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/I quite like this picture. I took it yesterday. It reminds me a tiny bit of one of my favourite album covers….
Rob Miles on the web. Also available in Real Life (tm)
I quite like this picture. I took it yesterday. It reminds me a tiny bit of one of my favourite album covers….
Went for a walk around the woods today. I wasn’t intending to take any pictures, but the clouds and the sun were just too good to pass up.
I think the best time to take pictures of Christmas lights is probably before it gets too dark. I wandered out into the late afternoon with the big camera and took a few pictures. After all the hit and miss fun of instant cameras it was rather nice to be able to get high quality images at the touch of a button.
Cottingham Church was looking pretty good too.
We went to Glow at Harlow Carr yesterday evening. It was lovely. I’ve put a few pictures here.
My “new-old” camera arrived last week. It’s the one that I’m selling a receiver to pay for. It’s a Polaroid SX-70 which was made in 1974. So it is very old. Up until a few years ago such cameras were completely useless as Polaroid had stopped making the instant film that they used. However, the Impossible Project (which has now assumed the Polaroid mantle) stepped in and started making films again. So a whole new generation can now discover the joys of instant shooting using a fold-up single lens reflex camera with an really nice glass lens.
I’m probably going to have to sell a few more things if I want to take lots of pictures with it though. Every time I press the shutter it costs more than two pounds to produce a single colour photograph. Which might be blurred or too dark or light. I’ve taken 8 pictures so far and I’ve only had a couple of duds. Pro tips for using the SX-70 that I’ve discovered so far..
make sure the focus is sharp in the viewfinder. Use the rangefinder prism (if there is one) to check.
Make sure you fill the frame. It’s square which means that you might find you only put your subject along the bottom (see above). Note that the rangefinder prism doesn’t mark the middle of the frame, it is towards the bottom. This can confuse your framing efforts.
If you are going to get exposure wrong, try to under-expose so that things come out a bit darker than they should. If they are over exposed they are just blown out to a white part of the image. If things are bit dark they look moody, which you can sometimes get away with. You can twiddle a little adjustment towards the dark side to do this.
Get the picture out of the light as soon as it comes out of the camera. Put it in an inside pocket (or even under your armpit) to give it somewhere warm to develop. After a few minutes you can take it out and have a look at what is appearing, but do this in a shady place.
In absolute terms the pictures that the camera produces are not that great. Your phone will be able to beat them for sharpness and colour. But that is not the point. These are tiny little works of art. You have to work hard to get a nice one and when you do the feeling of accomplishment is great. I’m enjoying taking very few carefully composed pictures rather than my usually process of taking a bunch with the view that I might find one or two good ones when I get the camera home and download the files.
I took my autumn leaves screensaver picture at Harlow Carr RHS Gardens which is one of my favourite places in all the world. I took some other pictures too..
Here’s your screen saver background for the next few weeks. You can find the full sized version here.
You’re welcome.
Took a camera for a walk yesterday. Came up with this. However, I really need to work on my image filename system:
I was going through a memory card from a camera and I found these pictures that I’d completely forgotten about.
This picture wasn’t taken with my Floppy Disk camera. I used the phone for this one. It illustrates quite well how we’ve come on in the world of photography. The picture is brighter, sharper and technically much better. But when I look at it closely I get the impression that there’s been some image trickery going on. the brightness of the sky seems go up and down a bit around the trees and the horizon. It brings home to me that the primary job of a phone camera is to make pictures that look good on the phone. But I think that sometimes the software tries a bit too hard.
Took the Floppy Disk camera for an outing yesterday and took some pictures. They came out quite well.
..and another…
… while we are waiting for my camera to arrive, here’s another nice picture…
You do get some nice skies this time of year.
So I took the Fish Eye Lens for a walk. The hard bit is making sure that you don’t end up with your feet in the picture….
I took one of my old camera lenses for a walk today. It has the useful property of producing rather nice amounts of blur.
Went for a walk today and took this picture. Which was 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.