So yesterdays new technique was to give Sarah a camera, get her to take a completely random shot with the white balance messed up, then mess it up further in photoshop and post it. The intention was to see if anyone said it was rubbish.

Anyway… on to the real new technique…

I’ve been reading about Lomography - which originated with Lomo cameras issued to the Russian army. They’re very silly things which have manual focus and aperture and an automatic exposure which will keep the shutter open for anything up to two minutes to get the correct exposure. So pictures invariably come out unfocussed and with motion blur, but the saturation of the colours is excellent.

Another limitation of the cameras is that the lens can’t see enough to cover the whole of the film frame, so the corners are significantly darker - known as vignetting.

The technique involves taking as many pictures as possible, usually from interesting angles (there’s no need to look through the viewfinder - it doesn’t help!), and seeing what comes out. Anyway… on to the pictures…

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I’m undecided so far whether they’re blurred crap, or art.

Experimenting with a new technique… let me know what you think!

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Details on the technique tomorrow!

There was a great post on our local Freecycle list yesterday. It went something like this:

OFFERED - double bed

Ideal for lying down, waking up etc.

You know the 25 Smiles project I embarked on a short while ago? You do? Good. Well, browsing around the pbase galleries over the weekend, I found a vaguely similar project - only the photographer got people to wear a hat he supplied. Oh, and the people he met were mostly rather famous.

Go to One Hat Wonders

Have a look, it’s rather fun.

Playing with a bit of post-processing. This is a photo I took in April last year at the Forbidden Corner using my old camera. I’ve run it through a Velvia filter, bumped the contrast and finally had a play with layers - I duplicated the image onto two layers, sharpened one and blurred the other, then blended the two to get a ’soft but properly focussed’ look. It’s better if your lens can get that look on its own, but usually it can’t, so postprocessing is necessary if that’s the look you want.

Anyway… on to the image…

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So, the other day I decided to buy a Stirling engine kit, and it arrived today. About an hour and a half was all it took to build (with two hours out in the middle to play badminton and allow the loctite to set). The results are just great!

There’s a 4.8MB video to download here, too.

I’m not quite sure how I missed this story about personal Stirling-engine-based power stations for use in the home.

I’ve been into Stirling engines for some time - they’re whisper-quiet external combustion engines used in many areas such as pumping, power generation and (in reverse) cryogenics.

If the article is to be believed, then we’ll be seeing them in homes Real Soon Now™.

Well, who’d have thought it. There I was thinking that avian flu would affect me in no way at all, and suddenly I notice that feather shuttlecocks have gone up about 25% in price.

Good job we use synthetics.

I’m looking at prices for train travel through Finland because, once again, I’m planning the trip up to the North Cape. The booking website works like any other you’d normally see, but while I was getting an idea of a price, something struck me - the list of concessions. You will pay the following prices on a Finnish train depending on who you are and what you do:

With military service rather outdated in Britain, it was rather odd to see ‘conscript’ in the list. I guess the ‘person in non-military service’ is the pacifist’s equivalent.

Anyway… it doesn’t look like I fit into any of the categories, and I’m not getting signed up for the Finnish army or border patrol just to save a few Euros on a trip!

One of my favourite photographers, David Lawrence, has come up with this. I just want to go there and rescue it!

I think I’ve previously mentioned his Funny galleries, and it looks like he covered the latest Muslim protests in London quite well. I’m not entirely sure that this chap was in the right place, but never mind.

Anyway, Mr. Lawrence is my current role model for street photography… have a look around his work, most of it is excellent.