Author: Robert Young

Cameras in the Cupboard #9

Ilford Sportsman

 

 

This is another camera that just “turned up” in my unofficial collection. For those of you who haven’t been following this blog closely (and why haven’t you?), I don’t collect cameras, they just sort of appear.

The Ilford Sportsman was made by the German company Dacora for the British photographic film and paper manufacturer, Ilford. The first model (the Mark 1) was introduced in 1957. It was designed to compete with the Kodak Retinette range of cameras. The last of the line, the Mark 5, was introduced in 1967.

My camera seems to be the Mark 2 model from 1959.

Stories of Iceland #2

Food

Do they have nice food in Iceland?

Yes, they do. But if you believe some of the tourist guides, you mightn’t think so. According to some reports, Icelanders live on a diet of rotting shark, pickled ram’s testicles, grilled minke whale and smoked puffin.

The culinary highlights for tourists are hot dogs and hamburgers. This starts to sound believable when you read that the most popular restaurant in Iceland is a hot dog stand.

Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur

However, we were very pleasantly surprised to find that there is real, fresh and excellent food available just about everywhere. We didn’t try the hot dogs, but on the couple of occasions we resorted to hamburger, we were very pleasantly surprised at the range of choice and the quality. (If you find yourself in Stykkisholmur, go to the Café Narfeyrarstofa and have the hamburger with the blue cheese dressing.)

Although the lamb in its various forms was excellent, the best option just about everywhere was seafood. In most places, this is served the day it is caught and in some places it is straight off the boat.

In Isafjordur, the Tjöruhúsið (Tar House), a restaurant in the local folk museum, is right beside the harbour. There is no menu, just whatever was caught that day. The fish is fried and delivered to the table in the pan in which it was cooked.

We were having an afternoon coffee at the Café Riis in Holmavik, when about 3.30 pm a man entered and asked the waitress what the catch of the day was. She replied, “I don’t know. We haven’t caught it yet.” We decided to go back that evening and find out. It turned out to be trout from a local lake.

But the freshest seafood of all was in Stykkisholmur. We went on a boat trip to see the rare white-tailed eagles nesting on an island in the fjord. On the way back the crew dropped a basket overboard and scooped up a load of scallops and sea urchins. These were opened and eaten on the spot. My first scallop had been out of the water for less than a minute.

Stories of Iceland #1

Sheep

Are there sheep in Iceland?

Yes, there are a lot of sheep in Iceland.

Iceland has two types of sheep: beach sheep and road sheep.

Beach sheep, as their name suggests, live on the beach. These sheep are mostly seen in the West Fjords where there isn’t a lot of land between the water and the rock walls of the fjords.

Beach sheep can be seen walking on the sand, or the rocks by the water’s edge. They can even been seen wading and paddling in the water. And on one occasion wading in the rock pools and eating vegetation off the rocks.

Road sheep, as their name suggests, live on the roads. This is because there is very little flat land in Iceland. In Iceland a lot of roads are built up above the surrounding land. Road sheep stand on the road to eat the grass on the edge. They also sleep on the slope of the road, and rest their heads on the road, using it as a pillow.

When you approach a group of road sheep in a car, they stare at you. They will move out of your way if you really insist. But probably not in the direction you were expecting.

What I did in my Holidays

We went to Iceland.

I drove 3700 kilometres and saw; fjords, waterfalls, sheep, mountains, beaches, sheep, turf-covered houses, big four-wheel drives, ducks, sheep, skuas, fulmars, sheep, horses, sheep, volcanoes, waterfalls, sheep, waterfalls, sheep, sheep, and swans. And puffins.

We met many charming people who wanted to tell us about Iceland and wanted to know about Australia. It is a fantastic place.

Did I mention the puffins?

An Email Survey

I have been conducting a survey of all the email that comes to my private email address. As a result, I have reached the conclusion that:

97% of the world’s manufacturing economy consists of Viagra and fake watches.

82% of the world’s money is locked up in forgotten bank accounts owned by dead people.

99.9% of the women in the world who want to get married are Russian.

Sometimes it Just Doesn’t Work

Usually I don’t mind it so much if a planned photographing session doesn’t produce usable results because I generally learn something in the process; but not always.

I have just spent a very frustrating day trying to photograph a glass. The book Light: Science & Magic has a very good chapter on how to light glass. I had tried it very briefly on a previous occasion and got a result good enough to give me encouragement.

The technique for photographing a glass on a white background (in brief) is to have the white background the same size as the field of view of the camera, then bounce the light off the background back through the glass. Buy the book for the full explanation.

I set up the camera and the background, then carefully masked out the area of the camera’s field of view (not easy by yourself). Once that was done I began shooting.

Two problems emerged immediately. I was getting good definition of the sides and stem, but no definition of the rim of the glass. And the white base the glass was sitting on wasn’t getting enough light and was being rendered as a dirty gray. Not good. The only thing I can think of was that I set the glass and camera up too far away from the background. I’ll try that one again when I have the time to go through the masking process again.

In an attempt to gain some usable images, I switched to a macro lens, filled the glass with water, moved in very close and photographed food dye drops in the water.

Two problems immediately emerged. The macro lens showed up every flaw and smudge on the glass; and no matter how I tried, even at f16 I couldn’t get enough of the colouring in focus to produce a usable image.

After spending a lot of time trying to get a glass spotlessly clean and work out a way to get the drops to fall exactly in my very narrow zone of focus, I gave up.

Somedays it just doesn’t work.

By the Light…

As anyone who has been following my photography on Flickr and Ipernity would know, empty early morning streets is a theme I return to often.

Part of the reason is that I walk through the city on my way to work; usually sometime around 7.30 am. This gives me a good opportunity for photography.

I also like the low, yellowish, directional light that fills the streets at certain times of the year.

I have just added a new gallery to the Photography page. It features photographs taken in North Melbourne on two mornings in March.

North Melbourne, Early Morning.

Fast Photography

On the 19th March, 2010, a couple of friends and I went to Phillip Island for a day out at the classic car races.

Last year I was disappointed with the photos I took, so this year I was determined to do better. Last year I came home with a lot of blurry photos, so concentrating on getting a decent shutter speed and holding the camera still was my goal.

I set the ISO at 800 and the program mode to aperture priority at f8. This gave me a shutter speed of around 1/1000.  I turned the auto focus off and manually focused on a section of the track in front of me. As the cars came out of the fast right-hand corner at the bottom of the main straight, I tracked them until they reached my pre-focused spot, then I pressed the shutter.

I got some good results in terms of sharpness and the position of the car, however, my lack of a longer tele lens (I was using a 200mm) and the fact that I don’t have access to the track, meant that the images were still rather dull.

So I wandered off to the pits and tried to make some interesting images there.

Here is a gallery of the best ten photos of the day.