Jonathan's blog

I quite enjoy macro photography. When I used to use my Fuji S9600 as my main camera, it had a super macro mode, which allowed me to focus on objects as close as 1cm. That was pretty handy for macro shots and the results were generally good – such as this disgusting pupa.

Since swapping the S9600 for a Canon EOS 450D DSLR, I don’t have a macro facility. The best I could get was my Tamron 70-300mm telephoto zoom lens which allowed 1:2 magnification at full zoom. But the subject had to be at least 1.5m from the camera and image quality wasn’t great, so it wasn’t really a solution.

I bought a set of EF mount macro extension tubes from eBay. These sort of replicated the behaviour of the S9600, by allowing the camera to focus closer. By spacing the lens further from the camera body, it’s possible to focus down to just a few millimetres away from the end of the lens, so tiny objects can fill the frame.

However, as EF lenses are electronically controlled, you lose autofocus and the ability to shoot with the aperture anything other than wide open. Naturally, the depth of field is then very shallow. Sometimes it works, like in this photo of a pound coin, but it’s quite frustrating not being able to stop down.

The other disadvantage of “cheating” at macro by focusing closer is that it’s hard to get light onto your subject, because the snout of the lens casts a shadow. When I use my macro LED ring flash, some of the objects I photograph have to be so close to the end of the camera that they are within the ring flash and hence get no light.

So I decided the only real solution would be to buy a proper macro lens with 1:1 magnification. I considered the Canon 60mm macro as the cheapest entry-level macro lens, but unfortunately it’s EF-S mount and can’t be used on 35mm SLRs, such as my EOS 300. If I’m going to shell out for a lens, I want it to work on all my cameras.

The next lens up in Canon’s range is the 100mm macro, which is EF mount, but is unfortunately quite a bit more expensive. I watched a few second hand lenses on eBay but the auctions always closed for prices significantly higher than I was willing to pay – especially as macro photography is only an occasional treat for me.

The two main rivals of the Canon 100mm are the Tamron 90mm and the Sigma 105mm. The Sigmas are rarer but there were plenty of Tamrons on eBay. The first few auctions for the 90mm finished at quite high prices but eventually I found one ending at an awkward time and won the auction for a bargain price. The lens is second hand but very new; mint condition and boxed in all original packaging.

The main disadvantage of the Tamron compared against the Canon is that the Canon has an ultrasonic autofocus motor, and full-time-manual focussing. As nice as those things are, they weren’t worth an extra £150 to me. The Tamron lens flips between manual and autofocus by sliding the whole focus ring back and forth, which is much nicer than fumbling for a small switch on the side of the lens barrel.

The Tamron 90mm feels solid compared with some of my other lenses – most of them budget ones. It’s reassuringly heavy and feels like an expensive lens. The autofocus is quite slow and quite loud, but this doesn’t matter. When I’m composing a macro scene, I can take all the time I like.

The main gripe is that the lens barrel extends by about two inches when focussing. You have to be careful not to bump into your subject if you are working at close range.

I’ve only owned the lens for a few hours, but I can see it’s a fantastic lens. The images are very sharp and almost completely free from any aberration. When I have some time to experiment with some small subjects, I’ll see what I can come up with. But for the time being, here’s a picture of a piece of Velcro.

Fedora 13 (“Goddard”) was released today.

I wouldn’t normally go upgrading my OS to the latest on the day of release, but frankly anyone who runs Fedora is an early adopter by definition.

I started by upgrading two unimportant Fedora 12 virtual machines at work using preupgrade. One went smoothly but the other failed because the /boot partition was too full. I cleared out all old kernels and tried again, with success. Each upgrade took less than an hour, I think, but I wasn’t really paying attention.

After brief testing to make sure all the important stuff had upgraded properly, I upgraded my work desktop PC, my home PC and my laptop too. They were all on Fedora 12 and the upgrades went without a hitch. I’m very impressed.

Massive thanks and kudos are due to the Fedora team for working so hard to get this release out and for providing such an easy upgrade path. I look forward to getting stuck into the new features of this release in time.

My next task is to upgrade my home server, which is currently running Fedora 11. Updates for Fedora (N-2) are only available for one month after the release of Fedora N, so time is now of the essence if I wish to keep my server secure. Unfortunately the reason I’m still on 11 is because the upgrade to 12 failed and I wasn’t able to get it working. I will probably take this opportunity to do a complete wipe and reinstall (scary!). Then I can also migrate from i386 architecture to x86_64.

Watch this space!

As much as I like fair weather, I’m not nearly so keen on fair weather cyclists.

Fair weather cyclists are those who suddenly take to two wheels only when the sun is out. Typically I find them to be poor cyclists, both in their control of the bicycle (e.g. going in a straight line) and their road sense and observation skills.

At all times of year, a city commute is perilous, but never more so than during the Summer months. In the warmer season, my journey to work is continually hampered by other cyclists who cycle too slowly, ride on the wrong side, ride inconsiderately or unobservantly, stop and start without warning, hop on and off kerbs without looking and make many of the other mistakes that would be obvious to any semi-experienced urban cyclist.

I’ve had quite a few near misses and close encounters with foolish cyclists so far this year.

I can’t see testing and licences ever being issued for cyclists so not much can be done about it except hope they meet a sticky end with another major category of unsafe road user – a taxi driver.

I was just burning a data DVD in Brasero, and the following dialogue popped up.

Brasero screenshot

Ah, I get it. It’s negative because the data is going out of the computer and onto the DVD. Still not sure why it thinks I’ve got 2 billion megabytes though…

On Saturday 15^th May (tomorrow) this blog (as well as my photo blog and the Photo Challenge) will be going down for a while in the afternoon and evening.

I host with Ridgeon Network, owned by my mate Chris. Tomorrow some of the servers are being relocated to a new rack and so will be temporarily offline.

I’ll post again when we’re back online

Hana went to a car boot sale recently. I half-jokingly asked her to pick up anything photographic if it was cheap, hoping to sell it on eBay for a few quid (and maybe even use it).

Girl done good – she found a early 1960s Braun Paxette Electromatic II for not many pounds. The seller assured her it was fully working, so she bought it.

Braun Paxette Electromatic II

The camera

For those that aren’t familiar with the Paxette series of cameras (I had never even heard of them until this week!) the Paxette Electromatic II has a fixed shutter speed of 1/40s and a variable aperture between f/2.8 and f/22.

It has a crude light meter which shows a red marker in the viewfinder if the light is insufficient and a green marker if there’s enough illumination. I think it’s broken on mine, because it always shows red. I don’t mind though, because it almost feels like cheating to use any electronic or automatic features on a camera like this. I will use the sunny 16 rule to help me expose the photos properly.

Unfortunately it seems quite hard to find much information about it on the Internet. Almost all information refers to the Paxette Electromatic I which seems to be a very similar camera, except with fixed focus. You can tell the I and the II apart because the I has striped ridges around the barrel of its lens while the II has a slanted chrome ring, which also twists for focussing.

Mending it

All day I was hopping with excitement until I got my hands on it. Unfortunately the shutter mechanism seemed to be jammed. Unlike many modern cameras, the shutter is composed of 5 or 6 metal leaves that open in the same way as the aperture leaves. I couldn’t find any service manuals online (without paying – bah) and my heart sank. Anyone who knows me will tell you I have as much dexterity and patience as I have oestrogen. But I thought “what’s the worst that can happen?” and went to fetch my precision screwdrivers.

I wasn’t able to get into the back of the camera because it was very well put together, to say the least. But it didn’t take too much work to get the various elements of the lens out, and I poked the shutter leaves with a tiny screwdriver and suddenly they pinged into place. Apparently they had simply seized up from lack of use. I reassembled the lens in reverse order.

Results

I shot a roll of Ilford Delta 100 black & white film in it, and this evening I developed the film. The results are quite nice. Most of the outdoor shots are overexposed, so I guess everyone else’s definition of “Slight overcast” is different from mine. I’ll know for next time – shoot one stop slower.

A greater shortcoming of this particular set of photos is the focus. The camera has a viewfinder so you don’t get to see the results of your focussing. The focus ring has numbers printed on it – the distance to your subject in feet or metres. I just guessed (or paced) how far it was in each case. Apparently the focus ring is not at all accurate, so most of the portraits and other close-ups are quite badly out of focus. The landscapes and architecture (effectively at ∞) are in pretty good focus.

As I mentioned above, the shutter has a fixed speed of 1/40s. This is a pretty slow shutter speed, and through most of my film there is a fairly large amount of camera shake. Obviously I could use a tripod or monopod to steady the camera, but there is no self timer. It looks like there might be a small hole for a cable release, but it’s filled with half a century’s worth of fluff.

I’ve published all the best photos from this roll of film on my photo blog.

Other thoughts

Loading film into this camera is an absolute pain. It doesn’t hook into the spool very strongly and kept pinging off as I tried to wind the film onto it. Eventually I managed, and closed the back of the camera. I shot about half a dozen frames and then the film apparently became unhooked again. No idea how – you’d think the film being wrapped around the spool several times would be enough. So I couldn’t wind it on, but I couldn’t wind it back either, because it had got snagged somehow and rewinding it tore the sprocket holes out of the film. I had to open the back, ruin all the photos I’d taken so far, cut the spoiled film off, snip the corner off to make a new leader, and reload the film. This time it stuck. Next time I will probably stick it to the spool with a square of sellotape.

Winding the film on doesn’t always advance it by the same amount. Some of my frames were touching, instead of leaving a few millimetres between frames. Not the end of the world – just makes it a bit annoying to scan because my filmstrip holder has a plastic frame round the edge of each picture.

In future I will be using a tripod with this camera, because the 1/40s shutter speed is just too slow for the focal length of the lens. I also noticed by looking at the inside of the shutter (without film) that you can take long exposures by holding the shutter release.

I will calibrate the focus (or at least figure out by how much it’s out). This should be quite straightforward, simply by opening the back of the camera and holding some tracing paper where the film would be. I can place a subject precisely 5m away from the camera (for example) and then see what the focus ring needs to be set to in order to achieve focus at that range. It might even be possible to adjust the alignment of the focus ring.

This review might sound negative. But it’s anything but! If I want an accurate camera with perfect focus and exposure that’s right every time, I can using my DSLR. Which is boring. This camera is fun, and I will be using it again!

Seems like O2 is down this evening. It must be a fairly widespread problem since loads of people have posted about it on Facebook and Twitter.

I searched for information online but there was nothing on O2′s website, which is pretty poor.

Some forums discussed the outage, although there were no facts – only speculation that building work at a data centre had damaged the power supply to the building.

Anyway, I don’t care. I don’t like being phoned, and I also have a Vodafone handset if I particularly feel like calling someone.

As for data service to my iPhone, this is being supplied by my WLAN deathnet. My ADSL is almost as fast as a 3G connection(!)

Perhaps the service I will miss most is SMS – although most of the people I care about will know that I’m also contactable by other text-based protocols.

That said, I’m off to sleep now and will not be contactable by any means for several hours. Goodnight!

Back in September 2009, I was given a 35mm SLR camera – a Canon AE-1 Program. I loved it, it was fantastic to use, and I wrote a blog post about the possibility of upgrading to a DSLR.

In March 2010, temptation got the better of me and I bought a Canon EOS 450D. My main concerns beforehand was the loss of the large LCD viewfinder of my Fuji S9600, and in particular, not being able to flip it out for awkward shots, and not being able to see useful information about the camera settings in the eyepiece.

Well I needn’t have worried – the 450D is of course more advanced than my AE-1 and has a small LCD under the optical viewfinder for that information. I hadn’t realised until I tried it out in the shop.

The issue of having to put my eye up to the camera still hasn’t been addressed, but it hasn’t been a problem. I just find myself lying on my belly more, or simply pressing the button and guessing about the composition.

In the two months that I’ve owned the 450D, I’ve taken over 2,000 photos^[1] and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of them. I feel more in control of the photos, and I can’t recommend an SLR strongly enough to anyone who is serious about photography.

I now have three EF mount lenses for this camera. Unfortunately they don’t fit the AE-1 (which uses the FD mount) but this very evening I bought a Canon EOS 300, which is a consumer-level 35mm SLR with an EF mount. You can pick up 35mm camera bodies on eBay for a fiver so I thought it might be nice to make even better use of my lenses.

If you’re actually interested in any of my camera facts and figures, you might like to look at my page of cameras. If you’re more interested in the pictures themselves, then why not browse my photo blog.

[1] That’s about 1.4 each hour I’ve owned the camera

As posted on my photo blog yesterday, I faked a tilt-shift miniature model of the A4 in the Avon Gorge.

I’d never tried it before, so I followed this guide on how to do it. It was pretty straight forward, but I’ve recreated the steps here, with my own modifications.

Step 0: Take a photo

Start off by taking a photo to make into a fake miniature. The best photos are taken looking down on your subject, as a human observer would see a model on a table, for example. Include subjects such as people or cars to give a sense of “scale”.

Strong shadows also lend themselves to the effect, as you may well look at a model railway using a single desk lamp, for example.

Step 1: Adjust colours

Most models have more vivid colours than real life, due to their glossy paint. There are several ways you could achieve this.

• Go to Layer > Colors > Curves. Click at about x: 130 y: 210. Move the curve around until you get what you are looking for.
• Or, go to Colors > Auto > Color Enhance. This is the lazy man’s way of boosting the saturation.

You might also like to enhance the contrast to make the shadows stronger.

Step 2: Set gradient mask

Open the image and toggle the switch mask on. There are three ways to do this:

• Click the dotted box in the bottom left had corner of the open image, or
• Got to Select > Toggle Quick Mask, or
• Press Shift+Q.

The image will now be pink. Click on the Gradient tool. It looks like a square with a grey gradient applied to it. Set the gradient shape to Bi-linear.

Step 3: Apply mask

Pick your focal point. Decide what areas of the image you would like to be in or out of focus. Click in the center of the area you would like to be in focus and drag a line perpendicular to the direction you want to be masked, i.e. dragging the line from the “in focus” region to the “out of focus” region.

Play around with the centre, size, and angle of the mask until you get what you are looking for. Toggle the switch mask off.

Step 4: Apply blur

GIMP doesn’t have Lens Blur like Photoshop (although it can be installed). We have to make do with Gaussian Blur. Go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur. In the Gaussian Blur window click on Preview and maximize the window so that you can see what you are doing.

Play with the blur radius until it looks right. A Blur radius between 5.0 and 10.0 seems to work most of the time, although I found a radius of 50.0 was needed to achieve a decent effect in my image. It depends on the resolution of your camera.

When you have the blur right, delete the quick mask by going to Select > All.