I have finally begun scanning all of my 35mm photos, mostly taken between 2 & 5 years ago, a feat which I had intended to do nearly 2 years ago. Click the image beneath for a larger (1920 wide) version.

One of the more unusual events to take place in the Union, amateur boxing has taken place in the Union once a year for a few years now. Despite >24kW of light from above (we rigged 24x 1kW CP62’s as well as some other lamps, all directly above the ring so that the fighters wouldn’t be competing with glare or shadows) I still had to shoot at 3200 with the 135mm wide open at f2.8 to stand any chance of getting sharp images. As such, most of the shots suffer from nasty blue/purple fringing, which could probably be removed if any of them were actually worth further working on!

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Not a great photograph, but I did my best from my position on the floor & with no flash. Click the one beneath for a larger version (1920 pixels wide), email me if you want an even bigger version for some reason (full version is 8600 pixels wide).

The UK Garrison hardly count as ‘cosplay’ but hey,  thought I’d post these too.

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Could really have done with a decent flash that day, old Pentax one is rather limiting with no tilt/swivel at all.

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Obviously this wasn’t taken recently, even in Scotland it doesn’t tend to snow in late July!

Some quick photomerges from Celticsoc’s 2010 trip to Pitlochry. I haven’t bothered altering the levels on any of the individual photos before the merges, as I wanted to try & get them up quickly. (Edit: 6 months is quickly, right?) Click for bigger versions. The one above was actually from the 2009 trip, but I don’t have an entry for that so I thought I’d put it here too – scroll down to the bottom to see the 2010 version, though the weather wasn’t so good for that particular shot.

Walking the longer route from Moulin back to Pitlochry.

In stark contrast to last year, there was ice all about.

Down by the loch. The branches at the top sort of ruined this one, but I didn’t notice at the time. Fairly noticable chromatic aberration of the branches against the sky, but I probably had the apeture set to auto instead of stopping down like a sensible person. Possibly a candidate for content-aware fill.

Don’t think we went past this bit last year. Still ice floating out on the loch in places.

Looking back from the dam. Took one looking the other way toward Ben Y Vrackie last year that I’ll dig up some time.

This year’s version of the photo at the top of the page. The light wasn’t quite as nice this year, but I couldn’t really control that!

Went for a jaunt along the coastal path out past Albany Park, but didn’t really get very far as I spent all the remaining sunlight shooting these nice little pink flowers on the other side of the fence. Google-fu tells me they are silene dioica or red campion.

I tried taking some panoramas of the seafront too, but nothing really came out.

Was using my new (secondhand) Tenba tripod for these. Surprisingly irritating shooting with such a shallow depth of field when the breeze causes the subject to move in & out of focus all the time!

I recently bought an old lens on eBay for ~£11 & had the first real chance to try it out today. I’ve been noticing beautiful blossoms all over St Andrews over the last month or so, but haven’t really had time to take any photos. Luckily today on the way back from the hardware store I came across a tree that was still well endowed whilst the rest are starting to fall bare. All the photos on this page were taken with the new lens; there’ll probably be another post later of some blossoms/flowers that I took with the 28mm Sigma, abusing it’s under-advertised macro capabilities.

A bit about the lens. The Helios 44 is a Soviet copy of the Carl Zeiss Jena ‘Biotar’, a 58mm f2 with 6 elements in 4 groups. Several Soviet factories manufactured the Helios 44 as the standard prime for Zenit SLR cameras. My particular sample is one of the earliest, the 44M, made in 1978 by Красногорский механический завод (Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod, better known by their acronym KMZ & their dove prism logo). It seems they kept improving the design & manufacturing the lenses for decades, but this early design came before the advent of multi-coating so will probably suffer badly from lens flare & may warrant getting a hood for it, but it also has an 8-blade aperture rather than the 6-blade of the later versions. This gives it a wonderfully smooth bokeh, though the lens is incredibly sharp (even surprisingly so wide open at f2). After some of the shots I took today I understand what some people have said about the bokeh looking almost ’swirly’ in shots involving foliage in the out-of-focus regions.

It’s an M42 screw mount, but you can buy adapters to every modern mount under the Sun (Pentax K in my case) for a few pounds. It seems that some of the very latest revisions were available in Pentax K mounts, but are rather rare & certainly won’t sell for just £11.

Build quality is excellent, reminding me of old Pentax M lenses but a lot chunkier; the thing exudes the sorts of qualities that make you think it would waltz through a nuclear holocaust just to take photos of the aftermath & sell them to AP. I’ll try to get some photos of the lens itself, maybe compared to my Pentax M 50mm f1.7, but that will have to wait for another time.

All of these were shot wide open at f2, with ISO cranked down as low as it goes on the K20D (100). I think this is the first time I’ve had a genuine reason to use the body’s fastest shutter speed (1/4000)!

K20D seems to consistently underexpose by about 1 stop with this lens. Couldn’t see the photos on the camera’s screen at all because of how bright the sun was, so had to go by the histogram & hope to get the exposures close enough.

Should’ve stopped down a bit on some of these. The M42 to K adapter isn’t perfect, because without modification the body can’t stop down the lens at all (M42 uses a pin that moves perpendicular to the K mount’s lever). Luckily the early versions of the Helios 44, including mine, have a manual/auto switch on them for controlling the aperture, so I can permanently stop down the aperture if needs be; just isn’t very handy if it’s too dark to see with a small aperture!

Luckily managed to avoid shooting towards the Sun or any reflections so I didn’t get any nasty lens flare in these. Never really knew how useful multi-coating actually was until I started pointing this lens at direct light sources!

Effective focal length on the K20D’s 1.54x APS-C crop is 89mm. Combined with the nice smooth bokeh, it should prove to be quite a nice portrait lens, should I ever have the opportunity to get into such a thing!

This is going to be a long post, so apologies for loading times.

12th – 20th February 2010 saw Rag (Raising & Giving) Week return for another highly successful year & amongst the events this year was St Andrews’ very own version of Britain’s Got Talent. Acts ranged from singer-songwriters to dance groups, bands, beat boxers & even a magician. There was a seated audience, so I couldn’t get up close to the stage with a fast prime, so instead I sat to the side with a 135mm f2.8 & turned the sensitivity up a bit.

Singer songwriter to kick the night off.

This is the second time there has been a harpist & I’ve been on the wrong side to get a good photo!

If the competition was judged on trousers, these guys definitely would’ve won.

Some dancing to mix things up.

One of 2 acts that a certain Luke Hodgman performed in.

The magician was rather impressive.

He produced some twenty odd umbrellas from somewhere.

And covered the stage in confetti!

A rather well-practiced band up next.

The fancy-pants band back again, as their microphones weren’t working properly the first time round.

Drum kit abuse at its best.

This guy had one seriously impressive voice.

Scotland’s under 18 beat box champion.

Finally, the Rocksoc band!

Sash doing what he does best.

Then busting out a solo.

Some American rapper who needs to buy a belt.

And his beat box accompaniment.

This guy was certainly brave.

And the audience loved it!

I think these guys were the overall winners, but can’t remember for definite.

Rather cheerful looking pianist/singer.

One last acoustic cover to finish the night.

Going back a few months now, a few days of torrential rain resulted in the Kinnessburn river, which runs not far from my flat, flooding in quite spectacular fashion. Almost impossible situation to photograph though, as it was extremely dark, raining & very hard to get close without getting rather wet feet!

Here I am using a 12 watt LED torch to try to show how high the water level is compared to the bridge – it’s usually about 6 feet beneath the bridge!

Trying to get artsy, didn’t really work.

Upstream side of the bridge, lovely collection of flotsam collecting where the water has risen too high.

Hideously exposed photograph, but gets the point across.

This gent with the umbrella hung about on the opposite bank for a while, but I couldn’t get into a good position to get a nice silhouette without sacrificing the dryness of my socks.

Had to go to the lab to collect something before it got closed for the Christmas/New Year holiday (the only time in the year it ever closes) & figured I would take my camera with me to see if the kit lens could handle low light at all after some coaxing through Lightroom with high-contrast black & white conversion. The answer is not too well it seems!