digitaldust

Finally I’ve managed to upload all of my Canada photos. I could have done a more full on edit, and I could have reproduced some of the HDR shots to make them a bit less intense. But otherwise they’re a nice set and give an idea of what our trip was like.

Queen of Camera by Hiroshi Araki. Not the photographer/porn Araki, another one. This one looks like he is fascinated by robots and anthropic machinery.She is very cute and has inspired me to start blogging again. I hope she works, Heather and I were discussing whether she would or not. I would like to think so, most of his stuff looks like it would. It wouldn’t be too hard to build a structure around the camera and keep it functional.

I also like to thing that she would be going to balls and fashionable soirees, trundling around the place on smooth, ball bearing feet. At these events her and her friends would flash and snap each other in elegant stroboscopic discussions.

This little guy… about my size. Ambled along the road with his mother, straight by my car window.

I thought I would upload the whole lot as a set because they sort of animate nicely. Nice motion blur on his little leggins.

Check it out on the flickr slide show with the speed set at about 2 secs.

tower bridge detail

New toys arrive by the minute. The DSLR has opened the floodgates. I got my new Lensbaby the other day and have started to get used to it.

It is a bit weird to begin with. I’m trying to apply all my large format learning - lens angle equals half the angle between the film plane and the focus plane, yadda, yadda… but it seems to be a bit more unpredictable than that. More of an intuitive experience. Which is actually a bit more enjoyable. Screw the maths I can just take lots of pictures with the DSLR and hope I get it right. Shoot from the hip!

Cue some Straus, dum dum dum dum dum dum

I found two great looking sites.

This site’s got two forums, one for pinhole, hence the f295, the other mostly about DIY, getting your hands dirty, alt process stuff.

www.f295.org

And this blog with lots of equipment hacks.

www.diyphotography.net

I’ve just poked through my make mag RSS feed and pulled out the photography hacks that caught my eye, things that might be useful and I would play with if I had the time.

Full on UV light box for alt processes. Puts my sunlamp and 2.5 inch printing out frames to shame. Which reminds me that I ought to get my cyanotyping materials out. Maybe this summer if the year I do my banners.

Step by step, pictorial instructions on the good ol’ holga 35mm conversion.

Two still life set ups. One a wee backdrop frame and the other a soft light tent.

Home brew motion sensitive camera setup.

And mounting a camera on your handlebars.

Wow! Amazing! Cool! I want one! Are the things that went immediately thought when mind when I saw this guys digital lomo conversion. The pictures look just like lomo shots, which goes to prove that it is the weirdness of the lens that does the job.

Seeing as I’ve got 3 broken lomos at home (I say I, but two of them are Heather’s), perhaps one could become a digital conversion jobbie. Though I have to say i’m rather jealous of sushicam’s R-D1, it’s a nice piece of kit and if I do get around to it I think that I might have to do it with a slightly cheaper removable lens camera. The price they go for I think I would rather invest in my 6×17 dreams.

I screwed up my site for a bit there by messing around with wordpress and having it do a naughty thing with my .htaccess file. Wordpress uses the .htaccess file to rewrite map human readable URLs to its query strings. That will teach me for trying stuff first thing in the morning before work and not thinking stuff through. All works again now thanks to James C.

And my new flickr gallery stuff is working now properly too, which was what I was trying to do. I think I might eventually make that the core blog bit and have a blog built around my flickr feed.