Bendy Lenses at Folly Lake

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More programming today. But we took a break by heading to the Folly Lake Cafe for lunch. I think they do the best chips in Hull. But I'm biased. They taste like the ones my mum used to make.

Anyhoo, the food was lovely and the day was very pleasant. And I'd taken  my Lensbaby, a simple lens which you can tilt to play with depth of field and whatnot. To adjust the lens aperture (the size of the hole that lets the light in) you drop in metal discs with different sized holes. And it has the ability to make very interesting images with selectively blurred bits. Great fun to play with. 

Hull Looks Great

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Every now and then I take a picture that I'm really, really, pleased with. This is one of them. I took it today wandering round the waterfront in Hull. This is fast becoming one of my favourite places. The Fruit Market is coming along a treat and interesting cafes and shops are springing up. It's a pity you have to cross the A63 to get to this part of town, but it's well worth a few seconds waiting at a pedestrian crossing. 

I took a few more pictures that I'm happy with. You can find them here. 

Out damned spot..

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So we're staying in this awesome flat in Bridgeport Chicago and I notice that the ceiling light is rather neat. So I tip my camera onto its back and take the above picture. 

And a huge lump of dust drops off the back of the lens onto the camera sensor.

So now every photograph has a grey dot on it (you can see it on the shot above to the right of the centre). 

Now, the rational part of me knows that this doesn't matter at all in the great scheme of things. Really. But the other, stupid, part of me will focus and obsess on this little grey mark, panic that the camera is now broken and it will never be right again. 

Eventually I did the right thing. We wandered down to Central Cameras in Chicago (an amazing camera shop) and I bought a rocket. 

I don't know who's idea it was to shape this dust blower like a rocket, but it works for me. The good news is that a couple of puffs at the sensor from this wonder machine and the dust has gone completely.  I held the camera upside down while I did this, so hopefully the dust has dropped off completely. At least I've managed to convince myself that this has happened.

I've now formed the habit of dusting the base of a lens before I attach it to the camera. And the word on the street is that the sensor in a digital camera is actually quite well protected, certainly not just a naked piece of silicon, and cleaning it is reasonable (and not particularly dangerous)  thing to do. 

Burnby Hall Tulip Festival

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I'd not heard of Burnby Hall until this weekend. They are presently having a tulip festival, and number one wife wondered if I'd fancy going along an taking some pictures. 

Would I just.

So it was into a bag with a goodly assortment of lenses, tripods and kinds of other paraphernalia (that's the great thing about photography - plenty of scope for paraphernalia) and then off down the road to Pocklington. 

It was lovely. We got there nice and early when there was a bit of an angle to the light and it was nice and quiet. It's a great place to visit. Good food, good weather (at least today) and lots of tulips. We saw loads of families with picnics making a proper day of it. And there was even a brass band at 2:00.  

Not sure they've fully grasped how Secret Gardens work though....

What use is an old, cheap lens?

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I've been playing with old lenses on my camera for a few weeks now. And yesterday I spent a massive 19 pounds on another one. This is an elderly, but still excellent, Canon zoom lens, probably from the 1980's. It has that lovely zoom action where you pull the barrel towards you to zoom in. One of the things that a long focal length lens will do for you is compress perspective, flatting everything together. You can see the effect at work above, where the church, which is actually quite a lot further away than the other items in the picture, looks a lot more prominent in this picture of Cottingham lights. Great fun. 

The lens also took a pretty good picture of part of our tree.