Author: Adam Isler

photographer

Driving South

Next we took a combination of A3x roads towards our destination of Lyme Regis and I managed a few snaps out the window as we went (I wasn’t the one driving). As we grew closer to Lyme Regis we passed through thick fog, or maybe a cloud.

Jane Austen House

The Jane Austen House was mere minutes away. There was a lot to see and a lot of information to read. Here are a few impressions. Click any image to see them all enlarged and captioned.

Blog Note

The last 2 weeks of May we went on holiday, walking in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, averaging about 7 miles a day (see mileage below). I shot over 1000 frames and have been attempting to winnow through them. As a lifetime city boy, I was probably more struck and enchanted by walking through fields with various animals: cows, horses, sheep; flowers, and simple earthly beauty than someone with a more rural upbringing would have been.

So over the coming weeks I’ll be posting sets of images, attempting not to be too repetitive or cliché. But forgive me if there’s just too much pretty landscapes and calendar or postcard-type pictures. It was a remarkable experience and I’m indebted to my wife, Margaret and her good friend Marta, for organizing and arranging it, as well as for hazarding driving on the left side of the road, through endless roundabouts, and down narrow, hedgerow-bound single lanes of 2-way traffic – without them this wouldn’t have been possible.

Broken Glass

Farnham, Surrey

Garry Winogrand is reported to have said that he photographed things to see what they would look like in a photograph. Sometimes you see something that just looks interesting or treats light in a special way and you just have to see if somehow you can capture some quality of the light that has struck you. Such was the effect this broken glass in a vacant store window had on me. Is it a punctum (pricking my individual interest only), or a studium (of more general photographic interest)?

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.