Vintage camera reviews, repairs and photography blog
We recently spent a weekend at the Elvden Centreparcs and I took this picture of James holding our Cockapoo puppy Freddy in the garden of the Starbucks above the sailing lake with my mobile phone. I really like the expressions captured on their faces, although I wish had taken the photo with my XT-1 and a longer lens so I could have de-focused the background a bit. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible as at the time I took this picture all […]
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This is a picture which I took several years ago when my daughter Emma was only a small child and we took a family trip to the Park at Knebworth house. It was taken with a Pentax K200D DSLR, and a Pentax 55 to 200mm zoom lens. I particularly like the way the fence which she was holding on to leads the eye into the subject matter.
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Today, my son James took our 10 month old puppy Freddy for a walk over the fields and took a picture of him on his phone which he showed my when he returned. I was so impressed that I though I would post it on this site. Every time I try to take a picture of Freddy, I can never get him to sit still, so I think James did remarkably well here.
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The picture below is another of my favourite pictures which I’ve not published on this site before. It’s a picture of my daughter which I took several years ago when she was only a little girl. I think the think which most strikes me about the picture, and which marks it out as one of my favourites, is the light in the picture. It was a very bright day, which led to a very high contrast picture and it particularly […]
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I wanted to introduce everyone to a new member of our family who will probably be the subject of many photos over the next few years. His name is Freddy and he is a 6 week old Cockapoo puppy who we visited for the second time today and is going to be joining us permanently in two weeks time. We decided a few months ago that it would be a good idea to have a family pet and it didn’t […]
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The National Trust own houses and gardens all over the United Kingdom, and when we were recently on holiday in Oxfordshire we visited several of their properties. This short post is written to include some of the pictures I took at one of the visits we made – Upton House in Warwickshire. We were once again fortunate with the weather and had a nice, bright sunny day for our trip. After an uneventful journey and having parked the car, we […]
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Last week, whilst we were away on holiday, I posted a picture that I’d taken at the Stowe National Trust property with my Fuji X-T1 and Samyang 12mm combination. Well, we are back from holiday and I’ve had time to sort through the rest of the images I took and I’ve included the best of my Fuji X-T1 pictures in this post. We were fortunate the the weather was very good for our day at Stowe, which meant many of […]
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A few days ago we visited another National Trust property at Stowe in Buckingham and I used it as another opportunity to use my Fuji X-T1 and Samyang 12mm lens combination. Although I took many photos, I’ve not yet been through all of them and decided which I like best, but I thought this picture was one of my better ones as I reviewed it in the camera. It was taken across one of the lakes, looking at the House […]
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I posted a couple of days ago about how we had visited the Southwell Workhouse National Trust property and also how it gave a proper workout for my Fuji X-T1 and new Samyang 12mm lens. In this follow up post I’m going to show the rest of the pictures I took and give a few more impressions of using the combination. As I said in the last article, this type of photo opportunity was exactly the reason I bought the […]
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my initial test of the Samyang 12mm f/2 lens which I’d bought for my Fuji X-T1 mirrorless, and today I got to try the camera out in a real life situation when we visited the National Trust Workhouse in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Although the picture above is only a single shot, I actually took lots of pictures in exactly the sort of situation I bought the lens for, internal shots with low light, […]
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It was a few months ago that we visited Chatsworth in Derbyshire, but I’ve only just been through the images I took and decided that these Chatsworth house pictures are the ones I like best. Just as when we visited Eyam a few days earlier, we were lucky with the weather and it was a brilliantly sunny and warm day so I took both my Pentax K5 DSLR and Pentax Z-1p film SLR with me on the trip. The sunny […]
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When we were in Derbyshire earlier in the year one of the places we visited was Eyam Hall, which is a National Trust property only a few miles from the cottage we stayed in. We were fortunate because the weather was glorious, and so it presented many photo opportunities for me with both the Pentax K-5 DSLR and Z-1P film SLR. Eyam Hall is an interesting place for a visit, although there is no car park at the actual property […]
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When we were in Derbyshire a few weeks ago I took lots of pictures with my Pentax K5 which I’ve only just imported into Lightroom on my main Photography computer. The series shown here were all taken in Chesterfield, and specifically are all of the famous chesterfield church with the crooked spire. All these picture were taken using a Sigma 18 – 125 HSM zoom lens which is the lens which is normally attached to the K5 as a ‘standard […]
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When we recently visited the Crich tram museum I took quite a few pictures with my Pentax K5 DSLR and posted the pictures I was most pleased with a few days ago. As well as the K5, I also took along a Pentax MZ-3 loaded with Ilford HP5+ film, and although I’ve posted some of the pictures I took with that combination, this post is to publish the others. Just for the record, I developed the film in a 1 […]
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When we recently went to the Crich tramway museum in Derbyshire I took a lot of pictures with my Pentax K5, but I also took along a Pentax MZ-3 loaded with Ilford HP5+ black & white film. The picture above is one of the pictures I took that day, and developed in Rodinal a couple of days ago. This was taken with a Sigma 24 to 70 autofocus zoom lens fitted to the MZ-3 set to about 60mm and about […]
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