What a scary concept!
Can you work out how I did it?
Category Archives: Photos
The Holly and the Ivy
From yesterday’s walk at Wandlebury.
You can’t see me, but I can see you!
I met this fellow on a walk today. Isn’t he magnificent?
He seemed very placid, but I was grateful that there was a fence between us, unlike the time when I met one of his cousins a few years back.
May I?
I’m not quite sure if I’m allowed to have this. But we could have a fun chasing game if you wanted to take it away from me….
It’s lovely once you’re in…
A rainy night at Gog Magog Hills farm shop – one of my favourite local haunts.
In a box in the loft I found my old Olympus OM30, which I purchased a little over a quarter of a century ago: an OK, but never great, camera. With it, however, were a couple of Olympus OM-series Zuiko lenses, which were pretty good for the price. And I was delighted to find that you can get adapters to connect them to a micro-4/3 body like my Panasonic Lumix GH2. You can buy the adapter from Olympus for £143 or from Fotodiox for £29. I chose the latter.
My first few experiments with the combination are here.
Misty-eyed
Had a delightful if decidedly foggy walk on and around the Torpel Way near Peterborough at the weekend.
Very pretty villages round here. Thought this was a rather impressive house, in Ufford:
More pictures on Flickr. Pleasing 8-mile route on Everytrail.
Product Placement
We love the Cawston Press drinks; Our local Waitrose sells several, but our favourite tipple is the Apple & Rhubarb juice. Actually, ‘tipple’ is probably the wrong word: we consume gallons of this stuff! Recommended.
However, the real reason for this photo is simply that I’m playing with a nice Voigtlander 35mm/f1.4 lens lent to me by John, which gives my Lumix a pleasingly quirky ancient-and-modern appearance.
It’s a nice challenge to go back to a fully-manual lens for a bit; rather more so, though, without the aid of a focus prism, and using an LCD viewfinder…
Panorama on the BBC
A view from the top of BBC Television Centre yesterday, cobbled together from a couple of quick iPhone snaps.
The Television Centre building itself, one of the earliest and still one of the largest purpose-built TV production buildings in the world, is being sold off as part of funding cuts, and its residents gradually dispersed to other parts of London, Salford and elsewhere over the next 18 months, so there won’t be many more opportunities for pictures like this, at least not with the BBC logo visible!
Seldom has such an ugly building inspired such fond memories. This is the home of the Blue Peter garden, for example. Much of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python was filmed here. And under that canopy on the bottom left you can find a Doctor Who telephone box…
Autumnal access
Autumn colours at Coton. And Tilly demonstrating that gates are intended for humans and not for spaniels.
(Another iPhone shot)
An Englishman’s Home
I tried out the HDR mode on the iPhone yesterday, deep in the walls of Orford Castle.
I’m still getting used to having a phone that can take such images easily. What was more shocking was that I also snapped quite a few shots with my (much more expensive and less convenient) micro-four-thirds camera, and when I got them home onto the big iMac, I had to look quite hard to tell the difference.
I did notice it when it came to making some adjustments, because the Lumix captures RAW images where the iPhone just does JPEG.
Come on Apple, prove that it’s a real photographer’s phone by offering RAW output too!…
The Artful Dodger
(That’s a small photography pun)
I’ve been having a quick play with an iOS photo-manipulation tool called Snapseed. It makes pretty effective use of the touch screen as a way to select and apply effects, and the effects are rather good. I discovered the app just before bedtime, so haven’t done much with it yet, but here’s a quick demo:
This photo of the basin in our bathroom was just taken with the (pretty crummy) camera in my iPad while I was sitting on… well, never mind where I was sitting, but I could instantly apply and adjust a couple of effects before uploading it to Flickr.
Snapseed is certainly not the first app to do this kind of thing, but it’s the best I’ve used so far. There are a few intro video clips on their website to show you how it works. There are few quicker ways of turning your photo into an arty photo, even if, like this, it wasn’t a particularly good photo to start with.
So is it just too easy now to flick the ‘artiness’ switch? it feels a bit like cheating. In the past, such effects would have taken long hours of practice and years of experience in the dark room. (Or sometimes they were just mistakes which looked good.). Is it still art without the struggle? Is a book still a masterpiece if it is written with a word processor rather than a quill? Why do we take photographs and try to make them look like non-photographs? Is it guilt over the fact they’re not paintings?
Mmmm. Too late. Bedtime.
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