House by the Green Channel

GF1, 1 sec., ISO 200, JPG

Shadow

GF1, 1/14, ISO 3200, JPG

Fire Through the Pinhole

Sometimes you are limited by the choices you made when you walked out of the door with only your newly designed pinhole lens but then realize a proper lens would give you the results you would like in a situation like this. Well, since it is useless to complain or regret not having brough the right gear along it is best to just try and make do with what you have. I doubt many people have tried any documentary or journalistic photography with a pinhole camera but having a digital camera with a pinhole lens does work to some degree as you can see my small series here.

Also my new design of the pinhole lens is much better and does work very well but most important is that I have a lot of fun with this.

Deliveryman

GF1, 1/40, ISO 3200, JPG

Today’s trials with my improved pinhole lens did not go quite as well and I must have messed up the design a bit. I need to make a smaler hole and try to get more distance to the sensor even if this means a smaler field of view. Better luck tomorrow I guess.

Pinhole GF1

GF1, 1/20, ISO 3200, JPG

One of the main reasons for buying the GF1 was to use it as a pinhole camera. Now you might ask why would I spend so much money for a advanced camera and use it for pinhole photography if I can just take a box and a roll of film and it would be much cheaper.
Well, I don’t like film and find it too much hassle. Besides, the GF1 offers many advantages which film can not offer, like live view for example.

The picture posted here was one of the first sample pictures I took with the alpha version of my pinhole ‘lens’, some tinfoil over the C-mount adapter I had here. This was for testing purposes only to see how big the hole had to be and check a few things about the distance.
I have now made a beta version and will take it for a spin tomorrow.

I have said it many times but the ability to play around with old lenses or pinhole photography is exactly why I think the m4/3 format and especially the GF1 are so good and currently the best camera around. I surely hope Ricoh releases something similar soon, best thing would be a m4/3 sensor module for their GXR.

City Business

GXR A12, f7.1, 1/310, ISO 200, RAW

Groombridge Park Series

Since the Wordpress theme does not allow me to post more than one picture and also has advertising whenever I write something I thought I use this blog to post the latest series from groombridge Park. Also all pictures are taken with the GRD I so it makes sense to post them here.

The weather has been fantastiv for the last weeks so I decided again to go somewhere out of London for a daytrip. Going to Tunbridge Wells and taking a steam train to see Groombridge Park sounded like a great idea.

I have posted an almost random selection of pictures that hopefully give an indication of the trip. I took quite a lot so had to cut down quite a bit to reach even the ten I selected.

Busy Bee

Just Lying Around

Tiny Spider

Poppy

Only Steel and Glass

Dropped Your Keys?

Hey Mr. Guitarman

Recently I always struggle with the decision of which camera to take with me and depending on the mood I might end up with more than one camera.
So today I decided not to take any camera with me but use my iPhone instead. I can not realy take any phone camera serious and think people are wasting their time using phone camras to take pictures but it seems most don’t care.

Since I think of phone cameras more as gimicks and see it as kind of a Lomo (just with worse quality), I decided to do another iPhone week and not use a proper camera but challenge myself to try and get something usefull out of the crappy iPhone camera.

Walk around Wycombe

GF1, f7.1, 1/125, ISO 100, RAW, 40mm

The weather has been fantastic today. Instead of spending the day in London I decided to go with some friends out and explore the Wycombe area. We started off with a visit to Hughenden Manor before walking across fields to West Wycombe Park where we gatecrashed a wedding by mistake.

It was a great day out and I took lots of pictures with the GF1 and both the Panasonic 40mm lens and the Olympus 14-42mm lens. I can’t help but wish either Panasonic or Olympus would release a lens like the one on the LC1 for their m4/3 cameras so I could just get this and never have to worry about using anything else.

I decided to upload a small gallery on Dropbox with some of my favorite pictures. You can find the gallery here.

Howard the Duck

GXR P10, f5.1, 1/12, ISO 200, RAW

I took this picture while walking by the Barbican today and really loved the scene. The duck was standing there posing for quite a while so I took quite a few pictures. Unfortunately the light was fairly low and I needed quite a bit of zoom for the right composition so it was not a perfect situation for the GXR with P10 module.

I chose the title based on the movie ‘Howard the Duck’.

Boats on the Thames

GXR P10, f15.4, 1/320, ISO 119, RAW, 300mm

Filling the Water Bottle

 

GXR P10, f5.9, 1/200, ISO 100, RAW

Broadgate Tower

G

GF1, f4.5, 1/200, ISO 100, JPG, 40mm

Stairs and Lines

GF1, f1.7, 1/20, ISO 400, JPG, 40mm

I never used to like the Barbican Centre before but after working close by and spending more time there it did grow on me. Now I really like it and go there to chill during lunch but also to take some pictures, the architecture is very interesting and unlike Canary Wharf nobody bothers you if you take pictures.