MorseBlog

My wife and I recently spent a week near Machynlleth in Wales. She found a good cottage up the end of a long single lane track in a steep valley. We had a very relaxing time and did quite.a bit of walking. I got a chance to take some photographs and came up with a few nice ones I think. This trip we took after having cancelled a trip to the US to see friends and relatives due to the Covid19 scare. Photo for 'Front Page' I decided to take a simple camera setup this time so I dusted off the Fuji GSW690iii which I haven’t used in a while. It is a rangefinder with a 6x9 negative and a 65 mm wide angle lens. I have found this camera a real challenge to use. (I have very often thought I should have bought the 90  mm version.) It has a very wide angle with the 65 mm lens and 9 cm wide film. Compared with my G617 very wide panorama camera it has half the film width but a much wider lens. The overlaid image below puts this in perspective. Despite being half the negative size the 6x...

I traveled out to Holme Fen again this morning. The area has become a focal point for my woodland project as I try and understand it better and I undertake to express the feel of the place as best I can photographically. This follows on from a short walk we took with friends who visited for the weekend.  The are keen walkers as are we; inevitably we walk and then enjoy a pub lunch somewhere. They live in Gloucestershire and are blessed with some vertical terrain. I suggested Holme Fen primarily because its peat soil is more pleasant walking this time of year with all the heavy mud about elsewhere. It did not disappoint in that regard. It was a  typical Spring day with scattered cloud and breaks of sunshine. We entered the woods and it was gray and with the dead brown bracken about did not impress. This is one of the many moods of the place as I have experienced it in the winter. Indeed places where I could find nice photographs a week before looked dull and unpromising. Th...

Introduction It all started with a little trouble dodging shadows in a print I was working on. This lead me to explore masking in an intuitive fashion have never really studied it. I always thought a contact print on film could be used to reduce contrast or lighten shadows depending on the exposure and contrast of the contact print. So I started there. I also started to read more and looked into the problem of registration. There are pin registration systems though they are expensive (on the order of $500). I began to think about making one myself. A little more research and I could see the pieces coming together. The Implementation The core of the system is to produce 2 precisely spaced holes in film or a film carrier. This is simply addressed by a two hole paper punch like follows. Hole Punch This punches 1/4” holes. I had to order this from Amazon as in the UK the hole punches have 6mm holes. The reason becomes apparent when I learned that a company called Ternes-Bur...

The weather here in the UK has been horrendous this past few weeks. We have been spared here from the awful flooding but the wind and wet has been epic. Consequently I have not been able to get out until today to take any photographs. I have been shooting large format lately and wind is anathema to this with long exposures and the possibility of the camera getting knocked over. I went to a new section of Holme Fen this morning and arrived shortly before sunrise. I learned these areas are call coverts. A definition I did not know was the noun form of the word 'a thicket in which game can hide'. It makes sense in a wonderful way. The sunrise was lovely and I really did not have a plan to use the light. I was just having a look around (a recce in the UK) and would see what happened. The sun rose under the clouds and shown through the trees as I walked towards the east and the edge of the birch forest. This may be something to work on at some other time.... I did manage as fe...

What a day the other day. Finally out taking photographs after a month of lousy weather. Not the best conditions but a very nice morning to be outside. No rain and light intermittent wind and increasingly cloudy. I took a few photos and ended up with at least 2 with light leaks! The color ones probably have them as well. What is going on? Lots of things rush through my head. Camera problem? (Intrepid 4x5 mkIII). My new second hand film holders I got for a bargain price? Film loading problems? The trouble is I have used the Intrepid quite a lot and while there are aspects of its build quality and smoothness I might criticize I have been taking a a lot of photos without many problems. The film backs I had seen one or two possible problems, but I wasn’t able to nail down one particular unit.  I had taken to photographing the film backs with my phone after a shoot to record which film came from which back for just such a contingency. I googled for problems with the Intrepid b...

What is all this talk about stops and what power does it have? When you first enter the world of photography you have to reconcile yourself to this term of stops, at least I did. It was a confusing term at first. That and the idea of fast or slow. Eventually I suppose all of us grasp the meaning in whatever way we find useful. Photography expresses all aspects of an exposure whether on film or paper in f-stops. Though it  did not always and even today not everyone everywhere expresses exposure as stops. The term derives from the settings on the aperture of a lens. That apparatus now almost exclusively defined as a movable diaphragm (though not always as some cameras use neutral density filters and some old cameras had plates with different sized holes drilled in them.). Indeed our current system was not so universal. I came across this when I obtained an old Kodak rectilinear lens and was confuse by the aperture markings. This article here explains in more detail this history....