Astbury's Adventures in Photography

Just a few flower photographs from the Scottish countryside to enjoy.

Digital pinhole photography is something I've not tried my hand at for some time so I thought I would refresh my mind, go back over some old notes and give it a try with my current gear. I wanted to answer two questions; would it be better/different with a newer higher spec camera and would it look different processing through Capture One rather than Lightroom. Below are some old notes reposted along with updates to address my two new questions. My pinhole set-up I have a simple low cost pinhole adapter based on a modified body-cap type design which fits my Canon EF mount DSLRs. These adapters are readily available for most popular camera mounts. Pinhole adapter DSLR with pinhole adapter fitted instead of lens The focal length was quoted as 42mm (NB almost the same as the Canon EF flange distance which is 44mm) with an aperture of 0.25mm (not easy to confirm). These two parameters give a relative aperture of f168 (by dividing 42 by 0.25). With the long exposur...

A selection of photographs taken at Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. These were all taken with a telephoto zoom and natural light. A couple of them by necessity have been shot through glass. Not my usual subject matter but a bit of fun anyway and hopefully some good images. Meerkat Meerkat Meerkat Meerkat Meerkats Panda Red panda Red panda Sun Bear Gelada baboon Banteng Pelican Pelican pair Penguins Penguin Penguin

Here are a selection of recent photographs of subjects around the Oban area. Taken as digital raws, they have been processed through Capture One only as I continue to explore a monochrome workflow without Silver Efex Pro. Nose down in the dirt, Airds Bay Abandoned boat, Loch Etive Converted fishing boat, Oban Bay Kilchurn Castle Tree roots triangle Gate post Cabin in the woods Beyond a short caption I've opted not to say a lot about these photographs, please feel free to imagine your own narrative.

Light pads are thin surfaces fitted with arrays of small LEDs and may typically be used for tracing and drawing applications. Strangely they are sometimes advertised as being suitable for viewing X-Ray images (is this a common need outside a hospital?) and this may suggest that they would also work for viewing photographic negatives. Light Pad However there is a problem, the surface is shiny and prone to specular reflections, you can see the reflection of my LED OttLite desk lamp in the image above. Even worse is that the array of LEDs shows through when trying to back light an image, so for example here is how a colour slide (positive) looks: Slide viewed directly with LED array showing Not very good but the solution is actually very simple, a layer of diffusion material is needed and this can be done with a sheet of paper. The paper should not be coloured and should be thin, I found a sheet of 41gsm tracing paper works well. To see the difference this makes here's...

I've already spent some time investigating Lightroom alternatives and identified Capture One as looking likely but you can only get so far with reading reviews and looking at tutorial videos so it was time for me to get hands on with Capture One Pro. My intention is to put Capture One through it's paces for those aspects that matter to me but not to run through every single function or option and not to compare with Lightroom at a pixel by pixel level. I started out simply by going onto the Phase One site, entering a few basic details and then being emailed a download link. Capture One About Once installed I fired it up and created a new empty catalog (tip: I located this on my SSD drive to improve performance). Tip: once installed this is a good moment to review and edit preferences, you'll want to check the "Preview Image Size", it defaults to 2560 pixels, set lower if your screen resolution is lower to avoid having unnecessarily large preview files (NB...