Nice Weather for Pictures - Mostly

The weather yesterday was horrible and nice by turns. I took this picture during one of the nicer parts.  I've just pulled if out of the camera and I'm quite pleased with the result. 

What use is an old, cheap lens?

I've been playing with old lenses on my camera for a few weeks now. And yesterday I spent a massive 19 pounds on another one. This is an elderly, but still excellent, Canon zoom lens, probably from the 1980's. It has that lovely zoom action where you pull the barrel towards you to zoom in. One of the things that a long focal length lens will do for you is compress perspective, flatting everything together. You can see the effect at work above, where the church, which is actually quite a lot further away than the other items in the picture, looks a lot more prominent in this picture of Cottingham lights. Great fun. 

The lens also took a pretty good picture of part of our tree. 

In Praise of Older Lenses

I've got myself another camera. Surprise. And I'm definitely going to sell all my old ones to pay for it (now that would be surprise). The bad news is that the lenses for my latest acquisition look to be rather expensive. The good news is that very old lenses for it are a lot cheaper. 

For around ten quid you can get an adapter that lets you fit lenses from yesteryear.  And it turns out that way back in the past they weren't just better at making music. They could make some amazing optics too. I picked up 55 mm Canon prime lens from Ebay that is a fraction of the cost of a modern lens, with image quality which is top notch. The picture above has been heavily tweaked in a way that tends to hide the sharpness of the lens, but take it from me this thing is pin sharp. 

My new/old lens doesn't have any of the new fangled features such as auto-focus or automatic aperture adjustment. But it turns out that I really like that. The camera viewfinder does a thing called "focus peaking" where it outlines the sharp parts of the picture in yellow. And adjusting the aperture manually means that I get to preview the depth of field in the picture and see how well the subject has been isolated from the background. 

It seems that you can get lots of adapters for lenses from way, way, back - even for old Leica lenses from the thirties. If you fancy testing your understanding of photography a bit and you have a camera that supports interchangeable lenses I'd say it was worth having a go with some old glass. 

Hull Fair in the Golden Hour

Photographers talk of "The Golden Hour". This is the hour around sunrise and sunset when the light from the sun is scattered just so and you get some nice lighting effects. It's not really an hour, and it varies from day to day and where you are on the planet, but if you are going to take pictures of Hull Fair I recommend trying to arrive around 6:00 in the evening when, if the weather is right, you can get a little bit of golden hour goodness.

We went on Wednesday and headed straight for the big wheel. Which this year was really big. I had my fisheye lens for the maximum coverage of the scene and I'm also playing with a plug-in filter for LightRoom (the program I use to import and manage my photos) that converts the fish-eye view into something like a normal wide angle. I'm quite pleased with the results.

Lensbaby Fun

My Amazon delivery came up trumps today, so I toddled down to the union and picked up my package. Then, when I got home I got the adapter out and attached my Lensbaby lens to my Fuji camera. As you do.

I've had a Lensbaby for a while. It's a "bendy" lens that you can move around in its mounting to change the way that images are focused. Turns out that if you put it on the camera and then point it at the ceiling you can get some interesting results after a bit of image processing.

Winchester Cathedral

Since we were just down the road from it, we took a trip to Winchester today. Lovely town. Got a great big cathedral in the middle. Yesterday we were in Salisbury, today Winchester. I reckon this is cathedral country. 

Anyhoo, it is a lovely place. It is huge, with a fantastic atmosphere. It is also the resting place of Jane Austen and there is a lovely memorial to her. 

They also have some fantastic stained glass windows. I had a go at taking pictures of one or two. They are surprisingly tricky to get right. I ended up taking different exposures and then merging them to get something that looks reasonable. 

Bendy Hull Pictures

I think my favourite lens of the moment is my 8.0 mm fish eye, which gives the most amazing effects. especially if you point it up or down. Before I did my paper reviews yesterday I had a walk round Hull. The light at around 7:00 am was really nice, and I got some interesting pictures.

Fun with Lens Extension Tubes

For a while these stick on jewels and bits and bobs have been floating around the house (not literally, that would be scary - they've just been in a little jar on a shelf). Anyhoo, I thought I'd try to take some pictures of them. I bought some extension tubes off eBay some time back and I wanted to see if they work.

You can use extension tubes if you have a camera which uses interchangeable lenses. The tubes fit between the lens and the camera and have the effect of drastically decreasing the focus distance, making it much easier to take pictures of tiny things. The tubes usually come in sets of two or three, which you can combine to get different focus distances.

These are a rather racy red colour, which is nice I suppose, but the important thing is that they preserve all the electrical connections between the camera and the lens, so that focus and aperture control all still work. You can pick sets like this up on eBay for less than twenty pounds or so, and they are fun to play with. Make sure you get the set that matches your type of camera.

When you start to use them you'll discover that you can focus very close to things (beware of bashing the lens into the thing you are taking a picture of) and that the depth of field (the range of parts of the picture that are in focus), is very shallow. You can address this by adjusting the aperture, try using F8 or so, but then you'll need a lot more light.

I take lots and lots of pictures with the camera on continuous shooting, and rock slowly backwards and forwards during shooting so that the focus changes. Then I go back and pick the ones that I like the best .If you use a larger aperture (F4 or so) then you can get some interesting effects where not all the picture is sharp.

The tubes worked fine, and I got one or two shots that I'm happy with.

Mystery Picture

I like taking abstract pictures. I took this on the way to work. Can anyone tell me what it is?

Plane Rainbow

As we were in the shuttle bus out to the plane to fly back last night there was the most amazing rainbow over the airport. When we got off to head into the plane I threw all my bags down on the concrete, grabbed the camera and took a few shots.  I'm quite pleased with the composition, although it really had nothing at all to do with me, and everything to do with dumb luck.

The over eager dog that is Lightroom

Some software drives me nuts. The kind I'm thinking about is the stuff that is useful enough to be indispensable, but actually really annoying to use sometimes.

Such as Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is a fantastically useful program for managing your photos. If you are a serious photographer, you use Lightroom. It's that simple. I only started using it a few years ago, but it has transformed the way that I work with images. And just about all for the better.

Unfortunately though, it has a few problems. Sometimes it is a like a big, helpful, over-eager dog that is always trying to do the best for you. And most of the time it succeeds. But sometimes it does insane things.

Take, for example, importing pictures.  This should be easy. Find the folder where the pictures are, and then copy in all the ones that aren't in the catalogue.

Except that whenever you click on (or perhaps even wave the mouse near) a folder at the start of an import Lightroom insists on running off and seeking out all the images in that location. In the entire directory hierarchy. Even though there is absolutely no need to do this.

And it always thinks I want to import from the SD card that I keep plugged into the Surface. So when I start importing it proudly displays a whole bunch of clipart I'm never going to want to look at.

What I'd love is for someone to come back to me and tell me that there are magical options that can be used to turn off this rather daft behaviour. Any ideas folks?

Batmobile

They had this Car Expo in Bristol today. Including a version of I think one of the best Batmobiles.

No Photographs

I carted a camera all around Bristol today without taking a single photograph. Never mind, here's a picture of Hull centre instead...

Flickr Magic View is quite, er, magical

I've been hosting my pictures on Flickr for a long time. When if first came out Flickr was genuinely revolutionary, with unlimited online storage for subscriber's pictures.

Unlimited storage is pretty much the norm these days, and Flickr has been a bit left behind by other, fancier sites. But of late they've done some rather nice things. If you've got a Flickr account (paid or free) you might want to take a look at the new Magic View option in the Camera Roll part of your site. It does a rather good job of working out the subject of your shots and then itemising them.

I'd no idea I'd taken so many pictures of birds.....

Thwaite Gardens Open Day 2015

Every year the Friends of Thwaite Gardens open up the gardens for folks to look round. And if I can, I go round and point my camera up a tree or two....

Hello from Paris

Pointing the fat lens at the tower

Well, this is nice. I'm in Paris for the Microsoft Devices and Networking Summit 2015. A chance to look at some very interesting embedded stuff. In Paris. What's not to love. The hotel is just down the road from the Eiffel tower. So of course I headed over there.

I took the stairs

Not a bad place to reach your steps goal....

I love the Eiffel tower. Fantastic place. And great for photographs too. If you want to see full size versions of the pictures you can click through to the images on Flickr. The conference starts tomorrow. Can't wait.

I love these telescopes

View from underneath

Not a bad view from the balcony

Very nice reception

Just got back from a great reception on the 11th floor of the hotel. There were splendid views of the tower from the balcony, and huge glass windows that let give you a great view of the surrounding neighbourhood - but proved quite hard to walk through. Even though I tried. Talk about making an impression.....

I'd love to have stayed longer, but it turns out that I'll be updating module descriptions for the rest of the evening. In Paris. Such is life.

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.