Went out again today and finished my #trichrome roll at Dunsapie Loch. However this time I couldn't get the filter holder off... or, more correctly, the adapter ring that connects holder to lens. This evening I thought my pliers were winning, but it turned out I was unscrewing the front of the lens! Not sure how to proceed. Luckily it's a cheap #Vivitar28mm and I've even got a spare!

@apkeedle I don't have PS but do use AP. I've found the descriptions of mapping photos to colour channels from various old forum post, very complicated to follow. I 'm thinking of writing a thread for Talk Photography to try to get more folk doing #trichrome (from my VAST experience of, checks notes, 3 films). The mapping stage is the hardest to write, specially as I don't have PS. Planning to link to something for that.

Out trying to make #trichrome in Holyrood Park today, I spent half the time I had, trying to unfold my travel tripod! TBF I've only used it once before. Once I finally found the trick to get my Vanguard Veo 2 into position, it worked a treat. Exposed 24 frames of Kentmere 100 though red, green and blue filters, so that should eventually turn into 8 colour frames, hopefully with lots of interesting colour glitches where things have moved between frames! #FilmPhotography #BelieveInFilm

#photography #trichrome

Pic of the day: Agfa Isoly Junior and Fomapan 400 film. A fairly boring picture at first sight, but actually the best trichrome I ever made. Turns out not shooting hand-held but putting your camera down on a solid base actually helps! Who knew!?*

(*Everyone who knows about trichromes.)
#FilmPhotography #BelieveInFilm #TrichromeParty #trichrome

Pic of the day: Agfa Isoly Junior and Fomapan 400 . Another sloppy trichrome made from the handheld black and white pictures.
#BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography #Trichrome

Pic of the day: Agfa Isoly Junior and Foma Fomapan 400 film. Another messy trichrome.
#BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography #Trichrome

Lens-Artists Challenge #335: Exploring Colour vs Black & White

This week, Patti of Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures is hosting the Challenge and she’s asking us to look at our use of colour or black & white in our photography. ‘When is it best to use one vs the other?’ She ponders: ‘What’s the benefit of each one?’

Patti sets us a challenge, ‘to explore the difference and the impact of using color [sic] or black & white photography in your selected photos. … Post pairs of the same image in both color and black & white. Limit the number of images to 3 pairs.’ She continues by asking us to: ‘Compare the differences in mood, texture, and light. Share your thoughts on how black & white or color processing impacts each photo. Tell us which one you prefer.’

I tend to use colour a lot in my photography, especially in film photography where I’m a big fan of those colour shifting emulsions like Lomochrome Turquoise or Purple. But in my digital work, I’m a little less … picky. 

Often it will depend on the subject. Most of my intentional camera movement (ICM) work is done in colour, I feel that ICM benefits from colour a lot, but the exception is urban ICM, which I think is much better in black and white. Similarly, if I’m out recording some street art then that always deserves colour — even if, or especially if, it’s starting to decay.

Sometimes, though, I set out to make images in black and white, then create colour images from them. There’s nothing I like more than taking an old digicam from the 2000s (the noughties) and testing out the infrared sensitivity of its lovely, lovely CCD sensor. This is often the first thing I do with every new digital camera I get my hands on, and the results can be … interesting. 

For example, here is a black and white infrared image of the steel footbridge over the Parque de Infante Dom Pedro in Aveiro. Taken with a Samsung Digimax U-CA3 digital camera from 2003, the camera has been set to monochrome mode and the image taken through a Hoya 720nm Infrared filter. It’s a typical looking infrared image, with white vegetation, which reflects the infrared wavelengths falling upon it, and dark skies and the metal of the bridge, which do not.

But when you take more monochrome images, using red and green filters, and edit the images as layers in a photo editor, everything changes. Suddenly the vegetation becomes shades of red, the sky becomes a bright blue or turquoise, and the image just pops. This is what I call a digital aerochrome, after the long defunct colour infrared emulsion made by Kodak and based on the procedure devised by Joshua Bird. He developed his method using infrared film, but the same technique applies to digital photography as well.

You can have a lot of fun with a digital camera and a set of filters. Take this infrared image of a landscape with lovely wispy clouds in the sky. It’s an OK infrared image in black and white, with the clouds popping against a dark sky. But make it into a digital aerochrome and suddenly the clouds become a kaleidoscope of colour. This is down to the clouds moving in the sky between the three exposures. When the images are lined up in the photo editor the colours of the filters don’t match and are presented in the image as individual colours.

Of course, it doesn’t always go as planned. Turns out this Konica Q-M100, a 1,3MP digital camera from 1997, can’t actually be set to monochrome mode, and the digital aerochromes were absolutely awful. That said, the regular colour images were quite stunning, but through an infrared filter, all of a sudden the image became almost monochrome in appearance. It looked as though a sepia filter had been applied, and personally I found this much more appealing than the colour image.

Sometimes we can combine two techniques. I thought that it might be a nice idea to try some infrared ICM. The results were less than stellar, though, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more boring infrared image, or ICM image for that matter.

But when you make a digital aerochrome of the infrared woodland image, by taking further ICM images through red and green filters, all of a sudden the ICM becomes much more interesting. I’ve used this technique two or three times, and I really love how it comes out.

So instead of using these noughties digicams for ‘regular’ colour photography, odds are that during the sunny spring and summer months you’ll find me wandering around the woods behind our house or in Aveiro with a noughties digicam set to monochrome mode and my little collection of filters. So if you ask me, do I prefer to use colour or black and white, I can happy say, BOTH!

Next week, Ann-Christine will host the Challenge, so I hope that you can join us then. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Aerochrome #Blackandwhite #Challenge #Colour #Infrared #Landscape #LensArtists #Monochrome #Nature #Tree #Trichrome #TrichromeEverything #VintageDigital #LensArtists

The swan in the optical feedback loop.

#photography #trichrome

Lens-Artists Challenge #326: This Made Me Smile

This week it was the turn of Ann-Christine (Leya) from To See a World in a Grain of Sand … to host the Lens-Artists Challenge, and she chose as her theme, ‘This Made Me Smile‘. In her post she says, ‘So much in this world is rather tough right now, … don’t we all need a smile? Let’s share something that made us smile, … and make the world smile with us!’ 

Well naturally this was a bit of a head-scratcher for me since my images are rarely funny or cute. We don’t have any pets and the kid is all grown up so most of my ‘fun’ images are strange out of focus abstracts, or blurred ICM landscapes. So I thought I would introduce you to one of my favourite pastimes: taking funtographs. What? You might say, don’t you mean photographs? No, definitely funtographs, with emphasis on the fun.

Back in 1998, Nintendo released the Gameboy camera to accompany its hand held gaming console, the Gameboy. The Gameboy Camera is a monochrome camera that records four shades of grey to produce super low resolution funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known). In today’s terms the Gameboy camera has a whopping 0.014MP.

The Gameboy camera is actually a full spectrum device — the sensor has no infrared cut filter to stop wavelengths outside the visible spectrum from showing on the image — so in full sunlight trees and vegetation come out a strange white (‘strange’ if you’re not familiar with how infrared images look). Indoors, or at night, you don’t have so many issues and images look normal, but during the day using an infrared cut filter stops these extra infrared wavelengths reaching the sensor and the images look much more natural.

Although getting good results from the Gameboy camera can be quite hit-and-miss, it can produce some lovely monochrome funtographs. But with a little work it can also produce some striking trichromes too, and even digital aerochromes using infrared filters. Making infrared trichromes — digital aerochromes that emulate the look of the defunct film Kodak Aerochrome film — is one of my favourite pastimes, and I attempt this with all new cameras, often with mixed success. 

I’ve been the proud owner of a Gameboy console and the Gameboy Camera since January 2023, and it’s my favourite camera of all time. I managed to get my hands on one for the Shitty Camera Challenge #1990sCameraChallenge, and since I’ve had one it’s been hard to put down. I’m also convinced that the Gameboy was the factor that tipped the scales into my becoming Shitty Camera Challenge Champion for the 1990s Camera Challenge, probably the single most important achievement of my whole life. 😉

I hope these few examples of Gameboy funtographs brought a smile to your face, and the next time you are shopping around for a new digital camera perhaps the Gameboy might fit the bill? Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#1990sCameraChallenge #2Bit #Aerochrome #Challenge #Digicam #Funtography #Gameboy #Infrared #LensArtists #Nintendo #PixelArt #Trichrome #LensArtists #Smile

@thereisnocat Yup. Deleted all my tweets in the last week. Sad. A lot of #believeinfilm, #fp4party, #trichrome stuff 😞

Yay! I made a #trichrome. First for a little while. Big cheat though, handheld digital images processed to B&W with RGB filters and then combined. Not sure what to think, but I made it so you have to see it. Soz, I don't make the rules... 😁

It's a self portrait btw. That's me in the reflection being nothing like Lee Friedlander 🙄

#photography

Pic of the day: I actueally manages a fairly decent trichrome! Yashica Half 17 rapid and Agfa XPR 100 film.
#BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography #Trichrome

Filling in the Gaps: The Nikon Coolpix S4 https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/09/13/filling-in-the-gaps-the-nikon-coolpix-s4/ ##aerochrome, ##Coolpix, ##infrared, ##landscape, ##monochrome, ##nature, ##Nikon, ##trichrome, ##TrichromeEverything

A few years ago I came across a YouTube video about the Nikon Coolpix 900, an unusual looking camera from 1998. It was nothing particularly  special for it’s time, but what made this camera different was its swivel lens. You could literally rotate the lens around the body by nearly 360°. Of course ,my mind was blown by this and I just had to get one of these little beasties. Sadly they rarely become available, and when they do the models are either terribly expensive or broken (and still expensive). However, I did manage to get some others in the range, the Coolpix 990 and the Coolpix 4500, and I am always looking out for more.

So I was really delighted to spot a Nikon Coolpix S4 on the Kamerastore website. I hadn’t realised there were any swivel lens models after the Coolpix 4500 was released in 2002, but a quick look on Wikipedia showed that the S4 was released in 2005 and the S10 a year later. It appears my search is not over.

The Coolpix S4 was introduced by Nikon in 2005. It has a 6MP CCD sensor and shutter speeds of 2s – 1/1000s. The ISO range is a meagre 50 – 400. Like its older brethren it features a rotating lens, but this time it’s housed in a silver body, like the Coolpix 900 and not the chunky black body of the other cameras in the series.

Of course, my first outing with the Coolpix S4 was to my favourite tree and well across the road. As well as a regular colour image I also used colour and infrared filters to make trichromes and digital aerochromes. I couldn’t figure out how switch the S4 to black and white mode, I’m not even sure if you can, so I used the colour filters and later desaturated the colour images in GuIMP before combining the layers for trichromes and aerochromes.

The regular colour image came out quite nicely, but things got really interesting with infrared and colour filters. The straight colour infrared image was quite nice, though it was a little dark with a maximum exposure of 2s. When the image was desturated and enhanced it looked like a ‘normal’ infrared image but was full of noise (and I reckon a fair number of dead pixels).

Making a trichrome from the red, green and blue filtered images gave a slightly brown tinted image, somewhat reminiscent of film images from the 1970s, which was quite attractive, and the digital aerochrome was full of noise and nothing special compared to other swivel lens cameras in the series, which was a shame considering this was a newer model compared to the 990 and the 4500.

Channel mixing the colour infrared image produced a wonderfully trippy and barely legible image.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/09/13/filling-in-the-gaps-the-nikon-coolpix-s4/

#Aerochrome #Coolpix #Infrared #Landscape #Monochrome #Nature #Nikon #Trichrome #TrichromeEverything