Canon EOS 50E
“Canon EOS 50E (film body) with BP-50 battery pack. Bought for £50 from Cash Converters on September 19th 2008. Lens 50mm f/1.8 (auto-focus, plastic fantastic) bought last year sometime.” Caption from gallery

Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 and Canon 85mm f1.8
Both beautiful lenses - really fallen for the Sigma, lets pray it doesn’t do what the last one did!

You can see the test/sample images I’ve take with the Sigma and Canon. The EOS 50E test images will happen next week when I have chance to develop the rolls!

This week I started back at Manchester Metropolitan University.  I am officially a second year!  With that means that my student loan has come through.

Do you know what that means boys and girls?? Shopping time!  I’ve bought myself two new lenses - Canon 85mm f1.8 USM and the Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6.  I also bought a new camera body, Canon EOS 50E, one beautiful film body!  Yes, a automagic film body, but it works nicely along side the digital body.  Sadly, I haven’t been able to get the lithium batteries that the 50E requires, but I do have the battery pack to go with it which takes AA batteries instead!  Not to forget about the ordered things that have still to come though the mail - sensor cleaner, filters for the lenses (don’t forget to get your UV filters to protect the front element!) and a few other odds and sods for the camera bag.

This does, however, mean that my dear Epson R340 printer is being dicky. The yellow printing head is clogged and has been quite rapidly not printing things right for a couple of weeks. Kian is working his technical genius on it to help me out (I really don’t want to buy another printer for another 6months or so - when this one hits 3years old I was planning on replacing it…). Annoyingly, Epson feel that it is time to replace my printer and offer no way of repairing it - only replacing with an all-in-one unit (further down the scale then the R340, but *slightly* cheaper!).

Things that are happening at uni - part of our education this term is that we must enter 2 photographic awards/competitions/contests, one of them being the Nikon Discovery Awards. There are a few people that don’t like the idea, but I’m not too sure that their reasons are that logical - the work, if chosen by our tutors, *might* have a chance of winning a place at an exhibition and having their work printed and publicised by Nikon and the British Journal of Photography.  As it is, the brief for it is so broad that I don’t feel restricted by it in anyway!  Its getting us ready for next term where we *must* put on a public exhibition.  So, on top of the Nikon Discovery Awards I need to choose another photographic competition to enter before Christmas.  Got a couple in mind.

Still debating going to the fencing competition this weekend - its the Manchester Cadet.  I’ve not been around the fencing scene since last December - got the next lenses and camera I want to try out.  We Shall See.

Today I decided to re-organise my gallery - have a look.

I’ve also put on-line my photographs of the Anti-War/Labour Party Conference Protests (flickr and my gallery).

Tony Blair

I wasn’t much in the mood for arranging my face today so I thought I’d try an idea that’s been bouncing around my head for a few days - a blurred, backlit portrait.

Take:
Canon 10D,
Vivitar 285HV
Stofen
Cable release,
PC Sync cable
tripod
lighting stand
and a blank piece of wall

Mix together in an appropriate way. Camera pointing at subject, flash (on 1/2 power) with stofen behind subject at shoulder height. Subject, in this case, holding the cable release. Auto-focus off and focused at the very minimum.

The only post-processing done - added a vignette, image size and saved as jpg!

As the caption from the images says:-
“Captured with Canon 10D, on camera flash with a home-made “stofen”-like defuser about a foot away from the subject. The defuser is made out of a film reel canister with a cut about a cm wide to accommodate the flash unit.”

For a while I’ve been having to use sheets of paper with any photograph that needed flash (and not using the Vivitar 285HV) with under 5ft between camera and subject (many of my portraits, macro-ish shots, etc) to defuse the on board flash. Well, no more! I now have a defuser and it came free with film!

On top of all that - I’ve not had to edit the file, just convert it to jpg.

The last few days I’ve been playing around with the flashgun and how to use the light on camera. Trying to get my head around how to use this strobe in portraits on the go and with little prep.

The strobe is in the hot-shoe so, about 4inches above lens, pointed straight forwards at the subject(ie, me) on 1/16th power. 75mm, 1/125th sec, f.4. Used a hand trigger - wired clone - and tripod slightly higher than the default height.

This photo is manually focused and for once looks to be spot on..

So what do you think of the colour?? It was meant to be a redy-brown, but it is over my old purple hair.

A couple of weeks ago I was chaperoning Kian’s younger brother with his Dutch girlfriend while she was visiting.

128/365 (BTW)

This was taken after a day out at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. It just so happens to be Kian’s youngest brother’s favourite place to spend an afternoon/whole summer holiday and there’s a Weta exhibition on atm.

This photo started life as a shot out of my Canon 10D. It had a large dirty white door in the centre that has at somepoint been kicked and looked rather unsightly. So I chopped it together.

Now the question is reader - can you see the chop?

So I’ve been rather absent from this blog for a while. I’ve not updated since coming back from Edinbrough in May. Since then I’ve been keeping up with my project 365 - there is a photo per day from the time I’ve not been updating. I’ve broaden my camera use - now using my Polaroid for stuff.

Anything any of you want to know?

83/365 9th June 2008 - one of the few nice days I’ve been able to go out with the camera

88/365 14th June 2008

92/365 18th June 2008

100/365 26th June 2008

102/365 28th June 2008

113/365 9th July 2008

115/365 11th July 2008

127/365 23rd July 2008

130/365 26th July 2008

Random selection of the photos from the collection.

the rest of the gallery

Adam Joshua

This is my nephew, Adam Joshua. He’s 8 and this might just have been the only time during the weekend I was in Edinburgh that he sat still!

Main light (room feature) camera right and flash gun 2 foot above camera with stofen at 45° either 1/16th or 1/4th power.

Gallery

29th May 2008