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Orange Tentacle Christmas Card
Merry Christmas to all from Orange Tentacle.
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Photography Ebay Listings
There’s something of a clear-out going on. Some of it’s mine, some of it’s being sold for a friend. Listed for your pleasure.
Photography – Minolta
Minolta X-300 35mm Film Body
Minolta SRT-101 35mm Film Camera (MC/MD Mount)
Minolta MD 28-70mm f3.5-f4.8 (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Minolta X-300 35mm Film Body (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Tokina SD 70-210mm f4-5.6 (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Minolta 2x Teleconverter
Minolta X Series Power Winder (X-300/X-700/XG/XG-M)
Photography – Pentax
Ricoh KR-5 35mm Film Body (Pentax K Mount)
Chinon 50mm f1.9 Lens (Pentax K Mount)
Photography – Canon
Canon AV-1 35mm Film Camera (Canon FD Mount)
Canon FD 70-210mm f4 (Canon FD Mount)
Canon MD 50mm f1.8 (Canon FD Mount)
Canon 1000F 35mm Film Camera (Canon EF Mount)
Canon 3000N 35mm Film Camera (Canon EF Mount)
Photography – Nikon
Nikon FE-2 35mm Film Camera (Nikon Mount)
Nikon EM 35mm Film Camera (Nikon Mount)
Sigma UC Zoom 27-70mm f3.5 – f22 (Nikon Mount)
Photography – Flash
Jessop 300 TTL Flash (Minolta/Nikon/Pentax)
Cobra MD-210 Flash (Sigma/Olympus/Minolta/Nikon/Canon/Pentax)
Non-Photography
Pioneer TSG1001i 100W 10cm Dual-Cone Car Speaker
Nokia E61 Mobile Phone Dock
Dell Laptop Docking Station
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Northern Geeks Has A Website!
This took me long enough. It’s not much of a site yet, but it does have the basic information for the project.
Spread it around! Shout it out from the moutaintops!
http://www.northerngeeks.info/
We’ve even got a Twitter account…
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Northern Geeks
Now my new larger easel has finally arrived, I can announce one of my new projects. “Northern Geeks” will be a series of portraits of geeks in the north, showing them in their natural habitat and “at play”. I want to show geeks are people too.
The final images will be put into an exhibition, put online and be made available as a book.
So I need volunteers. If you would like to be part of this project, please send an e-mail to kian@kianryan.co.uk with the subject “Northern Geeks” or comment on this post. Please enclose a small “geek bio”, and what you do for kicks (this can be something tech related or completely different). Sport, gaming, gardening, gerbil farming, anything. I’m looking to shoot and print in July with an aim to exhibition in August/September. If your natural habitat is a company office, please ensure you can gain permission to be photographed there before applying. All volunteers will be given a copy of the book as thanks.
Go on – be a part of something special.
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At This Space Exhibition
The “At This Space” exhibition is opening on the 26th April, at 5pm. I’m invited to the private viewing and you’re not, so neerrrr. If you want to try and bribe your way in (there’ll be free drinks, and people, and cheese[1]), then drop Cat Ashton a line and she’ll try and weasel you in. Cat’s work is being exhibited there as part of the exhibition.
Otherwise please, please, please drop by Tuesday to Saturday, 10am til 6pm. These are young, upcoming, budding artists who need all the support they can get. Hell, one of them may even be the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon. The exhibition is being held at the rather fancy-pants Urban Splash location in Castlefield:
Urban Splash (Mooch)
Worsley Street
M15 4LD
I was there today helping put up some of the work, and occupying space at other times. The exhibition looks great, the space is superb and there’s some excellent work on the walls. All very much worth your time.
[1] I may be lying about the cheese.
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The Massive Dev Chart for Android
I’m proud to announce the first release of the Massive Dev Chart for Android. For those in the know, the Massive Dev Chart is an invaluable online database containing thousands of tested combinations of developers and films for Black and White development.
A portable version of this information already exists for the J2ME platform, and has been in existence for some time. But with the advent of the next generation mobile platforms, there was a gap for a new application to fill the void.
The Massive Dev Chart for Android goes beyond the remit of the original application by providing real-time search facilities for developers and films, providing information for small, medium and large format, and providing crucial extended information where it’s needed.
This is the first in hopefully a line of Android applications from Orange Tentacle and is available in the marketplace on your G1 now.
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Leeds Photocamp ‘09
Well that was a fun day. Photocamp aims to take the same ideas of unconference that make Barcamp so successful and bring them to photography. This is the second Photocamp held in Europe, both have been held in Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Sessions over the day have ranged from theory of composition, through to strobism and urban fashion photography.
Later in the day we got the opportunity to recreate some classic photographs. We split into groups and decided to tackle Bailey’s photo of Paul Lennon and John McCartney and Andreas Feininger’s “The Photojournalist”. For your consideration our results and the originals are shown below.
Ours
The Originals
For those interested in the lighting, we used two strobes, one set to flash against a solid white background at 1/32 for both photos, and for the Feininger a single light tightly snooted pointed directly at the model’s face and for Bailey, a single light behind a shoot-through brolly front and slightly left, with black material directly light to absorb any spill (and hence generating the strong shadow on the side of the face).
The hands on sessions were wonderful, and managed to learn a huge amount in the short time we had. The walk and talk by the fashion photographer (apologies for not catching your name) was a multi-part exercise in working with models, making use of available light, fill-flash and textures. All packed into an hour.
In contrast, the “theory” sessions didn’t carry so well. It’s my own view that while sessions like this are important, they need to be backed with practical work to reinforce the learning experience. Slide-shows are all well and good, but people haven’t just brought piles of gear with them to sit in the corner doing nothing. It does appear that pleanty of photos have been taken, you can follow them on Flickr with either the photocamp, photocamp09 or photocampleeds tags.
We enjoyed ourselves, that’s definite and we would love to see more sessions run like this. To that end I’ve got a secret project in mind, which hopefully you’ll hear more about in the next few weeks.
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Roma & The Vatican
Photographs from Roma and the Vatican. This was the first outing of the “travel kit”: a Minolta XD-7, Vivitar Series 1 28-70mm, Minolta 50mm f1.7 MD, Vivitar Series 1 70-210 f3.5, Manfrotto Modo Monopod and a Crumpler PrettyBoy XL bag.
Lessons were learnt on this trip. First off – always check your ISO before you start shooting. On the switch back from Tri-X (for the indoor shots at the Vatican) to Fuji ACROS, I completely forgot to reset the ISO back to 100 on the lightmeter. Alas, I now have several sheets of overblown film. On the flip side, it does give us an excuse to visit again…
The Modo Monopod also died a death over this holiday. I bought it specifically for this trip because I wanted a lightweight low cost monopod to stick a light body and lens on the top. On the second day, the foot fell off at St Peters, and the day after the lower half of the shaft shattered completely. While I appreciate the Modo kit is not designed for pro use, nor to last forever, for it to self-destruct after a few days of use is completely unacceptable. The monopod is currently with Manfrotto awaiting replacement (and has been for a while).
Click the image above to view the slideshow.
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Review (of sorts): Belkin Network USB Hub
The curse of a digital workflow is getting things to play nicely from end to end. If I decide I’m processing a photo on the Mac, then I need to scan the negative, edit the photograph and print it back out at a quality that isn’t going to make me wince every time I look at it.
This is harder than it looks for B&W, but so far we’re having success with the combination of an Epson Perfection V700 scanner, Vuescan, Photoshop Elements 6 and the Epson R1900 printer. The pigment inks of the R1900 are a vast improvement on the dye inks of previous generations, and B&W prints look almost passable.
The downside was that all devices required me to be rooted in a single place. Photography is my hobby, and since my home office is also my day work space I don’t relish the thought of being stuck in there every evening waiting for scans to finish (no matter which way you try it, you always end up scanning frame by frame) or waiting for A4/A3 prints to complete (which do take rather a long time). I wanted to be in a position where I could load the scanner with two sets of 120 and sit comfortably in front of the fire, controlling my scanning and other functions from there.
We tried popping the R1900 onto the print server, only to find that we appeared to lose control is sending colour configuration and other settings to the network printer. It was ok, but not great for producing high quality, high accuracy output. As to the scanner, all the solutions we could find (USB over network client/software) were starting at £100, which felt too much to spend on a “convenience”.
I fielded my needs to GeekUp, and Tim Nash replied with the suggestion of a Belkin USB Network Hub. I must admit to being pleasantly surprised.
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Analogue Photography – Gearing Up
In this increasing age of digital, you would be forgiven for thinking that analogue photography was going the way of the dodo. Not so, in fact it’s benefiting from something or a resurgence over recent years.
But having been in this position myself a few years ago, I appreciate that knowing where to start to acquire darkroom and film bodies is not necessarily the most straightforward of things. Google searching provides a limited list, and you don’t know if you can trust the dealers of not.
So here I present my list of shops. These are the ones I have either purchased from, or have heard enough to consider well enough to shop from. There are various shops dealing with chemicals, paper, darkroom equipment and film cameras, with reasonable prices for the aspiring amateur in mind.
I hope it proves of some use to you.