting there pretty late because I immediately popped my tire after leaving my house. They got some wonderful dorks in attendance at this thing, and gizmos like you wouldn't believe.

This was my first chance to try out my new physical light-meter. I ended up with a higher than usual number of bungled exposures, which I would like to blame on the new equipment, but frankly, I felt rushed after arriving late, and I didn't have a great idea of how I should handle metering the CRTs, which were often right under bright windows. The app that I used to use on my phone for this was much more intuitive, I could frame the scene, and then tap the highlights and lowlights of what I was looking at to compare them to the averaged settings for the whole display. The physical meter has a tighter angled cone of 'perception' compared to the phone, and maybe I'm meant to be compensating for that somehow.

Since I already bought the dang thing I feel like I should keep fiddling with it until I get the results I want. Plus, I hate the phone. I hate it on it's own two feet, and I definitely hate when I'm waving around a silly mechanical camera and then I need to dig around my pockets to pull it out, unlock my pin, launch an app, look at the wretched screen. Sickening.

I have a real aversion to taking photos of people, holding the quickly antiquating belief that it's rude to do so, and the extremely antiquated belief that cameras steal your soul. If I dwell on it too long I end up with some sort of reflexive iconoclasty as well.

The price of admission was $46, and your consent to being recorded. The extent of this I assume that you may appear in the audience of some presentation that gets put on the web, or on a pamphlet for the next year's gathering. Some guy did ask if he could take a picture of my shirt since they collect all the graphic tee's in attendance, he seemed very nice, and I didn't want to bother him, so I didn't say anything about the fact that we had both already consented to this on entry.

None of these photos really have anyone as their subject, generally where people appear, its their plausibly deniable backs, their hands, or their rough shape obliterated by the depth of field. Where these don't hold, they're part of a crowd, the crowd itself is maybe a subject. I feel like since everyone here opted in to having their photos taken, I was spiritually covered by the existing contract between them and the event organizers, but now I'm remembering the shirt guy. The shirt guy asked anyway, and it's weighing on me. I'm navel gazing. The navel is gazing. I pull my New Jersey Vintage Computer Federation t-shirt with the checkered amiga ball over it like a shutter. 3 weeks later I get the negatives back. My navel was painfully underexposed. I think the timing on my navel might be off, I check online and it costs $350 to get my navel CLA'd.

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