Very good wizards

I take it that these wizards are very good at hiding

Still playing with the Rabbit R1. Asked it to take a picture and add some wizards. The picture is OK, but it isn’t quite what I wanted.

Cute Cassette Light

Makes a nice torch too

It is often very useful to have something you can use to add a splash of light to a photograph. These lights are packaged to look like 35mm film cassettes. They give out a nice solid light for around half an hour or so and you charge them up using their USB connection. Very nice and not too pricey.

End of a Cube Era

Still Got it

The Cube has been part of our lives for the last fourteen years. It has never let us down and is one of the coolest cars I’ve ever driven. We’ll be parting with it soon, succumbing to the lure of an all-electric vehicle. We gave it a wash, took it for a drive and grabbed some pictures.

Even the back looks cool

I hope that when the time comes the Cube will find an owner who appreciates it as much as we did.

Watch Pachinko

If you are lucky enough to have Apple TV you should take a look at Pachinko. It’s a tough watch. For a start there are a lot of subtitles and some of the material is quite hard going. It’s not a show all about nice things happening to nice people. But it is well worth getting into.

Pentax 6x7 Colour Film

At the same time as I was taking a tiny Pentax camera around I was also carrying my great big Pentax 6x7 camera about and shooting a few proper colour pictures.

I’m very happy with the pictures, although I need to work on holding the camera horizontally.

Pentax 110 in Turquoise Mode

The Pentax Auto 110 is a tiny single-lens reflex camera that was sold in the 1970’s. It takes tiny pictures on a little cassette. I picked one up a while back for a very low price. Just for laughs I got some Lomo Turquoise film and took a bunch of shots with it. It was great fun, and really easy to carry round. The results were…. interesting…

All the colours are wrong, but in a really interesting way. Greens don’t really go anywhere, but all the other colours go all over the place. People turn cyan. The Pentax did a lovely job of taking a bunch of properly exposed, sharp pictures. My advice; get yourself a Pentax 110 and a roll of Lomo film (it is surprisingly cheap) and then go out and have a ton of fun.

Three Reel Circus - Adventures with a Patterson Developing Tank

It turns out that if you only get eight shots from each film you end up with lots of rolls to develop. I thought I had the answer to this. A while back I bought a cut price developing tank which can process three films at the same time. The first problem was the height of the tank. It won’t fit under the sink for rinsing. This turned out to be quite an easy fix.

Half an hour with OpenSCAD and I had the above adapter design. It took three goes to print out one with the correct size to grip the hose pipe and fit in the top of the tank, but all I needed to do was buy a shower adapter, cut the end off the pipe and then pop this on. It works very well.

The only snag that I hit was the difficultly of loading the film onto the spirals that fit inside the tank. The film kept getting stuck. This was not fun for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I had my hands in the dark bag when all this was going wrong. Eventually I managed to get two films into the tank and was able to process them,

The images came out quite well, but fighting to get them into the spiral took its toll, with a few scratches here and there. I’ll have to decide whether the hassle of loading up the film is worth the time saving.

Duck

Duck

Sewerby Hall with a Mamiya Press Camera

Took the Mamiya Press Super 23 camera to Sewerby Hall today. It’s a bit of a pain to cart round, and I lost three frames due to a not using it properly (in case you were wondering, two to not taking the dark slide out and one to not extending the lens for the picture). However, I’m not unhappy with the remaining shots.

Planning the Computer Science 50th Anniversary

We had another planning meeting for our 50th anniversary celebrations today. It’s going to be fun. If you’ve been in the department as student or staff we’d love to see you. You can find out more here.

Contax G1 Lenses on a Sony Camera

I’ve been after one of these for ages but they’ve always been too expensive. But last week, thanks to a bit of eBay shenanigans I managed to pick one up for a really good price. What is it? I hear you ask. (actually I don’t. That’s not how web pages work). Anyhoo, its a Techart G-NEX TA-GA3. I’m surprised you didn’t recognise it.

It’s an interesting piece of kit. It lets you use lenses from a thirty year old film camera on your digital camera. The lenses in question were designed by Zeiss and made by Contax and they are really, really good. They are supposed to be used on the Contax G1 or G2. These cameras contain a little motor that turns the lens to focus it. The Techart contains a tiny motor along with a microcontroller that manages to convince the host camera that this is “just an ordinary lens guv”.

There are one or two issues. Not all auto-focussing modes are available, you have to set the aperture manually and the adapter makes amazing noises as it moves the lens mechanism back and forth. I popped a 28mm Contax lens onto it and we headed for the Humber Bridge to see what it can do. This time we went up onto the bridge deck to take some shots.

These pictures were taken with the lens wide open which is when the optics have to work the hardest. The images are super sharp in the middle of the frame and then that sharpness fades off a bit towards the edges. But the colour rendition is splendid and I’m very pleased with the results. I’m looking forward to taking more pictures with this setup. The only problem I’ve noticed is that the effort of moving a big metal lens seems to take its toll on the power source. The battery in the camera drained a lot faster than I’m used to.

Inside Out 2

Went to the movies today for the first time since lockdown. It was great fun. We saw Inside Out 2 and its a lovely story very well put together. I was a bit worried that after the perfection that was the first movie they’d mess things up with the sequel, but this wasn’t the case. Well worth the trip. This moviegoing thing looks quite fun. We should do it again .

IKP Little Mermaid

Had a splendid time at Burnby Hall Gardens tonight watching The Little Mermaid from IK Productions. All the kids there (along with the one we took with us) really enjoyed the tale and the way it was told. Great fun.

Rabbit Portrait Fun

Finally managed to get the Rabbit R1 magic camera to produce a picture of me which I think does me justice. And no, I’m not going to show you the original it was produced from.

Farewell Rodney

It was my father in-law Rodney’s funeral today. The best funerals are a celebration of a life lived well and to the full. I like to think that we did Rodney proud. Many thanks to everyone who came along and special thanks to celebrant Scott and Kelly from the Co-op who played their parts perfectly. It means a lot.

Zenith Flower

Last 1970s picture for a while. This one was taken using my brand new Zenith B which I bought for the princely sum of 15 pounds. It had an Industar F3.5 lens (which was described by one expert as “the closest thing to a bottle bottom ever attached to a camera”). However, the pictures weren’t that bad if you were prepared to fiddle a bit.

Time Travel Bridge

There’s a motorway bridge near us which is presently undergoing expensive repairs because bits of it are worn out. When I was going through my old pictures from the 1970’s I found this picture of the bridge before it was made.

They are pile driving foundations for the pillars that will hold the bridge up.

This picture is so last century

I took this picture at the start of my photographic career in 1971 balancing the family Boots Bieretta on a railing at Piccadilly Circus in London and attempted a timed exposure. I think it worked quite well, although the verticals are a wonky. I was using Kodachrome 64 film and I’ve just started scanning the slides. Some of them look quite good. All of them, look terribly dated.

Mamiya Press 23 Photo Fun

My new (actually around 55 years old) camera seems to work OK - although it is not terribly good at focussing on things that are very close to the camera. Apparently there are some rangefinder settings that I’ll have to pluck up the courage to fiddle with. But everything else about the camera works really well.

Mamiya Super 23

Is it wrong to buy a camera just because of the way it looks? In my opinion the answer is no. Above is my latest buy investment. It’s a Mamiya Press Super 23. These were made in the 1960’s for use by press photographers that didn’t want to carry around heavy 4x5 press cameras but couldn’t afford to buy a Nikon 35mm camera. Or something.

I like it because it comes completely to bits. The lens contains the shutter and fits in the hole on the front of the camera body. The film is in a holder which clips over another hole at the back. Push the handle on the side, connect the shutter trigger to the front of the lens and away you go. And if any one of these elements fails in some way I just have to replace that bit rather than junk the whole thing.

It’s not a light camera, but it is nicely weighted in the hands. It takes enormous 6x9cm negatives on 120 roll film. I’m looking forward to posing taking some pictures with it.