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.
Photography
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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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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. Having a gander I always enjoy photographing geese. They are curious creatures and they always…
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.
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…
2009-04-26 Hong Kong Museum
Back in Hong Kong for a few days. Today we’re in Kowloon visiting the Hong Kong Museum. I must be getting old because I remember seeing a lot of this stuff for sale in Woolworth’s when I was kid
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Shinkansen to Kyoto Japan
Today we went to the beautiful city of Kyoto, on one of Japan’s legendary Nozomi Shinkansen trains. The Nozomi is Japan’s fastest train service and runs on the Tokaido and San’yō Shinkansen lines. The service only stops at the largest stations. Its N700 series rolling stock reaches speeds of 83 metres per second (300 km/h…
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Himeji Castle Japan
Day trip to Himeji Castle, photographed by my girlfriend Zsuzsi.
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Himeji Japan
Took a short Train ride to Himeji today.
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Osaka Japan
Decided to take a break from Hong Kong and spend a few days in and around Osaka, Japan. It rained quite hard today, so we took a riverboat trip. Also found some LED geese.
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Cleaning a camera CCD with a vacuum cleaner and a Lens Pen
I had Fuji S1, S2 & S3, all of which had dust magnets for sensors! They would get dirty even if I did not remove the lenses, simply from the air that got sucked in by varying the focal length of the lens. However, I cleaned them quite successfully with a vacuum cleaner. However there…
Southampton Common in the Snow
There was an unusually heavy fall of snow overnight. So I thought I would wander across to the Common and grab a few snaps.
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Christmas tree lit by LED
Our little Christmas tree looks quite pretty this year. And we decorated it with a very long string of LED lights.
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Backing up using big, cheap hard disks and some nifty Unix tools
We all have our favourite methods of data backup. Certainly DVD is a good archiving and distribution medium. But for routine backup, I look for reliability, low cost, ease of use, high-speed, high capacity and redundancy – so I am not reliant on just one device. One of my favourite methods is a complete off-site…
Pécs TV Torony
Another pilgrimage to the top of one of my favourite places: the observation platform on the 197 metre Pécs TV Torony
Pécs
Some Autumnal snaps of the beautiful Hungarian city of Pécs