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.
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.
I like taking abstract pictures. I took this on the way to work. Can anyone tell me what it is?
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.
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?
They had this Car Expo in Bristol today. Including a version of I think one of the best Batmobiles.
I carted a camera all around Bristol today without taking a single photograph. Never mind, here's a picture of Hull centre instead...
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.....
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the great things about living in Hull is that you can get up on a lovely morning like today, decide to go somewhere nice, and within 25 minutes be by the sea in Hornsea. Great place.
There beach was looking good too.
They say that you don't need great equipment for a good photograph. Just the right kind of light. I took this yesterday morning when we had around 20 seconds of good light. Not long, but enough for me to get my Smartphone out of my pocket.
After a bit of tweakage I'm quite pleased with the result. Next time I'll try not to have that tree in the way, although you might say it adds a certain something to the picture I suppose. Mainly a tree.
Well, the camera I started building on Friday is now complete. The build wasn't that tricky, although I did end up making the lens assembly four times until I got it right.
The viewfinder is kind of interesting. The view through the lens is projected onto a little screen, just like a "proper" single lens reflex camera. However, unlike a normal SLR, the viewfinder image is not further reflected inside a pentaprism. What you see on the screen is the right way up, but flipped left to right, which took me a while to figure out. The image is also a bit dim, so you need to assemble a little screen around it to keep the light out.
But it works. You can see to focus and compose your picture and I've loaded the camera up with film and taken a few shots. Everything is delightfully primitive and I'm looking forward to taking the film in and having the pictures processed.
I got a Konstructor camera for Christmas. It reminds me very much of the first camera I ever had, which was made of plastic, had a plastic lens and took photographs which were almost recognisable as the thing it had been pointed at. From the samples online this one has performance quite a bit better than that. But I'm not really looking for quality images here. I'm looking for interesting ones. And I think I'll get those.
The camera also reminds me of the Airfix models that I used to carefully construct when I was a kid, bearing in mind it comes as a kit. I've just spent a very happy evening attaching Part A12 to P11 and whatnot, and with a bit of luck I'll have it finished tomorrow. It actually uses real, proper, 35mm film too. I've got a bunch of cassettes and over the weekend I plan to take some shots and get them developed. I used to love getting my pictures back from the labs and seeing how they come out, now I'll be able to do that again.
Christmas Eve Fun Fact: Bokeh is the term used by photographers to describe the quality of the out of focus parts of a picture. Turns out that the designers of a lens pay nearly as much attention to the blurry performance of a lens as they do to how sharp the in-focus parts are.
By playing around with the aperture value (the size of the hole through which the light arrives at the camera) you can get some quite nice bokeh effects. Try using your camera settings to make this hole as large as possible by using an f-stop value (the unit that cameras use) as small as you can. Great fun with Christmas tree decorations.
You might be forgiven for thinking that my life is one long holiday, what with me heading off to London this week for a few days (and further travel shenanigans to come). However, we're spreading our time off over a few different weeks this year. So there.
Anyhoo, this means that we are presently away for a few days. With two tablets, a bunch of cameras and the fat lens. Which is rather nice.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
