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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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Boy meets gull
I recently popped down to the River Severn in Worcester to get some bird images. As it was a sunny day I took my OM System OM-1 and 100-400 lens. I knew I would need a fast shutter speed, and at 400mm the lens has got a maximum aperture of just f6.3, so it needs quite a bit of light to avoid having to use a very high ISO. I found a place on the west bank near the swan sanctuary and waited. The most active birds were the herring gulls, so I concentrated on them rather than the swans. The light was falling from directly behind me, so it…
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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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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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“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…
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Just how much lens do you need?
At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging. One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images. The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines. My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape. Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source. I recalled that I had some loose…
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A midweek miscellany
Today’s post does not have a single theme. It’s a mixture of images, each of which has its own story to tell, each of which shows an area of my photographic interest. Here’s a shot from a town’s bonfire night celebrations last year. They had fire-eaters as a diversion before the main fireworks event. It was hard to get into a good place to have a clear view of the fire-eater, and also hard to choose the right moment to press the shutter. I was pleased with the flame on this one. A nice tight crop to the corner and editing out some background distractions made the composition work better.…
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Helios – and a sunflower
A few weeks ago we went to to Coventry to see the Helios art installation. To quote from the National Trust’s website, “Helios, a seven-metre sculpture of the Sun, has been created by artist, Luke Jerram. It’s been made from 400,000 photographs of the Sun’s surface and observations by NASA to replicate swirling solar winds and sunspots.” This installation was outside in the garden of Charterhouse, Coventry, and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with it. I used the wide-angle lens on my Pixel phone to get a good view of the differences between those who chose the sun and those who chose the shade. There’s a bit…