So here I am back in China, naturally everything has gone to hell while I was gone. I won't get into all of it but just know that everything is a farking mess.

Highly camera geeky paragraph ahead, if you have no interest in cameras or heretical mutilations of cameras skip to the paragraph after.

So one of the cameras I brought back from the states, a Argus C3, the "brick" as they call them, has a jammed focus thing, what its called im not sure, but whatever it is its very much jammed, so I decided the manly thing to do would be to rip apart the camera and figure a way to stick the Argus Cintar lens on the end of my Canon 20D to make a Frankencamera of both rangefinder and SLR, digital and analog in one. It was pretty simple, after taking apart the Argus and removing the lens and its mountings I cut a hole in a Canon body cap to fit the brass screw in mounting for the lens, then simply screwed the lens into the mounting and whala, no problem, except that I cant focus to infinity, so I cut a piece of the lenses outer body away and part of the mounting ring so the lens would screw farther into the body which would in turn allow the lens to focus farther out. Well I can focus out to about 3-4 meters but to go to infinity I have to stop down to f16 and let depth of field take care of the rest. Close focus on the other hand is about 2 inches, which beats the hell off anything else I got in my bag and is getting close to macro since the lens is somewhere around a 80mm on this body. Photos look good, black and white especially, but metering is kind of wonky, what I need to do is use the center weight meter in order to get a proper metering or it doesn't quite work right with the average I usually use. If anyone wants to see some shots I will stick them in my scraps if there is demand.

Ok geek thing over.

School is ok, got a exhibition next week, sort of a class thing going on with a few people, it's a total mess as usual, we don't know what anyone else's photos look like or how many they have or what kind they are. Very difficult to plan an small exhibition when you don't know these things because you dont want to stick journalism and commercial product shots together. Class is good, the teacher and I after afternoon classes usually go to the bar where we enjoy a glass or two of vodka and lately cigars, which is odd for me because I don't smoke, but then cigars and cigs are two very different things, I hate cigs.

More geeky camera stuff.

The Leitz Elmar 50mm 3.5 red scale I have is amazing, on the large scans I dare say it out resolves the Voigtlander 35mm pancake II I got here, which is a pretty sharp lens. The Voigtlander lens is really solid feeling but even after less then a dozen rolls its starting to wobble in its mountings, guess I need to tighten it down then kick myself for not buying the Leica 35mm f2 asph lens I actually wanted. Oh well, money, what can I say, plus I have a greater need for a fast 50mm lens which is the focal length I use the most. A Leica 50mm f1.4 Summilux pre asph will fill that gap nicely, currently looking around.

We will see how much of that Leica stuff I can get into here though, money is going to get a lot harder to come by coming up here for reason im not going to. Also got this trip coming up this summer to Europe which I would like to do but…money. I am looking around for some places to start submitting stock photography or selling photos online type stuff. The time has come that I need to make more then I am on my photos, its expensive for me to go out on these trips to far off places to take these shots and the time has long passed where I should get some return for it.

Good news: got a scholarship, 16,000 Yuan, about 2100 dollars. Will help take care of a good part of next year's tuition. Hope that I can find some under the table tutoring stuff and maybe try to do my own private English classes here in my house or something to make ends meet, also the online picture sales, need to get that moving better, then work on my book.