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A rainbow with no rain.
More years ago than I care to remember I bought a “Rainbow Disk”. It’s a 6-inch diameter circle of clear, flexible plastic. It’s a “hologram replica diffraction grating”, and was made by a long-defunct Californian company called “Fluid Forms Inc”. If you look through it highlights break up into spectral colours. If point light sources reflect off its surface the reflections are also of spectral colours. The packaging is very much of its time! Here are my five office ceiling lights taken by shooting through the disc. You can see the spectral colours as well as the normal colours. You get a more abstract look by shooting the reflected spectral…
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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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Always looking for odd collections
When I’m out and about I’m always looking for incongruous or odd collections of things, or things that make a visual joke. It does slow down a walk though, but that can be useful sometimes. One recent useful time was this Sicilian answer to IKEA flat-pack furniture. I saw it in the beautiful town of Modica, near a viewpoint. It was very hot, so slowing down was a good idea. I loved the use of the food waste “umido” bin to act as a support for the planks. I reckon it’s made a two-seat bench, so why not just sit on the food bin and the chair instead? At a…