Posted in Photos
My photograph Crossed Rods at Sunset has been chosen as the monthly winner on the Camera Club web site.
I had a really nice Father’s Day this year. Woke up around 8am, had a shower, grabbed breakfast and sat down at my computer. Not too much later Rory and Chris woke up, came through and said “Mom’s not up yet but here’s your gift from all of us.”, whereupon Rory produced a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label from behind his back. Yum, and with me being such a heavy drinker that should last me well into next year.
Mela and I went for a drive over to Simonstown to check out some ruined houses I’d heard about. I thought they might make a good location for shooting with a model or two and I wanted to see it for myself. They do look promising so now I must line up a model or two, put in an order for good weather on some weekend and go for it. After leaving there we drove down the other side of the peninsula to Scarborough and along the coast road round the point, back to Simonstown where we stopped for a late lunch. It had started spitting before we got there and we had just sat down outside the coffee shop when the rain came bucketing down so we dashed inside and had our lunch in the warmth while watching the rain come down outside. After lunch we headed back home again and just chilled for the evening. All in all a pretty cool day.
Posted in Photos
I am fascinated by old cameras but don’t have the money to be a collector, as such. No fancy old Leica’s for me, but occasionally I manage to look in the right place to find something interesting, if not valuable. On Saturday I popped into Cash Crusaders to see if they had an interesting old cameras there. They had two SLRs, a Pracktica and a Zenit, but the Praktica was in much worse shape than the one I already have and was also rather pricey. The Zenit was quite cheap but also looked pretty battered. What really caught my eye was this Martex rangefinder. I’ve long had a hankering for a rangefinder and at only R145 there was no way it wasn’t coming home with me, even if I found it didn’t work. It was Sunday before I got round to buying a roll of film to try it out. After cleaning the camera, loading the film and figuring out what appeared to be the right way to use the light meter, which seemed to be working, I headed off down to the beach, my favourite haunt. It was near sunset when I got there and being winter there weren’t too many people about. I strolled around and shot off my roll of film before heading home again. As I was very keen to get it developed and see the results I popped the film into the Kodak minilab in the mall next door to our offices, rather than making the trip into town to the more professional (so I’ve been told) lab I would normally use. I picked up the prints at lunch time and was pleased to find that the camera works perfectly. The photographs were pretty much (it will take a little practice to get spot on) correctly exposed and accurately focused. I was worried about the focus as I’d never used a rangefinder before. The only disappointment was that I was offered, and accepted digital copies of the photos on a CD, and the quality of these was terrible. they were horribly grainy and as the prints themselves were fine I can only assume that the scanning process was not all it could be. In the end I made my own scans of the better shots from the prints. Here is a selection of the photos I took, not too bad for a forty or fifty year old camera. These photographs have not been digitally enhanced in any way.
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I snapped this beautiful double rainbow from the balcony at work earlier this evening. I see that Wayne got a shot of it too.
Posted in Photos
This is the tidal pool on Strand beach. Don’t be fooled by the bright light and blue sky, we’re moving into winter here and it was only 11 or 12°C with a chilly wind when I took this yesterday. The sky behind me was quite grey as there was a front moving in; it started raining just a few minutes after I took this shot.
This was taken in Berea, Johannesburg sometime during 1985 or possibly early 1986. Shot with a Pentax Spotmatic-F.
Posted in Photos
craniac's place 