Roamer Ten lit by laser gobo
I recently treated myself to a laser gobo. The patterns it makes remind me of the speaker grille on my old Roamer Ten kit radio. So I thought it might be interesting to combine the two and capture a few snaps.
Digital pictures
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Laser gobo
Just bought an RGB laser gobo cheap on eBay. So I thought I’d have a little fun with it around the studio and garden.
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Rescuing a starling trapped in our bird feeder
This morning I heard a strange commotion outside the studio window, From the corner of my eye, I could see that the transparent bird feeder appeared to be moving on its own. On close inspection I discovered that the incredibly boisterous and greedy young starlings we have round here had smashed the lid off the…
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Strange cloud
A strange cloud formation in the northern sky round the back of our house.
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Linux server builds
I had a bit of interest in my Linux media servers recently. In fact I recently completed four Linux media or Zoneminder builds. Here are a few snaps… The machines are based on basic Novatech business PC’s. Nothing special. The media server versions have KDE Neon GNU/Linux. This is a very attractive KDE based desktop…
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St Huberts Church and Rowlands Castle
Today we took a drive to take some snaps of the tiny St Huberts Church in the Idsworth Valley, Hampshire, We then went on to Rowlands Castle.
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Lymington and Langley
Took a trip to Lymington, Hampshire, then to Langley, near Blackfield and took a few snaps of a large stag beetle.
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Zsuzsi’s Easter display
Zsuzsi’s Easter display through wacky 60’s filters. I just bought a set of these things cheap on eBay and wanted to try them out…
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Cheap and cheerful overhead camera mount for mirrorless camera
Cheap and cheerful overhead camera mount for mirrorless camera. I reckon this is actually pretty safe up to about 2kg. Though I normally use a heavy cable tie as an emergency strap.
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The Big Russian – my MTO 1000 mm catadioptric lens
This is by far my largest and longest focal-length lens. Rumour has it that the MTO 1000 mm catadioptric lens was “standard issue” to KGB surveillance operatives during the Cold War Era. MTO itself also has an interesting history. Seems it started out by making the huge glass reflectors for Russian anti-aircraft arc-lights. It made…
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Drunken bumblebees in our garden…
Drunken bumblebees working the lavender in our garden. Seems Bumblebees have longer tongues than ordinary worker bees and can reach to the bottom of the lavender flowers in order to get to the nectar. Moreover nectar can ferment, when mixed with rainfall and natural yeast. Consequently these incredible little creatures can become quite tipsy, especially…
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Nematodes Microscopy
Today I had to spread some nematodes around our recently planted Portuguese laurel trees. But before I put the nematodes in water, I thought it would be fun to look at them under the microscope, and possibly take some photos with my recently acquired 23.3mm eyepiece to µ4/3 camera adaptor. The camera is my little…
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Experimenting with Fujian 35mm f/1.7 CCTV lens
Experimenting with Fujian 35mm f/1.7 CCTV lens. This is a cheap £10.00 lens off eBay. It is designed for CCTV. However with a simple £1.00 “C” to µ4/3 adaptor it fits nicely and works well with my little Lumix DMC GX7. These are some of the results… Actually, I’m a big fan of the…
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Portsmouth from Portsdown Hill
Testing out my new old MTO 1000mm lens that I recently found cheap on eBay… You can find out more about the massive MTO 1000mm that I used to take these shots, here.
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A few close-ups with my Fujian 35mm f/1.7 CCTV lens
I treated myelf to a new lens the other day, a Fjujian 35mm F/1.7. This thing has no stop clicks. But it’s astonishingly well-made, of all metal/glass construction and behaves very much like a Victorian Petzval lens. It’s a “C” mount and fits nicely (and fills the frame) on my µ4/3 cameras with a simple…
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Old photo kit
A couple of odds and sods I rediscovered when I tidied up the studio earlier this month…
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Cheap but effective continuous studio lighting
For continuous lighting, one needs a light source that has good colour balance, uses power efficiently, is reasonably robust and does not present a health or fire risk. I am also a tightwad – interested primarily in “bangs per buck”. Whilst I love new technology, I am not prepared to pay silly money for it….
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Setting up a home studio
Editors note: this article is a few years old and there are updates and related posts that some readers may find helpful… 2016 – Converting inexpensive LED flood lights for use in the studio 2017 – Cheap but effective continuous studio lighting 2018 – Cheap and cheerful overhead camera mount for mirrorless camera 2019 –…
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Silver mannequins
I was given a pair of broken but usable silver-painted mannequins by a photographer pal. Here are a few snaps of them as they arrived in their new home and saw their first tours of duty in my studio…
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Converting inexpensive LED flood lights for use in the studio.
This is how I converted three left-over cheapie (£60 for a box of ten, delivered) 20 watt daylight LED flood lights for use in the studio. The basic tools you need:- Vernier or digital caliper, M10 ISO metric taps. Suitable spanner (17mm AF). Bench vice. Electrician’s screwdriver and wire strippers, to make the electrical connections….
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Romanesco – alien food
I have always been rather fascinated by the fractal-like properties of the romanesco. It really does look like it is not of this planet. SO I thought it would be fun to team up a romanesco, some cheap RGB LED lighting and a couple of broken silver coloured mannequins. Just in case anyone is wondering:…
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My cheap new Amazon Basics photographic rucksack
A couple of days ago, I purchased an “amazon basics” camera+laptop rucksack, for the princely sum of £ £35.49. delivered. Well it just arrived. So time to check it out, and move in. I have to say I’m actually quite impressed. This model also has a built-in laptop carrier too that comfortably holds a 40…
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Aliens ate my shed
Slightly off-the-wall experiment with a pair of broken mannequins and some cheap but effective RGB LED lighting.
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Alien prank
I thought I’d play a tick on my girlfriend, such that when she came home from work, she’s find it filled with aliens. As it happens I messed it up and fell over something in the hall bruising my leg and spoiling the surprise. Which she thought was all rather silly anyway. But I did…
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Studio lit by LED
I rather like LED lighting. I never cease to be amazed what one can do with it – and do very cheaply. So I decided to have a bit of fun in the studio, with some of the latest budget RGB LED and a couple of Cokin starburst filters.
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Repairing my vintage Tannoy Monitor Golds
I decided to have a go at repairing the HF tweeters unit in my vintage Tannoy Monitor Golds. It was a tricky old job. More pictures to follow.
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Hedgehog in the garden
For some time now, this little fellow has frequented our garden. We have a sort of hedgehog highway behind the shed. And because we have no cats or dogs, they hedgehogs are free to pretty much come and go as they please.
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My studio at night
More LED experiments – this time using some small daylight LED and a 12 volt DC power supply to light the Dexion racking.
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Repairing an elderly Tamron 80-210mm lens (103A)
I’ve had this old but very chunky Tamron 80-210mm Adaptall 2 telephoto zoom lens since the mid 1980s. Only I noticed that the overall image quality had become rather poor. I wanted to find out why. When I shone a small torch through it, I noticed what appeared to be a haze. Despite several cleans…
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Macro with a 58mm 44-m4 Helios lens and a 10 mm macro ring
Macro shots using an elderly Soviet era 58mm 44-m4 Helios lens and a 10 mm macro ring. Much to my surprise, it seems to work remarkably well, certainly on my little µ4/3 camera. I particularly like how the shots of my cute little Юпитер (Jupiter) 50mm f/2 came out…
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Fifty shades of shed
This little project was intended to capture colour-cycling RGB lighting. One of these days I must get around to doing it again and making a rather better job of it.
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Southsea in the rain
I was fortunate to be given a rather nice 20mm f/1.7 Lumix prime lens. So obviously I needed to test it. A 20 mm with a nice wide aperture is particularly good for street photography. So I braved the awful weather and made my way to Southsea one wet and windy Sunday afternoon, and grabbed…
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Pecs, Hungary
Another Christmas with my girlfriends parents in Pecs, Hungary. I always enjoy my Christmases in Pecs. And her folks are such lovely people. These are a few snaps from around the town, just after Chirstmas…
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Checking out my new lens tilt mechanism
I treated myself to a lens tilt mechanism and a vintage Helios 4m-44 58mm f/2 lens. So I figured I needed to go out and test them. These were taken from Portsdown Hill, facing south, over Portchester and Cosham. Being able to tilt the lens means one can shift the focus onto a particular part…
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2014 Retrospective
It’s the end of our second full year in our new home. Here are some random retrospective snaps from the year that’s just shot past us.
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“This Is Hans in Ungarn, from Pécs, Hungary…”
“…playing his favourite music, I hope you like it.”
These are the first words you will hear when you connect to the internet radio stream of Radio Pécs International. And I recently had the pleasure of meeting the man behind the show, Hans Randau. His station is located in a small basement room in his lovely home, which overlooks Pécs, a Mediterranean style town about 200km south of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
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Pecs at Christmas
Spent the Christmas with my girlfriend’s parents in Pecs, Hungary. They are lovely people and Pecs is a lovely place. And there is always something quite special about central European Christmases. (More pictures to follow)
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2013 Retrospective
2013 was quite an interesting year for me, not least because we finally moved way from my tiny terraced cottage overlooking Southampton common, to a much larger place, where there is enough room for a reasonably usable home studio. Only moved 35km, but it felt like moving to another planet. Of course, it takes a…
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Weald and Downland Museum
2013-09-08 we had a family outing to the Weald and Downland living museum, Sussex, England. In addition to being a very interesting place to take a camera, it is also home to a gaggle of particularly photogenic white Embden geese (bottom of page 2 and top of page 3 in the gallery below). Having a…
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Day trip to Hayling Island
I took a day trip to Hayling Island today, armed with a little Fuju HS20 EXR bridge camera.
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Pictures to sell a house with
Trying to sell our house and move somewhere with a bit more room. However the pictures taken by various estate agents (realtors if you are American) are nothing short of bloody awful. So I thought I’d have a crack at it myself.
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Steampunk watchstraps
I seem to have accumulated quite a lot of old wrist watches that have no straps (or “bands” if you are American). So I needed to figure out a way of being able to use them. Then I saw these straps on eBay. They are genuine leather and they only cost a few quid a…
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Pécs open air concert and dancers
Spent the day in Pécs, watching the summer concert and dancers.
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Aircraft HA-MDT and HA-MAM spray insecticide over Pécs
Another warm afternoon in Pécs.as a pair of very noisy biplanes buzzed overhead for an hour or two spraying insecticide over the city. Their purpose was to kill mosquitoes. The aircraft were single-engined, twin-winged PZL-Mielec AN-2R, tail numbers HA-MDT and HA-MAM. They looked and sounded like something that belonged pre-World War 2. However, they were…
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The Candovers and Alresford
Today we took a day trip to the Candovers in Hampshire with old friends. While there, I took a few snaps of Church of the Virgin Mary, Preston Candover. We the went on to Alresford.
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Houghton House Bedfordshire
Just spent a fine spring days with friends photographing Houghton House in Bedfordshire, and some of its environs.
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Hong Kong Cemetery
Today I took a walk around Hong Kong Cemetery. I then took some snaps around Central and caught the Star Ferry to Kowloon. Kowloon is away interesting especially after dark. Then I caught the bus back to Hong Kong. Its route included Hong Kong’s famous Harbour Tunnel.
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Protest in Central
I found myself in Central Hong Kong today, as I stumbled upon a protest. Seems some of Citibank’s customers are not altogether happy with the banking corporation.
