Solar Eclipse

The last time I went to see a solar eclipse it didn't end that well to be honest. Having carefully placed ourselves bang on the "line of totality" and enjoyed viewing a fantastic meteor shower through clear skies the night before, we woke up to two layers of cloud and a whole heap of nothing much.

So today my expectations were a bit low this morning. I viewed the gathering crowd on the campus as a being bit optimistic, to be honest. But when the time came it was great. I even suspended a tutorial so that we could go outside and get a look. There were telescopes and kids and a carnival atmosphere as it got gradually darker. There was a bit of cloud, but nothing that got too much in the way.

I was somewhat unprepared, I did have a camera but that was about it. However, by fiddling with the exposure I managed to get the picture above. Then someone suggested that floppy disks made a good light filter, so it was off up to my office to crack open a 3.5 inch disk.

I've no idea what the disk had on it, but I'm quite happy with the resulting photograph.

In Praise of Older Cameras

If you fancy owning an older camera my tip is to buy one and then wait. Works for me. I've had my Sigma DP2S for a while now. I bought it ultra cheap off eBay some years ago. I think you can get them even more ultra cheap now, which is unfortunate for me, but good news if you fancy an interesting camera to have a play with. This weekend I got it out to have a play with again. 

The Sigma uses a rather strange Foveon sensor, which means that rather than combining adjacent Red, Green and Blue pixel information it has a multi-layered sensor which grabs all the colour intensities at one spot. This makes for sharper appearing pictures even though the actual resolution of the shot is modest. The camera also has a rather nice fixed lens.

The biggest problem with the camera is that, compared with modern devices, it needs a lot more light to get a good quality picture.  The good news is that when you get a shot, it looks very good, on a par with much more expensive cameras.  

Sometimes, rather than spending a huge amount on an expensive, state of the art, camera it is fun to spend much less on something that has been around a while. If you choose your supplier carefully (eBay feedback is important here) you can get some quite fun devices to have a play with. 

Capturing the Students Union

We've had a few lovely mornings on campus over the last week or so, and I've become kind of obsessed with getting a decent picture of the Student Union building in the sun first thing. After a few sweep panoramas that didn't turn out very well I've managed to stitch the above together out of six different photographs. It's not quite perfect, there is a bit of weirdness right at the very top of the roof, but will do for now. 

Konstructor Camera Shots

Portrait of the artist...

Some time back I made myself a camera. I've just got some of the pictures back and it's worked. Yay!

When I dropped the film off to be processed I said to the girl in Jessops that it was quite possible that the pictures may all be black, or white, or on the same frame. But I took 25 or so pictures and got 22 back, which is great.

We don't have a word that describes that feeling you get when you go to get something from the place where it is usually stored and it isn't there.  If we did have I'd be able to use it now. I thought I'd been clever by having all my photographs transferred onto a CD when I had them processed. But of course when I got home I couldn't find my CD drive. Fortunately I'm an inventive soul and managed to use the PS3 to move the files somewhere I could read them.

Turns out that they have not been scanned to very high resolution and there are some nasty scratchy artefacts, but I'm very pleased with the results. They have a nice "other worldly" feel. I'm definitely going to put a few more rolls of film through the device. 

Hornsea Pictures

One of the great things about living in Hull is that you can get up on a lovely morning like today, decide to go somewhere nice, and within 25 minutes be by the sea in Hornsea. Great place.

There beach was looking good too. 

Light and Pictures

They say that you don't need great equipment for a good photograph. Just the right kind of light. I took this yesterday morning when we had around 20 seconds of good light. Not long, but enough for me to get my Smartphone out of my pocket.

After a bit of tweakage I'm quite pleased with the result. Next time I'll try not to have that tree in the way, although you might say it adds a certain something to the picture I suppose. Mainly a tree.

Made My Camera

Well, the camera I started building on Friday is now complete. The build wasn't that tricky, although I did end up making the lens assembly four times until I got it right. 

The viewfinder is kind of interesting. The view through the lens is projected onto a little screen, just like a "proper" single lens reflex camera. However, unlike a normal SLR, the viewfinder image is not further reflected inside a pentaprism.  What you see on the screen is the right way up, but flipped left to right, which took me a while to figure out. The image is also a bit dim, so you need to assemble a little screen around it to keep the light out. 

But it works. You can see to focus and compose your picture and I've loaded the camera up with film and taken a few shots. Everything is delightfully primitive and I'm looking forward to taking the film in and having the pictures processed. 

Making a Camera

I got a Konstructor camera for Christmas. It reminds me very much of the first camera I ever had, which was made of plastic, had a plastic lens and took photographs which were almost recognisable as the thing it had been pointed at. From the samples online this one has performance quite a bit better than that. But I'm not really looking for quality images here. I'm looking for interesting ones. And I think I'll get those. 

The camera  also reminds me of the Airfix models that I used to carefully construct when I was a kid,  bearing in mind it comes as a kit. I've just spent a very happy evening attaching Part A12 to P11 and whatnot, and with a bit of luck I'll have it finished tomorrow. It actually uses real, proper, 35mm film too. I've got a bunch of cassettes and over the weekend I plan to take some shots and get them developed. I used to love getting my pictures back from the labs and seeing how they come out, now I'll be able to do that again. 

Christmas Eve Bokeh

Christmas Eve Fun Fact: Bokeh is the term used by photographers to describe the quality of the out of focus parts of a picture. Turns out that the designers of a lens pay nearly as much attention to the blurry performance of a lens as they do to how sharp the in-focus parts are.

By playing around with the aperture value  (the size of the hole through which the light arrives at the camera) you can get some quite nice bokeh effects. Try using your camera settings to make this hole as large as possible by using an f-stop value (the unit that cameras use) as small as you can. Great fun with Christmas tree decorations. 

London Ho

You might be forgiven for thinking that my life is one long holiday, what with me heading off to London this week for a few days (and further travel shenanigans to come). However, we're spreading our time off over a few different weeks this year. So there.

Anyhoo, this means that we are presently away for a few days. With two tablets, a bunch of cameras and the fat lens. Which is rather nice.

Hull Pie, Parade and Classic Cars

Did something today that we've been meaning to do for ages. Had lunch in Hull Pie. The word on the street (love using that phrase, although I'm probably not of an age to be streetwise any more) was that the food was ace.

And it was. Good prices, amazing cuisine. I had chicken, ham and leek pie on mash and it was great. Number one wife had the quiche and salad. Both were thoroughly excellent. Yesterday was the Lord Mayor's Parade and Hull was packed. We missed the World War 2 Hurricane flypast (we were eating pie at the time) but we did see some of the celebrations.

Little Drummer Boy

Look at all those buttons and dials. Must be at least three of them...

Me and the Town Crier go way back. No, really.

They had a big parade, which was very big, and a collection of classic cars, one of which actually was a Ford Consul Classic.

This was the car that my dad really wanted to buy in the early 1960s. We had to make do with a Ford Cortina. If they'd had one of them at the show I'd have been in car heaven. 

The car we never had

Fun with a Wide Angle Lens

I've always liked wide angle lenses. I've been playing with one and taking pictures around campus which turns out to be great fun. Places, like the area outside the Student's Union, suddenly look different and strange, and you can get some really interesting angles that you can't get any other way.

If you are interested (and why should you be) the lens I've been playing with is an 8mm focal length FishEye from Samyang. For such a bespoke piece of optics the price is very good, particularly if you get the cheaper silver one. The lens is completely manual, you have to set the focus and aperture by hand, but I rather like that and the cleverness in the camera seems to take this in its stride. The results are pin sharp in the centre of the frame and very good around the edges, particularly if you stop down to F8 or so. The colour rendition is good too, with hardly any fringing.

I'll certainly be taking it on my travels from now on,  it gives a very refreshing angle of view to familiar scenes so it should do amazing things with unfamiliar ones. 

Rainy Saturday

It rained a lot today. Here's a picture of slightly less rainy times. Thursday evening to be specific. 

Bee Pictures

The Buddleia had a whole bunch of bees on it, so I set my little camera in macro mode and fiddled around until I got the picture above, which I'm quite pleased with. Then I got out my Lovely Lumia 1520 and got this by pointing it at the flower and pressing the shutter button:

I'm finding fewer and fewer situations where I need to have a proper camera with me....

Whitby at Whitsun

We've gone to Whitby for Whit weekend. It seemed somehow appropriate (I must have used that line before). Anyhoo, I took the camera.

I took this one of the beach, and then tweaked it a bit. 

Hull Holy Trinity Church

Hull Holy Trinity Church must count as one of Hull's biggest "hidden treasures". It is huge, right near the centre of the town and when I visited it was ringing its bells as loud as it could. And yet there was hardly anyone inside. This is sad. It is a very lovely place. I reckon the stained glass windows rival the best in the country. I took some pictures there yesterday which I think turned out quite well. 

If you are in the middle of town and fancy somewhere nice to just sit (they serve coffee and biscuits too) then it is great place to go.

Autographer Fun

The Autographer is a strange device. It is a little camera with no shutter button. The idea is that you clip it onto yourself and then head off and have interesting experiences. The Autographer will take a picture every now and then when it thinks something interesting is going on. It uses its compass, PIR sensor, accelerometer and GPS to keep track of what you are doing, and it has three levels of "alertness".

From a photography buff's point of view the pictures are nothing much to write home about. There is a 5 megapixel sensor, but the lens has a very wide angle of view, which means that you can often find lots of stuff in the frame. The thing that makes the Autographer interesting is that it lets you get pictures that you could not obtain any other way. And you just don't care that lots of them are rubbish. The 8G internal memory can store literally thousands of shots that might be taken during the day and there are smartphone, PC and Mac applications that let you pull out all the best shots and make them into animated gifs and videos. 

I wore the device during some of the "Wedding of the Year" and I'm very glad that I did. Some of the shots are lovely.

You can clip it to your shirt or hang it from a lanyard, but what I really wanted to do was stand it somewhere. Sadly it doesn't have any kind of stand, so I've designed and printed one, as you do.

This will screw onto one of those tiny tripods that you can get, which means you can use it for time lapse photography, something it does rather well. 

I've put the design on Thingiverse if you are lucky enough to have one of these neat little devices and want to stand it somewhere.

I'll post some pictures I've taken in some later blog posts.

Cottingham Church Looking Great

Cottingham Church was holding a flower festival today so I took along the big camera with the fat lens. And some of the pictures came out quite well.

Beer and Culture

We started off today with a trip to the Rijkmuseum. They have some superb pictures here, including the Night Watch, although it was a bit busy.

After lunch we headed for the Heineken Experience, a somewhat less cultural experience, although it did involve yeast. Fun fact of the day, the text in the Heineken logo was adjusted to create "smiling e's".

This probably doesn't improve the flavour very much, but it makes the brand look a bit happier.

Heading for TechDays via Amsterdam

Thunderbird Three at Humberside Airport. Who knew?

We are having a day or two in Amsterdam before heading off to TechDays in The Hague. So we hopped onto to the plane at Humberside and headed off to Schipol. After a quick train journey we checked into our hotel and then headed out for a walk. Of course I took the camera.

There are a lot of bikes here

Tooltip from Amsterdam...

I really do like it here.