The other day I aired my idea of Project 35.
Project 35 is to shoot 35 pictures over 35 days on 35mm film with a 35mm lens.
Today I started the project, and took the first picture. Now I have to keep up the daily photo habit for the next month-and-a-bit. As it’s film, the results will be published in one big bang at the end. Watch this space!
For ages I’ve fancied doing some kind of solo photographic challenge – along the lines of photo-a-day. I don’t think I have the inspiration to take a picture every day for a year, and I worry that I’d end up shooting crap. I had a different idea, though. It’s a bit more achievable.
Project 35 is to shoot 35 pictures over 35 days on 35mm film with a 35mm lens. Yep, that’s a lot of 35s.
I don’t know exactly when I will start. I’ll post again when I begin, but as I’m doing the project on film I won’t be able to post the results day-by-day. There will be a bumper post at the end of the project.
Perhaps if Project 35 works out and I get into the habit of taking daily photographs, I might do a photo-a-day for a month with a digital camera. Who knows!
I decided to take a close-up picture of a rose. I wanted to challenge myself, so I took the picture on my Mamiya RB67, which has no metering, no electronics, or in fact anything at all – apart from a gurt massive piece of film.
The RB67 has built-in bellows so any lens becomes a macro lens. I experimented with a 180mm lens and a 50mm lens (although remember this is medium format – those lenses have approximately the same field of view as a 90mm and 25mm lens on a full-frame DSLR).
I’m pleased with the result, although I think the rose is overexposed by about one stop. But this is the fun of shooting film!
Photo taken using a Mamiya RB67 with Mamiya Sekor C 50mm f/4.5 lens on Kodak Ektar 100 film. Two strobes, one pointing at the rose from camera right, the other camera left bounced off the ceiling. Artex makes a good diffuse reflector, it seems, even if it is hideous.
This week’s Photo Challenge is entitled “go for gold”. We have to send in something related to gold. I decided to photograph the underside of a computer processor – an AMD Opteron – which was on my desk. The pins are gold-plated.
From a super-macro like this, the scale is hard to tell. In real life, the gold pins are about 2mm tall. The macro equipment I used gave me a magnification of around 3:1. Something expensive? No. This was a Helios-44M lens, dating back several decades. It’s a 58mm f/2, but the magic here is a macro bellows, which I extended out to about 13cm. Lighting was with a very bright LED lamp (not pictured).
Please excuse the quality of this setup shot – taken on an iPhone without flash. Also try to ignore the mess on my desk 😉
It’s the Bristol Balloon Fiesta this weekend and tonight at 6pm there was scheduled to be a mass ascent of 100 hot air balloons near the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Paul and I checked my ephemeris to find a good location (it’s a really useful app) and set off to Cumberland Basin, which affords good views of the suspension bridge.
The balloons were late taking off, and the wind was going the wrong direction anyway. The balloons drifted away from the city, nowhere near the bridge as we had planned. Rather than waste our effort, we decided to have a golden hour photowalk around Cumberland Basin, along parts of the floating harbour and back towards the centre.
We didn’t see a single balloon but there were quite a few varied photos to be had and it was a very pleasant evening for a walk. Fingers crossed it will be windy in the right direction for the ascents on Saturday and Sunday!
I decided to treat myself to a Mamiya C220 medium format twin-lens reflex camera. It takes square pictures with 6×6cm negatives. When shooting with old cameras, the golden rule is to try it before you rely on it, so I took it out for a lunchtime photowalk and photographed the “usual suspects” – things near my office that I’ve photographed many times before. I wanted to make sure the shutter worked, the bellows didn’t have holes and things like that.
Turns out the camera is in perfect working order and I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it. Not only that, but the 80mm f/2.8 lens is a wonderful piece of glass – pin sharp and with beautiful shallow depth of field. As the camera has bellows focusing built-in, you can also achieve almost 1:1 macro with no extra equipment. It was intended as a professional camera, and it feels like it. It’s heavy, sturdy and strong.
You get 12 photos on a roll and I’ve published my favourite six here. That’s an extraordinarily high hit-rate, especially given that these were just quick snapshots to test the camera. I’m delighted!
Note: Paul took the picture of the grass. I’m sure he won’t mind me stealing showcasing his work 😉 In fact, he published the same photo taken with a digital camera for comparison.
Nathan and I went for a walk on Bristol Downs today, hoping to find some pictures of sport for this week’s Photo Challenge. Two local football teams were playing each other in training, so I stopped to take a few photos. This one was the best.
Then the heavens opened and it started to pour with rain. Luckily I had foreseen this eventuality and had brought my rainproof camera cover. I carried on shooting and took these pictures. I’m quite pleased with the way I’ve frozen the raindrops in mid-air.
Finally, no trip to the Downs would be complete without an obligatory picture of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Here it stands, shrouded in misty rain.
Ever since a couple of tower cranes were erected just across from my office, I’ve had a photo like this in mind. First I didn’t have a camera on me, then I brought it to work but it got switched on in my bag and ran its batteries flat. Then it was terrible weather for a week.
Finally today it was sunny at the right time, my camera was present and functional, so I nipped out of the office in the afternoon to shoot this photo.
I had to hold my camera high and aim it through a small gap in the fence. I couldn’t see the viewfinder so I had to just hope it was pointing the right way. It’s actually a 3-frame HDR, shot handheld, on tiptoes. Who says you need a tripod for HDR? 😉
Ideally I’d like to be between the two cranes, but as you can see that would put me squarely in the middle of the building site. Still, I hope there will be a few photos of this construction site over the next few months, as the Bristol University Life Sciences Building takes shape.
Also included here is another picture I shot of the two cranes about a month ago. I entered it into the “Work the edges” Photo Challenge but it never made its way onto my personal website.
Released 1968
I bought this TLR for the purpose of shooting infrared. Sure, I’ve got lots of other cameras that can do that, but with an infrared filter over the lens you can’t see anything in the viewfinder. With a TLR, the viewfinder uses a separate lens and you can still see what you’re doing without having to remove the filter between each shot.
| Lens | Mamiya C mount |
|---|---|
| Film | 120 6×6cm |
| Focus | TLR waist level finder |
| Meter | None |
I took these two pictures with my Horseman 980 view camera on two separate trips to Somerset. The first is a view of the ruins of St Michael’s Church which sits on the top of Burrow Mump, overlooking the village of Burrowbridge.
The second is a view of St Thomas à Becket Church in the village of Pensford. It is now disused. It sits immediately next to the River Chew and not far from a tall viaduct. There will be photos of the viaduct later, once I’ve developed the film 🙂
Jonathan Gazeley 