Experiments in Sinking

Still trying to achieve the effect in the "Big Wheel" photo below, which is hard without a portable bus shelter... Will find a more interesting subject to submerge once I've perfected the technique a bit...

World Pinhole Day

Today is World Pinhole Day, and handily enough I had converted my now spectacularly out of date 50D to a pinhole camera by drilling a hole in the body cap and sticking one of my Coke-can pinhole lenses to the inside. Here are a couple of shots:

It does work perfectly well, but kind of takes the fun out of it, and the photos seem to lack the dreamlike feel of the "real" pinhole pics. Also, you lose a lot of the wide-angle effect because of the digital crop factor. So I'll probably stick to my trusty "Like-A", currently encased in a "Pinox" shell:

(It was actually meant to be a "Pinox - Slide", but my tendency to "cut twice and measure once" kind of got in the way of the sliding mechanism working, so it's more of a "Pinox - Swing"... )

Underwater/Overwater

I was chatting to Morag yesterday about underwater photos, including one she'd seen at the Edinburgh Science Festival that featured a shot of a shark underwater and a nearby island above the water. Anyway, this reminded me of a series of photos by Neil Craver featured in JPG a couple of months ago, particularly the one here. There are more otherworldly under/overwater shots from the series on his blog.

Edit: Morag has tracked down the actual shark photo in question which is by Alexander Mustard and is the second photo in this gallery (it's a basking shark - they're terribly cute).

Through the Pinhole

These are the first shots out of my newly constructed (and now mostly deconstructed - I overdid the electrical tape which made opening it a bit difficult) pinhole camera. Despite the man in Snappy Snaps being very disparaging of the likelihood of getting anything off the film, I think they have a certain, shoogly, overexposed charm...

Kibble palace.

Giant toffee and hedge. The ragged black border is the edge of the "window" cut in the inside of the camera that masks the film.

Light squiggles on the pond.

Daffodils

Cresswell Lane

Cat on a Warm Slate Roof

I always wanted a room with a roof you could climb out onto, but the cat has beaten me to it with her extra-sticky paws and ability to squeeze out of the bathroom window...

Aria Alba

I was through in Edinburgh on Saturday photographing the dress rehearsal for Aria Alba's upcoming show.

Singing "Such A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation" near the end of the set (Blogspot always puts them photos back to front from the order you upload them for some reason and I am feeling too lazy to fix it).

A Finnish piece, sung by an actual Finnish singer (I did manage to recognise the occasional word from Cathures' recent adventures in singing Finnish, but unfortunately I still have no idea what any of them mean :-( ).

"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"

Impromptu rendition of "All That Jazz" in the absence of the person who was going to be singing it in the concert.

Nell Drew, the Vocal Director

Rossini's "Cat Duet", which was very funny...

as was "Three Little Maids from School" from "The Mikado". More photos over on Flickr.