Friday 28 August 2009

Big drips


Carmi's theme for thematic photographic this week is 'Big'. A very subjective subject and something that is smaller than bigger and biggest...

So here is my image of something on a grand scale along with the human figures in the third image (about halfway up and near the right hand edge) as a key to show you what it is.... and a colour image as well as the B&W one...



Summer Promenade


Continuing the Summer theme...



I went to see my father in Worthing and arrived for a couple of 'almost summer' days there, although it was breezy to say the least - as demonstrated in the first image taken with a real lens, overexposed and shot out of focus. The remaining images are from some 100+ I took that afternoon through the Guinness can lens on my digital SLR. On the 'Apple' some 50 of them are now in the form of a slide show with accompanying evocative music from Patsy Klein ~ but I've not found a way to produce this on the blog.

I feel these images are so much more effective than those from our local canal (which I then decided not to post) and probably there is a book in them. Some images will perhaps be too large and are best viewed without opening them up; however they are meant to be soft and dream-like and I have over exposed them all on the computer accordingly.

For those of you who have not tried digital pinhole photography the exposure times were 1 to 10 seconds for a normal contrast image at 100 ISO. Focusing is much harder than with a view camera (the aperture is probably around f150) and you are really looking for bright elements to help frame the image in the viewfinder, then trial and error altering the framing after capture. You will need a sturdy tripod! I think a digital back on a waist level viewing Hassel / Mamiya / Rolliflex would be good for framing here.
I still have to my beautiful wooden 5x4 pinhole camera with out of date film...




















Saturday 22 August 2009

Experimental work: Guiness photography

I've been wanting to try digital pinhole photography and having found a spare body cap for my SLR a can of Guinness was required to make the 'lens' (for the non Guinness drinkers, the part of the can you use is the black area so one can will make plenty of pinholes). The third attempt produce a reasonable lens with exposures from about 1.5 - 20 seconds at 100 ISO. I'd heard that you could use the priority settings but on the Olympus this did not work except in bright light so manual and test images were required as I forgot my exposure meter to calibrate the aperture.

The images are on my Apple at the moment but will hopefully get them across to the PC to put on the blog.

Thursday 20 August 2009

Summer - What Summner

Carmi's photographic theme this week is 'Summer'. I would just like to have one this year, not just a few sunny days between May and August 20. Last year we had a proper summer and as my memories of an English Summe: sun, wind sometimes, waves, sand, rocks, camping, messing about on the river, and sitting on cliff tops.

So here is some nostalgic summer from Cornwall ~ maybe I will post something later from one of the sunny days this year...








That feels better...

And More...















Sunday 16 August 2009

Abandoned Mill























Carmi's theme this week is 'Abandoned'. This is found to the North East of Manchester...



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