Batman’s House

I’m lucky enough to live in an area that is quite close to Wollaton Hall. It’s a super nice day out, plenty of space to let dogs run wild and chase some deer, Fenton style!

 

I went the other day to take the pup a walk and decided to take a camera I’ve never used, my Pentax SFXn. It’s quite a simple automatic 35mm film camera to use. It’s definitely not one of the ones I will go to to do some more serious work (my Canon EOS5 is where it’s at for me right now). It still however produced some half decent images on some expired film.

 

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Samyang 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye – First use impressions

I received a Samyang 8mm Fisheye through the post yesterday and have had a very brief chance (moving house malarky) to go and grab a shot with it.

This is by no means a lens you can pick up with and get decent results you would expect. I’m not talking about the fact it’s a manual aperture ring and manual focus (I’m use to both features through shooting a fair bit of film), I’m talking in regards to composition. The field of view on my 7D sits at about 167 due to it being a 1.6x crop sensor. This is still an extremely wide field of view and of course an extreme fish eye distortion.

This is my first fish eye lens and so I’m no expert and also I’m not a camera lens nerd (I salute the effort and time these ‘nerds’ go to to help us understand lenses in the most basic of terms) so I’m not even going to go in to that. I’m not really going to say anything other than practice, evaluate, practice, evaluate etc.

Obviously in a digital age it’s very easy to review photos we have just taken but there is a difference between reviewing and evaluating. Take a bit more time looking at your view screen, they are nice and bright and easy to see for a reason. One of the main reasons will be for focusing, as I mentioned it’s manual and very easy to pin point the incorrect point you were aiming for (not as hard as medium format f/1.4 lenses mind). Also a little note about the build quality, I have no qualms with how well it’s built for the price I paid, it wont last a lifetime but it will certainly last my current requirements for the foreseeable future

As I have said I’ve barely had it a day but I understand the lens much better after getting the photos up in Lightroom. I very rarely take a lot of pictures of the sam subject, same angle and same setting hoping I get it right, simply by evaluating what I’ve put into practice I end up taking much fewer photos and saved myself a lot of time shooting and post-edit.

It’s not really an everyday walking around lens (I usually have my Canon 50mm f/1.8), but I would definitely say just take this lens out, and only this lens, out every now and again to force you get to get closer to your subjects and hone your manual focus skills

I only have one photo to share and here it is.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Nottingham City Hall

I took my 7D out and about with me today as the weather was nice and had some time free. I have previously tried to capture the whole of city hall from a distance and it just doesn’t work. Between all the people, the overhead cables on tram lines and trees, i’s hard to get a decent shot that shows it off really well.

With that in mind I’ve decided to break it down bit by bit. Here are the only two I took today but seem to have worked real nice. Real shame about the safety net though.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Town Hall

Right now in Nottingham we have a pretty crappy attempt at a Christmas Market, mainly designed to extort money out of visitors to the city. It does make you try and take a different angle of town hall, it’s pretty hard as there is a lot of distractions.

Here is what I managed to snap.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Mamiya + Music

I’ve owned my Mamiya 645 for a fair while and in all honesty I’ve not used it that much. This has been due to the fact I couldn’t find anyone locally to develop it, I thought it was broken after a very nasty fall (luckily all is perfect) and I had no way of putting the developed film anywhere other than print …

Focused on the cameraman focused on his camera

The hand movement brings more life to the photo

… that’s until I purchased an Epson V500. Took a fair bit of fiddling around to find the right setting, still not convinced I’ve found the right balance between quality / file size / ability to edit. These two shots are just an example of what it is capable of. Now I have somewhere I can develop the film (going to attempt to do this myself, expect a post about it!) and have plenty of expired stock to experiment with. I also ordered a fairly tatty lens from eBay for landscapes so I am given more flexibility of what I can shoot effectively.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Remembering

I took this photo just before we had a 2 minute silence to remember those who gave their life for others. This photo was actually a candid shot I had taken in Nottingham’s market square. I had a telephoto lens so it allowed me to get up close without being directly intrusive. I also don’t care too much for posed photos of people, much in the same was as I hate posing for people when having my photo taken.

The sincerity of this photo is what I like the most about it.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Bookcase Top

My front room is on the small side but I love the furniture we have in there at the moment.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Softness of Film

This was taken with my Canon EOS5 35mm film SLR. I can’t describe why I like this photo, whether it’s the subject, the colour reproduction or the softness of the image. It could be a collection of all of those things.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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A Star Media

Recently I’ve been asked to help out a local business, A Star Media in developing a set of photos to use on their site along with the launch of their new show reel. They’re a top rate video production company based in Nottinghamshire. The brief was simple, take candid shots of them at work recording their new show reel and a few posed team shots that weren’t corporate.

Here are a selection of the photos:

I’m away for the next couple of weeks which means very limited posts but it also means I will have a lots of awesome photos to share once I’m back.

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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Under The Tree – Josh Wheatley & Beth Frisby

A quick step away from photography to bring you a live acoustic performance of local Nottingham artists performing at a Under The Tree night at BrewDog Nottingham.

Give it a listen!

Thanks for looking,

Andy

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