Bendy Lenses at Folly Lake

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More programming today. But we took a break by heading to the Folly Lake Cafe for lunch. I think they do the best chips in Hull. But I'm biased. They taste like the ones my mum used to make.

Anyhoo, the food was lovely and the day was very pleasant. And I'd taken  my Lensbaby, a simple lens which you can tilt to play with depth of field and whatnot. To adjust the lens aperture (the size of the hole that lets the light in) you drop in metal discs with different sized holes. And it has the ability to make very interesting images with selectively blurred bits. Great fun to play with. 

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. 

Graduation Fun and Games

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I've been helping with graduation ceremonies for a while as a Graduands Marshall. Each year I try to take a picture of the audience. This is the effort for 2016. I've used a very wide angle lens to get everyone in. The results are a bit dark (sorry, there is not a lot of light in the hall), but you should be able to find yourself. You can click through the image above to find a larger one on Flickr and go exploring.

This was my final graduation ceremony as a member of staff of the university, and I'm very pleased to have been given the chance to do it. It's a matter of great personal pride to me that for a long time  I've been the first person to present to prospective students on the Open Day and the last person to present to them at their graduation ceremony. 

HDR Projects 4 Professional for Twenty Quid

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Whitby Abbey looking good

StackSocial is a place where they sell stuff at nice prices. I first came across them when they were selling Lytro Illum cameras at a very knock down price. But only in America, chiz chiz (chiz is a Nigel Molesworth word meaning cheat or swindle - as any fule kno). 

Anyhoo, I've bought a couple of items of software from them at very attractive discount, the latest being HDR Projects 4 Professional. The software is very, very, good. HDR usually needs several images which are taken at different exposure. But this software will also take a single exposure and do a tone mapping job which is almost as good as using multiple shots. It has lots of presets and works very well. 

If you are interested in making your pictures that bit more awesome, and particularly if you use Photoshop and Lightroom, this package represents great value at only twenty quid. 

Free Photographic Filters

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It is rather strange that, having invested in cameras and lenses that give the most true to life images, we then invest even more in filters to make the pictures look lo-fi again. But we do.

The good news is that one of these filter packs has now become free. I've no idea how Google ended up selling a bunch of high quality filters for Photoshop and Lightroom, but they did. And now they've made the filters free.

The Google Nik Collection of filters is well worth having. There are some noise reduction and HDR ones among them which are OK, although these kind of things are probably done at least as well by some of the built-in features of Photoshop and Lightroom. However, the vintage camera and black and white filters are lovely. The set used to represent reasonable value at 85 quid. For free its a steal. 

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....

Kodak Photo CD Fun and Games

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Twenty years ago, when I was still learning how to take photographs, Kodak Photo-CD was supposed to be the next big thing. Keeping photographic negatives and prints was going to be so old-fashioned in the new, wonderful, digital age. 

Of course I bought into it. I got four or five rolls of film encoded onto this magical, future-proof, media. Of course, twenty years on all my prints and negatives are still around and usable. And the Photo-CD? Well, if you dig  around long enough you can find a program called Irfanview which will convert the files into something you can view again. I spent a happy hour or so this evening getting a bunch of pictures of the disks and passing them around the family.

The one above came out sort of OK, although I seem to have got a perfectly focused foreground and blurry background. So, twenty years ago I was still making the same mistakes I'm making today, just with a lot less technology to help out. 

Photomatix Pro and the Mysterious Drive D:

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Tone mapping bananas....

Tone mapping bananas....

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself how to fix problems that I hit. In a couple of years I'll search for this problem and find this post. And then fix the problem again. 

It's happened before. 

I love Photomatix Pro. I use it to make my pictures a bit more interesting, and to create HDR shots. It works very well. Except that for the last week it's been crashing out when I try to save the image. Turns out to be my external plug-in memory card reader. If that is connected it gives what Photomatix thinks is a drive D: that doesn't actually exist. This does not end well, but if I unplug the reader it all just works. Yay. 

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. 

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. 

Hull Fair in the Golden Hour

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Photographers talk of "The Golden Hour". This is the hour around sunrise and sunset when the light from the sun is scattered just so and you get some nice lighting effects. It's not really an hour, and it varies from day to day and where you are on the planet, but if you are going to take pictures of Hull Fair I recommend trying to arrive around 6:00 in the evening when, if the weather is right, you can get a little bit of golden hour goodness.

We went on Wednesday and headed straight for the big wheel. Which this year was really big. I had my fisheye lens for the maximum coverage of the scene and I'm also playing with a plug-in filter for LightRoom (the program I use to import and manage my photos) that converts the fish-eye view into something like a normal wide angle. I'm quite pleased with the results.

Lensbaby Fun

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My Amazon delivery came up trumps today, so I toddled down to the union and picked up my package. Then, when I got home I got the adapter out and attached my Lensbaby lens to my Fuji camera. As you do.

I've had a Lensbaby for a while. It's a "bendy" lens that you can move around in its mounting to change the way that images are focused. Turns out that if you put it on the camera and then point it at the ceiling you can get some interesting results after a bit of image processing.

Winchester Cathedral

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Since we were just down the road from it, we took a trip to Winchester today. Lovely town. Got a great big cathedral in the middle. Yesterday we were in Salisbury, today Winchester. I reckon this is cathedral country. 

Anyhoo, it is a lovely place. It is huge, with a fantastic atmosphere. It is also the resting place of Jane Austen and there is a lovely memorial to her. 

They also have some fantastic stained glass windows. I had a go at taking pictures of one or two. They are surprisingly tricky to get right. I ended up taking different exposures and then merging them to get something that looks reasonable.