Long time Phogotraphy advocates will know all about our eternal struggle to find a decent camera, film or even lens based photography Kickstarter. If not ego-inflating projects, the vast majority of crowd funding attempts tend to be little more than money spinning cons.
Then we discover this. A no frills 4×5″ film loading system.
Introducing the Sp-445, the smallest, lightest most proficient home developing system for 4×5″ film. Its inventor, Continue reading
December is almost upon us and being that time of year we thought we’d save you a “Gifts for Photographers” Google search with this incredibly cute photography book with a twist.
It’s a camera!
Designed by the brilliant Kelli Anderson, this wonderful little stocking filler would be a joy for child or adult alike. At a price of just $29 it’ll be hard to resist for Continue reading
Music videos can be a hive of experimental photography. Often a director will take an idea they’ve seen and put it into practise to produce surreal often breathtaking results using unorthodox camera techniques.
Richie Johnston is one such filmmaker that demonstrates how subverting a traditional photographic process called slit scan photography can be used to create mesmerising visuals for the musician’s audience.
The film was made to coincide with the Just Music’s Ambient Zone 2 compilation and clocks in at almost an hour in length.
Throughout the performance ballet dancer Rachel Bodger moves in a slow, rhythmic motion drawing on the obvious quirk of photography to elongate her body and draw patterns within the frame. The result is hard to turn away from. After a few minutes it’s clear that the dancer’s improvisation is geared towards the photography used rather than the music, although it compliments it perfectly.
We compiled a few screenshots that show the different patterns Bodger and Johnston’s collaboration achieved and at Phogotraphy we truly think they are marvellous!
If you’re interested in slit scan photography and want to try to do something similar in a project of your own, Richie Johnston put together a short ‘making of’ video to guide us through the thoughts and processes involved in the production. It’s well worth a look, maybe more so than even the highly polished film above.
Check it out:
Video and stills used with explicit permission of the Richie Johnston.
Having spent most of his life building things for other people, photographer Rene Smets of Lummen, Belgium now enjoys his retirement by designing and constructing unusual wooden cameras which he would then go on to use for wet plate collodion photography. On the 3rd of October René set himself a project for the winter; to build a camera lens made out of wood. He would then go on to spend an exorbitant amount of time over the next nine days bringing his idea to life.
Rene documented the process with photographs, but like all great makers, started with a self made design first of which he would follow throughout the process:
This is how the lens would start its life. Two different pieces of Belgian wood that have been dried over a twenty year period. On the left is Buxus wood, Continue reading
Anthony Northcutt is a freelance photography tutor who teaches students from all over the world. Phogotraphy reached out to ask if he’d share some fundamental advice on how to judge photographs online.
During the past 5 years or so, we’ve seen an enormous growth in the birth rate of “photography experts”. Camera owners that have a tendency of being immediately available the moment that you post your latest image on social media. And who, typically, don’t have the first idea of how to analyse a photograph let alone understand how to offer an informed and constructive critique.
So here’s some help, a by no means exhaustive guide to analysing a photograph. Continue reading
At one point or another, every astrophotographer will experience the dreaded lens dew while taking photographs of the night sky. They’ll be minding their own business trying to capture meteors, beautiful Aurora Borealis displays or just a simple time lapse when a layer of moisture appears on the lens glass and turns every captured image into a blobby mess.
This moisture is dew, a normal Continue reading
We caught up with Anton Orlov this morning who kindly agreed to guest post here on PhoGoTraphy and share his latest work:
The day has come my friends! After months of being nothing more than a dream and concept, weeks of experimenting and building, and days of testing and working out the kinks today at San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts I will be unveiling what I believe to be the first completely transparent and entirely functional camera. I call it CLERA, short for Clear Camera, and without further ado here it is pictured against the clear San Diego skies. It is the first camera where you can actually SEE the image projected onto the piece of photographic material during the exposure!
#CLERA by Anton Orlov
I came up with this idea while working in my dark box and developing tintypes. Those of you familiar with my work know that for the past few years the medium of wet plate collodion has consumed my photographic endeavours almost entirely.
In what has been hailed as the first of its kind, scientists have embraced the old art of the moving image to project an image of a galloping horse onto clouds from a plane.
The horse and rider, an obvious reference to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion appears as a ghostly green shadow in the clouds courtesy of a modified zoopraxiscope by artist Dave Lynch.
Here in the video you can see the contraption’s internal workings prior to scenes shot from a plane. If viewed from the ground it’s unlikely you’d see anything but flashing random lights dancing within the clouds.
Despite the feat of imagination it will have taken to achieve, the final product is still somewhat shaky and basic in design. We really look forward to seeing what advances in visual technology are made as a result. It’s worth taking a trip to Dave Lynch’s website to learn more about the collaboration involved in ‘Project Nimbus’ and the three years of documented effort that went in to its creation.
via Gizmodo via New Scientist.
In what may be heralded as one of the most important photographic breakthroughs in recent memory, Pizza Hut has unveiled a pizza box that comes with a lens, thus turning it into a projector. Revolutionary!
The instructions say that you’ll require a smartphone and a darkened room. Then as with any cardboard projector the luminescent image of the screen will be projected and focussed through the lens that comes with the pizza. Ingenious. Perhaps they were inspired by Google’s cardboard Virtual reality system. Continue reading
Oh it’s a very, very good day. After over a year of it being out of production for various reasons, Ilford’s Harman Direct Positive fibre based paper is to make a return. Pinhole photographers the world over will be punching the air in delight.
As described, direct positive paper has been popular among many analogue photographers because of the way it produces a positive image using normal black & white developing procedure. This makes it perfect for people experimenting with large format and of course the ever popular pinhole photography craze. Continue reading
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