I took a very wide angle lens to Bristol last Saturday. I got some quite interesting photos.
Bristol Tower
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Took the big camera with the fish-eye lens for a walk around Bristol today. We climbed to this tower. Next time I hope we have time to go to the top and take some more pictures.
Out damned spot..
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So we're staying in this awesome flat in Bridgeport Chicago and I notice that the ceiling light is rather neat. So I tip my camera onto its back and take the above picture.
And a huge lump of dust drops off the back of the lens onto the camera sensor.
So now every photograph has a grey dot on it (you can see it on the shot above to the right of the centre).
Now, the rational part of me knows that this doesn't matter at all in the great scheme of things. Really. But the other, stupid, part of me will focus and obsess on this little grey mark, panic that the camera is now broken and it will never be right again.
Eventually I did the right thing. We wandered down to Central Cameras in Chicago (an amazing camera shop) and I bought a rocket.
I don't know who's idea it was to shape this dust blower like a rocket, but it works for me. The good news is that a couple of puffs at the sensor from this wonder machine and the dust has gone completely. I held the camera upside down while I did this, so hopefully the dust has dropped off completely. At least I've managed to convince myself that this has happened.
I've now formed the habit of dusting the base of a lens before I attach it to the camera. And the word on the street is that the sensor in a digital camera is actually quite well protected, certainly not just a naked piece of silicon, and cleaning it is reasonable (and not particularly dangerous) thing to do.
Cranes at Hull
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Good news: it's only a short distance from the car park to where you work.
Bad news: the distance is straight up.
Burnby Hall Tulip Festival
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I'd not heard of Burnby Hall until this weekend. They are presently having a tulip festival, and number one wife wondered if I'd fancy going along an taking some pictures.
Would I just.
So it was into a bag with a goodly assortment of lenses, tripods and kinds of other paraphernalia (that's the great thing about photography - plenty of scope for paraphernalia) and then off down the road to Pocklington.
It was lovely. We got there nice and early when there was a bit of an angle to the light and it was nice and quiet. It's a great place to visit. Good food, good weather (at least today) and lots of tulips. We saw loads of families with picnics making a proper day of it. And there was even a brass band at 2:00.
Not sure they've fully grasped how Secret Gardens work though....
Pig Pictures from Sewerby Hall
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I didn't actually go to Sewerby Hall to take pictures of a pig. But since it was there......
Flickr Image tags
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Flickr are doing this new image tagging thing where something works out what is in your pictures and tags them for you.
Seems about right.
Hull University Nature Reserve
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Round the back of the Wilberforce Building we have a tiny nature reserve. It's looking very nice at the moment.
Hamster Pictures
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While I was in Leeds I took some pictures of the local hamster. As you do. Say hello to Peggy. I've a feeling those bars are for our protection, not hers....
Blossom time
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This tree outside our office is in full blossom. Rather nice.
You can't beat an Old Lens
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I've sold all my cameras and lots of my lenses to buy a new camera. It's what I do. But the good news is that I can use old, cheap, lenses on the new device. I picked up a Canon FD 135mm f2.8 lens a while back for a lot less than a "proper" piece of glass would have cost me. I'm really pleased with the results.
Good Weather in Whitby
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The word on the street was that today was the best day of the Bank Holiday weekend. So we headed off bright and early. And it was great.
For the first time in a while we went for a walk around the abbey. I'm quite pleased with how this picture turned out.
Campus Flowers
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The university puts a lot of effort into making the campus look good. I think it is definitely worth it.
Plant Pictures
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I've no idea what this plant is. But it looks nice in the early morning sunlight
Nice Weather for Pictures - Mostly
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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?
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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.
Early Sunrise University Pictures
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One of the few nice things about getting up in the dark is that if all is well you get to see the sunrise when you get to work. Today it was quite a nice one, and so I nipped into the library and took some pictures.
I was up at the top floor which was refurbished last year and turned into an open workspace called "The Observatory". It looks awesome, so I took some pictures of the furniture as well.
This looks to me as rooms from the future are supposed to look....
Get to work early for the best photographs
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Perhaps there aren't that many good reasons for arriving at work early. But I suppose that one of them could be to get nice pictures of the campus during the sunrise.
In Praise of Older Lenses
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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.
