Jonathan Gazeley

Gloucester countryside

Jonathan — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:09:11 +0000

This is the first roll of film I have had processed as slides. I don’t (yet) have the capability to process slides in my darkroom so I decided to shoot a couple of rolls and send them away to a lab to see if I liked the results.

Turns out I love the results. The colours are so bold and saturated, even if the resolution isn’t quite as good as negative film. My scanner hasn’t done these pictures justice – they just don’t compare to viewing them on a projector at home. Nonetheless, these are my favourites.

First there’s the obligatory shot of Troopers Hill. These pictures were taken on and around the hill in the late afternoon when the sunlight was golden.

Troopers Hill

Dandelion clock

Allotments

The rest of these pictures were taken on our recent weekend break to Gloucester. I already published some black & white pictures of Gloucester cathedral & docks, but here are some more that were shot in colour.

Gloucester docks

Rusty dock building

The rest were taken on a ramble in the countryside around the Hempsted area of Gloucester. As country walks go, it was a bit of disaster. We encountered flooding, were chased by cows and Hannah went to hospital after an accident involving a barbed wire fence. (She’s OK!)

St Swithun's church, Gloucester

Gloucester countryside

Clouds over Brandon Hill

Jonathan — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:12:16 +0000

This week’s Photo Challenge was stormy skies. Unfortunately the weather in Bristol has been grey and overcast – lots of cloud, but nothing dramatic. So I decided to resort to abusing the HDR technique to create this image of Cabot Tower on Brandon Hill.

It certainly isn’t realistic, but I don’t think that matters. I like the effect (in small doses). Do you?

Clouds over Brandon Hill

Gloucester cathedral & docks

Jonathan — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:48:17 +0000

Hannah and I spent the Bank Holiday weekend in Gloucester. It rained for most of the time, but I managed to take some reasonable interior shots of the cathedral.

These pictures were taken on Fuji Neopan 1600 film, using a Canon AE-1 Program camera with Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 and Canon FD 28mm f/2.8 lenses. I didn’t quite nail the exposure inside the cathedral (who’d have thought a 30-year-old light meter might be inaccurate?) and the thin negatives didn’t scan well. However, I hope they will print acceptably well in the darkroom.

Gloucester cathedral nave

Gloucester cathedral steps

Gloucester cathedral window

Gloucester cathedral nave

Gloucester cathedral Lady Chapel

Gloucester cathedral

Gloucester cathedral cloisters

The rain added a lot of atmosphere to the historic docks, so I walked around there after I had finished at the cathedral. As well as the 50mm and 28mm lenses I already mentioned, out here I also used a Canon FD 135mm f/3.5 for that little bit of extra reach.

Gloucester docks

Gloucester docks boat

Gloucester docks

Redscale

Jonathan — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:39:39 +0000

I recently saw an article about redscale photography online, and it inspired me to have a go myself. For those who don’t know, colour film is a sort of orangey-brown colour. Usually the light hits the front face of the film which is light-sensitive, and the orange base doesn’t play a part in the picture taking. With redscale, you tinker with the film and put it in the camera upside down, so the light has to pass through the orange base before it hits the light-sensitive side of the film. This gives all the pictures an orange cast, although depending on the outdoor light at the time, it can actually turn out anything from purple to orange.

There are lots of mixed opinions online, but given that my chosen film (Tudor Colour 200, which is actually manufactured by Fuji) has quite a dark base, I decided to give two stops of extra exposure. Perhaps in hindsight I would give three extra stops. In the most under-exposed areas, the pictures seem to have gone blue.

I exposed the 35mm film in a medium format camera, which explains the sprocket holes in the pictures.

But that’s enough about the technical side – let’s look at the artistic stuff. I’ve visited all of these locations many times before, since I work nearby. But in redscale the scene takes on a whole different feel: somehow nostalgic and autumnal.

Bristol dockside

Queen Square

Wills Memorial Building

Royal Fort Garden

Old Park Hill

Rodway Cloister

Chemistry Building

Cheerleaders

Jonathan — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:15:12 +0000

I don’t normally go around taking pictures of cheerleaders, but today the University of Bristol hosted an Olympic-themed street party to celebrate Universities Week and to showcase some sporting talent.

I thought the whole event was a bit lame – no real sports displays, just a few people playing a variety of sports messing about in the street. I think I saw football, lacrosse, frisbee, and cheerleading. The lighting was grey and overcast and I hardly took any pictures. The only one that came out close to OK was this one.

Cheerleader

I’m pleased with the timing of the shot, but the exposure is not right, the composition is lacking, the focus is not fully sharp, and due to the relatively dim sunlight the shutter dragged a bit and the cheerleader is blurred in motion.

Oh well, next time…

Homemade lens

Jonathan — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:21:53 +0000

I’ve often thought about making my own lenses, but unfortunately I’m so bad at making things I’ve always avoided it (apart from making a pinhole “lens”). But this week I was fortunate enough to be left with a broken 35mm slide projector, a Braun Novamat 515 AF-I, to be specific. It had a Braun Color-Paxon multicoated 85mm f/2.8 lens, with the usual screw mount for projectors. What’s the worst that can happen to a broken projector?

Braun Novamat 515 AF-I

Canon L lenses(that’s the pro series) have a red ring around them to distinguish them. Perhaps if you don’t look too closely you might think I’ve got an expensive lens here. Red ring? 85mm? Yep, must be expensive.

Braun Color-Paxon MC 85mm f/2.8

I dismantled the projector and removed the lens mount from inside it. “Removed” sounds so tidy… I had to use a hacksaw. Then I drilled out a Canon body cap, and glued the projector’s lens mount onto the body cap.

See, I told you I wasn’t good at making things. I believe that anything that can’t be made with a saw and a glue gun can’t be made at all

Canon EF mount for projector lenses

The lens simply screws into the barrel, and can easily be focused like any other manual-focus lens, although the steep thread means it’s hard to focus accurately.

I seem to have cocked up the focal-flange distance and the lens can’t quite focus to infinity. However, a quick zap with a file will allow the lens to slide further back into the barrel and will fix this. I’m not too bothered though – 85mm is traditionally used for headshots.

As the lens screws so far out of the barrel it has very good macro capability too.

Braun Color-Paxon MC 85mm f/2.8

Canon 600D with 85mm f/2.8

Crucially – how well does it work? Surprisingly well, actually. Unlike camera lenses, projector lenses usually don’t have a variable aperture. This lens is stuck at f/2.8 all the time. This gives narrow depth of fieldand can make it hard to get a sharp picture.

Perhaps more importantly, as this is a projector lens and not a camera lens it suffers from worse aberrations. Stopping down would probably help reduce them. Perhaps in the future I will make a set of interchangeable apertures out of black cardboard. I reckon this lens would look nice at f/5.6 or f/8.

The contrast of the lens is a little low, despite the multicoating. I think it would perform badly outdoors in sunlight, since it just isn’t designed for that. However, the front element is recessed in a sort of hood, which will help.

These photos have had the contrast boosted a little and the white balance fixed (I shot with auto white balance under ugly CFL lighting, combined with golden evening sunlight from the window).

In this photo of the mains plug, you can see how shallow the depth of field is, by how blurry the skirting board goes. But the lens is capable of sharp images – just look at the dots on the plug for my toothbrush.

Mains plug

In this picture of Mittens, the whiskers, eyebrows and hairs on her left ear are quite sharp. I could probably have focused more accurately given some time, but kittens never sit still for long. The black shapes in the background are cables hanging off my computer desk.

Mittens

And finally, this picture is of my jeans. Obviously when doing macro work, you need to stop down a lot to achieve decent depth of field, and that just isn’t possible with this lens. But it’s not too bad.

Jeans

Abstract colour

Jonathan — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:58:31 +0000

This week Paul set the Photo Challenge, and he chose “abstract colour“. The short version is that we have to take some crinkled foil and shine coloured light on it to create an abstract sea of colour.

These are my two favourite attempts at the Challenge. The first one used a blue light source with a star filter on the front of the camera. The second one used two light sources of different colours.

Blue foil

While it has nothing to do with the Challenge, I thought I’d also publish this picture here as it is quite abstract. It’s a super-close up of a 2p piece, using my macro bellows. This image has not been cropped or magnified – this is how it came out of the camera.

2p coin

Hannah’s new glasses

Jonathan — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:13:29 +0000

Last time Hannah got some new glasses, I photographed them on the table. This time, she was kind enough to let me take her picture wearing them.

Hannah

While the flashes were set up, I asked her to point the camera at me (it’s about time I had a new profile picture!). I wasn’t planning to have my photograph taken, so I hadn’t changed into anything nicer than an old T-shirt or bothered shaving.

Jonathan

Fake magazine covers

Jonathan — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:26:25 +0000

This week’s Photo Challenge says we have to take a picture and turn it into a fake magazine cover using one of the many online generators. I’ve had a few ideas but rain has stopped me from shooting most of the them. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

They look bad in the square thumbnails, so click and use the arrow keys to view them in their normal size.

Testing a zoom lens

Jonathan — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:41:27 +0000

When I bought my 450D I started out with the standard 18-55mm lens, and added a 70-300mm to cover most of the usual range of focal lengths. But when I’m on lunchtime photowalks I don’t want to carry two lenses, nor repeatedly change between them. I often miss shots that need a longer focal length than 55mm, so I’ve been sniffing round some longer “everyday” zooms, such as the Canon 18-135mm and 18-200mm. They are pretty expensive – today’s prices are £287 for the 18-135mm and £404 for the 18-200mm, although cheaper offerings are available from Tamron and Sigma.

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS

Then I remembered that I have a 28-80mm lens that came with a 35mm autofocus SLR (an EOS 300, actually) that will fit my 600D. It’s not as “zoomy” as I had might have liked, but as I’d never used it before I thought I’d give it a shot and see if I actually used the extra bit of reach.

Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II

As it turns out, at lunchtime today I quite often used the extra few millimetres. However I was extremely disappointed with the lens optics. Sharpness at all focal lengths and apertures is poor, there is more chromatic aberration than a prism, and at short focal lengths there is more barrel distortion than an actual barrel. I know it’s just a cheap kit lens from the 1990s but it is significantly worse than the present-day kit lenses.

This was just my gut reaction from taking pictures for one hour and casually inspecting them on the computer later on. I haven’t done any scientific tests so I decided to check a few figures online. You can quickly find that it has been slated by professional reviewers and casual users alike.

The Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens is very soft wide open – especially at 80mm. Stopping down at least 1 f-stop is required to get reasonable sharpness. Corners are soft at 28mm.

Even on a 1.3x FOVCF body, barrel distortion is obvious at 28mm until fading away at 40mm. Slight pincushion distortion is present from 60 to 80mm.

Some vignetting is exhibited with the aperture wide open. Color and saturation are not wonderful.

The Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens has a focal length range that falls within the normal, general purpose zoom range. I recommend, if possible, purchasing one of the lenses suggested on the Canon General Purpose Lens Recommendations page.

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-28-80mm-f-3.5-5.6-II-Lens-Review.aspx

In the meantime, I’ll stick with the 18-55mm kit lens, and save my pennies for one of the newer Canon zoom lenses. Below I’ve included my favourite few from today’s photowalk around Clifton. Don’t look too much at these photos for the faults I described above – I’ve mostly corrected the distortions, sharpened them, and where the colour fringes were too bad, made the pictures black & white! You also can’t get an accurate look at the low resolutions on this site, although they were clearly visible to me when inspecting the JPGs on my computer at “fit to screen” – not even zoomed in for pixel peeping!

Gate hinge

Clifton house

Front door and window

Church door

Victoria Rooms