Archery

Back in January I took up archery - it's something I've quietly fancied for a few years (see below) and I finally got round to doing something about it when a leaflet dropped through the door over Christmas.I'd only tried it a couple of time before - once on a Warner Holidays break on the Isle of Wight back in 1994 (see the first photo in the gallery below) and then at Nudefest in Cornwall in 2013. So yes, a lot of my previous experience at archery was in the buff - and I am duty-bound to point out that I won the competition at Nudefest - I even have a trophy and can therefore claim to be Best Naked Archer in Britain 2013! I do have photos of that too, but well, no. Chatting with the club organisers at North Bristol Archery, I offered to take some photos for their website, so last week I went along with my bow...
Read More

Using A Vintage Camera

One of the cameras I inherited from my father was his parents' camera - an Ansco No.3, which is now somewhere in the region of 100 years old.I'm pretty sure that this is the camera my dad took with him when he cycled through the Alps in 1953, which was a couple of years before he bought his own camera. It's a lovely old folding camera, but with some surprises. It has movements - rise and fall and some swing.It takes 118 rollfilm (more on that in a moment) but also has a separate back for sheet film - quarter plate, for which there are also a dozen (heavy) dark slides.You can see on the photo below that it even has a small built-in stand that folds out - there's another for when you use it landscape. It's always looked in good condition (although I have had to re-stick the leather(ette) cover, and the shutter speeds seemed sensible. The big blocker has...
Read More

Concorde

Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the first Concorde flight, I thought it would be appropriate to share some photos from its last landing in Bristol, in November 2011. A work colleague lived backing on to Filton airfield, and they were all given free tickets to see the landing from the airfield itself - he very kindly offered me one on the ground that I took photos. Before it came in to land, it did a flypast of the airfield, and the shot below is all I have of that - I took that one photo and the camera battery ran out. Now remember that this was back in the days of film, when camera batteries lasted for at least a year, so it was quite an unexpected event. Panic hit - have I taken a day off work, used a friend's ticket and ended up with just 1 photo, and that not even of the landing? Fortunately I can be...
Read More

Timelapse Videos

Something a little different - I've been occasionally dabbling with timelapse videos, and while there's nothing spectacular about them (the resulting image quality when shooting on a phone doesn't help) I'm relatively pleased. We'll start with one I took at Aust at the high tide came in and then ebbed. The composition and positioning could have been better but it works to some degree. Then we have two different views of dusk moving into night, both from France this year.The quality on these is better because they were shot on my camera - but I should have left the first one running for longer! And finally a couple of sunsets, again from France this year....
Read More

Further Adventures in Film

Following on from the posts earlier in the year about getting back into film (see here and here), I thought I'd give a progress report after having bought the Hasselblad. There's also the Intrepid 5x4 to consider.Once thing that's quite interesting is how little 35mm I have shot (with one exception, which we'll come on to later) - it's mainly been medium and large format. But when you've got a Hasselblad, why wouldn't you concentrate on that? The HasselbladI managed to cram the Hasselblad into my luggage when I went to Amsterdam, but somehow managed to mis-load the roll of B&W film I shot - no idea how I managed it, but it meant I lost half of the film images from there.The next block of photos are from Caen Hill Locks (see Day Trips), which I think worked well - exposures all looking pretty good. On that note, the photos I took at the Pershore Confetti Fields weren't so...
Read More