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So today started grey, and as the afternoon went on Fareham creek became very misty...



Misty creek and eerie fog )
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I've been playing a lot of Pokémon Go while out on walks, and experimenting with the AR photo mode...

Cross-posted to deviantArt


Pokémon! )
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Just a random photo taken in the local sensory garden, while out and about today...



There was just something that caught my eye about the little purple flowers poking up through the autumn leaves.
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I really ought to pop out and get something for supper... but why do that when I can spend the past hour out on my balcony, watching a beautiful sunset instead...

Photos! )
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Tonight a full lunar eclipse was forecast, and so [livejournal.com profile] elemnar popped round in the hope of watching it from my flat.

Unfortunately the weather, which had been gloriously sunny for the past month, chose today to cloud over...



...and as the night drew in the cloud thickened. There was no sign of the eclipsed moon when it rose at 9pm. We spied a patch of clear sky to the west so [livejournal.com profile] elemnar and I decided to jump in the car and head towards it. We got to Warsash to find that the clear patch had vanished, and given the timing gave up on searching for clearer skies and headed back to my flat. In the end there never was a gap in the clouds and so we didn't get to see the eclipse - all we saw was the effects of it on the clouds, as they became more visible with the end of the eclipse.

On the flip side we did get to spy Jupiter through a gap in the clouds (the pale dot in the middle of the photo, taken by [livejournal.com profile] elemnar with her phone!), so it wasn't a total eclipse fail.



Random night photos )
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A slightly different flotilla made its way up Fareham Creek today...



Shiver me timbers, there be more photos! )
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Work is having a snow day - the boss texted yesterday evening to say "it's pretty tricky on the roads around there so don't try to come to work in the morning!" - so I went for a stroll with camera in hand...



Snow! )
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I swear I'm not intentionally making this a weekly thing... but here I am, another Sunday evening, and another random film.

[livejournal.com profile] boggyb: *turns on scanner*
Scanner: whirr whirr whirr THUNK BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

Okay, there'll be short interlude while I open the scanner and give it another dose of PTFE lubricant...

Scanner: whirr whirr groan grumble whirr

Close enough. One of these days I'll pick up some degreaser and do the job properly by removing the existing gunk. Anyway, today's random film is another roll of Fujicolor 200 with the label Green 1601. I'm going with the Fuji Super HR 200 Gen 2 preset this time (insert standard rant about film negative colour correction).

Most of the photos on this roll were from a walk on a sunny spring afternoon in 2017 near Lee-on-Solent, heading from Thatcher's Copse towards the Chilling Cliffs. In photography terms this was one of my more successful outings - most photos that I took came out quite well, so prepare for incoming picspam!

Picspam! )
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Another Sunday, another random film!

This negative claims to be a Fuji Color 200, so I'm scanning this one as Fuji Super HR 200 Gen 1. That gives... well, old-film-like white balance for the Battle Abbey photos, and fairly decent colour for the flypast ones. Eh, I've spent enough time playing around with presets in the hope of finding something that matches this type of film (Fuji Color seems particularly tricky to scan, which is a pain as I've got a lot of it).

Photos! )
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Random film time! It's been many months since I last put a roll of film through the scanner...

Today's random film is mainly of Titchfield Abbey, and was taken sometime in the autumn of 2016 using the Nikon F-301. It's a Kodak Gold 200-7 film, scanned as Kodak Gold 200 Gen 6 with Neutral colour correction as that looks reasonable (one day I'll apply SCIENCE to film scanning and come up with a better colour correction system).

Photos! )
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Bonus post!

Today's random film Red 7189 - a fitting identifier, as it's got these chaps in it. This is from a few years back when I spotted that the Red Arrows and the Vulcan were going to display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. It was not long after Father's Day which [livejournal.com profile] elemnar and I hadn't done anything for yet, so we came up with a sort of delayed Father's Day outing for The Gnu to go and watch it. This was very much planned at the last moment so we didn't actually visit the Festival of Speed, but instead trundled off to The Trundle, an iron age hill fort on the Downs north of Chichester that's well placed to see the display ([livejournal.com profile] allegramente posted about it at the time). I brought the F-301 and a couple of rolls of film (though it looks like [livejournal.com profile] allegramente may have managed better photos with her cellphone!), and here's the first of the two films!

This one just has the Red Arrows in it - film Red 7190 (which I need to rescan as VueScan decided to change the colour correction settings it was using halfway through) also has the Vulcan.

Red 7189: Red Arrows over Goodwood 2014 )
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During the gloriously sunny weather a couple of months ago house group chose to meet down on the beach, where we actually did very little housegroupy-stuff but instead enjoyed ice cream, toasted marshmallows (and wine gums), and wonderful sunsets...

Team House Group - Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men (Mat 4:19)
Cross-posted to deviantArt


Sky anvil
Cross-posted to deviantArt


This particular cloud put me in mind of Aslan...
Cross-posted to deviantArt
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Cross-posted to deviantArt

It's been a while since posting a meme, and I happened to stumble across this one on deviantArt...

  1. How long have you been on DeviantArt?

  2. 13 years? Lemme check... huh, dA only says 12. I claim almost 13.

  3. What does your username mean?

  4. the-boggyb: Six inches tall, and armed to the teeth, a fine soldier he made. And his name was Boggy B.

    I picked it because at the time I was going by the handle of BoggyB and that was taken on dA, so the-boggyb it is. It's an old name as these days I almost entirely go by Torkell - the only places where I still use boggyb are dA and LJ (both cases because I've just not got round to paying to rename).

  5. Describe yourself in three words.

  6. Um... Photographer, Programmer, Explorer?
    Better suggestions on the back of a postcard :)

  7. Are you left or right handed?

  8. Almost always right-handed, though I tend to be ambidextrous when using the laptop's keyboard-mouse-thing.

  9. What was your first deviation?

  10. Either a desktop screenshot or an experimental photograph. Let's see...


    Multiple monitors rule


    A screenshot! In particular, a screenshot showing off a multiple monitor desktop which is common these days but most certainly wasn't back in 2004.

  11. What is your favourite type of art to create?

  12. Photographs, particularly ones where I'm playing around with the light and the composition trying to capture a specific view or idea of something.


    A Fool's Reward II

    Rainbow fountain

    Team House Group


  13. If you could instantly master a different art style, what would it be?

  14. Drawing. I'm terrible at actually creating two-dimensional art - hence why all my submissions start with a photograph.

  15. What was your first favourite?

  16. No idea. Possibly something from [livejournal.com profile] elemnar? Hold on a moment while I scroll back through my faves...


    The Hollow Victory
    by aridante


    Huh. Did not expect that as my oldest fave ([livejournal.com profile] elemnar has #2 with Dozing Lynx).

  17. What type of art do you tend to favourite the most?

  18. Whatever catches my fancy. Recently it's been a fair amount of fanart (some from rather obscure fandoms), mixed with images that I find impressive and/or moving.


    The Lure of a Book
    by FictionChick

    _.Scarcely Unseen._
    by UNIesque

    Keladry of Mindelan and Peach
    by Klork

    Two Halves of a Whole
    by yuumei


  19. Who is your all-time favourite deviant artist?

  20. I can't come up with just one, so here's my top three (in no particular order, with a semi-random upload for each):


    [livejournal.com profile] elemnar


    Dance like no-one's looking




    -.+Guardian Arella+.-

    [livejournal.com profile] nendil


    Keeper of Dawn, Guardian of Dusk


  21. If you could meet anyone on DeviantArt in person, who would it be?

  22. I have no idea! So here's a semi-random collection from my dA friends list:

    :iconcrimiclown: :iconka-rose: :iconkapunua: :iconloobywibble: :iconnendil: :iconolego: :iconom-nom-berries: :iconuniesque:

  23. How has a fellow deviant impacted your life?

  24. Well, my sister has a dA account so there's obviously her. Outside of immediate family... [livejournal.com profile] pleaseremove/pleaseremove I've know since forever. And then there's [livejournal.com profile] olego/olego who if I remember rightly gave me an invite code for LJ all those years ago and got me into the whole social network thing.

  25. What are your preferred tools to create art?

  26. For the digital photos I tend to use an Olympus C3030-ZOOM. It's a very old compact digital but has a nice fast lens and full manual control (something which is missing in a lot of modern compacts, and which I occasionally find invaluable when I'm trying for a particular balance between aperture and exposure). I do have newer cameras, but I'll still sometimes dig the old Olympus out as I'm used to it and know how to make it achieve what I want.

    For film, an even older Nikon F-301 manual-focus SLR. There's something quite satisfying about creating photos on actual film that you don't get with digital cameras.

  27. What is the most inspirational place for you to create art?

  28. Somewhere I'm out exploring, particularly if it's out in the countryside and there's a glorious sky.

  29. What is your favourite DeviantArt memory?

  30. I don't have many memories of the dA community as I never got really involved with it - my uploads only get a low number of views and I'm not part of any groups/communities/whatever-they're-called. On the other hand, since I mainly upload photos they all come with memories for me of where I was when I took the photo and what I was doing.

#DeviantArtistQuestionnaire
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It's been a while since the last random film...

Today's film of choice is another roll of Boots 200 (DX code 001304 so probably Fujicolor 200 - the Fuji Super G 200 settings look reasonable) dating from my Brightonian days. In fact I can date this film fairly accurately - the first few photos are of [livejournal.com profile] pleaseremove unboxing what was at the time a shiny new Nikon D80, which would likely make this mid 2007. For a laugh I took the lens from his new camera (a Zoom-Nikkor AF-S DX G lens, I forget the focal length), stuck it on the ancient F-301 and took a photo in Program mode. The result: a perfectly exposed photo of [livejournal.com profile] pleaseremove, albeit with camera shake due to the slow aperture. The F-301 is fairly unique in that it does proper closed-loop metering and so gives a correct exposure even with lenses without the mechanical aperture coupling.

Hilariously, going the other direction doesn't work anywhere near as nicely - if you take a non-CPU lens and mount it on the D80 then the camera just throws its hands up and drops back to full manual mode. I don't think it even gave focus or metering assists. I do recall it behaved itself better with the SB-16 flashgun and would happily drive that with some level of automatic exposure (though digital cameras can't do proper TTL flash metering) - impressively, the SB-16 could keep up with the D80's motor drive mode for a good dozen or so exposures.


Anyway, enough rambling and time for the photos! )

Film fail!

Apr. 11th, 2017 09:01 pm
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One downside of using film is there's many ways in which it can all go wrong leaving you with no photos. In this case, I had a roll of film that seemed to be exceptionally long and was going well past the usual 36 exposures. This was a bit disconcerting so I decided to rewind it - and found that there was almost no resistance to the rewind crank, and the telltale spinner on the cover wasn't spinning. Ah-ha, I thought, the camera must have pulled the film off the reel inside the canister, and so I gave it all to Boots to extract inside their dark tent.

A few days later I picked the film up from Boots to find it was completely blank! This puzzled both me and the lady at Boots (who was kind enough to not charge for processing) - the film was not obviously defective as the leader was exposed, and being a SLR it would have been rather obvious if I'd left the lens cap on. However I've come up with a theory: the Nikon doesn't have a slot you have to thread the film through, but rather you pull the film out far enough to reach the takeup spool and it grabs the sprocket holes and winds it on automatically. Except if I haven't quite got things lined up then it won't do so - and the symptoms of "film pulled all the way out of the canister" and "film not advancing at all" are identical.

Lesson learnt: pay attention to the telltale spinny thing when loading a new roll of film, and check that it is actually advancing properly!
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Cross-posted to deviantArt


Scanning the last negative (Red 0787) I was struck by how I'd happened to take two photos of the same subject with almost exactly the same framing on two very different days. A bit of experimentation with Corel later and here's the result: winter fading into spring.

Other than resizing one photo to line up on the other (more or less - the two were taken at different angles and so an exact match isn't practical) and applying an alpha blend, these photos are straight off the film scanner, film grain and all.
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Random film time! I have things to do and so I'm procrastinating by feeding another negative to the scanner.

Today's mystery film is... Red 1022, a roll of Boots-branded Fujicolor 200 from 2007. How do I know it's from 2007? Well, because it's the follow-up film to this set with the rest of the Battle Abbey photos. Come to think of it I ought to be able to date this very accurately as I also took a digital camera with me... lemme dig through the archives. Yep, 16th August 2007 according to the EXIF data. That was only a few days before I moved out of the student house I shared at Sussex and left Brighton for pastures new.


Lots of photos! )
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Speaking of film, I scanned a much older negative the other day (Red 7351). This one is from a family holiday in Portugal, many years ago! Around the turn of the millennium my grandparents sold their house in Falmouth and spent a few years gallivanting around the world (as one does). For a time they were staying in Portugal (somewhere in the Algarve region) in a friends/relatives villa and so we went over to visit. This would have been probably in 2000ish - they left Cornwall in 1999, and this would have been before I started university in 2004. In fact, I'm fairly certain it was 1999 or 2000 as it was before the Spanish holiday and on that one myself and [livejournal.com profile] elemnar had recently got Pokémon Gold/Silver which came out in 2001 (I remember the pair of us passing time in the airport by sending Mystery Gift messages to each other). That's got to be one of the more unusual ways of dating photos!

This film is a Kodak Gold 400-6. Being ISO 400 there's a fair amount of grain... and with a basic point-and-shoot camera it was generally very overexposed to boot (I looked up the specs of the Canon Snappy LX-II - shutter speed ranges from 1/45 to 1/180 with a f/4.5 lens. Correct exposure on a sunny day with ISO 400 would be more like 1/2000). Fortunately colour negatives are fairly forgiving of this, though it did mean all the dynamic range was squished into one end of the raw scan. I also experimented some more with white balance as I was having problems with colour casts with the White Balance setting - trying to lock it on an unexposed portion of the film didn't work well (because of the dynamic range issue mentioned), so in the end I went with the theory that colour negatives are balanced for daylight and set VueScan to Auto Levels (which preserves the colour balance of the original scan). This generally worked well.


Anyway, the photos! )
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Random film time! Today's mystery film is... Blue 1626! Another one from late in my university days. One evening [livejournal.com profile] pleaseremove was round, and we (along with most of the house) spontaneously decided to drive to Beachy Head to watch the sunset. I posted a couple of digital photos back in 2007, but I also took the Nikon F-301 with me.

The film is another rebranded Fujicolor 200 (I probably bought a bag of the stuff from Boots) so I'm trying the same settings as last time.

As a random aside, the back of the film has been gunked with something or other, which Boots presumably didn't notice when developing it as the marks are visible in their prints. Since it was the base side rather than the emulsion I attacked it (very gently!) with a few drops of isopropyl-alcohol-containing lens cleaner which quite happily dissolved the gunk. Infra-red cleaning took care of the rest. Result!

Photos! )
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Random film filler post! Today's film is Green 3563, and is probably from a similar vintage as the last one. This time it's a roll of Kodak Gold 200-6 which VueScan actually has a preset for!

Photos! )

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