Playing with gladwrap.

I was in the darkroom today and I decided to take a failed experiment from last week and give it a re-run with a different intent. Last week I was trying to contact print off oiled paper and used cling film (food wrap) to seperate the layers so I didn't get oil on the photo paper, well, it failed cos I had an appearance of the darkroom fairies - little creatures that only come out in a dark room under very particular circumstances, ie. when the operator doesn't know what they're doing.

So this time I tried to invoke the darkroom fairies deliberately, I spread clad wrap over the photo paper and put a photocopy over top as an incubator, and yup... It worked.

So here's some darkroom fairies. First the butterfly jellyfish sort.




















A worm type and a couple of amorphous glowing ones.






















Seahorses with spears and shaman badgers.






















Well after this I decided to take photo's of gladwrap without the photocopy and see what I got - this is about 1 sec exposure at about F8. (my first attempt)





















Same, but I waved my hand over it very briefly (timer only goes down to 1 sec on the enlarger I was using).
















And a positive print off one of the above - just to screw me up, it took a 25 sec exposure at F2 to get this.






















I think I'm gonna play with the darkroom fairies a bit more when I get some time.

Wandering about cameras.

A not-so-smiley lion - Looks kinda anguished actually, but then so would I after a couple of generations of kids had polished me with their bums.
Color is a bit out - forgot the exposure value thingy.

















I brought a 300K camera (640 x 480 pix) a week or two back for a few bucks, I'm so far kinda suprised by the fact that it takes shots as good as it does, it has quite nice colour too - very warm (this is un-modified). All other shots were taken with a 2MP camera.
The black thing at the bottom is a windowsill - the camera has no (usable) viewfinder.

















Just a steel palm tree.






















I look up to palm trees - no coconuts here.

















I was fascinated by the perspective on this building, it seemed to change as I moved my head each way (yes, I was getting odd looks from passers by at this point), interestingly I've found that even on the computer screen the perspective seems to shift as you move from one side to the other - the building seems to tilt - go on, try it - I know you want to.

I took these a couple of months ago on a long and boring bus trip, I decided to see just how many photos my trusty (crap) old fixed lens 2MP camera could take on a set of batteries - about 250 on 2 AA batteries - I tend to carry 6 batteries as part of my daily kit plus my digital camera and perhaps a film camera too. just for kicks and giggles.

Anyhow I was lining up a shot of nothing in particular and a split second after I pressed the shutter release a truck went past - this is the result.
















Well it seems that a slow CCD will actually slant an image quite nicely at the 200KPH the trucks were passing at, So I got curious and tried to see if I could get it under control.
















Not quite on that shot, but I realized that I would get the background in focus.
The difficult thing was anticipating the time between pressing the shutter release and the camera taking the shot, In this case I got the digger on the back of the truck - less than ideal.
















I started to get the hang of it about 20 trucks later and found that the sweet spot to try and get a shot of was the gap between the trailers, of course this didn't work so well with white trucks as they did odd things to the exposure. Start of a nice gap there.
















Close but no cigar (it is pretty hard to time this at approx 130 mph closing speeds).
















Waaay out, but this is probably my favorite shot of the series.
















And there we have it - the shot I was trying for - only took about 50 attempts too.



















Todays post was brought to you by the letter schwa and the color puce.

First off - just for fun.

Squirrel photography :)
















And a coupla stencils

Not a great shot - not my design, just rescued by me - the frame was wrecked and the cat was black on a tobacco orange ground - very 60's






















Caught - 12 colours, 8 layers, a stupidly long time taken to cut.























Loreal Guineapig - 8 colours, about 30 application steps - even longer to cut.

Some pinhole pic's I took recently.

A mirror building.





















Buildings & cars.





















More buildings.





















A... uh... wall?





















And a pic of me - self portrait in a mirrored building.

I mainly have buildings as they don't tend to run away in the 1 - 2 min that an exposure takes - most of these shots I had people walk through - the camera couldn't see them as they were moving too fast.

I have better prints of these that I'll upload when I get them back - the better ones are 8x10" photographic prints - these are just scans of the negs.

New blog - yay.

This'll be mainly image based.