Hey all,
my name is Friedemann, I am currently 43 years old and I am a film nut and a maker, constantly working on way too many projects at a time. I got a darkroom in my basement since I was 15 years old, since about 20 years it has been used almost exclusively for film development. There is no process I am not doing or haven’t tried to do, I love optimising chemistry for old, expired color stock, adjusting bw stock to my liking or coming up with soups that solve a certain problem I have.
The access to “virtually free processing” makes me having a severe hoarding problem — I got a 7 ft freezer containing nothing but film stock, some of it most obscure, and I admit it’s not the only freezer. So yes, I film a lot, too.
I am also repairing (my) cameras and projectors with joy whenever necessary. Since I set up a nice shop over the years, and my day job is in (photogrpahy) software, I am also a passionate maker and love electronics. Beside smaller projects, I developed the “Synkino”, an OSH digital music player board that stays in sync with the pulse of any projector forever. Yes, I love making PCBs, don’t fear fine pitch SMT soldering and am a big fan of 8 Bit AVRs (still not feeling at home in the ARM world, probably b/c I am a pretty horrible coder).
Oh, and I run the www.filmkorn.org website (whenever I have time to write something, ahem)
Believe it or not, I have never really been interested in digitizing film, since I love real projection so much. However, I was given one of these horrible Wolverine film shredders a while ago for free, and could not imagine how horrible a product can be. I modded the heck out of it, but it just remained horrible — and before making it even more Frankenstein, I got the vague plan to build a film scanner on my own some day.
I now stumbled over the ne Raspi HQ Camera and ordered one, it should arrive next wednesday — let’s see where that ends up…