#lens-artists — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #lens-artists, aggregated by home.social.
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Lens-Artists Challenge #377: Holiday Fun
We’ve got the builders in, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make an entry for the Lens-Artists Challenge this week. Fortunately, I found myself in the nearby town of Agueda on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon and found the perfect subject for the Lens-Artists Challenge. Kind of. This week it’s Ann-Christine’s (Leya from To See a World in a Grain of Sand …) to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Holiday Fun‘. ‘The Holiday Season is approaching’, she says. ‘This week we invite you to share some Holiday memories with us!’
Although Christmas is approaching, Ann-Christine didn’t actually specify which holiday. In fact, she writes: ‘Pick any fun and/or happy memories from holidays you enjoyed – your own or others´, at home or abroad.’ Well, I thought instantly of our trip to the Maldives, but I’ve posted far too many from there already. So here’s a quick shot I grabbed of Santa’s giant ass in Agueda. Apparently, this is the biggest Santa in the world (to date), and although I was only able to grab it from behind (no pun intended), it’s worth sharing. Happy Holiday Fun!
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#agueda2 #ass2 #challenge #holidayfun2 #lensartists #santa2 #tongueincheek2 #lensArtists
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Lens Artists, #367: Everyone Should See This
I’ve been a bit lax with the Lens-Artists Challenge just lately. A couple of weeks ago Egídio chose ‘Longing’ as the subject, but the only thing I mostly long for is our beach down in Meco, and I’d covered that the week before. Then it was Tina’s turn to host the Challenge. ‘Country Mouse, City Mouse’ was certainly an interesting subject, and I went to a few of my favourite spots to make some images. Sadly, though, my films have only just got back from the lab, so this entry is still very much a ‘work in progress’.
Last week, it was our guest host Joanne, from Joanne Mason Photography, to host the Challenge, and her fascinating theme for the week was, ‘Everyone Should See This‘. I had this entry all ready to go, but then I had a kidney stone (just a tiny one, mind), and my whole plan went out the window. Now, though, I think I’m back in better health, so it’s time to catch up with the Lens-Artists Challenge.
‘Often times we see something that inspires us’, says Joanne. ‘We think – “Oh! I wish others could see this!” … I think all of us have this experience now and again.’ Joanne’s Challenge was to ‘share some photographs of things/people/places that are inspiring and that you want to share. Tell us the circumstances of your photograph and why you want everyone to see it.’ My take on this was less, ‘everyone should see this’, and more, everyone should see the world like this. Joanne and others have presented some wonderful images of places they have been, but I thought it would be nice if we look at the world with a slightly different perspective.
Nowadays, digital cameras — or even smartphones — demand the highest resolution, be this 20, 30, or even 50MP. But what if all you had to play with was 0.014MP and four shades of grey? The Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy camera cartridge is a device that everyone should have. Each cartridge can hold 30 funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known), and each funtograph is roughly 128×112 pixels. To download funtographs from the Gameboy, you’ll need a secondary device to save the images to a computer, and a photo editor to make them a decent size for sharing. But after all that effort, you’ll have an image that, yes, everyone should see.
This first image is a landscape. It’s a view of the trees in the woods that we walk through to get to the beach down in Meco.
The next two images are abstracts. The circular patterns are actually the ends of logs cut for firewood during the winter, and the square abstract is the pattern on a carpet. But you can see how even with the mundane, the Game boy gives the world a different perspective.
The funtograph below is one of my favourite, a Hiroshi Sugimoto-like minimal image of the beach, the sea, and the sky. There are people on the beach, but you wouldn’t know it.
Finally, these last couple of funtographs are of the paragliders on the Praia das Bicas. I presented a few more of these in a Lens-Artists Challenge about sports a few weeks ago, but when viewed through the Gameboy, you see the paragliders in a whole new light.
Occasionally, you might need to squint a little to identify the subject of a Gameboy funtograph (in this case a palm tree blowing in the wind), but there’s no mistaking that through the lens of the Gameboy you’ll look at the world in a whole new way (and don’t get me started on Gameboy trichromes and infrared).
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#2Bit #Challenge #Funtography #Gameboy #GameboyCamera #GameboyPocket #LensArtists #Nintendo #PixelArt #Retro #Summerinmeco
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Lens-Artists Challenge #355: Looking Back to Challenge #42 – Creativity
It’s Leya’s turn to host the Challenge this week, and it’s a little different. In a post on her blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand …, Leya introduces the first ‘Looking Back’ Challenge, Creativity. ‘This week we are starting to look back …’ says Leya. ‘one of us in the LAPC – team will repeat a PREVIOUSLY USED subject for the week [and] create a new post on the same subject’.
The Challenge Leya chose was #42 from 2019, ‘Creativity‘. In that post she wrote that Creativity ‘… is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something new’. Initially, this gave me some pause. One of the reasons I originally got into photography, way back in the 1980s, was that my drawing skills were pretty awful. And they’ve not improved since then. I considered posting about some of the wonderfully creative street art in Portugal, or the designs on the bows of the tourist boats on the canals of Aveiro, but sadly there’s little chance of spending much time there this week.
And then I remembered. For many years I was happy to produce images that were nicely exposed, in perfect (or near perfect) focus, and pleasing to look at. But then I became a little jaded with that and sought to embrace the errors and imperfections. In short, I wanted the create uncertainty in my images. I started using film again and bought a film camera, and then another, and another, until by now I have quite a collection. None of these cameras were perfect, they always had some flaws (which also made them quite cheap), but I took great pleasure in getting around these flaws to produce images from them once again. Imagine, some of these cameras might have laid neglected in drawers or cupboards for decades before they came into my possession and breathed new life into them.
A lot of these cameras are no longer light tight. I could do something about this, replacing light seals, or repairing the broken camera bodies, but instead I prefer to enjoy these imperfections. I’ve recently become fascinated with the Agfa Rapid system, which uses 35mm film but rolled into little canisters and not cartridges, like Instamatic film, or cassettes, like 35mm. There are a lot of variables with Rapid canisters where light leaks might be introduced, and I seem to have found them all.
The featured image was actually taken from a panorama of the beach at Mira. It features one of my favourite creative endeavours, redscaling film (exposing film backwards), and of course there inevitable light leaks.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Abstract #Art #Challenge #Creativity #LensArtists #LookingBack #PhotographyLightLeaks #42 #LensArtists
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Lens-Artist Challenge #354: Reflections
It’s Anne’s turn, from Slow Shutter Speed, to host the Challenge this week, and I couldn’t be more excited. Her theme is, ‘Reflections‘, and as soon as I saw this, I knew instantly what I was going to do. Not the subject, necessarily, but certainly the technique. It was time to break out the Vortoscope.
Back in the early twentieth century, a group of British artists and poets formed the Vorticist movement, an offshoot of cubism, which ‘rejected landscapes and nudes in favour of a geometric style that was much more abstract‘. Published by writer and artist Wyndam Lewis in 1914, a manifesto pamphlet called ‘Blast‘ declared, ‘Long live the Vortex! Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town! [London] We stand for the Reality of the Present — not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past. We want to leave Nature and Men alone’.
Self portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn (Wikimedia)The manifestos in Blast carried on like that for another 200 or so pages, and from the quote above, I’m not even sure what ‘sacripant’ means. From what I can tell, it’s from the French meaning, scoundrel, or rogue, so I imagine the Vorticists were just trying to distance themselves from a ‘scandalous’ past. Anyhow, around 1915, the American photographer and recent émigrée to London, Alvin Langdon Coburn, met one of the Vorticists, poet Ezra Pound, and became involved in the movement.
Over a period of just one month, Coburn produced a series of portraits and photographs which featured overlapping and abstract images, and to create these he made a device that Ezra Pound called a Vortoscope, and the photographs it produces Vortographs. A triangle of mirrors like a kaleidoscope, when viewed through the camera the subject was fractured and reflected within it. The Vortoscope I made was a triangle of mirrors 3cm wide and 15cm in length. On reflection (pun definitely intended) I should have made each edge a little wider, though the Vortoscope works fine.
In use, the Vortoscope is simply held over the lens of the camera and the image in the viewfinder, or on the LED screen, is broken up and presented as a kind of abstract. A lot actually depends on the subject, and I’m not convinced that I’ve ever found the right subject/Vortoscope combination. The original Vortoscope was always awkward to hold in front of the lens, so I’ve mounted it semi-permanently to a UV filter mount (with the filter removed), which hopefully will make use of the Vortoscope a little bit easier. The images were taken with a Canon Powershot G12, and mounted on a filter attachment.
I took one of my regular walks around the block, but this time I took a different route and I tried to make vortographs of man-made objects; telephone and electricity poles, doors and gates, and the patterns of the porcelain tiles that cover a lot of the houses in Portugal.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Abstract #Art #Challenge #Cubism #Cubist #LensArtists #PhotographyModernArt #Reflections #Surrealism #Vintage #Vortism #Vortograph #Vortoscope #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #349: The First Thing I thought Of …
This week Tina from Travels and Trifles is hosting the Challenge, and her theme is, ‘The First Thing I thought Of …‘. ‘This week I thought perhaps some humor might … be in order, says Tina. ‘Sometimes our sense of humor kicks in before we press the shutter button, other times a perfectly serious image can be made humorous after the fact’. Humour? In my photography? That’s a tall order, I thought.
I hardly ever photograph people, or animals, from which a lot of humour is derived, and instead I take fun from making images deliberately ‘wrong’, either by using a camera that produces an image that is outwith the normal ideas of what a photo should be, or just taking a perfectly good digital image and corrupting the data in some way. But then I got thinking about what I was doing just over a decade ago, when I was learning about photo editors and whatnot, and also some of the situations I came across when we first came to Portugal. And suddenly, I found that I had a few images that might be perfect for this week’s Challenge.
This first image is from a day out in Aveiro. At the time, some workers from the local council were doing some maintenance on the walls of the canal, and their idea of health and safety was unusual, to say the least.
Another thing that struck me as unusual was some people’s propensity to take a short cut to the train.
Another thing that we used to do quite often, until I fell down a hole, after which my Better Half flat out refused to go again in case I repeated this misfortune, was go the the annual hill climb in Caramulo. Cars and motorcycles would race up a hill, and the fastest driver to complete the time trial was the winner. Sometimes the motorbikes didn’t behave themselves.
Several years ago, the village of Oiã was awarded the status of Town, and we were honoured to have the then President of Portugal, Cavaco Silva, come to the town to officiate the ceremony and unveil a plaque. Back in those days, the security didn’t really stop the people from approaching the President, so grabbing some real close-up images of the President wasn’t a problem. Of course, not everyone treated the ceremony with the reverence that it deserved.
‘Back in the day’, I spent a fair bit of time trying how to use PhotoShop, and here are some of my attempts at multiple exposures. I really enjoyed doing these, and it reminded me of long-forgotten skills. I’m not sure if I could do this today.
The final image in this post, and the featured image, was taken at the annual Tall Boats festival in Ilhavo, near Aveiro. The brass band had just finished playing and were marching from the parade ground when the last musician just turned around and looked back. Fortunately, I was just taking a photo of the row of uniformed musicians as they passed by.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Challenge #Humour #LensArtists #PhotoShop #TheFirstThingIThought #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #348: Serenity
This week Egídio from Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes is hosting the Challenge, and his theme is, ‘Serenity‘. ‘Last week, Ritva asked us to break the rules,’ says Egídio. ‘This week, I’m challenging you to find serenity in your photos.’ Egídio continues, ‘Serenity alleviates today’s problems for me,’ and he continues to give several lovely examples of photographs that bring him serenity.
For me, serenity is simply achieved by taking photographs. I like nothing better than taking a train to Aveiro, or a ‘walk around the block,’ to relax me and bring some peacefulness to my thoughts. I derive an extra bit of pleasure by trying something new, and these few images are a perfect example of that. A few days ago, I came across a blog post from Dave’s Place about his close-up experiments with a Holga film camera and a +4 close-up filter.
Dave achieved some really nice results with the close-up filter taped onto the Holga lens, the lens set to infinity and the camera held at the focal distance of the close-up filter from the subject, which for a +4 diopter filter is about 25cm. Now, I have a Holga lens for my micro four-thirds mirrorless cameras, and I wondered if such an arrangement would work with the Olympus Pen E-PL2 and the plastic Holga lens I picked up recently.
I had this nagging idea that somewhere I actually had a close-up filter, and sure enough tucked away in one of my boxes was an old Jessops +4 close-up filter. Also in the box was a 52-58mm step-up ring, which luckily fitted snugly onto the front of the Holga lens. After a bit of experimentation I realised that rather than setting the lens to infinity, if I set the Holga lens to the portrait setting, the closest focal distance on the plastic lens, and held it about 15cm from the subject, I got a nice close-up result. It wasn’t perfect, and it was a bit finicky seeing if the subject was in focus on the LCD screen of the camera, but it worked.
I took the Holga/close-up filter combination out for a ‘walk around the block’ in the woods and fields behind our house, which at the moment are filled with spring flowers. The cloudy weather (and thunderstorms) of the morning had mostly cleared away, even though it was still quite windy, but it was great for some close-up photography. And it worked a treat!
I had the camera set to aperture priority mode, and manually set the ISO depending on the sunny or cloudy conditions. On reflection, I probably should have left the ISO on auto mode. As mentioned it was sometimes difficult to see if the subject was in focus on the LCD screen but the results were fabulous. The Holga lens has a fixed aperture of f8, but it also has these circles around the aperture, which I think are intended to give it that lo-fi ‘look’. In the close up images, this resulted in some fabulous swirly bokeh, and with the vignetting gave some images that I really loved. Serenity achieved.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Challenge #Closeup #Digital #Holga #LensArtists #LoFi #Microfourthirds #Plastic #Serenity #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #347: Break The Rules!
Due to the inclement weather that has been plaguing Portugal for what seems like forever, I wasn’t able to take part in last week’s ‘Cinematic’ Challenge. (Not yet, that is. I will submit an entry once we get to the location that I had in mind.) This week, though, I was determined to take part, no matter what. It’s Ritva’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Breaking The Rules‘. Well, how could I possibly resist that? ‘We work so hard to learn the photography rules,’ says Ritva, ‘but now it is time to BREAK them!!’ Then Ritva raises a salient point, ‘The problem is, that in order to break a rule, you must know that there is a rule in the first place!’
And that’s actually what stymied me. I’ve been making photographs for a long time. Perfectly exposed (mostly), well focused, and (most of the time, I hope) nicely composed, that I’ve never really thought about the rules of photography that I was taught back in the day. It’s only in the past few years, with my renewed interest in film photography, that I’ve consciously tried to make something out of the ordinary with both film and digital media: Intentional Camera Movement (ICM), light leaks, redscaling film, that sort of thing. But even then, I still kind of follow the rules.
Looking at these ICM images, for example. Even though the subject is blurred, I’ve still unconsciously tried to place the boundary between the grass and the trees about one-third up from the bottom of the frame. Dammit! So my idea this week was to take a ‘walk around the block’ and make some ICM images using a Canon PowerShot G12 digital camera fitted with an Urth ND64 (6-stop) neutral density filter.
I’m not really sure if these are ‘rule breakers’, because I’m not really sure what the rules are any more. But I hope that you will like them. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Artistic #Blur #Challenge #Creative #Effect #Exposure #ICM #IntentionalCameraMovement #LensArtists #Motion #BreakTheRules #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #342: It’s a Wild Life!
This week Egídio from Through Brazilian Eyes is hosting the Challenge, and his theme is, ‘It’s a Wild Life‘. ‘What is wild?’ Egídio asks. The dictionary says it is, ‘living in a state of nature, untamed, uncivilized, not inhabited or cultivated, uncontrolled, unruly,’ and Egídio asks the question, ‘I am curious about what you consider wild. Is it a place, a person, wildlife, wildflowers, or something else?’
Living in the countryside we get a lot of wildlife, cranes nesting on electricity pylons, eagles living in the nearby woods, but we only ever see them from afar. So I’m left with the smaller animals and insects that dominate the local woodlands, and occasionally even land in our garden: flies, bees, reptiles, and so forth.
We used to have some large cypress trees in the garden, and occasionally we would get spiders making a web in the spaces between two trees. Here the spider is in the middle of preparing their lunch.
This dragonfly probably accidentally flew into the shade in our garden. Fortunately we were able to encourage it back into the sunshine, where it perked up and soon flew off.
The neighbours have a small orchard, and a few years ago it was completely overgrown. I would take my camera out to photograph the flowers and insects in the spring, and this bee was feeding from a flower. Taken with a zoom lens, I love this image.
After the rain one day, I came across this wasp on a rosebush in the garden. It was still quite cold, and a little sluggish. Just as well, I’m very wary of wasps.
In the woods behind our house, my photos are not limited to the trees. This fly was caught from a really low angle, and the lovely colour in the background is the clear blue sky.
We get a lot of small lizards everywhere in Portugal, and as often as not they’ll be spotted basking in the sun or running away when approached. This one, though, was caught in the shade on the wall of our office. It probably didn’t hang around for long, though. Just long enough for me to grab a portrait.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Bug #Challenge #Closeup #Dragonfly #Insect #LensArtists #Lizard #Macro #Nature #Reptile #Wildlife #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge # 340: Portraits
This may sound like an invention, but it’s not. Last Saturday, after lunch, I was quietly relaxing and my thoughts turned to the possible subject of the next Lens-Artists Challenge, which this week is being hosted by Ritva. As usual, I was wondering what mischief I could have with the subject, and I thought, ‘well, just so long as it’s not portraits, I’ll be fine.’
A couple of hours later, I checked my WordPress reader and noticed that Ritva had posted her theme for the week, and my heart sank. Portraits. ‘This week, you have the opportunity to capture the essence and personality of your subjects’, says Ritva. ‘I’m not looking for professional results, but I hope you have fun trying to get the portrait to tell a story.’ Well that’s alright then, because I’m just not good with people. Check out my photos and you’ll be hard pressed to find people in them, well not recognisable anyhow, so I was feeling a bit stuck.
Then I remembered that ‘back in the day’ I used to have great a great time travelling around the region going to the annual village festivals and photographing the bands who performed there. These bands would play a genre of music known as pimba, which is best described as an upbeat form of folk music, often with lewd lyrics, though much of that is lost on me.
The bands mostly comprise of two or more lead singers with accompanying musicians and dancers, and often the performances are hugely professional, with portable stages built into lorries and excellent light shows. Mostly the villages feature local bands, but occasionally national pimba stars like Quim Barreiros would turn up. Nowadays, I tend not to go to the festivals, but a few years ago I was a regular visitor, and it was great practise for concert photography.
I also used to cover a local heavy metal festival, Vagos Open Air (latterly Vagos Metalfest) for a Canadian heavy metal website, Metal Rules. These used to be excellent festivals, though it was suspended for a couple of years during the Pandemic and is only just getting back on its feet again. Nowadays I don’t get to the Festival since it coincides with our summer holidays, but I do miss those heavy metal weekends. If you want to see some reports, they can be found here, and here, and here, and here.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Challenge #ConcertPhotography #Festival #LensArtists #LiveMusic #LiveMusicPhoto #Metal #MusicPhotography #Pimba #Portraits #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #335: Exploring Colour vs Black & White
This week, Patti of Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures is hosting the Challenge and she’s asking us to look at our use of colour or black & white in our photography. ‘When is it best to use one vs the other?’ She ponders: ‘What’s the benefit of each one?’
Patti sets us a challenge, ‘to explore the difference and the impact of using color [sic] or black & white photography in your selected photos. … Post pairs of the same image in both color and black & white. Limit the number of images to 3 pairs.’ She continues by asking us to: ‘Compare the differences in mood, texture, and light. Share your thoughts on how black & white or color processing impacts each photo. Tell us which one you prefer.’
I tend to use colour a lot in my photography, especially in film photography where I’m a big fan of those colour shifting emulsions like Lomochrome Turquoise or Purple. But in my digital work, I’m a little less … picky.
Often it will depend on the subject. Most of my intentional camera movement (ICM) work is done in colour, I feel that ICM benefits from colour a lot, but the exception is urban ICM, which I think is much better in black and white. Similarly, if I’m out recording some street art then that always deserves colour — even if, or especially if, it’s starting to decay.
Sometimes, though, I set out to make images in black and white, then create colour images from them. There’s nothing I like more than taking an old digicam from the 2000s (the noughties) and testing out the infrared sensitivity of its lovely, lovely CCD sensor. This is often the first thing I do with every new digital camera I get my hands on, and the results can be … interesting.
For example, here is a black and white infrared image of the steel footbridge over the Parque de Infante Dom Pedro in Aveiro. Taken with a Samsung Digimax U-CA3 digital camera from 2003, the camera has been set to monochrome mode and the image taken through a Hoya 720nm Infrared filter. It’s a typical looking infrared image, with white vegetation, which reflects the infrared wavelengths falling upon it, and dark skies and the metal of the bridge, which do not.
But when you take more monochrome images, using red and green filters, and edit the images as layers in a photo editor, everything changes. Suddenly the vegetation becomes shades of red, the sky becomes a bright blue or turquoise, and the image just pops. This is what I call a digital aerochrome, after the long defunct colour infrared emulsion made by Kodak and based on the procedure devised by Joshua Bird. He developed his method using infrared film, but the same technique applies to digital photography as well.
You can have a lot of fun with a digital camera and a set of filters. Take this infrared image of a landscape with lovely wispy clouds in the sky. It’s an OK infrared image in black and white, with the clouds popping against a dark sky. But make it into a digital aerochrome and suddenly the clouds become a kaleidoscope of colour. This is down to the clouds moving in the sky between the three exposures. When the images are lined up in the photo editor the colours of the filters don’t match and are presented in the image as individual colours.
Of course, it doesn’t always go as planned. Turns out this Konica Q-M100, a 1,3MP digital camera from 1997, can’t actually be set to monochrome mode, and the digital aerochromes were absolutely awful. That said, the regular colour images were quite stunning, but through an infrared filter, all of a sudden the image became almost monochrome in appearance. It looked as though a sepia filter had been applied, and personally I found this much more appealing than the colour image.
Sometimes we can combine two techniques. I thought that it might be a nice idea to try some infrared ICM. The results were less than stellar, though, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more boring infrared image, or ICM image for that matter.
But when you make a digital aerochrome of the infrared woodland image, by taking further ICM images through red and green filters, all of a sudden the ICM becomes much more interesting. I’ve used this technique two or three times, and I really love how it comes out.
So instead of using these noughties digicams for ‘regular’ colour photography, odds are that during the sunny spring and summer months you’ll find me wandering around the woods behind our house or in Aveiro with a noughties digicam set to monochrome mode and my little collection of filters. So if you ask me, do I prefer to use colour or black and white, I can happy say, BOTH!
Next week, Ann-Christine will host the Challenge, so I hope that you can join us then. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Aerochrome #Blackandwhite #Challenge #Colour #Infrared #Landscape #LensArtists #Monochrome #Nature #Tree #Trichrome #TrichromeEverything #VintageDigital #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #327: Five Elements
This week, Sofia of photographias is hosting the Challenge and her theme for the week is, ‘5 Elements‘. Immediately this gave me pause. Five elements? I thought there were just four. However, I continued to read Sofia’s post: ‘… then I got to the 5 Elements of Wuxing, a Chinese philosophy. [The elements] are slightly different too, with Wood and Metal joining Water, Fire and Earth’. Sofia continued: ‘So, this is the background for this challenge. The elements that create the world around us’.
Decoding ancient philosophies is not really my cuppa tea, so if you want to know more about Wuxing Sofia’s post will explain further. Instead, I decided to take a more literal approach and stick to representations of the theme.
Wood and Metal were straightforward. Go to any village in the Portuguese countryside and the streets are filled with houses with rusting metal doors, or abandoned buildings with rotting wooden doors or window frames. These are a goldmine for anyone (i.e. me) interested in textures or abstracts and a lunchtime trip to the nearby village of Largo da Feira provided some excellent examples.
The header image of this post is a wooden door with peeling paint, and another example combined a wooden door with metal nail heads sticking out. I was quite tickled with this mixture of two elements.
Water gave me an excuse for one of my favourite subjects; cabbage leaves. I’m not sure what it is about cabbage leaves but they always produce lovely water droplets, and early the other morning the leaves of the cabbage plants along the side of the road were covered with dew.
Earth was surprisingly difficult, though, and I’m not sure if I’m really happy with this example, there’s certainly no artistic merit to this image and for me it’s a bit … bland. It’s a close up of a colony of moss or lichen on the top of a small pillar of earth. Around the moss the earth has been eroded away by successive years of rainfall leaving these odd little pillars behind. Eventually they will topple over and be lost, not that anyone will ever notice as they pass by on their way to and from the railway station.
Admittedly, Fire was the element that I had the most fun with. Right from the start I wanted to make a trichrome of Fire, just to see how it would come out, and our pellet-burning fire was the perfect subject. My first attempt, with my little noughties digicam in Program mode, was a bit of a disaster, but when I used the camera in Manual mode it was much better. Hope that you like this tamed fire.
So these are my elements. I’d been waiting for the weather to turn so that I can get out and make a trichrome of moving clouds for the Air element, before I remembered that Air was not one of the elements of Wuxing, but here’s an example of what I had in mind.
Thank you to Sofia for suggesting this subject, it’s been a challenge, in more ways than one. Next week John will be setting the theme, so I hope you will join in. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Challenge #Earth #Fire #FiveElements #LensArtists #Metal #Photography #Water #Wuxing #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #326: This Made Me Smile
This week it was the turn of Ann-Christine (Leya) from To See a World in a Grain of Sand … to host the Lens-Artists Challenge, and she chose as her theme, ‘This Made Me Smile‘. In her post she says, ‘So much in this world is rather tough right now, … don’t we all need a smile? Let’s share something that made us smile, … and make the world smile with us!’
This funtograph was found on a Gameboy Pockwt Camera (the Japanese version of the GBC). I’m not sure if it was pre-loaded or taken by the user in the 1990s.Well naturally this was a bit of a head-scratcher for me since my images are rarely funny or cute. We don’t have any pets and the kid is all grown up so most of my ‘fun’ images are strange out of focus abstracts, or blurred ICM landscapes. So I thought I would introduce you to one of my favourite pastimes: taking funtographs. What? You might say, don’t you mean photographs? No, definitely funtographs, with emphasis on the fun.
A trichrome funtograph of a playground in Oliveira do Bairro.Back in 1998, Nintendo released the Gameboy camera to accompany its hand held gaming console, the Gameboy. The Gameboy Camera is a monochrome camera that records four shades of grey to produce super low resolution funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known). In today’s terms the Gameboy camera has a whopping 0.014MP.
A funtograph of the water tower in Oliveira do Bairro-A funtograph of a hotel in Coimbra.The Gameboy camera is actually a full spectrum device — the sensor has no infrared cut filter to stop wavelengths outside the visible spectrum from showing on the image — so in full sunlight trees and vegetation come out a strange white (‘strange’ if you’re not familiar with how infrared images look). Indoors, or at night, you don’t have so many issues and images look normal, but during the day using an infrared cut filter stops these extra infrared wavelengths reaching the sensor and the images look much more natural.
A funtograph of my favourite tree and well taken with the Gameboy camera.A funtograph of my favourite tree and well taken with the GBC and an infrared cut filter.Although getting good results from the Gameboy camera can be quite hit-and-miss, it can produce some lovely monochrome funtographs. But with a little work it can also produce some striking trichromes too, and even digital aerochromes using infrared filters. Making infrared trichromes — digital aerochromes that emulate the look of the defunct film Kodak Aerochrome film — is one of my favourite pastimes, and I attempt this with all new cameras, often with mixed success.
An aerochrome funtograph of a tree in Carris.A trichrome funtograph of the water tower in Oiã.I’ve been the proud owner of a Gameboy console and the Gameboy Camera since January 2023, and it’s my favourite camera of all time. I managed to get my hands on one for the Shitty Camera Challenge #1990sCameraChallenge, and since I’ve had one it’s been hard to put down. I’m also convinced that the Gameboy was the factor that tipped the scales into my becoming Shitty Camera Challenge Champion for the 1990s Camera Challenge, probably the single most important achievement of my whole life. 😉
A trichrome funtograph of a scene from the Coronation of King Charles III (taken from the TV).An aerochrome funtograph of a windswept tree. In the background in an overpass.I hope these few examples of Gameboy funtographs brought a smile to your face, and the next time you are shopping around for a new digital camera perhaps the Gameboy might fit the bill? Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
A trichrome funtograph of a sunset in Águas Boas.If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#2Bit #Aerochrome #Challenge #Digicam #Funtography #Gameboy #Infrared #LensArtists #Nintendo #PixelArt #Smile #Trichrome #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #325: Gratitude
This week, Tina of Travels and Trifles is hosting the Challenge and her theme for the week is, ‘Gratitude‘. ‘Here in the U.S.,’ says Tina, ‘November is the month of our Thanksgiving holiday. It is noted as a time for family, for recognizing our many gifts, and …. for turkey! Gratitude, of course, should be practiced much more frequently. So today we’d like you to focus on those things for which you are most grateful.’
As photographers we can always enjoy and express gratitude for a beautiful sunrise (or sunset).This was not an easy subject to approach. Naturally, I’m grateful for the things I have, like a happy family, a warm home and the little monsters — as my better half insists on calling my many vintage film and digital cameras — but as a European it’s not always easy to express this and a traditional Thanksgiving day is an unfamiliar concept. So I thought I would take a slightly different approach. What if we incorporate a sense of gratitude into our photography?
A photograph that always brings me joy. Taken on my mother’s Brownie Box on film that had been in the camera since the late 1970s. A few months after I took this photography my mother sadly passed, but the camera is always with me.Being grateful for being able to do what we want to do is not a new idea. Indeed, from my understanding the whole point of thanksgiving days were originally a celebration of gratitude for overcoming some traumatic communal event, or a celebration of a successful harvest. But from what I can gather ‘Gratitude Photography’ is a fairly recent approach.
An infrared image of the woods on the way to the beach. I’m always grateful for the beauty of this woodland but on this day I just looked behind me at the right time, and saw this view.Back in 2014, the National Geographic published an article by Jared Gottleib entitled, ‘The Art of Mindful Photography‘. Gottleib asked himself whether, ‘photography support[ed] awareness of my immediate experience, or detract[ed] from it’ and interviewed a former photographer, Jonathan Foust, about mindfulness and how this impacted on his photography.
My first attempt at freelensing, with a reversed old 50mm lens on a mirrorless camera. Taken on my regular ‘walk around the block’ I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting subjects.Gottleib identified several traits in the Mindful Photographer: ‘heightening our awareness of seeing’, by being a witness to experiences and events rather than trying to force them to happen as we want them to; embrace imperfection, by ‘appreciating the photos that worked, rather than lamenting the ones that didn’t’; expect the unexpected — don’t wait for the perfect photo opportunity to arise, just take a shot when you can; and to keep going, ‘photography as a spiritual practice is an exploration conducted over a lifetime’.
I’m always looking around and acknowledging the beauty of the local woodlands. This image is an infrared digital aerochrome of the leaf litter beneath the trees. In the middle frows a single fern.All of these practices that Gottleib talks about were best distilled into three steps, Recognition, Acknowledgement, and Appreciation, as described by Richard Newman in a blog post for the Texas Photographic Society entitled ‘Practicing Gratitude in Photography‘. Newman asks us to recognise and ‘understand how to work with what [we are] given’, ‘acknowledge the beauty or magic in front of [us] … and appreciate what [we] have been given’.
We can always be grateful for friends. Here’s my better half and our two best friends at the top of the cliff above our favourite beach. After a glorious day on the beach we’re enjoying the sunset (before a welcome beer).Most of us probably practice Gratitude Photography without even realising it, when we take an image of a beautiful sunset or record our families laughing and playing, but it has been demonstrated that incorporating gratitude into our photography also increases our well being. In Psychology Today, Andy Tix in his paper, ‘Taking Photos of the Good Increases Gratitude and Well-Being‘, observed that, ‘taking photos of the good increases positive emotions such as gratitude and overall life satisfaction. When these photos are shared with others, it tends to build connection. Other research shows that the task of taking photos increases engagement in the positive aspects of a situation. Furthermore, feeling grateful is tightly linked with overall happiness.’
A smartphone image of a tiny mushroom on a banyan tree in the Maldives. This was an example of taking a photograph of the lovely whenever we can. A day later this mushroom was gone.By ‘photos of the good’ Tix was talking about ‘being intentional about [taking and] sharing photos of the lovely and the meaningful … turning our attention from what we don’t have to gratitude for what we do. In his example this was images of a location that was considered as boring. But it could also be considered as making photographs in a situation that was far from what was intended, or making the best of a bad thing. Perhaps the weather is not as you had expected, or you’re unable to get to the location that you had wanted to visit, but wherever you are be grateful for what you have and use this to make your photography better.
The Ponte 25 de Abril in Lisbon. In the foreground is ‘Engagement Ring’, a piece of artwork by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconsuelos outside the MAAT art centre. Here we can appreciate the art and the view.But how can we use Gratitude Photography techniques in practice? In her blog Wild Willow Ways, Mary Farron outlines her approach to mindful photography: ‘I go to my chosen area and observe my surroundings, using my senses to really be in the place and in the moment, listening to sounds and becoming aware of any smells around me as well as taking in the visual environment. … Seeing, hearing and sensing the beauty of nature produces moments of awe and wonder, … It is in these moments, which are part of the mindful photography experience, that I feel gratitude for being alive and for all that life gives me.’
One of my favourite trees from my walk around the block. Every time I pass this tree I feel a little joy, and at the same time try to see it in a different way. In this instance this is a colour infrared image with mixed red and blue channels.In this image I have made a digital aerochrome of my favourite tree using an Olympus Camedia C-100 digicam with a failing sensor. To get a reasonable image I have to use a variable ND filter at its maximum setting.In her blog post, ‘Integrating Gratitude Practices into Nature Photography‘ Sarah Marino makes mindfulness or gratitude an integral part of her photography technique. ‘If a [subject] draws me in for a photo, it is simple to pause and express some gratitude for the moment … A minute or two spent like this during each photography outing seems like a good way to extend the practice of taking photos to also include a form of gratitude.’
I walk around Aveiro all of the time, but this time I stepped off my normal path into a park that I’ve passed but never been to. Tucked away in the park is this amazing bandstand. I can best acknowledge this as a digital aerochrome.As mentioned before, many of us probably practice Gratitude Photography without even realising it, and some people have even suggested exercises to practise expressing gratitude in photography, like using one camera and one lens for a particular period, or limiting oneself to taking one photo per day of something that represents gratitude for for us, or brings us joy. Jaime Kurtz, professor of psychology at James Madison University, says, “Mindful photography is about slowing down … It’s keeping an eye out for something that is beautiful or meaningful to you.”
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Challenge #Gratitude #Joy #LensArtists #Mindful #Mindfulness #Photography #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #324: In the Details
Note: This is the entry for the Challenge that I had intended to make last week, before life got in the way. I had the text all worked out, pretty much, so I’ve left that as it is. I had adapted the text for last week’s post, so there may be some overlap. I hope that you don’t mind.
Something a little different for the Lens-Artists Challenge this week. Instead of a specific theme, Patti of pilotfishblog has announced her ‘In The Details‘ challenge. Quite simply, Patti asked us to choose a subject, any subject, and take a series of photos, getting closer and closer each time and focusing on detail. ‘Vary your shots’ of the subject, she says, and ‘change your perspective’ each time. Then ‘post three photos of [each] subject’.
After last week’s stymied attempt we headed out this past Monday. The day didn’t quite go according to plan, but the weather was lovely and I made the best of it. The camera I chose for this project is the Pentax X70, a 12MP camera from 2009. It’s what they used to call a ‘bridge’ camera — it looks like an SLR but the lens is fixed and it has features closer to those of a compact camera. What appealed to me for this project is the well publicised (at the time) 24x ‘superzoom’. This means the lens has a range of 26mm at its widest to a whopping 624mm.
One thing that the Pentax X70 doesn’t have is a thread on the lens, so if I want to use it with a neutral density filter for some Intentional Camera Movement I’m going to have to hold the filter in front of the camera while I’m waving it around. In fact, I had a little practise with this camera the day before and discovered that the camera’s response with the neutral density filter is not that good. I’m really not sure why but a lot of the images came out really dark, even at the neutral density filter’s lowest setting.
Anyhow, it was a lovely sunny day and we headed out to the nearby seaside town of Barra. I already had my subject in mind, and as usual it’s a bit of a cheat on the theme, ‘In the Details’. My first image is a broad ICM view of the beach, which includes my intended target, I hope that you can see it? Because the variable ND filter is a little dodgy with this camera, the slowest shutter speed that I could achieve was about 1/50s, but a good fast sideways sweep seemed to do the trick.
Then we moved towards my ‘subject’, which is situated on a long pier which forms the entry to the port of Aveiro. The pier is about 1,5km long and it’s a lovely walk, especially on a pleasant sunny day. There are always people jogging the length of the pier, and this day there were many fishermen (actually, exclusively men) lining the ‘port side’ of the pier, where the water is much calmer compared to the sea-facing side.
About mid-way along the pier is a tall bright orange structure. I’m really not sure what this is for and it was only added about 10 years ago. However, it does feature a door for access, so certainly something goes on in there. And here we find my first detail. Some aspiring street artist has drawn this lovely ghost-like figure, which perfectly fills the door. It’s been there for a few years now, and as you can see other visitors have put stickers on the door, and generally messed with the image.
In fact there’s another ‘ghost’ in Barra, near a set of steps in a residential part of the town at the top end of the beach. I’m hoping that the artist created a series of these around the town, and I’m always on the lookout for more.
However, this was not the detail that I came to Barra for, so we headed further along the pier. At the end of the pier is a small automated lighthouse, which I imagine is there to stop boats running into it at night. There’s actually another little lighthouse on the pier at the other side of the entrance, but that is always battered by heavy waves and I’m not sure if access is even allowed. This pier is getting closer to my subject, and if you look closely you can actually see my ‘In The Details’ subject.
Just beyond the lighthouse, forming the end if the pier, is a pile of concrete shapes that support the entrance to the Port of Aveiro. These fit really well together and form a secure barrier around which the pier was built. You can actually climb over these rocks, and people do (I have done this myself. Not recommended) either to get a view of the ships coming into port, or for the fishing (which is a big thing on this pier). And there, on these concrete shapes, are the details that we have come to see: smiley, happy faces. I’m not sure when these were added, but I’ve been here in Portugal for 20-odd years and they’ve always been there.
I did have another subject in mind, a half-built and abandoned house near the water behind Barra. I spotted this from the car as we passed over the bridge approaching Barra, but when I reached the house it wasn’t as wonderful as I had imagined. Nevertheless, I thought that you might like to see the photographs that I took of this. In the first image, the lamp post is not distorted by the wide angle of the Pentax X70, it’s actually been pushed over.
Later this week I hope to prepare a post on this week’s theme, ‘Gratitude’, but we shall see. It’s not proving to be easy. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Agua #Barra #Blue #Challenge #Details #Digicam #Digital #InTheDetails #LensArtists #Macro #Pentax #Praia #Sea #Sky #Superzoom #WideAngle #X70 #LensArtists
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Lens-Artists Challenge #324: In the Details (Part One)
I had great plans for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, great plans. But a combination of factors meant that we were unable to get out, despite the nice autumn weather on Monday and Tuesday. The rest of the week hasn’t lived up to expectations either. So what I’m going to do is post three images that I grabbed earlier in the week and then, (hopefully) when we go out next Monday I’ll make an attempt at the Challenge I had in mind.
This week, instead of a theme, Patti of pilotfishblog announced an ‘In The Details‘ challenge. Quite simply, Patti asked us to choose a subject, any subject, and take a series of photos, getting closer and closer each time until we were focusing on details. ‘Vary your shots’ of the subject, she says, and ‘change your perspective’ each time. Then ‘post three photos of [each] subject’.
The camera I have chosen for this project is the Pentax X70, a 12MP camera from 2009. It’s what they used to call a ‘bridge’ camera — it looks like an SLR but the lens is fixed and it has features closer to those of a point and shoot camera. What appealed to me for this project is the well publicised (at the time) 24x ‘superzoom’. This means the lens has a range from 26mm at its widest to a whopping 624mm.
The first cloudscape was at the camera’s widest angle, 26mm, and the third image was at near maximum zoom. I didn’t fill the frame with the moon, although this camera is certainly capable of doing so, because these are all hand-held grabs and at such magnification it was difficult to keep the camera steady, as you can see from the framing.
So I hope you will all excuse this little bit of fun. The plan for next Monday is to go out and hopefully get the shots I was aiming for this week. It’ll be a busy time Lens-Artists wise, since by then Patti will have delivered the theme for the next Lens-Artists Challenge.
Themes for the Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.
#Cloudscape #Details #Digicam #Digital #InTheDetails #LensArtists #Macro #Moon #Pentax #Superzoom #WideAngle #X70 #LensArtists
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Here's a sneak peek of my entry to the WordPress Lens-Artists Challenge. A digital aerochrome made up of three images, but this time I introduced a little Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) into the mix. Of course there was no way that I could line this up in post, so I didn't even try, but I really like how this came out.
#WalkingTheNeighbourhood, #LensArtists, #Digicam, #Landscape, #DigitalCamera, #Retro, #TrichromeEverything, #Aerochrome, -
Do Tomatoes Self Seed?
These persistent cherry tomatoes keep coming back to my garden year after year.
