Bokeh
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I’m very adaptable
I recently bought a Pentax 110 SLR camera and a selection of Pentax 110 lenses*. The camera was made in the late 70s/early 80s, and was advertised as the world’s smallest interchangeable lens SLR system. It was made for the 110 film size and 110 negatives are almost exactly the same size as the Four Thirds sensor in my Micro Four Thirds (MFT) cameras. This means that the lenses behave on MFT cameras just as they would on the original Pentax 110 body. All you need is a £20 Pentax 110 to MFT adapter. The lenses are all f2.8 aperture, are very small indeed! Here’s the 24mm lens, the smallest,…
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Gorgeous Gower always delivers
A week or so back I took a trip to Gower in South Wales. It’s a fantastic place, with very varied landscape and lots of wildlife. I took one of my OM bodies and a couple of lenses, but never used them. All these images were shot on my Google Pixel phone and edited in Snapseed. Rhosilli beach is a favourite place; it’s been voted as one of the best beaches in the world. I spotted a cool bit of driftwood and got low down and close to it. The wide aperture of my Pixel’s lens meant that only one bit of the foreground wood was in focus. The B&W…
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60mm plus 30mm = 90mm
They say that “nature’s red in tooth and claw”. That indicates that everything is struggling to survive against lots of potential predators. I saw this little vignette happening outside one of our windows. A honey bee was caught in a spider’s web. The spider is probably a Noble False Widow, and it was just doing what spiders do to carry on living. I shot through the double glazing with my 60 mm OM macro lens. The background is well out of focus, as it was quite a long way away. Later the bee and spider were to be seen tucked up in the corner of the window, almost out of…
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“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
OK, so it’s now winter rather than Keats’ autumn, but the mists thing is still true. Tied in with mists there are other sorts of wetness, such as rain and condensation, and even melted frost. Yes, I know this is a tenous link for some water droplet images, but bear with me! It rained a week or so ago, and one sunny morning some lingering rain droplets were sat on a twig of one of our Japanese maple trees. I liked the way they were in a fairly regular line, and there were some fab reflections/refractions in each drop, so I popped my 60mm macro lens on to my OM…
- Abstract, Architecture, Black & White, Bokeh, Composition, Creative Photography, Fine Art, ICM, Landscape, Macro, Mobile, Movement, Snapseed
Worcestershire Open Studios is nearly here!
The final preparation for this weekend’s opening of my exhibition as part of Worcestershire Open Studios (WoS) is pretty well done! Images are up, lights are installed and tested, mounted prints are in their display boxes, greetings cards are sorted, and signage is all done. Even the sun is getting in on the act and saying, “Here’s where you need to come to”! If you follow the directions that are found here, you should see a house like this one – only the right way up! There will be signs and green bunting to help you find it. This one of the key images in my exhibition. If you want…
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Welcome to 2025!
Firstly, HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know we are nearly a week into the new year, but it needed to be said. One of the photographic highlights of the Christmas period was the Christmas Tree Festival at Worcester Cathedral. It’s a fabulous display of lots and lots of Christmas tree decorated by loads of different organisations. There are, of course, lots of tree lights to be played with. Here I’ve chosen a tree that had lots of lights on and used OM System’s “Live Composite” mode set on a 1/2 second base exposure. I rotated the camera in a circle during the exposure. There are some interesting colours and shapes, and…
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Happy Christmas!
As it’s less than a couple of weeks till Xmas Day I thought I would take the opportunity to wish you all a “Merry Christmas and a Phabulously Photographic New Year”. It’s been an interesting year for me, with lots of in-person and Zoom talks and well-received Macro workshops. I’ve already got talk bookings for 2026! This is a macro bokeh shot of an Xmas tree bauble. Not only is there foreground bokeh but there’s also wider background bokeh. It’s like differential focus, but it’s all actually out of focus! Our neighbour over the road has a log-burning stove. One quite windy day it was smoking quite a lot, and…
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Macro musings – Part the Third
The Macro workshops I’m running locally are happening very soon. To help with those workshops I asked OM Systems if they would lend me one of their fabulous 90mm Pro Macro lenses, and they very kindly obliged. You can see the OM Systems range of camera and lenses here. I have no commercial relationship with OM Systems, I just love their cameras and lenses. It’s a super sharp lens that has a native 2x life-size magnification ratio. I, of course, wondered what it looked like when it was out of focus. I tested that on a cold morning when our windows had condensation on the inside. Shooting from the inside…
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Focus on your focus
Cameras these days are like science fiction devices compared to when I first started taking pictures. Back then everything was manual; setting the exposure, focusing, film winding. Now we have all these wonderful automatic tools at our disposal, and auto focus has come on in leaps and bounds since the first, rather clunky, iterations. That does not mean that it’s foolproof, nor does it mean that you should just let it do its work without any input from you. Here are three examples of different focus issues. Some auto focus systems need edge contrast to do their job, and when there’s not much edge contrast they can hunt around for…
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Autumn Acer Abstracts
Recently I went to the fabulous Autumn Garden at Queenswood Country Park near Hereford. One feature of that part of the wood is the Japanese Maples. They were in full colour and looked fantastic. It was a sunshine and showers day, so there were lots of water droplets around. I had my Olympus macro lens on, so set my camera to manual focus and defocussed the image. I concentrated on a small part of a maple that had dissected leaves. The shapes and colours of the leaves, and the water droplet highlights, made for a very pleasing abstract composition. I had my trusty Huawei mobile with me and couldn’t resist…