Month: May 2023

Staircase and Skylight

Somerset House, London

Last year we didn’t quite make it to London Photo. It was our last day in London so we would only have had about an hour and the tickets were quite dear. This year, the school procured tickets for us and I think I saw almost everything, including the architecture.

Trees Ago

While I mostly shoot with a Fujifilm X-T4, I still have my X-T3 with a longish zoom (55 – 200mm, or about 85-300 full frame equivalent) usually mounted on it. When I’m traveling I can therefore carry both cameras go all the way from 16 wide to 200 tele without switching lenses. Now and then I take a few random shots with the long lens in between travels and even less often I remember to unload the chip to Capture One and see if there’s anything on it. Here’s one such from months ago, taken from my window on a frosty morning and converted to Fuji Acros.

Farnham, Surrey

Camera Obscura

In the same camera-making class mentioned in my last post, Peter Renn turned the room itself into a camera obscura (a dark room) with a large single lens you can see in the first image. It has a focal length of something between 1000 and 2000mm, casting a massive image circle. In the first picture above you can see the lens and part of the image on the floor. In the next couple of images you can see different parts of the image transmissively through a large, hand-held roll of tracing paper bringing different parts of the image into focus by moving back and forth. Next we used a large foam stage flat, and I took pictures of different parts of the image projected onto it. Click any of the pictures to see them all full-sized.

Shoebox Camera Obscura

We had a fantastic camera-building workshop with Peter Renn a couple of weeks ago. I had bought a cheap 135mm, f/4.5 projector lens in a charity shop for £10 and brought in a shoe box to mount it on. The first two pictures show the final product. The cardboard flaps in the first image allow one to slide the imaging screen backwards and forwards to focus. The next picture shows the inside, a focusing screen which is simply some tracing paper in a cardboard frame. The next 2 pictures I took with my phone through a hole in the back. I made the hole the size of my Fujinon 23mm lens so I can photograph what’s on the focusing screen and maintain a pretty good light seal. The 5th picture is a shot my classmate Marilyn took of me using the camera and the bottom right picture is the first image I took digitally. Click any of the pictures to see them all full-sized.

Infrared

As part of a workshop in alternative cameras I took a few shots with an old Canon Powershot A570 which had it’s infrared filter removed and a piece of orange gel taped over the front of the lens. This yielded some interest color IR effects. Click any image to see them all enlarged.