Projects

A film camera doesn't remember anything. No frame count that survives a battery pull, no aperture in the EXIF, no note about the light. You write it down or you lose it.

CamLog is where I write it down. A phone-sized web app: pick the film, tap the light, tap the aperture, tap the shutter, add a word if there is one, and slide to log the frame. It keeps a running count for the roll and shows the last few shots so I know where I am. When the roll is finished, one tap archives it and loads the next.

The point is what happens after. I'm still learning the M6 — everything set by hand, no meter I fully trust. When the scans come back I can put each frame next to the choice I made: this light, this film, this aperture and speed — right, or half a stop off. Next time in the same light I already know.

No login — each camera has a short code instead, so the M6 and the point-and-shoot keep separate logs. Black screen, grey keys, one red accent; built to be used one-handed on a street corner without thinking about it.

Node, SQLite, a few hundred lines, on the same box as everything else. The logs are plain rows — so the shot data can eventually ride along with the scan into the archive, the same way PhotoTag's does.

I often shoot people on film. When someone asks for the picture, I can't give it to them — it's on a roll, weeks from a scan. A business card is worse: they'll lose it, and it isn't the photograph.

So I hand them a small NFC tag. They tap it with a phone and land on a page with a long random code in the URL — no app, nothing to type. The tag is the ticket.

Until I claim it, the page is a form: their name, the date, where we are, the film and the settings. After that the same link readsawaiting your photo. Weeks later I develop the roll, scan the frame, attach it from the back office, and the link becomes the photograph — theirs to keep, with a line underneath if they want to stay in touch.

PhotoTag isn't a separate thing bolted on. A delivered frame drops into the same pipeline as everything else here: added to the archive automatically, curated automatically by the same tagging pass, and — if the person agreed to it — surfacing in the portrait gallery on its own.

There's no server. The whole thing is one function running at Cloudflare's edge and a key-value store; the code lives in the tag and nowhere else. It costs nothing to run.

A film camera's oldest limitation — you can't hand over the picture — closed with a physical object and a few hundred lines. The analog constraint and the software fix in the same thing.