Yesterday I took my 3D printed camera around to see Ian and attempted to take his portrait. As you do. I’m still working on my focussing technique, and so what I ended up with was a slightly blurred Ian but a remarkably sharp windowsill behind him. Look at the detail on that M&Ms bag…
I don’t know what kind of a day you’ve had. Me, I’m just happy that my picture of a duck came out.
I took this picture on Sunday. And yesterday I developed it myself at home. Go me.
I assembled the 3D printed camera today. I used the fittings I got last week. It turned out to be quite straightforward. I popped the special tip on the iron and set the temperature as low as possible (200 degrees). Then I picked up the fitting with a pair of pliers, popped it on the end of the tip and pushed the fitting into the hole in the 3D printed camera body.
Above you can see the result. I can now screw a bolt into this fitting to hold the lens in place. This is a really great way to screw things together. I’ve had a lot of success just using bolts in 3d printed holes, but this should be stronger and won’t wear out if I need to remove and replace the bolts.
This is the finished fitting in place with the lens attached. It turns out to look quite tidy. Next thing to do is make the handle and then take some pictures.
I’m 3D printing a camera at the moment. I’ve discovered that one of my early design decisions was not the best. It turns out that white PLA is not the most opaque colour I could have chosen. Cameras that let the light in are not optimal.
So today I decided to remedy that by painting the inside of the camera with matt black paint. I bought a spray can of the stuff, found a place in the garden as far away as possible from everything else and set to. It worked rather well. I’ve put on two coats and it is now looking a lot darker inside the camera, which is a good thing. The only snag is that it has turned out to be impossible to stop the black paint getting onto the outside of the camera (at least for me) so the next part of the plan is to paint the outside of the camera black too. That way I also get even more opaqueness.
The really good news is that the paint I’m using seems to stick really well to PLA. The only other snag has been that I now have a black finger (the one that has been pressing the button on the spraycan)…
After watching a few YouTube videos about the Mamiya 645 camera I’d convinced myself that I knew enough about the camera to be able to venture onto eBay and buy a “for spares or repair” camera that came up for sale. It was a nice set of bits, including a waist level finder, a lens and a metered prism. It also included a camera body. Well, the camera arrived last week and I call it my “downstairs” camera as it looks as if it has been thrown downstairs at least once or twice. The lens works fine, but has a bit of a ding in the filter mount. The waist level finder works fine too, even though the mounting on one side has broken. The camera body is a bit of a mess though. By fiddling with it I’ve managed to lock the mechanism up completely. I’ve nothing against the seller here, nothing was sold as working. And I still think it was a great deal for the price. I’m gong to pop it back on eBay and see how much I can get for a properly broken device.
Apparently mirror selfies, where you take a picture of yourself in a mirror, have been all the rage on the internet for what, the last twenty years or so. I thought I’d have a go with one of my old cameras.
Today it was up bright and early and off to Leeds to pick up the thing I bought on Tuesday which will make it much easier to get pictures into my computer. I got it home, opened the box and a whole bunch of furry creatures with wings flew out of the box and disappeared. I rang up the seller and told him what had happened. “That’s fine.” he said “You did buy the bat-fled scanner didn’t you?”
Apologies. But I couldn’t resist it. Anyhoo, the scanner is now back home and I’ve been scanning some of the shots I took with the new camera I got last week. It turns out that I can use it to take pictures of leaves.
One takeaway from this is that black and white is not the same as colour. Duh. Two things with different colours might be rendered as similar shades of grey. Another takeaway is that with film photography dust is definitely a thing. You get spots and stray hairs all over your negatives and keeping them at bay is a constant struggle. But it is all great fun. Next step is home processing.
Very excited. Managed to bag myself a flat bed scanner that can handle large images. This is a big thing. It turns out that you don’t get optimal photographic goodness by photographing negatives lying on your iPad screen. The new (to me but actually around 15 years old) device is huge and I’m going to have to drive over to Leeds and pick it up because I’m scared of what might happen if it is posted. But still, yay!
Today I have taken a bunch of photographs. It’s been great. I’ll post them off tomorrow. By the end of the week I’ll should have something back. A lot of them will not be very good. But they will be my kind of “not very good” which works for me.
Hmmm. I wasn’t expecting that. Or perhaps I was. Anyhoo, I’ve bought another camera. I seem to be converting my gadgets from musical instruments into cameras. Expect some frantic synthesizer selling soon.
Anyhoo, I only went into the shop to talk about this and that. Then I might have asked them to show me a Mamiya 645 that I’d seen on their website. And they produced this. It looked awesome. Like new. Only around fifty years old. And that was that. It takes 15 pictures on 120 roll film. Each picture is around 2.5 times the size of a 35 mm negative. The body is solid metal with leather stuck on and it is beautifully made. It also takes photographs. There’s a hugely satisfying “clunk” when you press the shutter release. I’ve popped a film in and I’m going to run through it as fast as possible so that I can get the pictures processed and make sure all is well.
Been walking round the house with a camera taking pictures of Lego. This is part of my camera testing program. The nice thing about taking pictures of Lego figures is that generally speaking they are already smiling.
Took some pictures today with a really old Polaroid camera. I thought I knew best, and twiddled the dial to increase the exposure and brighten things up a bit. Then the pictures turned out over-exposed. Oh well.
Went to Harlow Carr today. I seem to be rediscovering the joy of taking a picture (or three) merging them together and then image processing them within an inch of their lives. Great fun.
You know those shops that you thought had all disappeared? The ones with lots of stock and sales staff who know what they are talking about. And interesting second-hand bits and bobs that you didn’t know you needed until you found one?
Well, Beverley Camera Centre is like that. They have loads of photography stuff including cameras new and old, accessories, bags, tripods, lots of film - including instant - and even chemicals for home developing. I was in there today for a quick visit and I’m looking forward to going back and having a proper look round. The most important thing to know about the place is that it is closed Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, so if you turn up then all you’ll be able to do is stare through the window at the fun stuff within. If you are into photography or want to get started (using film is currently a trendy thing to do apparently) then go down and have a look at what they’ve got.
I’m printing a 4x5 print camera. I fancy some hand held large format camera action. I started the printing around 7:30 am this morning. We are now eleven and a half hours into the print. It is supposed take around 14 hours, but I’ll be very surprised if it is finished before we go to bed. The good news is that all is well so far. I put some glue onto the print bed (just a thin layer of Pritt stick) and that seems to have stopped the corners from lifting too much, which is nice.
White might not be the most sensible colour for a camera, but the plan is to line the inside with black felt to reduce reflections and keep the light out. And it should look cool…
We usually go to Hornsea on New Year’s day and have a bacon butty at the Floral Hall. But this year we are a day early. Still had the butty though. And it was awesome. I’d taken along the Mint RF70, a camera I’m trying to tame. It’s going fairly well, as you can see above. One of the issues with the camera is that if you want to take pictures in daylight you have to put a filter on the front to block out some of the light. This works well enough, but I managed to get my sums wrong when working out the filter compensation and the pictures were a bit under exposed.
When I was much younger and developing my own prints I would watch them develop in the darkroom. Sometimes a perfectly exposed image would appear and then further develop into a totally black print. This meant I had over-exposed it with the enlarger. My parents would hear me shouting “Stop developing” at the top of my voice to try and slow down the process. It never worked. Sometimes you could pull the picture out of the developer tray and put it into the fixer early, but this was a game of skill I never really mastered.
I was reminded of all this when I got the above pictures out of the camera and watched them develop. At one point the foreground was perfectly exposed, then it just got darker and darker.
I don’t think I can really blame the camera for this. The film only has a limited range of light to dark. If the foreground had been brighter the sky would have gone completely white, and we were lucky in having a really nice sky. Phone photographers just take the picture and the camera sorts it out. This leads to good, if perhaps a bit unreal looking, results. Film photographers use a “graduated tint” filter which has a dark bit at the top and a light bit at the bottom. I’m going to have to get one of those for the next try. That, and practice with my sums.
Took the other big ugly camera out today. This one came out quite well. I think the lens flare adds something..
The area has been scattered with Puffins. This is a close up of one near us.
Took a day off writing to go and look at old buildings. No prizes for guessing where this is (particularly in mind of the post title…..)
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.
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