Travel
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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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Classic Nostalgia at Shelsley Walsh
Recently I popped over to the Classic Nostalgia event at the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb track. It’s a fabulous weekend, with all manner of classic competition cars, including some vintage F1 cars. I took my OM-1 and 40-150 f2.8 Pro lens. It was a perfect chance to try the OM-1’s AI-powered Subject Detection system, set on “Cars and Motorbikes”. It’s actually calibrated to work best with racing cars, and there were lots of them! This MGB V8 was pressing on hard at The Esses, and lifting the inside front wheel. It was fascinating to see the focus box pick up the car and follow it round the corner. I had my…
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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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The light is back.
There’s a large, ruined, country house about half an hour from us. It’s called Whitley Court, and although the house is ruined, (after a massive fire in the 1930’s), the gardens and fountain have been restored. The light was very strong, and it cried out for the contre-jour technique, where you shoot with the light coming from behind the subject. I had taken my Lumix TZ100 travel zoom compact with me, so it was a test of just how much I could control the exposure to give the look I wanted. This shot of the fountain is a good example. I set about 3 stops of underexposure to expose for…
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March miscellany
Recently I travelled to Jersey for a few days to judge the photography section of the annual Jersey Arts and Crafts Eisteddfod. It was an honour to be chosen as Adjudicator, and I was well looked after by the organisers. I was kept very busy writing individual assessments for each image, so I didn’t have much chance to see the sights. I was able to pop out early one morning and visit the harbour in St Helier. One striking thing was the sculpture called “Jersey Girl” at Liberty Wharf. It’s by an artist called Rowan Gillespie, and was unveiled in 2010. Very cleverly she is suspended by cables from just…
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Pixel-lated water
Like most people these days, the camera I carry about with me all the time is the camera that’s part of my mobile phone. I’ve got a Google Pixel mobile, and it’s got an excellent camera and camera software. One feature I like is the Long Exposure mode. It’s not as good for long exposure as my Huawei Mate phone was, with its fabulous “Silky Water” mode, but within its limits it gives great results. The trick is to keep the dot inside the circle! That tells you you’ve kept the camera still enough. These three images of moving water were taken using Long Exposure mode. I rested my hand…
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Kelpies!
Because we were weather-delayed flying to Shetland we had a couple of days to fill. Some of that time was spent with a trip to see “The Kelpies”. Kelpies are mythical shape-shifting water horses inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. These Kelpies are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads between the Scottish towns of Falkirk and Grangemouth. The sculptures were designed by sculptor Andy Scott and were completed in October 2013. They stand next to the M9 motorway and form the eastern gateway of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which meets the River Carron here. Each head is 30 metres high and weighs 300 tonnes. They are positioned either side of…
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The fires of Up Helly Aa
At the end of January we went to Lerwick in Shetland to see the famous Viking fire festival called “Up Helly Aa”. There are several Up Helly Aa festivals in Shetland, and the Lerwick one is the largest. The festival involves various groups of Shetlanders called squads, and the main squad, the “Jarl Squad”, are dressed as Vikings. Their costumes are all made by them on the island, and are different every year. The festival culminates in a huge torchlit procession and the ritual burning of a replica Viking longship. Everyone else in the procession is in fancy dress, ranging from the sublime to the very ridiculous. On the morning…
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Tripping the Light Fantastic in Worcester.
One of the things that’s great about living in Worcester is the active arts scene. It sometimes manifests itself as “Light Nights” events, where there are various art installations all to do with light. Recently there was one called “Bridges of Light”. Whilst not as extensive as other “Light Nights” it was still fun. One installation used three very bright single colour projectors; red, green and blue, to throw multi-coloured shadows of folks in front of them. Some times people danced, so here’s a multi-coloured twirl. One installation inside a church consisted of a large rotating drum with cut-outs of stars and cut-out wording. Using my phone camera on “Long…
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Parys in the the Autumn
The post title is riffing on the famous visual trick: “Paris in the the Spring”, where “the” appears twice on separate lines, and many folks just read out “Paris in the Spring”. Anyway, this Parys is Parys Mountain on the lovely island of Anglesey in North Wales, and I was there last week. It’s an abandoned copper mine that was, at one point, the largest copper mine in the world. It’s an almost Martian landscape of colours and textures. One standout feature is the huge opencast pit, “The Great Opencast”, with the remnants of a wind-powered pump at the top. It’s a barren landscape in ochres and browns. The pump…