Collin Donnell

Excited I got my camera back yesterday and now it’s the first sunny day in a couple of weeks 🎉 Thinking I’m going to take the 50 with me when I leave the house.

I had no idea how much haze there was on the inside of the viewfinder on my Leica. It’s completely clear now after servicing.

Just got my Leica M2 and lenses back from Jadon at Red Dot Repair and it looks incredible. I’m so excited to get out and shoot. I had no idea how much of an improvement it was going to be. #leica #filmphotography www.reddotrepair.com

Made myself wake up earlier today, and I’m pretty exhausted. Looking forward to the weather being better next week so I can do some photography.

I’m going to move from a dedicated film scanner to using my micro four thirds camera with a macro lens. Should be faster and equal or better quality.

Trimming down the number of channels I follow on Apple News significantly. I wish the New York Times were in here. NYT Wirecutter is, but the Times proper isn’t. The publications where you click on them and it’s laid out sort of like a newspaper are really nice.

Switching to a custom Bluesky handle is incredibly quick and easy. I’m now @collin.social. Took about 90 seconds.

All stocked up on a few more rolls of Tri-X before those tariffs hit 😂 I gotta see what they might do with the EU. I might not be able to afford to not buy another Leica film body!

On top of my other collin.tld domains, it turns out past me already bought collin dot social. Good looking out, past Collin.

I’ve been using Kagi search a few days, and the results are good. The only problem I’m having is that it can’t integrate with Safari as well as the built-in search engines. I really wish Safari would give us the ability to add custom search engines like other browsers do.

I’ve been writing songs for most of my life, and what really hurts is that I’ll probably never write a line as good as “make it like Papa John.”

I’ve lost about 15-16 pounds since the end of August. A long way to go yet, but my clothes are definitely starting to fit better.

I’m enjoying doing it regardless of who reads it, but I bet if I made the same photo blog back when photo blogs were a big thing, it would have been a hit. 😆

Thinking of getting letterpress cards made that say “Photographer” and have my website on them to hand out if I do street portraits or just for fun. Is that pretentious? I think it seems fun.

I had this idea in my head that I should eventually try and get a digital M now that I have Leica lenses, and I don’t think it’s true. I can just keep shooting film as long as they’ll sell it to me at a price I can afford. If 35mm is limited to maybe 16 MP scans, that’s probably enough.

I am vibrating with excitement about getting my Leica and its lenses back tomorrow. #leica

Feeling a bit gross after forgetting to eat enough today. On a positive note, I made it out to the Japanese stationery store to get some materials now that my hand is healed enough to write again.

Regarding banning TikTok — why can’t we pass privacy laws prohibiting unlimited user data collection and tracking in the US and enforce them across the board? I don’t want American companies tracking me either.

I want to go spend a few days in San Francisco taking black-and-white photos in the spring and use them to create a photo zine called “SF Mono.”

RFK Jr. is such a dipshit and so misinformed about health issues that most of what he says I, a non-expert, can immediately recognize as incorrect and explain why. I really hope he doesn’t get through.

Another thing about AI coding tools is that they have no style. They’ll tack on a bunch of nonsense, poorly structured code, and then it’s up to you to make it more reasonable.

I used Cursor yesterday and got a big feature done really quickly. These tools can be like magic, but if you don’t understand the thing you’re asking it to help you with, it will make a mess of things and you’ll spend more time debugging than it would have taken otherwise.

I usually only shoot Tri-X, but this limited edition HP5+ box was too cool to not get a couple.

Maybe I’ll give Kagi search another try. Google has been pretty bad lately, and DuckDuckGo has consistently been worse for me.

I know there are almost certainly not enough people shooting a Leica M2/3/4 camera that would pay for this to make financial sense, but if someone made a modern light meter with the shutter speed coupling the old Leicameters had, I would pay a good amount for it. #leica