Vintage camera reviews, repairs and photography blog
This is one of those pictures which starts out as a colour picture which doesn’t really stand out, but once converted to black & white makes more of an impact. I took this whilst we were on holiday in Durham last year with a Pentax K5 and Sigma 18-125 HSM zoom. We were walking through the town and I saw this man playing and instinctively raised the camera and snapped without any real thought about composition. Later I cropped it […]
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This is a review of one of the latest additions to my collection of 35mm vintage cameras, the Praktica Nova 1B fitted with a Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Domiplan 50mm f/2.8 prime lens. The Nova 1B was manufactured in the G.D.R. by the Pentacon company from between 1967 and 1975 although I can’t find any markings to indicate when my particular copy was made. Praktica Nova 1b images My Praktica Nova 1b camera As with most of my 35mm camera collection, this […]
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We have a lovely sunny day here in the UK and I went into the garden to see what wildlife was about. This tidy spider was hanging in his web on a tree and the sun light was directly behind him. I rushed inside before either he moved or the sun went behind a cloud and managed to take a few pictures using my Pentax K-5 and Tamron 90mm macro lens. This one is about the best I got at […]
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I posted a few weeks ago about moving to a mirrorless camera system and guess what? Yes – I did it. Last week I sent for a Sony NEX 6 camera with 16 – 50mm kit lens and an e-mount to m39 adaptor. I’ve only had a few days to try the camera out in pretty poor weather but here are my first impressions. The EVF was something I really wondered if I was going to get one with because […]
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How good are my photographs ? I bet most photographers have asked themselves that question and find it as difficult as I do to get an answer. Of course you can ask your family and friends for their opinion (even their truly honest opinion) but they are obviously a bit biased and you know that it’s not the same as an opinion from other photographers. So I suspect that most people do what I do. They upload their pictures to […]
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As I mentioned in my last post I have recently subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photographers membership which gives me access to the full Photoshop CC program – something I could never have justified as a standalone purchase. I have been experimenting with the various features and thought I would start a series of posts showing some of the results. The first effect I have been experimenting with is the tilt-shift filter. A tilt-shift lens is one where the […]
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This is a post describing a walk around the local park in Stevenage and the pictures I took there this afternoon. I’ve realised today that I take a trip to the local park and take photographs just about every spring and autumn, and this autumn has been no different as today I had a walk round Fairlands Valley Park with my camera. I took a variety of lenses with me, a Sigma 18-125mm Standard Zoom, my favorite Tamron 10-24mm Wide […]
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This is a new treatment of an old picture which I took a couple of years ago with a Pentax K-r and a Tamron 10-24mm super wide angle lens. I took it during a snowy period in the field across the road from us and particularly like the starburst effect the Sun has which I believe is caused by the small aperture used. The main post processing which I carried out was to increase the saturation in the sky and […]
Read moreI this post I talk about my experiences of developing film in an Agfa Rondinax 35u Daylight developing Tank – sometimes also known as the Agfa Rodinax. I bought this tank a few months ago on EBay UK but hadn’t until now got round to trying it out. It is a tank which doesn’t require the film to be loaded in darkness, because the film canister is placed into the tank and the film wound onto the development spiral with […]
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This post contains all my best photographs from the Beamish living museum in County Durham which I haven’t yet published. We went to Beamish twice during our holiday, partly because Beamish has a policy that an entry ticket allows any number of entries over the next year, and partly because it’s such an interesting and large place that we needed two days to see everything ! Transport around the museum is by traditional trams and busses, although walking is also […]
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This post covers the importance of shooting in RAW when it comes to trying to recover pictures from badly exposed images using Lightroom, or any other RAW processor for that matter. In a recent post someone who added a comment remarked that they had not yet set their camera to store RAW images and were still shooting in jpeg. This got me thinking about the effects of shooting in RAW and why it’s so important to do so. It also […]
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This is another picture I took during our recent holiday in the North East of England. We went on a couple of trips to the Beamish museum and this was taken in the Engine shed using a high ISO setting of 1600 iso. I converted it to Black & White in Lightroom because the scene seemed to suggest B & W rather than colour. Considering the iso used I think the technical quality of the image is pretty good. In […]
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While we are on holiday in the North East of England we visited the Beamish Museum where I took this picture of coal trucks. I used a Tamron 10-24mm Super Wide angle lens attached to my Pentax K-5 DSLR and framed the trucks with the leaves of a tree branch. I like the way the lines of the trucks and the railway sleepers lead the eye into the picture, and the wide angle view tends to distort the shape of […]
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I’ve owned my Ricoh GXR Camera for a couple of weeks now and discovered a couple of days ago that SRS Microsystems are also selling parts of this system off cheap, and as a result I purchased an S10 lens unit to go with the P10 I already own. I received the unit this morning, just before we were about to go out to another National Trust property, Hatfield Forest. I fitted the new unit in place of the P10 […]
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