It’s been a while since the last post, so this one going to be a bit of more than one topic. Mainly to document for myself before I forget everything 😉

Little hijacker

First “job” was shooting one of the missus’ DIY projects. Simple set-up with two strobes – nothing exciting. Nice practise for the metering skills though. While shooting the scene got hi-jacked by our son. Who wouldn’t snap the shutter when that smile jumps into the frame. For a real portrait session I should add another strobe to properly light the background. I had another hijacker jumping the frame who didn’t want to end up on the blog. Well practise nonetheless.

With that task completed I wanted to explore how dark it can be to get a reading with the L-758D. It does do quite ok in limited light. So blue hour is mostly fine. But it gets to the limits shortly after that. So it’s quite amazing to see how much the human eye can actually do. It did however a pretty good job telling me the dynamic range I had before me. That reduced the number of shots I would have taken by just guessing. Unfortunately I found another limitation. The camera I had on me (the good ol’ Fuji S7000) produces mostly noise in the ‘shadows’ when I exposed for the highlights. I had to ditch a number of shots because they simply ruined the HDR images by adding too much noise. Continue reading →

As mentioned before this years Easter Sunday was also World Pinhole Day. For the fun of it I decided to go back to the very roots of photography and give it a shot or two…

Tulips with shoe box camera

To get the low tech feeling I went through the apparment looking for a box to use and found an empty shoe box that seemed about right. I could fit in a 10x15cm sheet of paper and the focal length would be about 100mm. For the pinhole I used simply kitchen tin foil. Unfortunately that stuff is so thin that it is really next to impossible to get a round pinhole into it. My first attempts always looked like I used a pump gun to get the hole into it 😉 Finally I managed to get a pinhole that looked okay. As far as you can judge a 0.4mm hole with the naked eye… After everything was fitted I loaded the camera with a sheet of Ilford RC grade 2 paper, covered the pinhole and went outside for a shot. Even though I had taped the lid to the box to get it half way light sealed – the box itself (being a 1mm thick cardboard box) was far from being light sealed. Pretty much every corner must have been leaking into to box. Anyway the aperture was somewhere around 200 giving me an exposure time of 3mins (I rated the paper to be about ISO8). Continue reading →