Voigtländer Bessa

Another week, another new camera, and some more photos from it. These photos are taken with my “new” Voigtländer Bessa. I posted on here recently with some photos from a film that was still in the camera.

With a camera from the late 1920s-1930s, it seemed fitting to visit a former industrial site – so I took a walk to Bristol docks.

Finally, here are some immature conkers on a horse chestnut tree in Oldbury Court Estate.

The Bessa is a fun camera to use. It looks great, and its fabric bellows turn heads when you wander around the city folding and unfolding the camera.

However, my specimen has a few faults. It has some minor light leaks, and something (I’m not sure what) has scratched the film as I wound it on. There’s a long line running through every frame. The violent action of the shutter release causes a lot of camera shake, and the slower shutter speeds (longer than 1/10 seconds) jam the shutter.

Nonetheless, I’m going to try and fix it up because this is one of my favourite cameras so far 🙂

Taking pictures of the night sky

I recently moved from a flat in Kingswood to a house in Fishponds, on the very outskirts of Bristol. It overlooks the massive Oldbury Court Estate, which shortly gives way to the countryside. Compared with Kingswood, there is hardly any visible light pollution here – at least to my urban-accustomed eyes. Back in Kingswood the sky was as orange as Fanta. Here it seems a much more natural blue/black.

Since moving, I’ve been waiting for a clear night so I can point my camera at the sky and take in a wide view of billions of stars (as opposed to regular astronomy, where the photographer/observer focuses one one object). Last night presented just that opportunity, so I whipped out my 450D and fitted my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens.

I quickly found out that astronomic photography is a balancing act and a series of compromises. In short, the thing you are pointing the camera at is very dark, so you need to collect a lot of light to make a decent picture. There are three real ways of doing this (and one way of cheating).

  1. Expose for longer. The trouble is, stars move across the sky. Exposing for 30 seconds, you see some blurring that just looks like poor focus. Exposing for 60 or 90 seconds, you can clearly see that the stars are all moving and have blurred tails. So in practice we have to keep the shutter speed faster than at least 30 seconds.
  2. Open the aperture wider. The trouble is, the wider the aperture, the worse the sharpness. When taking photos of fine points of light, f/1.8 just doesn’t cut it (unless you have a fantastic lens). You need to stop down to at least f/8 to see the sharpness of the stars come through.
  3. Increase your camera’s sensitivity (by increasing the ISO of your sensor or film). This effectively means you collect more light, so you can shorten your exposure, or decrease the size of your aperture. The trouble is, higher ISO means higher noise or grain in your picture. ISO1600 on your DSLR sounds great, until you see the results and find out it’s a load of speckle.
  4. Fix it in Photoshop. This has the same fundamental effect as increasing the ISO, although you can be a bit more intelligent about noise reduction. I’m no whizz at Photoshop myself, and in any case I prefer to get it right in the camera.

So, we have to find a suitable compromise. The best combination I came up with was a 20-second exposure at f/6.3, and ISO400. Then I briefly altered the curve in GIMP to keep the noise down in the paler areas of the sky. The result was a pretty mediocre photo. The stars were a bit blurred (motion blur) and a bit blurred (poor sharpness) while the background was also a bit noisy. I somehow don’t think it will feature on the cover of New Scientist any time soon.

These are the two best photos out of about two dozen that I shot. It doesn’t sound much, but bear in mind that each one was exposed for anywhere between 30 and 90 seconds! I’m sure that converting them to JPEG and resizing down to this size has done them no favours at all, but never mind. In the first photo, the shutter speed is too long (90 seconds) and the stars are blurred, while in the second one I shot at ISO400 and played with the result in GIMP, so the noise is bad instead.

Stars flying by
The night sky

Some of these issues can be worked around. I’m using a standard Canon f/1.8 50mm prime lens. If I had some more pocket money, I could upgrade to an L-series lens (for example) that would probably offer better sharpness at wider apertures. I’m also using a decidedly consumerish EOS 450D. I am a consumer, after all, but an EOS 1Ds mkIII with a full-frame sensor would offer lower noise at higher ISOs. I’m not sure what can be done about the movement of the stars across the sky though, regardless of personal wealth. I suppose I could buy a sky-tracking tripod like they use for real observatories.

Next time It’s clear I’m going to try approaching this from a different angle. I’ll keep the ISO low at ISO100, and the aperture small at f/16 perhaps. To compensate I’ll expose for a “while” – perhaps five minutes. This should give me a low-noise, sharp photo of some extremely blurred stars. It’ll be like the world is spinning, and I hope it will look interesting. Watch this space*!

Finally, coming back to the issue of light pollution from sodium street lights – despite it seeming far better here in Fishponds, the images from the camera still seemed horrifically orange. I can get around this by either adjusting the colour balance, or by simply converting the images to black and white. I suppose I could also solve this one with money, by buying a house in the countryside 😉

* Actually, watch my photo blog. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – this blog is for nerdy discussions about photography, while my photo blog is for showcasing the pictures that actually turned out OK.

Photos from a Paulette

Recently I was given a Halina Paulette Electric, dating back to 1967. It’s similar to the Braun Paxette, but more cheaply made. As usual, I took it for a spin with some black and white film.

The quality didn’t blow me away, but perhaps even more lacklustre was my inspiration that week. First here’s a view over Brandon Hill Park.

And here’s a cheeky snap of my LOMO Lubitel 166 Universal sitting on a wall.

A face from the past

Hana’s dad picked me up a folding Voigtländer Bessa camera at a car boot sale in Exeter. To my surprise, it had some film in it – although unfortunately I didn’t find out until I’d opened the back.

I developed the film in my darkroom, and found that, as expected, half the film was totally black but the rest had some faint images. One frame had some rust on it, as it had been in the camera for so long.

In the end, only three frames out of the eight produced any usable results once scanned and edited, so here they are.

The camera is rather older than the film, as the Bessa was first manufactured in 1929. The film used here was Ilford FP4 (note: not the newer FP4 Plus) which was produced from 1968 to 1990.

If you recognise the location in the first photo, or recognise the man in the second and third photos, please get in touch. I’d love to trace the person who forgot to take out their film, all those years ago 🙂 Chances are the man in the photos is still alive, if he was in his 30s back in the 1970s.

Playing with fire

Since moving into a new house that has a garden, I decided to buy a chimenea – a traditional Mexican wood-fired outdoor heater and stove.

Last night, I invited a couple of friends round for some beers and a curry on the patio, and needless to say, the appeal of playing with fire was too strong to resist. Between us, a chemist, a physicist and an engineer, we stoked the fire until it was leaping out of the chimney.

Later on, the fire died down and I was able to get some shots of glowing embers. These ones were stuck around the grate at the top of the chimney.

And these ones were flying out of it!

This photo of scraping the ash out reminds me of an iron forge.

Jonathan’s Blog now on new “hardware”

This blog, and my other blogs, used to run on a rather old server: two 1GHz Pentium III processors, 1GB memory and 2 x 18GB SCSI hard drives. I host with Ridgeon Network, which is owned by my friend Chris. I help him out with some networking stuff from time to time so he loaned me this spare server for personal use.

A few weeks back one of the hard drives failed. Service continued as normal but it was an acute reminder that the server was getting old.

Recently Chris bought a powerful server for use as a VMWare ESXi hypervisor, along with a large iSCSI SAN to host all the disk images, and powerful shared MySQL database server. As he was moving lots of his servers from physical boxes to virtual machines, I decided to do likewise.

So this website, and my other sites, are now hosted on a CentOS virtual machine, with their databases on a separate CentOS database server. Given that the load average on the old P3 wasn’t very high I wasn’t expecting a noticeable improvement in performance. But how wrong I was! The site is noticeably faster to load and navigate, and in particular the WordPress management interface is miles faster.

All in all, I’m happy with the new platform. To anyone else considering replacing old servers with a virtualised infrastructure, I say go for it. You’ll save tons of electricity, take up less rack space, pave the way for later expansion (by adding more hypervisors or more disks to the SAN) and have better manageability and backupabilitiy.

A weekend in Center Parcs

Over the Bank Holiday weekend, I visited the Sherwood Forest Center Parcs with Hannah and my family. As usual, I took at least one camera. I decided to take my trusty DSLR, as well a newly-bought waterproof 35mm camera, as we were intending to go swimming and canoeing.

I shall try to piece my holiday together from the various photos I took on my digital and two films. Obviously the digital photos have the time stamped into the file, but the film photos don’t.

Upon arriving at the villa, we had a walk around. The surroundings were very pleasant – lots of trees, and only a few paces to a small lake where there were ducks, swans, moorhens and other birds too.

This duck was paddling cautiously in the shallow part of the lake with all the confidence and enjoyment of a young child on Blackpool beach in November.

Later on, we had a barbecue. As usual, Dad set fire to everything except the coals (but including the food). However, the smoke billowing from our dinner looked pretty as the sun shone through it.

For those who have never been to Center Parcs, there’s a large boating lake with an artificial beach (yep – some 50 miles from the sea!). Now using my waterproof camera, I tried to finish some black & white film so I could get some colour film loaded before we went canoeing.

Walking back to the villa, my brother Oliver passed us on his bike. This photo was my runner-up for the “sport and action” Photo Challenge.

Now with colour film in the waterproof camera, Hannah and I took to the water in canoes.

The lake was too murky to get any decent shots under the water. The camera was great though – not only was it safe when it inevitably got wet, but it floats so you can simply throw it to somebody else. That’s how Hannah took my photo.

After a while our bums were so wet and and our fingers were so cold and numb that we headed back. A little later, I returned to the shore of the lake with my DSLR and a long lens.

These people look like they are having a lovely, relaxing ride in a pedalo.

And these boys are clearly having fun splashing around in canoes.

Unfortunately, this girl and her brother look utterly miserable. I guess the moral of the story is “love many, trust few: always paddle your own canoe”.

I repeatedly forgot to take the waterproof camera to the swimming pool, where the water is actually clear enough for it to be used underwater. Never mind – there’ll be other occasions.

How things change

Recently, I would say that photography is my favourite hobby. But it wasn’t always that way.

Throughout my childhood, I’ve taken pictures of important occasions on single-use cameras. My parents would always buy me a single-use camera before a family holiday, for example. I wasn’t interested in the camera, though.

A few years ago (2005, I think) I lived in hall of residence with a guy who had a “fancy camera”. I was so uninterested in it that I have no idea what it actually was. It was digital, and it had a big lens on it. This just goes to show that I didn’t care about photography at the time.

More recently, in 2007, I had a Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone. For a phone, it had an extremely decent camera and could compete with some of the entry-level digital compacts available at the time. But I still only really used it for taking photos of things that were happening around me.

But then, my colleague Paul starting doing his photo-a-day in 2008. I became a keen follower of his photo blog, and started to take “arty” shots on my phone. I enjoyed it so much that I quickly ran into the limitations of my phone and started wondering about buying a “real” camera.

There was a decent superzoom “bridge” camera in the office so I borrowed this for a few days and had great fun with it. Then unfortunately I was involved in an accident and dislocated my shoulder. Stuck at home, bored, I bought a camera. It was a bridge camera, one mark up on the one I’d borrowed from work. I bought it primarily as a high-tech toy, and with not much interest in the art of photography.

This was the stimulus I needed, and with a powerful and versatile camera I tried all sorts of photography. Gradually I became interested in the art of taking photos, and I now try to take photos that are nice to look at, as well as fun to take.

In 2009, I was given an unwanted 35mm SLR. At first I was sceptical – how useful could film be? I bought some film and had a go. I really enjoyed using an SLR for the first time and immediately wanted a DSLR.

In 2010, I caved in and bought a DSLR. I also continued shooting film and I now have a collection of around ten cameras – all film except for the DSLR. I’m still more interested in the cameras and the techniques in using them, but I hope that my work is also pleasing to look at. Make up your own mind.