Charlie's WorldStormy
Posted on November 28, 2012
Well, it seems that winter isn’t quite done with us here in the Southern Hemisphere! Normally the low pressure troughs have fully moved south by now and stable warm summery weather is here to stay until March.
But not this year.
It’s been a spring of fits and starts, warm days and squalls. It’s like a misfiring car.
The weekend was warm and dry. Today we have violent storms with howling gales and torrential rain Read More
Went for a walk
Posted on March 19, 2011
When the kids go their father’s house every other weekend, Saturday is the ritual lazy morning day.
Jay and I chill on the sofa, have a late breakfast and catch up with each other’s lives. Well, it’s hard when we’re busy during the week to get a solid block of time to not have to think about other stuff.
Today we decided to go for a little amble down to the foreshore and get morning coffee.
Piccies from a foreign land
Posted on September 17, 2010
I got my films from my trip to the UK back yesterday and they are awesome!
I love my Hasselblad, it produces amazing images – so clear and full of glorious colour and definition in a way that digital images somehow aren’t. The trouble is, scanning these amazing prints and showing them on here doesn’t show them how they are at all 😦
I tried scanning them at 600dpi, but the resulting images lack clarity, so I really need to do them at the full 1200 or higher – which means a scan time of more than 9 minutes per image – crappy scanner.
So, I need to buy a dedicated medium format negative scanner.
They cost AU$750
Add it to the list of stuff I ‘need’ 😦
Expensive hobby, this film lark. Looks like I might be getting familiar with home developing sooner rather than later!
Aaaaaanyhoo… I do have some initial scans to share – they’re pretty much all of my kids and family, but hey, its my blog, I can share if I like! I’ll probably redo these over the weekend – hopefully they will come out with a bit more ‘pop’
Oh, and I’ve done this on my work laptop which has a very bright screen, I don’t know if the colour/contrast on these pics is actually correct or not 😦
update
Posted on September 9, 2010
Well, whats been happening in the world of me?
My trip to England went well – the flight over was actually pretty painless, despite being sat next to a borderline Neanderthal on the plane from Perth to Singapore – he was laughing out loud to stuff on the entertainment system. I mean really out loud. Not good. When I asked him something, he spoke like he had experienced a very bad head injury – I don’t think he had though, he was just very odd.
Anyway – Singapore Airlines – 5 stars from me – good food, good aeroplanes and excellent service. Managed to sleep almost all the way to London too.
Went to collect my kids via my old local supermarket – I needed to buy jeans as for some reason, jeans in Australia are only available in one length to cater for all – so the legs are always 6foot too long, meaning I have to pay to have them taken up too. Its maddening. 2 pairs of jeans and some stripy coloured socks later (you can’t buy coloured socks here either) and I was at my kids front door. Its always so good to see them, they end up doing a little dance and their smiles blow away the travel fatigue in seconds.
We drove back to my parents house – was good to see them too – last time was when they were here for our wedding.
We had a nice week – the weather in England was shit though – what the hell happened to warm summers that I remember from when I was young? It barely made it to 20C all week and rained loads 😦 We did still get out to the park, take a trip to London to go the Natural History Museum (never go in the summer holidays – it was packed full of rude johnny foreigners who have never heard of waiting their turn) and spent a load of time with my family.
It was horrible to have to leave them again, but they were ok and missed their mum. I stopped off at Hotel Chocolat to get some goodies before flying home again.
miraculously, I didn’t get sick this time! I have a load of photos on film which are at the lab for developing right now – hopefully they’ll come back soon – I want to see how the Hasselblad did with taking photos of moving children 🙂
Holga and Hasselblad
Posted on July 22, 2010
So, as you are aware, I got my films back – I was especially looking forward to seeing the shots from the Hasselblad, given I paid a small fortune for it and am betting the farm that it’ll produce images that will stir my creative soul. I know, not too much pressure then.
First, the Holga, which never ceases to surprise and amaze
Next, the Hasselblad – early days with this beastie, only just got hold of a lightmeter so the early films were guesswork and counting back from Sunny 16..
I think it’s safe to say that the camera has done ok 🙂
Pretty happy with those so far. I have another 2 films I’m scanning and there are some interesting shots there too.
Can’t wait to get out again and take more shots now!
so slack!
Posted on June 7, 2010
One post in a week – thats pretty piss poor. Ah well.
So, whats been happening?
My Birthday. Apart from that fact that I was working from 8am till 11pm and couldn’t celebrate at all – I had a wonderful day. Jay bought me a guitar fx thingumy
which means I can sound like Dave Gilmore or Kurt Cobain, even if I can’t actually play like them in any way.
So I’ve been playing loads this week, not something I’ve done much in years – as my fingers will testify to – blister central. Ah well, no pain no gain. Currently learning Another Brick in the Wall and trying to get a good sound for ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ by The Gossip.
Jay also got me a cupcake making kit and book. I love cupcakes and have this idea that I could be the male cupcake king of the internet. or something. Anyway – they look awesome – more on this in the next post 🙂
2. Work. Been very busy. Very very busy.
3. Play. We went out to Serpentine National Park last weekend for a walk (well, as much as Jay’s back can stand) and some photo taking. I’m trying to take a lot more shots with my film cameras so I can justify a future investment in a Hasselblad or Rolliflex. Mostly used the iPhone though, cos its instant gratificaiton!
4. Jay had her operation on her back, which worked well for one day, but since then she’s been worse than ever 😦 Hopefully its just a temporary setback.
Thats kind of it for now, next posts – Trip to Fremantle, cupcakes and gardening
first shots
Posted on March 28, 2010
As I mentioned previously, I bought a B+W110ND filter – a wondrous thing which is basically a piece of very dark glass that reduces the amount of light into the camera by 10 stops.
For those that have no idea what I’m talking about – a stop on a camera is, for example, like the difference between a shutter speed of 0.5 and 1 second.
So if your camera was going to shoot at 1/125th second, adding a 10 stop filter means you have to shoot for 8 seconds to let the same of light in. Which means you can have quite a lot of fun at sunset when exposures are already down to a second or so without the filter. You have to check the exposure based on the aperture settings you want, frame the shot, get it to focus where you want, switch the camera to manual everything (inc focus), screw the filter in, which is so black you can’t see anything anymore. Then work out the correct exposure with the filter on, set the remote timer and basically leave it to do its thing for the 200 odd seconds that is needed.
Anyway, all this technical mumbo jumbo is all well and good, but the upshot of the camera being open for at least 3 minutes is that the ocean is totally smoothed out and the camera has captured the clouds moving.
Like this:
And yes, I am pleased with the results!
Next step, more location scouting and to start thinking in black and white…
having said I was crap..
Posted on March 17, 2010
…I take it all back. Well, not all of it, but some. back onto the subject of cool black and whites and living the 60’s Parisian cafe shooters dream
I went through some shots of Melbourne again and decided to convert a few to black and white to see if I could get that street photography look, and well I’ll be buggered – some of them look fab, with a hint of abstract (which is becoming something of a “thing” for me)
Now, I’m not claiming some kind of greatness here, but I kinda like this lot.
style
Posted on March 15, 2010
I was determined to be a cool street photographer.
I had designs on my camera collection down to a simple Leica M6 or M7 35mm rangefinder and a few tasty lenses, shooting exclusively in black and white and generally taking cool shots a-la Cartier Bresson and his ilk.
Well, the nearest I’ve got is my Trip 35 (which, despite being very cool and unflappable is still woefully underused)
and a couple of second hand autos from the 80’s
You might think I’m a bit gutted, and in some ways I am, but it transpires that I’m actually starting to like landscapes and also, rather incongruously, sports photography. Neither of which lend themselves to the Leica in any way shape or form.
I’m on the save up for an ultra wide angle lens for the D300 plus some very tasty filters that would enable me to take the shots that just can’t quite get with my current setup. Handily, I’d like to use said ultra-wide angle for sports photography too.
Here’s some recent landscapes that I’m rather fond of..
Okay, true, they are all sunsets, but I haven’t invested any time into daylight shots yet (plus I need better filters, mine are fine for sunsets, but tint clouds purple during the day). I have a few location ideas in mind which I think I’ll start to work upto in the next few months, especially as the cooler weather is coming.
So we’ll see how it goes, I might be getting up at the crack of dawn to catch that sunrise yet.
more Melbourne
Posted on March 8, 2010
Well, we had a good time, you should expect photos :p
this episode – details
Melbourne has plenty of nice things to take photos of – I wasn’t really there for that reason as it was supposed to be our honeymoon – but I did manage to get some snapshots of some the little details which give it some of its charm.
Charlie's World 