Some Cadobo Cam XL Mods and a Quote

I'm not at all intending to make this a literary blog, but I just couldn't resist posting a quote from the book I'm currently reading. It's from Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. I don't know how to even begin describing this novel. It's extremely dense and convoluted but, for me, extremely engaging. Solenoid is so dense that sometimes it seems that each short chapter could be it's own novel, but unlike say a Tolstoy novel, there is only one main character, so it's much easier (for me again) to follow. It's been described as a surrealist novel, but I'm not sure that does it justice. The novel pulls one into a whirlpool of swirling thought made seemingly concrete and three dimensional by Cărtărescu.

Yikes! What a crappy mini review that was. Here is the quote, sorry, but there may be others coming in the near future although I'm trying to resist...

“With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of a destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid, and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse.”

-Mircea Cărtărescu

To soften the blow of forcing readers to read Romanian literature I'm including a gallery of recent mods to the large format 11x11cm Cadobo Cam XL. My first shot with the earlier version of the XL was disappointing to me in that it was just too soft, so I modded the camera to be focusable. In the photo of the back of the camera you can see ther removable, light sealed plate. I can substitute a piece of printing paper for film and slide the whole back of the camera back and forth to focus. The shot shown here is a bit out of focus as I was focused on infinity when I took the shot, but overall I'm much more pleased with the results.

The paper was fully dampened Arista Edu Ultra because I have an 8x10" pack of that. The exposure was an hour and 45 minutes near sunset. I have to say that I'm completely pleased with the colors in this shot and will continue to use Arista in this camera at least.