#lensartists — Public Fediverse posts

Lens Artists Challenge #413: Bridges

This week it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Bridges‘. It’s a simple Challenge, ‘to show us your favorite bridge images. You can feature any kind of bridge: natural bridges, foot bridges, swinging bridges, highway bridges, stone bridges, railroad bridges, or any other kind of bridge you can think of’. What a great subject for the Challenge. I love bridges, and there are some great bridges in Portugal. Like the Ponte (bridge) 25 de Abril in Lisbon. Spanning the river Tejo, this always reminds me of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There’s also the new bridge over the Tejo, the Ponte Vasco Da Gama. Although I’ve been over it many times, I’ve never actually managed to get a photograph of it.

Anyways, today the Challenge is to look at the footbridges in the city of Aveiro. Famous in Portugal for its canals (Aveiro is known as the ‘Venice of Portugal’, which always made me wonder, is Venice known locally as the ‘Aveiro of Italy’?), these are criss-crossed by small bridges beneath which the tourist boats of the moliceiro pass. Some are new, but there are still a couple of the older bridges remaining, and even one that I was that I was unaware of until I went out the other day.

Anyone who has pottered around this blog might have noticed that my favourite camera of the moment is the Ilford Pixie 35-II, with its amazing radial blur. I’ve been trying to recreate this effect digitally using an old Canon EOS 10D DSLR and the Lensbaby Muse, and I reckoned that this combination  would be the perfect selection for a wander around the city. The thing with the Lensbaby Muse is that it’s a real challenge to focus. Instead of twisting the lens to achieve focus, with the Muse you have to push and pull a flexible plastic lens barrel. I think I achieved focus most of the time, but it was pretty hit and miss.

I managed to make images from some of my favourite bridges, and also discovered a couple of new ones. The Lensbaby has a 50mm focal length on full-frame cameras, so with the APS-C sensor of the Canon EOS 10D this is equivalent to about 75mm. As a result, this meant that in some cases, instead of getting a view of the whole bridge many images were presented in close-up. But in the event, I quite liked this abstract approach.

Also, for me the blur effect of the Lensbaby is sometimes more interesting in black and white. However, the old Canon EOS 10D DSLR that I was using doesn’t have the ability to dial in monochrome mode, so I ended up converting some of the images to black and white in post. Also, the EOS 10D weighs an absolute tonne, especially with the battery pack that it came with, so between the weight and holding the camera so I could ‘focus’ the Muse properly it was certainly a fun challenge.

If you’re interested, I’ve posted the whole series in an album on my Photo Web Cloud (formerly Joomeo) if you want to see the rest of the images. 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 following 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.

Lens Artist Challenge 410: one photo two ways

An interesting challenge, revisited by Ritva here. I’m accustomed to editing a shot, making it the way I see it, and moving one. Making more than one version is a rarity, and so this was an enjoyable challenge.

I posted several of the heavy horses images back a few days ago, but there were many more, and this is a double take at one of them:

I like them both… what do you think?

Information on the Lens Artist’s Challenge, into which I occasionally dip, can be found here.

Lens-Artists Challenge #409: Best Ever Images

I’ve been a bit lax with the Blog, and with the Lens-Artists Challenge just lately. We’re on holiday at the moment, and aside from reviewing and reading new posts each day — it’s like the morning paper — actually posting something is not that easy. Well not the way I seem to do it. I’ve also been taking a ‘break’ from the Challenge since I have so many (SO many) cameras that I’ve yet to try out. My draft folder still has something like 30 projects in it and I need to get a move on.

So anyways, this week it’s Steve Hyde’s turn to host the Challenge. Steve is an accomplished Blogger, and a guest host, and his theme is a banger: ‘Best Ever Images‘. It’s a ‘banger’ because I don’t think I’ve ever taken a good image in my life, so I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me. Steve writes, ‘All I ask [all? LOL] is for you to submit up to five images with a sentence or two about them and the stories behind them. I enjoy reading the narrative behind any image’. So, here goes …

We start off with a quite recent photograph, a pile of ropes on the beach next to a wooden fence under a blue sky filled with wispy clouds. It’s nothing special, but what makes me really pleased with this one is that it was taken with a Zeiss Ikon Contessa with shutter speeds that I knew were way out of tolerance. I guessed that the speed was about 1/100s (though the shutter speed was ‘set’ at 1/200s), set the aperture to f22, and nailed it. This is also from a piece of Harman Phoenix I film, and it came out great.

This next one I’ve posted before on the Challenge, but I never tire of it. It’s from our beach in Meco a few years ago. Most of the time the Atlantic water is quite cold and it’s OK if you’re of a sturdy constitution, which I am not. But sometimes the water becomes warmer and is great for a paddle. Unfortunately, it also brings in the jellyfish, and this particular year also a Portuguese Man’o’War. I know to keep well clear of them, but I also had an urge to make images of these poor cast ashore souls. And this one I shot just as a small wave picked it up. Love it. Sadly, this particular Man’o’War ended up in the plastic bag of the local ‘Baywatch’.

Also from our holidays, though this time on the trip home, is a view from the Oriente railway station in Lisbon. This one is of one of a pair of striking residential buildings that overlook the river Tejo in Lisbon. Of course, they’re mostly occupied by rich foreigners now, as Portuguese are being priced out of their own capital. This one was taken with Lomochrome Turquoise on a Minox GL 35 csmera and was my first attempt with this colour shifting emulsion. Since then, I’ve been smitten.

Now we’re getting to the ‘fun’ stuff. This one is an example of databending. What I did here was take a perfectly good image and edited it in Audacity. Yes, I imported an image file into a sound editor and applied some audio filters to it. I wouldn’t ever suggest you listen to the sounds that it produces (I joke with my better half that it sounds like Coldplay — it doesn’t really) but it creates some wonderful visual effects.

I like panoramas, so I was stoked a while ago to pick up a Horizon 202 panoramic camera at a bargain price. It was untested, and has some flaws, but aside from a little wobble, it works perfectly. I also like redscaling film. I’ve done my own, but in this case I was feeling lazy, so loaded the Horizon with the then-newly released Harman Red. If you’re not familiar, redscaling film is when you reverse load the film in the camera so you’re taking the photograph through the support layer and not directly on to the emulsion. This image is of one of my favourite abandoned structures near Costa Nova in Portugal.

Lastly, there’s the header image of this post. This is one of my best ever images of a steel footbridge in Aveiro. It’s a favourite location of mine, and when I can I always try to take a few photographs of this bridge. In this instance it was taken with a crappy little Samsung Digimax U-CA3 digital camera from the early 2000s. Whenever I get a new digital camera, especially one with a CCD sensor, I alway test the infrared sensitivity of the camera, and in this case the Samsung delivers in spades. This is an example of what I call a ‘digital aerochrome’, like the old infrared colour film produced by Kodak, made with the camera set to monochrome mode and using colour and infrared filters.

So this is a brief tour of my ‘best ever’ images, though if the Challenge was set next week, I’m sure the selection would be different (there’s no images from the Canon Powershot A80 with its failing sensor, for example, or the Gameboy). 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 following 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.

Lens-Artists Challenge # 396: Pick A Favourite Quote And Illustrate It

I’ve always been a big fan of astromony, space and science fiction. I think I probably developed this interest before I was a teenager. At the age of 10, I vividly remember my parents waking me up to watch Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon, and I spent many an hour glued to the eyepiece of my small telescope as I looked at the wonders of the solar system, and beyond. Of course I was a nerd, or is it a geek? On a Saturday night, I would impatiently wait for the sports and news to come to an end for the unmistakable tones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the theme for the long-running TV series Doctor Who. (And then, as often as not, I would discretely retire behind the sofa as the show got a little too scary.)

Over the years, I devoured as many science fiction books as I could, watched all the TV shows and films, and just basked in the adventures of the Doctor, Captains Kirk and Scarlet, Buck Rogers, Luke Skywalker, and the rest. A passion for science fiction has been present throughout my life, as have the characters that have shaped it. Back in the 1990s. the writer and producer J. Michael Straczynski created Babylon 5, a television series spread over five years that detailed the adventures of the eponymous space station and its crew.

One of the main characters of the series was Delenn, an alien played by the Croation-American actress Mira Furlan, who might be better remembered as ‘Danielle Rousseau’ in Lost. Sadly, she passed several years ago from complications of West Nile fever. Until her death, she remained positive, and on the day of her passing posted this on her website: ‘I look at the stars. It’s a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That’s where I’ll be going soon. “We’re all star stuff”, I suddenly remember Delenn’s line from Joe’s script. Not a bad prospect. I am not afraid. In the meantime, let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me. And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars. Breathe in. Breathe out. That’s all.‘

It’s a lovely sentiment, and I really latched on to the line, ‘Let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me. And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars’ to the point that it appears on most of my social media profiles. In setting the theme for this Challenge, Ann Christine asked us to ‘illustrate [our] favourite quotes‘, and I would have liked nothing better than to try my hand at making images of the milky way, or even of the moon. But sadly weather conditions, and the light from the streetlights, always makes this impossible. 

So instead, I thought that I would use what nature has given me and try to represent phosphenes. When you close your eyes, or enter a dark room, after a short period of darkness you might start to see colours and shapes morphing in front of you (or at least I do) and if you rub your eyes, these shapes might shimmer and dance. These effects are known as phosphenes, and are caused by the visual centres not completely shutting down, and sending random impulses to your brain. So for the Challenge today, I’m presenting a series of abstracts taken over the past couple of weeks that I hope represent the random shapes and colours you might see when you close your eyes.

These are actually photographs, taken with a cheap action camera/GoPro knock-off. I’ve circuit bent the camera with a little piece of tin foil jammed into the ribbon cable that joins the sensor to the main board of the camera. Instead of a normal looking low quality image, instead we get a corrupted (even lower quality) image filled with artifacts. Just to let you know, these are all cloudscapes.

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 following 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.

Lens-Artists Challenge #383: Looking Back To Challenge #174 – Shapes and Designs

This week it’s Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is another ‘looking back’ challenge, where the host revisits the subject of a previous Challenge. On her blog, Travels and Trifles, Tina writes: ‘This week we look back to 2021 when our Lens-Artists Challenge #174 focused on Shapes and Designs.’ Back in 2021, Patti, who hosted the Challenge that week, invited us, ‘to share images that feature shapes and designs. Have fun searching for them in nature, in your home, in architecture, in food, in textiles, on the street–and just about everywhere else.’

For pretty much all of January, and forecast for at least the first half of February, Portugal has been battered with rain. So it’s no surprise that I’ve not been out much. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy, my mind is always trying to come up with things to do when the weather improves, and one of those things is circuit bending. This is something I’ve been keen to do for a long time, but what’s always scared me off is the possibility that I might break a camera.

Circuit bending is exactly as it sounds, taking a camera and deliberately introducing changes to the circuitry in the device that corrupts the image that the camera ‘sees’. Sometimes this can be quite extreme, with wires soldered into the circuit board connected to knobs and switches that can create all kinds of variations within an image. This requires a fair bit of skill with electronics, which I definitely don’t have, so I’ve taken what I called the ‘bull in a china shop’ approach and chose the simplest form of circuit bending: jamming metal foil into the ribbon wire connecting the sensor to the main board within the camera. 

Because I become far too attached to the digital cameras that I get especially for circuit bending, even those digicams from CEX for a few Euros, I decided to use the G6 Thumb Camera from AliExpress. If you are not aware, the G6 Thumb Camera is a cheap knock off of the hottest camera of the season, the Kodak Charmera. Like the Charmera, the G6 has a resolution of 1—2MP and has few other features than that. It is cheap though, at around 10—15€, and if broken, will not be missed.

So what I did was cut a thin piece of metal foil from a Ferrero Rocher chocolate and insert it alongside the ribbon wire in the G6s main board. When I turn on the camera, the image on the screen and the photographs are beautifully corrupted, with unusual colour shifts and patterns. As the weather has been so awful, I wandered around the house with the circuit bent G6 snapping as many patterns and designs as I could find.

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 following 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 #Challenge #CircuitBending #Digicam #Experimental #Glitch #GlitchArt #Glitchy #LensArtists #LoFi #ShapesAndDesigns #ToyCamera #LensArtists

Light Paint Glass Vase: Minimalism and the Democratization of Photographic Practice

https://gregurbano.com/2026/01/28/light-paint-glass-vase-minimalism-and-the-democratization-of-photographic-practice/

Lens Artists Challenge #380: What’s Around the Corner?

https://youtu.be/vEymZ3rXOmc?si=w2qBxdeMWuzSjDWx

This week, in the first Challenge of 2926, it’s Anne’s from Slow Shutter Speed turn to host. ‘Have you ever gone out on a photo outing and not seen anything that would have your camera saying, “Pick me up and help me take this picture”?’ asks, Anne. She continues, ‘I have a theory that there is always something to photograph.’ And I agree. You may have planned to make photographs of something and not found it, or you may not have planned to take anything at all and come across a scene that just stops you in your tracks, and I think that’s what Anne is looking for here.

‘What’s around the corner?’ What unexpected image is waiting for you just out of view? But then again, what is a corner? Lots of things have corners. A road may bend sharply around a corner, a racetrack has corners (and turns, and straights). A street has corners, a block — I don’t have much experience with them — has intersections, but each block has a corner. (Right?) Buildings have corners, blocks of flats, office buildings, houses, all have corners on the outside, and on the inside. Rooms have corners. Furniture, doors and windows have corners, picture frames have corners, photos and pieces of art have corners. There are corners everywhere. Even your eyes have corners, as everyone spots something out of the corner of their eye. There’s  no escaping corners.

But of course, that whole paragraph was just a delaying tactic. To give a little space to post a couple more images of the scene that greeted me this morning. I wandered into the kitchen to prepare my breakfast, and I could see this golden glow in the corner of the window. I wondered what it was and moved towards the glow, to be greeted with a thin sliver of sunrise peeking through a gap between the horizon and the thick grey clouds that blanketed the rest of the sky. The light was broken up into abstract streaks by the patterned frosted windows that we have in the kitchen, and I new that I couldn’t let these few moments escape.

With my well-worn Panasonic Lumix GF1 (I didn’t wear the smooth black paint off the corners of this GF1, that was its previous owner, who clearly used this camera a lot), and an Olympus 14-42mm zoom, I filled the frame with the glow and added a slight hint of intentional camera movement to reveal these lovely delicate abstracts. I hope you will agree that you don’t have to be out travelling to be surprised by something just around the corner, there’s beauty in a lovely warm kitchen too.

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 following week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), 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 #AroundTheCornerSurprises #Artistic #Blur #Challenge #Creative #Effect #Exposure #Image #LensArtists #Motion #Sunrise #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #378: The Last Chance

This time there’s no one host to the Lens-Artists Challenge. Instead, the whole team is hosting the ‘Last Chance’ challenge, picking images from 2025 that either never fit in the themes of the weekly Challenge or were not included in any previous challenges.

In addition to the Lens-Artists challenge, for the past couple of years I’ve been dabbling with the Frugal Film Project. This is a monthly ‘challenge’ where for the whole year you use one camera, with a value less than $75, and one film stock for the whole year. This year, my camera of choice was the ‘Golden Wonder’, the Welta Penti II half-frame Soviet-era Rapid format camera. My film choice was Harman Phoenix, which might not seem that ‘frugal’, but since 35mm film has to be decanted into Rapid canisters in12-exposure strips, I could get at least two full canisters out of each roll of Phoenix, which made it much more economical. 

https://flic.kr/p/2rsdFxX

The Rapid format was also a great way to explore different film techniques. In addition to using film normally in the camera, I experimented with redscaled film, where the film was loaded reversed into the camera and exposed through the support level first. I even tried some EBS exposures, literally exposing both sides of the film. I have to admit, though, this wasn’t too successful.

https://flic.kr/p/2rt4bPe

Of course, being me I didn’t just have one Rapid camera. Oh no, I tumbled full tilt down the Rapid format rabbit hole and now have a full range of Rapid, Karat (the post-war precursor of the Rapid film system), and SL (the Soviet version of the Rapid system) cameras. Some of these cameras were awful, but there were a couple of real gems, like the Bilora Radix,  with its square format images, and the Pentacon Electra, which was an automatic camera that still works and produced some lovely results with Harman Phoenix.

https://flic.kr/p/2raDP7D

In addition to using film cameras, I’m also trying to get back into some digital work, specifically glitching and circuit bending. One thing I do like finding are ‘glitches in the wild’, where a film, or electronic advertising hoarding, is accidentally corrupted. In this instance, a thunderstorm over the Maldives disrupted the television signal being broadcast to our villa, and of course I could not resist recording a few corrupted frames.

The featured image on this post was actually taken back in 2022 in a Lomography Sprocket Rocket, but somehow I broke the film in the camera and never managed to get it developed until this year. I also accidentally exposed the film to light when I opened the camera back, so I wasn’t sure that I’d get anything. In the event, I got this wonderful trippy image, which might even be a double exposure.

The Lens-Artists Challenge is ‘on holiday’, until Saturday 03 January 2026 with the ‘Favourite Photos of  Last Year’ Challenge. Generally, 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 following 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’. This is likely to be my last weekly addition to the Challenge for a while, although I’m certainly going to keep in touch with everyone’s entries. I’ll be concentrating on my own projects, as outlined in a previous post, my Intentions for 2026. 

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 #LastChance #LensArtists #LensArtists

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

Lens-Artists Challenge #376: Wings

This week it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and she gets straight to the point: ‘I am challenging you to feature anything with wings‘. It’s a little dull and miserable around here at the moment, and even the eagle that soars over Oiã and the woods behind our house is staying in the warm, so instead I’ve got a few winged creatures from our trip to the Maldives in October. 

The place where we stay is a small island resort. It’s actually teeming with wildlife, even if the most obvious signs are the humans sunbathing on the beach, paddling or snorkeling in the sea (or lounging around the several bars on the island). There’s a black bird, that makes an unholy high-pitched scream, which I always thought were the bats that fly around the island. The bats themselves are really elusive, and I’ve never managed a good image, or any image apart from this terrible photo when we came across one feeding in a tree a couple of metres above our heads.

There’s also a white parakeet, known as ‘Snowy’, who frequents a couple of the bars on the island. In the mornings s/he can be found in the Banyan restaurant, perched on the shoulder of a member of staff and eating from the plate of pastries and fruit specially prepared for them. In the afternoon, Snowy can be found in the Lohis bar, being fed by the staff there.

This crane is a bit of a thief. S/he will wander around the Beach Grill, looking for scraps of food, and gobbling down pieces of burger bun thrown at them (specifically burger buns, any meat is ignored). One day we were enjoying our lunch, and the crane was doing their normal patrol, walking slowly around the benches, seeing what people might have. On this day s/he zeroed in on our table, watching as we enjoyed our burger and chips (that’s french fries, just to clarify). Slowly s/he edged closer, and we watched in amusement. Then, s/he jumped up onto the bench next to my partner, paused for a second, then lunged at her plate, defly grabbing the top layer of the burger bun before retreating to safety. All we could do was stare at the crane, then laugh uncontrollably. From then on, whenever we saw the crane hovering around a table, we’d warn the occupants, ‘be careful, that bird will have your lunch.’

It rained a helluva lot during our holiday, though it was warm rain and it didn’t spoil our enjoyment. We would walk around the island, clutching our umbrellas and dodging the puddles, enjoying the vivid greens that the rain-soaked leaves would reveal. One day, ambling back to our little villa, I happened to glance over and spotted this wonderful parrot on the veranda roof of a small building. Like Snowy, I don’t think this parrot was a pet in the strictest term, just an occupant of the island who realised that they had a good thing going mixing with humans.

In the conclusion of her post, Beth asked: ‘When you think of wings do you think of birds, insects, angels and airplanes? Maybe you think of … fantasy beings like dragons and fairies.’ Well, there were dragons on the island too, but sadly they didn’t have wings.

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.

#birds #challenge #dragon #lensartists #maldivas #maldives #parrots #thief #wings #lensArtists

Lens-Artists #375: Where to Find the Mysterious

This week it’s Patti’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Where to Find the Mysterious‘. On her blog, Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures, Patti writes, ‘When life is a bit crazy … I go out with my camera, hoping that someone or something catches my eye. … I’m searching for something beautiful, something I’ve never seen before, or something mysterious’.

Patti asks us to, ‘share your mysterious images captured for this challenge’, so I thought I would post a few images taken this afternoon and make no comments about them at all, except to say that they were taken with a toy camera, the Photo Creator MiniCam, with a variable neutral density (ND) filter at its maximum setting. The images were taken in colour, but you’d hardly know that from the results.

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 #challenge #lensartists #themysterious #toycamera #canaltoys #lensArtists #lofi #minicam #photocreator

Lens-Artists Challenge #373: Looking Back to Challenge #31 – Landscapes

It’s Egídio’s turn to host the Challenge this week, and it’s another ‘Looking Back’ Challenge. In a post on his blog, Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes, Egídio says, ‘when we began the Looking Back series, I was excited about the prospect of revisiting some previous challenges I had missed.’ He chose ‘Landscapes’ as the theme for the Challenge this week, revisiting Amy’s (of The World Is a Book) Theme from 2019.

A few years ago I picked up a DJI Pocket 2, a small digital camera on a gimbal that was great for videos on the move, not that I ever used it much for that purpose. What I did have great fun with, though, was the panorama mode. I would set the camera on a tripod, press the record button and it would create a lovely 180° panorama. The Pocket 2 went with me all over the place; in Aveiro,  the woods behind our house, and down to the beach at Barra. Nowadays, I still like panoramas, but I’m more likely to use a film camera, like the Horizon 202 or the 1920s Kodak 3-A folding camera.

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.

#Architecture #Building #Challenge #DJIPocket2 #Farol #Landscapes #LensArtists #Panorama #Seascape #barra #LensArtists #portugal #URBAN

Lens-Artists Challenge, #372: Ephemeral

This week it’s Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Ephemeral‘. She began her post with a, ‘short and simple definition of the word ephemeral – “lasting for a very short time“.’ A ‘short time’ can be quite subjective, from a few hours to a few days, or even longer. To my mind, an alternative term is ‘temporary’, and there’s nothing more temporary that interests me than street art.

First, a confession: I was all amped up this morning to get out and about and record some of my favourite pieces of street art around the neighbourhood. But what happened as I was bending over to put some rubbish in the bin? I felt something move in my back and I think I slipped a disc. So here I am, temporarily (ephemerally? 😉) confined to bed. So instead, I’m going to raid the camera roll on my phone for some of my favourite pieces from Aveiro and Meco.

This first piece you’ve definitely seen before, depicting a vampiric figure with the message ‘we scream but we have no voice: No! No!’ Back in 2021, when I first ‘found’ it in a back street in Aveiro it had already been there for several years and was quite worn even then. But nowadays, this photo was taken in October 2025, it’s even more decayed. With the development going on in this street at the moment, I suspect it might not last much longer.

A few years ago, I took a walk around Meco looking for pieces by the Portuguese street artist Dalaiama, who first visited the area in 2006, then again – I think – around 2011. He makes pieces protesting capitalism and the ‘fat cat’ culture in Portugal, and is known to work especially on electricity substations and junction boxes. I came across one spendid piece tucked away in an abandoned structure in Meco, which was in lovely condition. Sadly, a few years later the whole structure was demolished and the piece lost.

This second piece from Dalaiama is representative of the ‘fat cat’ art with a Pac-man styled figure in a car with a top hat gobbling up what I think represents a dove of peace. Often these stencils are surrounded with a red border, or are over a pile of ‘euros’. This piece on a wall was around for several years, and I had an image of it somewhere, but in the past few years it was partially covered with a generic tag. A shame, really.

Back in Aveiro, one of my favourite spots for street art is the Yacht Club. Just down the road from the Club is the overpass of the A25 road that leads to Barra. The concrete supports of the overpass are naturally a tempting spot for street artists, and are covered with tags. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to cover one of the tags with a load of publicity posters for the television series, Andor. Not the second season from 2025, though, but the first season, released in 2022. By the time I noticed these posters, the elements had already done their worst, and the paper was peeling from the concrete support, but the Star Wars style was unmistakable.

My final examples of ephemeral street art are two tags on the side of a building that itself is proving ephemeral in its own way. Just outside the coastal town of Costa Nova is a long abandoned stone building. When I first came across this building, probably over a decade ago, it was in much better condition, though even the the elements had been to work on it. But now all that remains are a couple of walls marked with these old tags that themselves are nearly invisible. Within a few years time there will just be some coloured bricks on a stone wall, if that survives.

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 #Dalaiama #Ephemeral #Graffiti #LensArtists #Mural #Streetart #Summerinmeco #Temporary #Weathered #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge, #371: Street Details

Preamble: I originally created a series of animated GIFs for this post, which I uploaded to Giphy and embedded in the WordPress post. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and the images were not displayed properly — or at all. So instead I have displayed red/cyan anaglyphs, which actually looks quite cool although you really won’t see the stereo effect without 3D glasses.

This week it’s Ritva’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Street Details‘. On her blog, Ritva Sillanmäki Photography, Ritva didn’t waste any time getting to the point: ‘This is a simple challenge … , skip the classic street-portrait approach and zoom in … . The goal is to reveal the often-hidden, magical world, of the details we never take the time to notice’.

For this Challenge, I took the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 digital stereo camera down the side streets of Oiã. I was looking for those items that might normally be overlooked: a worker’s stepladder in the street, an abandoned house, benches and bins in the new park, and a few other places. The abandoned sofa, on the road leading to Estação de Oiã, the railway station, has been there for a while, and I recorded that the first time I was out with the Real 3D W3. The park has only been open for a few months, and the ‘yellow brick road’ provides a pleasant short cut between the main road and the Town Hall.

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’.

Addition: Instead of using Giphy, I uploaded an album of the animated GIFs to Tenor. This was not easy. First of all, the images needed to be approved before they could be accessed, and to add insult to injury several were flagged as ‘spam’. I appealed those decisions, and hopefully these will be restored. In the meantime, I will attempt to add an animated Gif with the ‘Tenor’ block, but I can only do this on the desktop.

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.

#Abandoned #Building #Challenge #LensArtists #Streetphotography #Townscape #LensArtists #park #street #StreetDetails

Lens-Artists Challenge, #370: Ancient

I’ve been a bit lazy with the Challenge this week. It’s Sofia’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Ancient‘. On her blog, photographias, she writes, ‘the challenge is Ancient, as in things that belong to a distant past.’ She continues, ‘I’m looking for anything that has had an existence of many years.’ Just now we’re staying at a resort in the Maldives. While the resort has only been in existence for a few decades, the island on which it is situated has been around for millennia.

The Republic of Maldives is comprised of 1,192 Islands in a chain of 26 atolls made up of coral reefs and sand bars. With an established history of over 2,500 years, I think it counts as ancient for the terms of the Challenge, so I thought I would look at the foundation on which it was built — the coral reef — especially at the patterns of the coral washed up on the beach. Over the years, dead coral is broken off the reef and washed up onto shore. Over the decades and centuries, this is ground down to a coarse crystalline sand.

There are also a lot of hermit crabs on the island, especially on the sea front. Most of these are small, occupying shells barely a couple of centimetres long, but some, like the two shown, were quite large, about 5cm and 10cm long, respectively. The shells were battered and eroded, and the crabs inhabiting these shells must be really old.

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.

#Ancient #Challenge #Closeup #Coral #LensArtists #Maldives #Reef #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #369: Dreamy

This week it’s Ann-Christine’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Dreamy‘. On her blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand … she writes, ‘what is ”dreamy” for you, and how do you create a dreamy picture?’ Ann-Christine tells us the dictionary definition of ‘dreamy’, and also a photographic description of using, ‘soft light, soft focus, delicate tones, and other … aspects to produce ehereal pictures. A blurred, or hazy feel is typical to the images’. She also gives some ideas of making dreamy photographs, like using, ‘ICM [intentional camera movement], changing the colours, cropping or double exposure – just to mention a few.’

When I think of ‘dreamy’ in photography, I think of Lomography, the camera movement, now company, that developed from, ‘taking spontaneous photographs with minimal attention to technical details. [exploiting] the unpredictable, non-standard optical traits of toy cameras (such as light leaks and irregular lens alignment), and non-standard film processing techniques for aesthetic effect’. When Lomography talk of ‘dreamy’, they’re usually selling lenses that produce vignetting or a lot of flare, or using lenses with haze inside that produce a glowing, ‘dreamy’ effect.

Normally, I wouldn’t have an issue with this. I have many cameras, and a few lenses, that can produce such ‘dreamy’ image quality. But we’re away again, and I just have one camera with me, an Olympus Pen E-PM2, with its 16MP sensor (and broken image stabilization), and a few lenses. So, I have to think a little ‘out of the box’ if I want to make anything remotely ‘dreamy’ and, to make things even more complicated, we’re away on holiday again, in the Maldives, and it’s the end of the rainy season. Fortunately, I came equipped with my trusty ND64 six-stop neutral density filters, so here for your enjoyment are a few long exposure ‘dreamy’ images from around the resort. If you want to see a few more of these, I’ve saved a small album on my Joomeo.

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.

#Blur #Challenge #Dreamy #Exposure #Image #Landscape #LensArtists #Motion #Movement #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #366: City Mouse/Country Mouse

This post has been a ‘work in progress’ for a couple of weeks now. I had started it the week of the Challenge,  and went out with a few cameras specifically to make some city/country crossover images. But then I had a (minor) health thing and it was difficult to get to the lab to get the film developed. But we’re back! So here’s my take on Lens-Artists Challenge #366: City Mouse/Country Mouse. It was Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and on her blog, Travels and Trifles, she wrote, ‘some of the … sights along my daily walk reminded me of the classic Aesop fable “City Mouse/Country Mouse”. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, its moral is that no matter how appealing someone else’s life may seem, there really is no place like home.’

https://flic.kr/p/2ry6ECq

We live in a small village on the outskirts of the town of Oiã in Portugal. Actually,  it’s a bit of an overstatement to call it a ‘village’ as there are no shops at all, just a roundabout, the café next door, and a cluster of houses along the roads. From the roundabout (‘rotunda’ in Portuguese) we can either walk in the direction of Oiã, or towards the next village of Águas Boas (here, there be dragons 😉), or along a road that leads to the Zon Industrial de Oiã. Behind the houses, in all directions, are fields, and the remains of the woodlands that I still derive a lot of pleasure from wandering around. 

https://flic.kr/p/2ry518x

https://flic.kr/p/2ry517R

I reckon we’re closer to the idea of the ‘country mouse’ of the fable, and yes it’s certainly nice to go to the ‘city’ from time to time. For us the city is really Aveiro, with its famous canals, but I’m a beach person now, and the places that we most like to visit are the beach towns of Barra and Vagueira. So my intention for this Challenge was to take the Horizon 202, a Russian swing lens panoramic camera from the 1990s, and Lomochrome Turquoise film, for some panoramic views of the beach towns. I’ve posted the whole roll in an album on my Flickr, if you want to see the rest of the images. 

https://flic.kr/p/2ry6EzE

https://flic.kr/p/2ry6gmd

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’.

https://flic.kr/p/2ry6dNo

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.

#AesopFable #Challenge #CityMouseCountryMouse #ColourShift #Country #LensArtists #Panorama #Redscale #Urban #366 #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #368: Looking Back to #106 – Autumn

This week it’s John’s turn to host the Challenge, and it’s another  ‘Looking Back’ challenge, where a member of the team picks a subject from a previous Challenge, then makes a new entry on that subject. This time, it’s a topical subject: Autumn. On his blog, Journeys with Johnbo, he writes, ‘With autumn fully entrenched here in North Dakota, I searched the archives for a “Fall Colors” theme. In July 2020, the team hosted a series titled “Seasons.” Patti hosted the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #106: Autumn.’ He continues: Now, it’s your turn to show us autumn colors. Share with us your favorite images of autumn, or if the timing is right, share some new pictures.’

This week, I took my hint for subjects for the Challenge from John’s comment about searching for ‘Fall Colors’. Over here in Portugal, many of the trees are still quite green, though now the autumn colours are trying to push through. I decided that I would take two cameras with me on a ‘walk around the block’, where I tread the fields and what remains of the woods behind our house. The first camera was an Olympus Pen E-PL2 mirrorless cameras fitted with a Holga plastic lens (with a micro four-thirds mount) and a +4 close-up filter.

With this camera, I got some lovely autumn images of the changing leaves on the vines, which will soon fall and leave rows of bare sticks, to be trimmed and prepared for next year’s grape harvest, and also of the remains of the cornfields, with unpicked cobs among dried — and as yet uncut — corn.

With the second camera I had much more fun. This was my beloved Panasonic Lumix GF1 fitted with its dedicated Panasonic 20mm f1.7 pancake lens. This particular lens was sold as faulty, so I picked it up ‘for a song’ compared to the price of a ‘new’ lens. But on the GF1 it works perfectly, and I saved a fortune. For the Challenge, I fitted a 6-stop neutral density filter to the lens and concentrated on making some intentional camera movement images of the bare trees and autumn colours.

Instead of just presenting the ICM images, I brought them back home, loaded the files into my smartphone, and glitched a few with the smartphone app GlitchLab. I should have done this properly, but my new scanning/glitching setup is not finished yet. However, with a little RGB shift here, and some channel mixing there, I hope we have a couple of real examples of ‘Autumn colours’.

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 #Autumn #Challenge #ChannelMixing #Fall #FallColors #Glitch #GlitchArt #ICM #IntentionalCameraMovement #LensArtists #LookingBack #Motion #RGBShift #106 #LensArtists

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

Lens-Artists Challenge #364: Quiet Moment

This week it’s Ritva’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Quiet Moment‘. ‘Where is your serene sanctuary?’ Asks, Ritva. ‘This week’s challenge is [a] “story-driven” adventure, encouraging you to explore and connect with your own experiences and emotions – “quiet moment”’.

Our holiday is over now, and we’re back to the ‘hustle and bustle’ of life up north. Of course,  living in the countryside, on the outskirts of a small town, is nothing like living in the city, but compared to our routine for the last five weeks life feels … faster. Down in Meco, apart from perhaps seven days that we lost due to the weather, heavy seas, or a bit of a chill that I picked up from getting wet on a windy day, our routine was to wake up late, have breakfast, prepare food for the day and then take the roughly 1km walk to the beach. After setting up our little ‘compound’ (as we called it), we would spend the next several hours on the beach.

At the end of the day, we would pack everything away, dispose of our rubbish in the bins provided, and make the trek back to our accommodation. It’s important to take all of your rubbish with you. We appreciate that the beach is for everyone and it deserves to be looked after. ‘Leave behind nothing but footprints’ is a good philosophy to follow, and even on the beach footprints are transitory. After a shower (and a beer), at 9pm we would head out for a late dinner, a digestivo in the local bar, and after a short walk to settle our stomachs, head to bed. Then we would wake up the next morning and repeat the experience. 

During our walk through the woods, often all we could hear was the occasional bird, the wind in the trees, and the waves pounding against the shore. On a quiet day, when the sea was still, it was difficult even to hear the waves. On the beach, I spent much of the time in the shade, with the sound of the waves lulling me into a peaceful sleep. At least once, we would stay for the sunset, when the sun dips below the horizon, leaving the sky a beautiful salmon colour before the night sets in. It’s all over now, we’re back up north, but we’re already looking forward to doing it all again next year.

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.

#Beach #Blue #Challenge #Cliffs #LensArtists #Praia #QuietMoments #Sky #Summerinmeco #Sunset #LensArtists

Lens Artist Challenge #363: Virtual Scavenger Hunt

This week in the Lens-Artists Challenge we’re on a Scavenger Hunt. Our host for the week, Anne from Slow Shutter Speed, asks, ‘How many of you venture out for our weekly photo challenges? Or do you hunt through your archives? … So, this week, I challenge you to a virtual scavenger hunt!’ For her Challenge, Anne listed 20 options and invites us to do ‘a deep dive into your archives, going back as far as you want to find the items [on the list] … Please find at least five images, but no more than 10, and just one image from each suggestion’.

Something with a pattern

The featured image of this post features something with a pattern. In this case, the surface of a house plant with green and white leaves. Here, I’ve photographed it with the Olympus Camedia C-100 digicam with a failing sensor, and introduced some intentional camera movement (ICM) into the image.

Something with water in it

A few years ago I took a series of close-up photographs of various drinks with ice cubes in them. Sometimes, with suitable lighting or coloured filters behind the glasses, this produced some wonderful abstract images. Incidentally yes, I did finish the drink after taking the photos.

Something rectangular

Although this may not look like a rectangle, but it is in fact the corner of a rectangular balcony on the side of a building. My intention here was to create a series of close-up images of buildings where the abstracts were created by the light falling upon the structure.

Something with a bumpy texture

Another in my series of abstract structures, this is actually the corner of a building. In this instance you can see the rough stucco texture of the outside of the building.

Something with a soft texture

This might not look like a soft texture, but it’s actually the surface of the quilt cover from the bed photographed in close-up. What I have then done is glitched the image by a technique known as pixel sorting. Although I have a specific program that can pixel sort an image, in this case I’ve taken a short-cut and used the GlitchLab smartphone app.

Something glass

This is a nighttime image of the patterned glass of our kitchen window. Outside, in the garden, can be seen the lights on the patio.

Something with a design

This is a close-up of a piece of street art in Aveiro as photographed through the Vortoscope, a triangle of mirrors that when viewed through fracture an image. It was pioneered by the American artist Alvin Langdon Coburn in the early twentieth century as a part of the English Vorticist movement. Vorticisim, ‘rejected landscapes and nudes in favour of a geometric style that was much more abstract‘ and the Vortoscope was Langdon Coburn’s response to this. The name Vortoscope was coined by the poet Ezra Pound, a contemporary and friend of Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the image it produced as a Vortograph.

Zig-zag lines

This is what I like to call a ‘glitch in the wild’. It’s actually a close-up of the TV screen during a breakdown in service. They don’t happen very often, but sometimes we can get some lovely glitch effects from the digital broadcast. In this case, almost reminiscent of the zig-zag patterns of old analogue televisions.

Something circular

This is a simply a close-up of a piece of bubble wrap through a coloured photography filter.

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 #Challenge #Closeup #Details #Glitch #LensArtists #Pattern #ScavengerHunt #Shadow #Texture #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #362: Sports, Sporting Events and Fun Games

This week, it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Sports, Sporting Events and Fun Games‘. On her blog, Wandering Dawgs, she says, ‘Your challenge is to show images from any sports or games you choose’. Well, if lying on the beach for several hours a day, turning over occasionally to get an even tan, was considered a sport, it would be a shoo-in. Sadly, it’s not, so I’ll have to think of some other pasttime.

Fortunately, on the next beach to ours, Praia das Bicas, some people do practise a really exciting sport, paragliding. The paragliders assemble on the cliffs behind Praia das Bicas and launch themselves into the air, using the wind currents to glide up and down the coast, either towards Cabo Espichel in the one direction or along our beach towards Praia do Meco in the other.

A few of the paragliders make a good living from giving rides to tourists, and it’s quite amusing watching the clients with their GoPros on a selfie stick shrieking with delight as they pass overhead. One of the pilots in particular is out quite a lot, and he certainly gives the client the ride of their lives, and sometimes the spectators on the ground a bit of a thrill, too.

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’.

https://youtu.be/U99DroPBxEg?si=NiOgEQ5IMWpBEqbt

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.

#Blue #Challenge #Cliffs #Games #LensArtists #Paraglider #Sky #SportingEvents #Sports #Summerinmeco #Sunset #beach #LensArtists #praia

Lens-Artists Challenge #361: Looking Back to #20 – Open Sesame: Doors and Doorways

This week it’s Sofia’s turn to host the Challenge, and like Leya in Challenge #355, it’s a ‘Looking Back‘ challenge, where a member of the team picks a subject from a previous Challenge, then makes a new entry on that subject. On her blog, photographias, Sofia writes, ‘let’s go back to challenge #20 called Open Sesame: Doors and Doorways, hosted by Tina [in 2019]’. If you follow her blog, you’ll  know how much Sofia loves doors and doorways, they’re always popping up, and as she freely admits, ‘I love doors’.

Where we live, ‘up north’, there are some great doors, especially on the many abandoned and derelict buildings in the neighbourhood. My intention would have been to get up close and record all those fabulous textures in wooden doors or the rust-coated metal doors. But we’re not. We’re holidaying down south, near Lisbon, and frankly, pickings are a lot thinner. It’s not that there aren’t any doorways, of course there are, but a lot of the villas are in small compounds and to see a wall or a steel gate is just not that … interesting.

We’re mostly travelling from our little cottage (in a compound) to the beach and back again, so we don’t see many doors in that respect — unless you count the rough pathway that leads to the beach —  through that doorway leads delight (and a great tan). There is one door that always piques my interest. I think the intention was to build a privacy wall around this house, which was renovated several years ago, but after building the doorway and gate the wall was never finished. So it sits there, a door to nowhere. Just as well, too, since the tree visible through the gate is regularly plundered by the locals for the plentiful figs that grow on it. What a loss to the community that would have been.

The door on the side of this house facing the road has always mystified me. Was it intended to be the back door of a house (the main entrance is inside another old gated compound), but why is it so narrow? The door can’t be more than 50-60cm wide.

Finally, the door that would have been perfect for this challenge, on the side of a building that was once one of the best fish restaurants in Meco, turned out not to be a door at all. At least that’s what it says on the plastic sheet covering it.

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 #Doors #Doorways #LensArtists #20 #355 #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #360: Found at the Fair/Market

This week, it’s Leya’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is, ‘Found at the Fair/Market‘. ‘We have all been to a market or fair at least once … I’d love to see some of your memories, too!’ Leya adds, ‘They can be from any fair, Farmers’ market, Christmas market, or maybe a carnival? … feel free to choose whatever you have in store!’

We don’t go to many markets. Apart from foodstuffs, they don’t sell much of the things we are looking for, and most of the fresh vegetables we get from local producers. There are lots of festivals, though, including medieval fairs, which were really popular across Europe, including Portugal, though I don’t seem to see as much news about them since the Pandemic.

They are great fun, with swordfights, jousting, and the ‘knights’ vying to prove their worth to the King. The groups who run and perform in these festivals take it really seriously, and a lot of work goes into making the festivals as authentic as possible. There’s one medieval festival, at Santa Maria de Feira in Portugal, that takes over a considerable part of the town and is immensely popular.

We developed such a good relationship with the local medieval festival troupe, Viv’Arte, that they invited us to photograph an event honouring one of the main medieval organisers in Europe. This wasn’t completely medieval, though, and included a range of acts, from juggling to burlesque. Sadly, Viv’Arte did not survive to pandemic, and dissolved in 2021, with the loss of over 60 artists.

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.

#AtTheFair #Challenge #LensArtists #LensArtists #medieval

Lens-Artists Challenge #359: Tools of Photo Composition (Lines, Colors, and Patterns)

It’s John’s turn to host the Challenge, and his theme is ‘Tools of Photo Composition: Lines, Colors, and Patterns‘. ‘This week’, writes John on his blog, Journeys with Johnbo, ‘the challenge is to … find examples of photographs that feature compositional elements such as lines, patterns, or colors’. We’re on holiday at the moment, and our options are limited to roughly green (on our walk through the woods), blue (of the sea or the sky), and well, the light brown sandy colour of the beach.

Back in Lens-Artists Challenge #323, Egídio asked us to ‘explore how we see silence in photography’, and this led me to an introduction of the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese photographer and architect who has spent decades travelling the world and recording seascapes. ‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security,’ says Sugimoto on his website, ‘as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’ Sugimoto’s images often portray the division of sea and sky with a sharp horizon line.

Sugimoto used a large format camera to create his seascapes, sometimes with images up to three hours long. All I have is my smartphone. He also used to present them all in black and white with no signs of human habitation. I’ve actually tried a couple with a bit of sand included, a nod to the compositional rule of thirds. The last image, though this is in colour, actually looks like it was made in black and white. The wonders of light.

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 #Composition #Horizon #LensArtists #Lines #Sand #Sea #Sky #Summerinmeco #323 #beach #LensArtists #praia #Sugimoto

Lens-Artists Challenge #358: Live and Learn

This week, it’s Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Live and Learn’. In her post on her blog, Travels and Trifles, Tina writes: ‘Show me some of the things you’ve learned about photography or any subject you choose’. This was a frustrating theme for me, for one simple reason: I’m away from my weird and wonderful collection of film and digital cameras.

Back home, there are so many cameras to choose from, it would have been fun to relearn about one in real time. But now I’m ‘stuck’ with just my smartphone and a couple of cameras that I can’t get the images developed or downloaded from before September. So I thought I’d briefly talk about ‘the right moment’, as Tina called it. I’m not good at waiting for the right moment, which is why you’ll always find my posts full of my favourite trees, or telegraph poles, or graffiti/street art. They aren’t going anywhere.

When photographing animals, insects, or even, on that rare occasion, people, I’m always waiting for just the right moment, and in that moment … they’re gone. The bird has flown, the lizard has run away, or the person has got fed up waiting and gone off to make a cup of tea. But sometimes, in an odd moment, the right time just presents itself, and I’ve got the almost perfect image (for me). And so it was with the cat in these images. We were enjoying a post-beach beer when I spotted this grey tabby cat on a low roof. It was sitting there, in the dip of the corrugated roof, just watching us. Of course, I didn’t have my smartphone to hand, but fortunately, the cat was still there when I got back.

Cats can be notoriously skittish in Portugal, and it looked at me warily as I approached, but didn’t run away. I edged a little closer and took the shot. I wasn’t really happy with the result, there was too much clutter around the cat, with the wires from the TV antenna. So I edged around a little further and took another shot. This was better, but the cat was getting bored now and just looking around. The background was a little boring, too.

So I moved around and a little closer. This was better, with a lovely golden background from the trees in the early evening (it’s not called the ‘Golden Hour’ for nothing), but the cat’s attention had been drawn to something outside the frame. The profile image was not actually bad, but I wanted something a little better.

So I waited — I think the cat was getting used to me now, and was just ignoring me — and then he turned to look at something over my shoulder. That was it. The right moment, and I’d got it. I thanked the cat quietly and moved away. I don’t think I’ll ever top that cat image, and it was perfect for posting on social media under the #Caturday hashtag. Job done, and I returned to my (now warm) beer.

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.

#Cat #Challenge #LensArtists #LiveAndLearn #Smartphone #SocialMedia #Caturday #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #357: Into the Woods

This week it’s the turn of Egídio of Through Brazilian Eyes to host the Challenge, and his theme is ‘Into The Woods‘. He says, ‘I briefly mentioned the Japanese expression shinrin-yoku in a post about national forests … a concept that was developed in Japan in the 1980s as a form of natural therapy and stress relief, or immersing oneself in a forest atmosphere. It is a way to allow all your senses to experience nature mindfully.’ Egídio continues, ‘this week’s challenge is about how you [practise] ‘forest bathing’ in your corner of the world. 

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that the woods behind our house feature regularly in my blog posts. Whether it’s testing a new-to-me camera, or practising a new technique, or just going for a walk to relax or work off a heavy lunch, I’ll always head off for a ‘walk around the block’. For this Challenge, I’m taking one of my favourite cameras, the Olympus Camedia C-100 digital camera into the woods. 

The Olympus Camedia C-100 is a 1.3-megapixel CCD sensor with a fixed-focus lens released by Olympus in 2001. It’s fully automatic, which means that you can make next to no changes to the image you are taking, like monochrome mode for my beloved aerochromes. It’s a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera, and the sliding lens cover means that I can’t fix a filter thread to the camera, so if I want to make trichromes or aerochromes then I have to hold filters over the front of the lens, and sometimes the surround of the filter, or my stubby fingers, get into the frame.

The unique feature of this camera is that the sensor is failing, and I reckon that it’s overexposing by around 10 stops. Without any filter the images are completely blown out, but I’ve found that with a cheap Neewer ND2-400 variable ND filter on its maximum setting the vastly overblown natural images are made much more legible. It’s still a little overexposed on bright sunny days, but in overcast weather or in shadow the results are quite ‘good’.

I took the Camedia C-100 on a walk around the block, along with a tripod and a collection of filters. My intention was to try to make some digital trichromes and aerochromes, with red, green, blue, and infrared filters, but looking at the images from the red filter I reckon that the sensor has deteriorated even further and it seems to be even more infrared-sensitive. This did actually have some benefits in that red/blue channel mixed images came out wonderfully, but the images are now full of artefacts. Of course, I’m perfectly happy with that, the more glitchy this camera becomes, the better.

Around the fields behind our house, the woods look as they used to, but now, the once thick eucalyptus woods have been cut down to make way for heavy duty power lines for the long-promised high speed rail line between Lisbon and Madrid. I can still derive a lot of pleasure from the woods that remain, but now I just have to walk a little further.

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 #Challenge #Digicam #Digitalcamera #Glitch #Glitchy #LensArtists #Sensor #Trees #Trichrome #InTheWoods #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #356: Quiet Hours

I had a plan for the Challenge this week, but it was stolen from me. Not by time, but by circumstances. I spent more time in the local clinic than I had expected (thankfully, what I thought was troubling me turned out not to be) so the tasks that we had planned were put off to other times and, well, we find ourselves here. On a Thursday, and my plan for the Challenge has turned to dust.

It was a guest host for the Challenge this week, Stupidity Hole (SH) from the blog of the same name. I’ve been a follower of theirs for a while, and really enjoyed their writing, and images. It’s not always comfortable, but they challenge themselves and the blog is well worth a follow, not just for the Lens-Artists Challenge. Anyhow, the Challenge from SH this week is ‘Quiet Hours‘.

‘What are quiet hours?’ they ask. ‘Among many things, this can mean an empty space. It can be a sense of stillness; a lack of action; an absence of presence within a frame. Quiet hours are often associated with the time before people are waking up and getting about … there’s a sense of quiet hours through a lack of presence.’ Another term I have heard for this ‘quiet hours’ is Liminal Space, which may be thought of as, ‘a transitional period or place that exists between two states or stages’. To my horror, that definition was taken from the AI Overview on Chrome, but it actually fits with what I was trying to express quite perfectly. The shame.

Liminal spaces are those places where there are no people at the time of taking the image, but at any moment will be a hive of activity. It’s a transition between empty and not empty. A liminal space itself doesn’t have to be an empty space, though that’s often how it is portrayed, but essentially it’s an area devoid of human presence. Of course, as soon as I say that, some of my examples of ‘Quiet Hours’ contain human figures.

These few examples were taken from what was quite an emotional period, the time around my Mother’s funeral. It had gotten off to a dreadful start. We had left the relative calm of Portugal to discover on our arrival at Gatwick that there had been a landslide somewhere along the route and the trains from London Paddington to Pershore were all cancelled. I nearly just turned around there and then, but calmer heads prevailed and we ended up booking an overnight stay in a lovely little hotel near the airport. 

Before we left Porto, we were waiting on the plane to take off and there was a plane waiting next to ours to be boarded. This was actually the time I should have taken the image, the airplane enjoying its quiet hours before the hectic activity of the flight to who knows where, but I didn’t. Instead, I was baffled by the sudden sight of hundreds of people walking along the side of the busy airport road to catch their flight. We wondered whether the bus they were due to catch had broken down (it was Easyjet, after all) but whatever the reason, the liminal space transition was well passed.

The next day we caught the early train to London Victoria, and slowly made our way across country by train and the inevitable ‘rail replacement’ bus. I should add that I didn’t take any cameras with me, it did not seem appropriate, but I had my smartphone, and I just couldn’t help ‘seeing’. It was also a distraction from the events ahead. When we arrived at the station to Victoria, it was well before rush hour, and was a foggy morning. The station looked like it was waiting for the morning crush, and was taking a few moments to breathe.

After the funeral, we had planned to spend a few days with family before heading back. But with the continuing uncertainty over the rail travel we decided to leave a day early and spend a night in a hotel at Luton airport. The route took us through Birmingham New Street, a station I had not been through since the 1980s, and although it still retained its concrete bleakness, nowadays ‘upstairs’ the station has been completely modernised, and completely confusing.

We arrived to London St Pancras, and from that moment on, any thought of ‘quiet hours’ could be dispelled, though I did manage a quick image of the train after it had emptied its load of weary travellers, waiting for the next journey to begin. From there we went went to Luton Airport, and spent a pleasant night in an airport hotel. Our return journey to Portugal was uneventful  apart from one moment when we crossed between day and night. I’m not sure if this can be described as a liminal image, but I certainly felt it as a quiet hour as the hectic activities of the day gave away to the calm of the night.

This has been rather a long post, with not that many images for a photography Challenge, but it was a different post than normal that I hope Stupidity Hole, at least, will be pleased with. 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.

#Aesthetic #Challenge #LensArtists #Limina #Liminalspace #QuietHours #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #355: Looking Back to Challenge #42 – Creativity (Revisited)

The Lens-Artists Challenge is taking a break this week, next week it’ll be back with a guest post from SH, but I thought it would be an idea to share this little gem of Creativity that probably only a handful of people in the whole of Portugal are aware of.

In front of our local Lidl supermarket in Oliveira do Bairro is a small derelict structure. I’ve photographed this many times over the years, and I never tire of it. A few years ago the vegetation that grows around the building was cut back, and I went exploring. I was startled to find the most beautiful mural on one wall. This wasn’t a typical street art painted mural, but azulejos, hand painted tiles,  and it depicted a beautiful undersea vista.

Traditionally, tiles were decorated with a simple colour palate dominated by blues and whites, but in the twentieth century azulejos became more ornate and were used in advertising hoardings and murals. In the 1970s and 80s machine patterned tiles appeared,  and houses began to be adorned with a variety of geometric shapes. (I really must gave another wander around the ‘old town’ in Aveiro, there are some great examples there.)

After my original foray into the building, back in 2021, the vegetation was allowed to grow back and the structure became inaccessible again, but in the past couple of weeks a lot of the vegetation around Lidl has been cut back, including around the derelict structure. As I was in Oliveira, I took the opportunity to see if I could access the building, and after a bit of clambering (and narrowly missing a poor dead cat in the undergrowth), I entered the derelict building and discovered the mural was as lovely as I remembered. 

This time, I took some close-up images of the mural, or should it really be described as a mosaic, showing more details of the painted tiles. They really are splendid, and the close ups reveal the brush strokes and the effort that was put into the design. For someone this was a real labour of love. The shapes of the eyes of the fish, and individual fish, still retain their colour, and although there is some water damage, unsurprisingly since the building, and the mural, has been open to the elements for years, the mural is still an idyllic underwater vista. 

Judging by the clearing up around the Lidl supermarket, it’s possible that after some twenty years that development might be taking place. The scrubland is one of my favourite places to go to test new cameras, and although I would miss the concrete pipes that have graced many a post, I would miss this building, and this irreplaceable mural, even more. I had better record its intricate detail while I can.

This was for Leya’s first ‘Looking Back’ Challenge, ‘Creativity‘. 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.

#Abandoned #Abstract #Azulejos #Building #Challenge #Creativity #Decay #Design #LensArtists #LookingBack #Traditional #LensArtists

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.

https://flic.kr/p/2qzqPpA

https://flic.kr/p/2qG4PUS

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.

https://flic.kr/p/2qLpLyP

https://flic.kr/p/2qG66MU

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.

https://flic.kr/p/2r6id8V

https://flic.kr/p/2r6ickC

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. 

https://flic.kr/p/2r9zn9o

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

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’. 

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

Lens-Artists Challenge #352: Mellow

This week Sofia from Photographias is hosting the Challenge, and her theme is, ‘Mellow‘. ‘After the wonderful Books theme from last week’, says Sofia, ‘I invite you to continue in a relaxing mood …  However, I want to focus on a different mellowness: a sense of softness …’. When I think of mellow, aside from the name of the Donovan song, ‘Mellow Yellow’ — which I don’t think I would recognise until I heard it,  I think of being chill, or relaxed. When I go for my constitutional, or a ‘walk around the block’, or a trip to Aveiro, my Better Half sometimes gets a little nervous. That something might happen to me while I’m walking alone around the fields and in the woods.

In order to ease her worries, to get her to ‘mellow out’ (a term that I would never use but it fits with the theme of the Challenge), I’ll pause somewhere and take a close up of a flower with my smartphone. I’ll then WhatsApp her the image with the message, ‘A flower for My Baby xxx’. Taken over the past couple of years, here are a few of these images. It also just happens that these are (mostly) yellow.

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 #Closeup #Flower #LensArtists #Mellow #Natural #Nature #Plant #Yellow #LensArtists

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

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

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!’

https://flic.kr/p/2r36f4i

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. 

https://flic.kr/p/2r35RHH

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

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

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

Lens-Artists Challenge # 337: Bold

It was the turn of Sofia from Photographias to host the Challenge this week, and her theme for the week is, ‘Bold‘. Be bold’, says Sofia, ‘and take us all somewhere new’. Personally,  I don’t consider myself all that bold, but I do admire those Street arts and taggers who are bold enough to trespass in spaces that people shouldn’t really be entering to leave their mark in bright, colourful designs.

I took a trip into Aveiro, armed with my trusty Panasonic GF1 and 20mm f1.7 lens, with the specific aim of recording some street art. Actually, it was the first test ‘in anger’ of a 20mm lens that was supposed to be faulty but for me has behaved flawlessly. I had hoped to go to the Yacht Club, but the road was being resurfaced and the whole area was inaccessible (and I wasn’t bold enough to challenge the heavy lorries and industrial equipment that was speeding back and forth across the terrain).

So instead I wandered around the roads and alleyways of Aveiro hunting for street art. It’s always a great place to go. Sometimes the tags and designs are new and still retain their bright and bold colours, and sometimes the art has decayed over the years and has lost its vibrance. In one instance, under the underpass of the road leading to the Port of Aveiro and the seaside towns of Barra and Costa Nova, a brightly coloured tag, now faded with age, was in turn covered with posters that were also once bright and colourful but are now decaying and barely legible. (The posters were actually for the TV series, ‘Andor’.)

Sometimes the Aveiro city council sponsors street art, and one example was this commission by artist Fábio Carneiro to revitalise the area around the Praça do Peixe. Part of a tribute to fishermen, you might recognise this kitten from a previous Challenge entry. That photograph was from a few years ago, since then it has decayed further, but still retains its vibrance and bright colours.

I’m going to finish with a recent photograph of a really old piece depicting a vampire figure with the message ‘we scream but we have no voice: No! No!’ This piece has been on this wall for more than a decade now, but I’ve never been able to find out what it was for. Portugal has a rich tradition of political street art and it must refer to something. Over the years, a lot of the work has worn away, to the point that only the bold red ‘grito’ (scream) is left intact. Incidentally, this was taken with a 1960s Welta Penti II half-frame Rapid film camera with Harman Phoenix film, which is why it looks so different to the rest of the digital images.

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.

#Bold #Challenge #Graffiti #LensArtists #Urban #LensArtists #StreetArt

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

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

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!’ 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 😉

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’.

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

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.’ 

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?

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. 

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.

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’.

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’.

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.’

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.

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.’

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.’

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

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

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

This entry for the Lens-Artists Challenge is late, there’s no denying it, but in my defence I had a really good excuse: we were in the Maldives. Although I had the opportunity to prepare an entry — and did actually draft my text — between laying on the beach, snorkeling for sharks (and I found one!) watching the sunrise and sunsets or just feasting at the all-inclusive resort there just wasn’t really the will to get it done. So I hope you will all forgive me.

It was the turn of Sofia from Photographias to host the Lens-Artists Challenge last week, and she chose as her theme, ‘Looking Back‘. Referring to previous entries, Sofia observed that we’ve been, ‘posting old photos, full of that charm of a time long gone [and] talked about previous experiences with a longing and emotion that connects us all’. So this week Sofia gave us a simple instruction: ‘Look back at things you love(d) in your life, things that have happened, places you visited that you’d like to experience again’.

From around 2013 to 2018 I used to go to the beach a lot. We finally moved to Portugal for good in 2011, after some mixed experiences during the noughties, and my better half’s son joined us a couple of years later. He was then (and still is) a keen surfer so it wasn’t long before I would join him on his trips to the local beaches to photograph the freestyle surfers there. Like most experiences it starred by accident, we went to Labrego beach one afternoon and there were some surfers there who I photographed. These weren’t good photos, mind you, but the experience intrigued me, so of course I would go with him to one of the many beaches near Aveiro and roll off hundreds of frames through the old Olympus DSLR. After a while these got quite good, even if I say so myself.

I had an Olympus E-620 DSLR, a 12MP camera from 2009, and a 100-300mm zoom lens. Compared to full-frame that was equivalent to a maximum focal length of 600mm, which was a great focal length for surfing photography. On a nice sunny morning I would set the aperture to its widest, about f5,6 if I recall, and with a shutter speed of 1/1000s and the camera set to burst (a princely 3fps) I was all set.

The surfers in and around the beaches of Aveiro were (and still are) a great bunch. Sometimes people can be a bit wary of being photographed by someone wielding a long lens,  but they knew I was with a surfer and was made most welcome. Perhaps the greatest compliment I ever received was from one veteran surfer, who observed that of all the surfing photographers around I was the one who knew how to pick the right moment.

Eventually, after several years of misuse on the beach, the long lens started to fail and loose focus, and I felt that I really couldn’t continue to share my images with the surfing community any longer. At the time I really didn’t have the budget to replace my zoom lens so I moved on to other things, which in my case was an increasing enthusiasm for older film and digital cameras, and that’s where we find ourselves today. 

Dropping a small spoiler, Sofia had mentioned that this week Anne will host the Lens-Artists Challenge and that it will be about one of my favourite topics, Intentional Camera Movement. So if all goes according to plan there might be a connection between this week’s entry in the Challenge, ‘Looking Back’, and what is now this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, which should be following along shortly.

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.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/10/24/lens-artists-challenge-320-looking-back/

#LensArtists #LookingBack #beach #bodyboard #freestyle #kneeboard #LensArtists #longboard #prancha #SUP #SURF #surfboard #surfer #surfing #surfista #waves

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,

Down the Shore at Avalon Beach

Last month, Bhavna and I finally got a chance to go down the shore. It's something we’ve been meaning to do all summer but just hadn’t gotten around to. Bhavna grew up in Hackensack, so she’s well-versed in the North Jersey tradition of spending summer days "down the shore". You will often hear North Jersey and Philadelphia residents talk about going "down the shore". It means driving to a coastal destination along the New Jersey shoreline. While the rest of the world might say "going [...]

https://islandinthenet.com/down-the-shore-at-avalon-beach/

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias)

https://islandinthenet.com/great-blue-heron-ardea-herodias/

#ArdeaHerodias #BirdPhotography #BirdWatching #Birding #Birds #GreatBlueHeron #Heron #LensArtistPhotoChallenge #LensArtists #MillstoneAqueduct #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography

Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia)

https://islandinthenet.com/song-sparrow-melospiza-melodia-4/

#BirdPhotography #BirdWatching #Birding #Birds #LensArtistPhotoChallenge #LensArtists #MelospizaMelodia #MillstoneAqueduct #Nature #SongSparrow #Sparrow #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography

When I was ready to leave I turned around to see a small group of birders talking excitedly and staring at the ground. I asked if they were looking for the bullfrog I had heard earlier. They answered yes and pointed at the large pool of water. I had walked by, heard the bullfrog, but I was so focused on birds that I did not notice him in the puddle.

The Charles H. Rogers Wildlife Refuge provides an excellent habitat for American bullfrogs with its open marsh, diversity of food sources, and proximity to Stony Brook. The refuge's wetlands, ponds, and natural water drainage system create suitable aquatic environments for bullfrogs to thrive and reproduce.

https://islandinthenet.com/american-bullfrog-lithobates-catesbeianus/

#AmericanBullfrog #CharlesHRogersWildlifeRefuge #LensArtistPhotoChallenge #LensArtists #LithobatesCatesbeianus #WorldSeriesOfBirding

Female Purple Martin (Progne subis)

https://islandinthenet.com/female-purple-martin-progne-subis/

From the archives: Stone carving

https://creativeramblings.com/my-photography/archives-77/

#Architecture #closeup #lensartists #photography @photography

Female Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) at Charles H. Rogers Wildlife Refuge

https://islandinthenet.com/female-red-winged-blackbird-agelaius-phoeniceus/

Chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina)

They love my backyard.

https://islandinthenet.com/chipping-sparrow-spizella-passerina-3/

#BackyardBirds #BirdPhotography #BirdWatching #Birding #Birds #ChippingSparrow #LensArtists #MontgomeryHills #Nature #Sparrow #SpizellaPasserina #Spring #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography

Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus)

I like the red cap.

https://islandinthenet.com/red-bellied-woodpecker-melanerpes-carolinus/

#Backyard #BackyardBirds #BirdPhotography #BirdWatching #Birding #Birds #LensArtists #MelanerpesCarolinus #Nature #RedBelliedWoodpecker #Spring #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography #Woodpecker

https://islandinthenet.com/?p=103873

https://islandinthenet.com/?p=103880

Northern flicker (Colaptes auratus)

I heard the spotted Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) calling loudly from an overhead branch of a mature tree, near the wooded area by the volleyball field.

https://islandinthenet.com/northern-flicker-colaptes-auratus/

#BirdPhotography #BirdWatching #Birding #Birds #ColaptesAuratus #LensArtists #MontgomeryHills #MontgomeryTownship #Nature #NorthernFlicker #SalisburyRoad #VolleyBallCourt #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography #Woodpecker