Dead Camera III: It Lives

I managed to put the Cyclops back together and although it’s not perfect it has improved. It seems I managed to put the loose lens element back in the right place but it still needs some adjustment. I think the lens needs to start from slightly further around because I’m getting a dark area at the start of the swing. This means I’m losing about 1 cm of the 155 x 55 mm negative (could be worse!). There is some evidence of camera shake - the lens movement is fairly violent - but it would be a shame not to be able use it for handheld pictures.

You can also see a bigger version (edit - pic removed) and one other from this morning.

[Update: added a page (Feb '04) on the Cyclops].

“Architecture cannot escape fashion”

I’m reading The Look of Architecture which makes connections between architecture and clothing that had never occurred to me before. It’s also a bit negative about the failure of photography to capture important aspects of architecture which makes me wonder what the author would think of Tadao Ando: The Colours of Light which also seems to be at the top of my pile at the moment and has some great photographs by Richard Pare.

The Playpen Shifts

I’ve started a page for the medium format panorama experimenting where you can see pictures of the old 6×9 folder and the more ridiculous, disposable 35mm panoramas, which obviously aren’t medium format but it seemed like the best place for them.

This picture was taken with a Bronica RF645, the negs of which are starting to look small.

Someone’s gotta do it

I bought a 0.42x converter at a camera fair. It didn’t have the right adapter for my fuji so I just held it in front of the lens. It and the bus window were pretty cruddy, so after defishing the shot with panotools I thought I’d add to the low quality look and ran a lomo action on it. The lomo action blew out too much detail for my liking so I backed up a bit in the history. I’m fairly sure the action came from here, but I can’t connect to the site to check at the moment.

The converter is destined to sit on an old 6×9cm folder and is part of the ongoing investigation into finding cheap ways to do medium format panoramas.

More Stretching

This is another picture stitched from three digital pictures. You can also see a bigger version.