philmorris

Colin. This littlun is officially a "rism". Which is just as well because those "roids" suffer in later years, especially in the botty department.

Hi Bala. I was in Ireland the last week of October. Other than that the furthest I've been is the rim of my head.

 

The "G" in GN denotes the lens is made of glass. From very carefully selected optical milk bottle glass. As for the "roids" suffix, I thought loads of people named their holga creations "roids" as a mark of eternal affection. Until I discovered this morning that you require a polaroid back to mate with before you can make these critters. These aren't "roids" at all. I've had them examined by a fully qualified holgologist and he tells me he's 99% certain they are in fact "risms". I've altered the folder name accordingly. Cheers.

 

Thanks Julien. Yeah, may be I ought to get in touch with EMI and find out who they've got in the studio recording say Fingal's Cave or Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony. I reckon with a snip to one side it oughtta do the DVD cover as well.

Cheers Dave. Yeah I thought I'd splash out on some trendy toy gear, empty my head, shoot at whatever seemed "stretched" and was in front of me, and then think about whether it worked or not later. The thing I've learned is that I thought I was a meany and averse to wasting film. This and the Holga has shown that I'm not that way after all. I'll happily burn the film for a so-so picture that's just a click away. Hindsight has revealed that I am loath to wasting time fiddling with settings, hanging around on a picture and failing to fix a naff composition I came to realise was so-so half an hour ago.

Thanks John. I dogded the sea to contrast with the cliff edge. It needed it. In any case, it's hopelessly dark. It needs a nice bright seagull on the left to counter all that blackness. You know, the sort you wipe your nose on :)

 

This is another reminder to self of the limits of this particular camera. The ruddy blotches are on the neg. It's some kinda light leak.

Yeah, I think you really do need to put the subject smack in the middle. And therefore those which lend themselves to being placed smack in the middle are ideal. Or you could just move on to the poteen and laugh your socks off :)

A return visit to this place. The thingy's doing a good job.

Hi Colin and thanks for being so fast to come and inspect my first ever clutch of holgaroids. This shot and the three preceeding were from the first roll. As a nubee therefore, my trousers are down. With frame 1, I left the cap on! Frame 2, [Duffy's] was OK (pure luck thanks to the earlier mistake). Frame 4 [Galway Cathedral] was where the cock ups showed because I was winding on as if I was shooting for 16 pictures per roll. So there's overlaps from the frames either side. I put it up as a reminder to self. The tree branches showing up on the RHS are from the next shot, Frame 5, of the little Madonna and offertory bowl sitting on a wall at Corcomroe Abbey.

 

This shot, of the dolmen, incorporates yet more errors. To begin with there's still the overlapping going on (so this one and the Madonna are both crops - all the others are full frame), plus I set the zone focussing wrong. I left it on close focusing after the Madonna shot and didn't change it. It focuses on the foreground grass. The dolmen is probably thee premier magalithic site on The Burren in County Clare, and I'd driven all the way here from base in Co. Mayo with a car boot full of gear. But it was bucketing down (just like it was the two previous times I'd paid a visit). So the expensive stuff stayed put and the crappy camera was sacrificed. I blame the failure to think about focusing on trying to blink the rain out my eyes and lying low to the ground to hide the ring fencing the authorities have erected around this thing. That's my excuse!

 

So there's no doctoring with blur and so on in any of these shots. they are all, subject to the clarification I have given, straight out the box plus levels adjustment and dodging. Talking of which I'm not so sure whether I've got a bargain or whether I've been short changed. I thought I'd leave off sealing up the camera with velcro strips and so on until after developing. That way I could see the extent of light leak and figure if I liked it. But there aren't any leaks at all! Plus the pronounced vignetting common in these cameras is weak to non-existant.

 

Of course, I realised my cock up with advancing the film when I was offered the chance to shoot Frame 13. By the time I started Roll No2 I'd dropped just about every bollock going. The good thing about toy cameras is there's not much to learn. The lesson from Roll No2 is only ever shoot in decent day light (unless set to bulb and you've got your Holga modified to take a cable release - the shutter is a one speed 1/100 sec only). The indoor shots I took on Delta 400 are way underexposed. All in all, shooting with a Holga is almost as easy as an auto focus SLR.

Thanks there, Andy, Steve. Very nice of you to say so.

I agree. And generally speaking one will always be preferred to another. The two shots were taken about an hour apart from virtually the same spot. It was stimulating to observe how minute by minute the setting sun made vast alterations to the colour spectrum.

 

I appreciate your observations Steve (and go along with every word of your bio philosophy). And, now you mention it, that black hole really does suck your eyes out.

'Course I remember those heffelumps. Winnie The Pooh and Tigger's bumps. I remember old Worzel but am clueless on woozle, Though I've since googled woozle
And come up trumps

I for one did. I also confess to a prolonged fit of the giggles at "it is inevitable that responses to this thread will tapir off." Brilliant Pete! And in the current POW thread the suitably 'out of the blue' "Jacques, I believe that is a tapir's head." Stunning!

 

I'm frequently reminded how far flung participants here are. It requires some effort to get my head around that. How it is quite possible that something seriously doubtful might have happened for real umpteen thousand miles away however unlikely the same might seem to be from my little shack in England. So if John, or Leigh or Pete say had chimed in about one of their pictures saying, I dunno, say "my ham and eggs went cold in the course of this coz I had to chase a pack of woolley whiskered wombats off of my crysanthemum patch" I'd very easily accept them at their word.

Forgive the fool that doth misquote,

For 'Fayrie' Queen I ought have wrote.

No tapir spleen e'er passed her lips.

I 'fess I was but telling fibs.

Hi fellas and thanks for stopping by. A nice bunch of comments to get my teeth in to. Yes, I suppose those black bales are on the titchy side now. It was the white dots that bothered me. I burned in the highlights. When I was looking through the viewfinder though, they were blinking at me like a dozen lighthouses. They drove me crazy. I think I've now gotten over it. Leaving me to gnash my teeth coz o' them friggin' pylons on the horizon, dammit!

There is a serious side to this post though as the story behind the animal you see in the middle of the picture (as demanded by Doug) is one of overwhelming sadness. That of the Derbyshire clef-pallet tapir. Originally introduced to the fields and forests of the English Peak District by Oliver Cromwell in celebration of his defeat of Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bakewell in 1387, its numbers quickly swelled such that by the late sixteenth century it had become revered as a courtly banqueting savoury and a fashionable hors d'oeuvre:

Fortune bestowed you our sweet virgin queenPartake yee a tidbit of tapir spleen?(William Shakespeare Sonnet XXXIV)

During the World Wars, the tapir was used by restless POWs as a fiery alternative to sheep, hence the musicahall success of

Rub a dub dubTwo men in a tubTwo Gerrys tubbed a tapir

similarly, some thirty years later, a parody of "It's a Long Way to Tiperary", became the boastful "It's a schlong's way to Tub a Tapir"

Alas, after 400 years of feasting and fornicating, man's unrelenting misuse of the animal has brought it to the point of imminent extinction and impending doom. A suggestion then that the tapir should stay in the picture "in memoriam". Here you see one of the last three left anywhere in the world. With typical tapirian misfortune, all three of them are gentlemen.

Thank you gents. It was the light that got the camera out of the kit bag. And then I had to search for the composition. The gap in the wall was the entry thru to the main tree and the dip where the the two hills are conjoined. It was also the way to the black plastic lined hay bales - which you kindly didn't mention :)

I'm not clear how "more of a relationship" can be achieved here. Presumably the best way would be to break down barriers. Are we sure that removing the boundary promotes relationship? Put it this way, I take the view that there is a visible relationship (between rock and trestles). First, an enforced relationship by reason of their appearing together in the one frame, and secondly that they share the same background of glazed over water. Above all there is a third relationship in their lack of commonality, whether it be fluid vs rigid and so on. I accept the top right to bottom left diagonal presents as a separator, but I would argue that it is this separation that reinforces the distinctions. Imagine a photograph of two people for example, one outwardly rich and on one side of the road, the second on the other side, desperately poor, and shot in a way which accentuated their lifestyles, may be nearside a bloke getting out of a chauffeur driven limousine, and far side, some old geezer checking the bins for a half drunk banana milkshake. That they are brought together within the one frame and on the same stretch of road but either side of the street, compels the viewer to make distinctions and comparisons of the kind we are invited to make in this picture. That they are poles apart is the relationship. But it's negative, anti-relationship. Admittedly my example is an exaggerated analogy for rock and trestles, but I'd be surprised if, in my example, there was a complaint that the shot of the rich man needed another millionnaire and had been spoiled by the presence of a beggar.

Thanks for your comment Terry. And to everyone else, sorry I'm so poor at responding at times. Yes, it's one of my favourite little wildernesses too. And quite coincidentally, yesterday I booked to spend a week in Mayo later this month. I'm whizzing off on Saturday, 23 October. I can't wait. I remember taking this shot during my October 2001 visit. The bit I remember most is trying to find a position where I could include what I wanted but hide this bloody great iron bedstead that some indiscriminate person chucked the otherside of the fence. You can perhaps just make out a cross member on the extreme left of the picture.

I'd like to adopt just about every word written by Marc G. The one thing I'm not convinced about is that the rock ideally needs to be placed a little further to the right. Its placement seems to reflect the aspect ratio. If it's heading right, picking it up and plonking it back down again is hardly worth it. We'd be talking millimetres. To answer the elves questions, I'd say the diagonal adds a dynamic. And rather than seeing this as a shot of two subjects, I prefer to regard it as having one object, namely the visual ping pong between the static rock and the oscillating trestles (which is where the dynamic comes in). I think it a refreshing alternative to display the motion and direction of water by reference to shadows cast upon it, rather than the line of surf and tide. But if there was a dominant subject it would be the rock, and I think it owes it's dominance to just sitting there, enthroned in its kingdom of glassed over water. Conversely, I think that if anything was to be removed but a worthy picture was to remain, I'd remove the rock. The rock is not especially beautiful. Submerge the rock and what would remain would still be delicious. And mysterious too. Though the rock dominates, the aesthetics of the picture are to be found elsewhere I reckon. I am also uncomfortable with the strand encroaching upon the rock's territory. I think it needs to be told to butt out.

Where are yawns on the grand scale of things?

Yeah you've done it again. The drama was always in the sky. Who'd go to a theatre to watch cows graze?

We're looking at the lower base of a decrepid old willow. I was impressed how the bark might resemble some rock face and imagined little climbers with ropes dangling from it with lava spill tumbling from the crevice upper left. There was uniformity in the buttresses (the legs) and shadows between them (the crotch?) found along the top edge and so set about finding a spot where I might display them evenly and in a way which incorporated what could pass for a cavern seen here in the lower right. The cavern is not therefore a shadow, but rather a hole through the wood. The cavern did interupt the regularity but I satisfied myself it provided a secondary place of interest.

 

I'm astonished you (correctly) figured the little section on the extreme right was outside the tree edge Leigh. I incorporated it to show up the zig zag edging. Also, and as it happens, for curiosity,I did switch to a colour back. You can make your own minds up. But for my taste I had to de-saturate for the colouring to settle.

Thanks very much Pete. Ramble as much as you want to. Whatever you write, if it's as nice as the stuff you've just written, however long it is, I'll read and re-read it half a dozen times. Cheers.

The picture has dual equal sized subjects providing near and far interest. Though the two subjects are at first glance independent and unrelated, there is correlation in the maritime preserved in the slender band of sea between land and sky.

 

I have little doubt the photograph was correctly exposed and only has this dark atmosphere for dramatic purposes. I think the picture better for it. Bunched in the midtones and it might appear limp. I like what appears to be a bird's nest built in one of the rope loops and the rising left to right ditch running contrary to the rising right to left axis of the coil and mont. The use of wide angle is also evident (to a photog at least) and I can imagine the pains taking tripod adjustments to correctly frame the two subjects in a way which did not have them too far flung and yet included the strip of sea. You must have been pretty close to the coast. The wide and the pointing down of the lens seems to be responsible for the outward leanings of the buildings at the extreme left and right of the mont, though as ever, that might be down to history.

 

The other thing evident is the halo. I'm not sure what to think of halos. They are obviously a product of darkroom dodging. Their presence bends reality, but for a legitimate purpose. Are they to be regarded in the same category as grain; enjoyed for what they stand for; the by product of using film / wet printing? Or are they to be viewed as unwanted and preferably to be avoided? Are my reservations rooted in modern software capabilities? Then again, where should the line be drawn? What's your take?

Ha. I come along to visit your portfolio and what do I see on your home page (apart from two little square boxes with red squares inside each). Evan's (almost) world famous shot of the steps leading from the cathedral to the Chapter House, Wells.

 

As I view I've got three versions open. And as I look at yours and Evans's I'm struck by the similarity. It's as if the taking of your photo was an exercise in repeating the 1903 version in a modern setting so as to demonstrate how little has changed in a century of usage. I'd even go so far as to say the resolution in the uploaded / final image was restrained in order to maintain that resemblance to the version produced a century ago.

 

The other thing I notice is the subtle variation in view point. I've visited this spot and I'm aware that the door from the cathedral which opens on to the steps is placed to the extreme left as one views the staircase. Evans clearly had the advantage of being able to set up his tripod in the proximity of this door, at eye level, in order to line up the nearest and next nearest arches, so as to have a uniform band of white within the engraved door nearest. Your shot is taken from a place to the right so that the viewer does not have the Evans alignment, but more of the plaster to its immediate left, to include the second tier of staircase rise. Evans was able to incorporate the presence of the second tier (let us call it a wave in Evans's sense) only by virtue of the handrail that then existed. The handrail has since been removed and replaced with a simple bannister. As such I think the modern photographer is obliged to move right of where Evans had stood in order to capture this rise.

 

There is of course a second practical reason for the modern day photographer moving to the right, and that is the persistent ebb and flow of passing visitors journeying from the cathedral to the Chapter House. Yours is the best modern "replica" I've seen.

 

The third version I have open is here.

Thanks Peter and Colin. And thanks Gary for the benefit of your vision; once again an example of enhancing for immediacy. I also notice the introduction of a pesudo thiocarbamide toning. Something I tend to aim for but either overlooked or typically diluted to invisibility.

Steve, there can be two reasons why there's a filter on the end of my lens; one good and one bad. The good one is where I've thought about things and made a decision to filter. The bad one is where having previously thought to fit a filter, I couldn't be bothered to take it off again. This particular example may fit into the latter category, though in my defence I reckon that an orange filter does enhance contrast in overcast conditions, especially so in a scene such as this where the high level grasses are amber in colour. All I know is that my pocket tape recorder notes tell me I had the orange fitted for this one.

 

Gary, thanks very much for taking the time to look over my pictures and for the attachment. Your rendition is rather similar to John's would you not say, with emphasis being placed on the "ideal to burn" areas? I couldn't agree more that both suggestions up the contrast even further and make for a far more striking image. As I said before, I am timid when it comes to these adjustments. I think it can be put down to two primary reasons, the first being that I think I lack the confidence to make a significant departure from how the scene was captured on the negative (though I want to). And the second is that when working on a full scale picture (say 5000 by 5000 pixels), I am perhaps overly particular about ensuring that dodging does not spill on to adjacent shadow areas, or creates white splodges of undiscernable matter, the effects of which are much more apparent than in a small jpeg displayed on the internet.

 

Keep up the suggestions please. My confidence depends on it!

It's very well exposed for shadows, but I think the lighter parts could be even whiter.