Saturday 30 October 2010

Sunday 17 October 2010

Pinhole camera magic

Pinhole Sunburst at Stockers Lake

This picture was taken with a homemade pinhole camera - just cardboard, glue, two bits of dowelling, a piece of aluminium cut from a Ting tin and a couple of rubber bands. The poor focus shows why there is a market for expensive lenses but the fact that something so simple can capture any kind of image amazes me...

Back to basics...

Saturday 16 October 2010

Kew Gardens with a camera...

In Sunset Light

Today Mel and I went out to Kew Gardens... we'd been meaning to go for ages and today seemed ideal because we'd get the autumn colours before the weather deyeriorates into winter...

We were there for more than three hours and only saw a third of the place... the weather went from sun to rain and back to sun. It's a good place for pictures...

Autumn Twist #2

Thursday 14 October 2010

Spooky fun by candlelight...

Autumn ghouls #5

The Daily Shoot suggested a picture with fire... the obvious choice was a candle so I took it as an excuse to get a set of Halloween devil tealight candles - there is so much great spooky stuff in the shops this year... I found the skull on another shopping trip - it's actually a chocolate one wrapped in gold foil... it looked great in the candlelight.

Whooooooooooo!

Why the sudden bulk blog posting?

When I started this blog I said I was thinking about closing down my website and making this the hub of my web activities... well I've thought about it and now I'm doing it... bookmark this blog now...

The Great Panoramic Mask Experiment

I bought myself a SuperSampler Pearl in July. I took it off on holiday with me, ran two films through it and took them to Boots for developing when I got back...

One of the results appears below - a horrible out of focus mess - and they were all similarly out of focus... disaster! The camera had to be sent back... it turned out it was missing its optics so I was effectively getting a pinhole camera effect... kind of cool but not what I really wanted.

Supersampler rubbish #2

While I was waiting for a replacement to arrive I began wondering if there was a way of creating a similar effect with the digital SLR and Photoshop... It didn't need to be too sophisticated because Lomographic style is supposed to be imperfect and I decided to try making a card lens cover with a panoramic slit cut out of it...

The first attempt at a photo starred a jolly pink toy robot... It was done as a wide shot in response to a rather baffling challenge on The Daily Shoot. The date, by the way, was Friday the 13th of August, 2010...

Card Panorama Cut

The effect was what I wanted and it went up on The Daily Shoot and Flickr to good response - one of my Flickr freiends, Nick Harris commented: "I think you have invented a new photographic style here. Well done"... Mel echoed that and said I should put a "how to" account online as a record... this is it...

Anyway, the inspiration behind all this was to create multi-frame "Supersampler-style" images using Photoshop to glue the frames together... drum roll please... here are some of the best examples so far...

Four Funky Robots

Stretched Snack Shop

Lomography Shop London

What's the time?

A Short Discourse on the Origins of Time

A Short Discourse on the Origins of Time

by Beowulf Mayfield

TIME is one of those things which has frequently made life very miserable for the people of Planet Earth. The introduction of the concept of dividing the day up into units called hours and minutes meant people were encouraged to be forever worrying about which point of the day they were currently living in and consequently became very concerned that there simply weren't enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year or even enough years in a lifetime to be able to get everything done.

For centuries, people were frequently heard to exclaim: 'I just havn't got time. . .' and later complained that 'Life's too short' - which was a curious assumption, because nobody really had any real idea about just how long their lives are actually going to be.

Time was probably invented by an unpleasant middle manager of a stone-carving business at some unknown point in the planet's distant stone age. This unknown but very unpleasant individual hit upon the idea of designating a point early in the day, say, just as the sun was beginning to shine in the morning and the day ahead was starting to feel warm and pleasant, when all his stone carvers would have to go into a dark cave and work by candlelight until the sun was setting and the temperature starting to drop. Anyone who showed up after the point designated for starting would be asked: "And what time do you call this?" - which was, of course, a deeply humiliating question to ask because nobody had the slightest notion what time it really was and all they could do was to stand there feeling awkward and mumbling: "Don't know, Sir."

It really was a extremely unpleasant innovation and certainly didn't make that middle manager any friends.

An attempt to foil this bullying manager was made by an inventive stone carver who, on being asked "And what time do you call this?" on a particularly sunny and inviting day, replied: "Time you got a sundial, Sir." When asked to explain himself, the carver led the way outside and proudly pointed to a carved monolith and a semi-circle of round, coloured stones set out at intervals to mark the progress of the shadow cast by the standing stone.

Sadly, the carver was promptly sacked for misuse of company property and thus became the first working class hero. Unfortunately, his heroic status didn't last long because the manager requisitioned the sundial for his own use and took to standing by it with a mean look in his eyes ready to scold anyone who arrived after the shadow had passed the blue stone. The rest of the stone carvers blamed their former mate for the strict, new regime and saw to it that he never worked in the stone business again.

Time, like money, is one of those double-edged swords which the world might be a far happier place without.

© Beowulf Mayfield 2001

An old poem

The Monday Night Sidestreet Showdown

by Beowulf Mayfield

Last night
I saw a crimewave
He was walking up the street, twenty paces ahead of me
Seventeen years old
And ugly for his age.

Three times he turned
And looked back down the street at me.

I was on my way home
Carrying a supermarket bag
With a carton of semi-skimmed milk, a jar of pasta sauce
And two rolls of toilet paper.
I was smoking a cigarette
And had an urgent need for the crapper.

There wasn't much time.

I looked back at the crimewave
With the face of someone who doesn't need to carry a gun.
If he put one foot out of line
I was ready to shower him with
Hot, stinking shit.

He didn't fancy his chances
And ran home to the safety of his mother.

When I arrived home,
I put the milk in the fridge, the pasta sauce in the cupboard
And took the toilet paper upstairs to the bathroom.

As I relieved my bowels
I made a mental note
To form a gang
For social gatherings,
Weekend sporting activities
And routine vigilante duties.

© Beowulf Mayfield 1999