Heligan Pinhole Poppies

Heligan Pinhole Poppies, originally uploaded by Wulfus.

This is the best result from the first film through my second homemade pinhole camera. I've found that most pinhole camera shots tend to be rubbish but on every film I put through there is usually one gem. These experiments in pinhole photography have often produced surprising and completely unexpected results and it's the unexpected which makes the process so fascinating. The fact that the films have to go off to be processed and then put through the scanner to see what you've got makes the experience all the more exciting - gratification is delayed and the surprises almost seem bigger when they come.

The unpredictability of the homemade pinhole cameras feels like grappling with the raw science - the basic physical fact that light passing through a small aperture forms an upside-down colour image which may be captured if you place a light-sensitive surface behind that aperture. It may be tamed by lenses and view-finders but there's none of that with a pinhole camera...

Flying success!

The BBC sets a weekly themed challenge - last week it was "Flight"... How to illustrate flight? Simple, make a paper plane with a propeller you can spin and catch the movement with slow shutter speed. I used two colours and decided to fit a double propeller to see if I might get some interesting colour in the movement...

Getting the picture wasn't easy - I had to spin the propeller with one hand while holding the camera with the other and anything over 1/30 seemed to freeze the movement a bit too much. I found it wasn't worth using a tripod because every time I twirled the propeller the plane moved slightly and would have taken too much time... it had to be hand-held job...

I must have shot about 40 frames in about five minutes, most were rejects but I got three I was pleased with for different reasons and the one above looked the most effective - I was particularly pleased with the way the two colours showed up in the spin.

Anyway, off it went to BBC online and I was really happy to see that it was used: here's a link to the gallery - if that wasn't good enough it also featured as the thumbnail on the main "In pictures" page... a very good result!

Beauty of sunrise

Got up dead early today... it was worth it.

Pinhole camera magic

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...

Kew Gardens with a camera...

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...

Spooky fun by candlelight...

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!

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.



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...



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...

Who called a taxi?

Tiny Taxi, originally uploaded by Wulfus.

Today's challenge for The Daily Shoot: "Make a photo that uses negative space to good effect. Give your subject room to breathe, and balance it within the frame."

I decided to use a tiny toy taxi I found in Brighton and used my battered Olympus compact. The backdrop was the black tabletop of a table outside Pizza Express in Dulwich Village - lighting was available light...

Considering the light was pretty poor and the camera was being held I'm quite pleased with the way it's come out...