Bokeh

What is bokeh? Bokeh is a Japanese word which means out of focus blur.

The method I used to create some interesting bokeh has been popularly used by many people. There are lots of bokeh tutorials on Youtube. You can even buy a bokeh pack which is made of plastic or paper. You need to attach them onto you lens and then you can take some funny bokeh shot. However, that is not necessary to buy because you make you own bokeh pattern.

Actually, I knew this trick for a long time but had not tried it out, until I watched this video from DigitalRevTV. That encouraged me to do some.

Hearts!

Flowers!

And @#$#%!

Paper Sculpture

I am getting involved with the Chorlton Green Festival with my classmates on 15th April. What I am going to do in the festival is to display an artwork. The artwork will be a paper sculpture that will represent the development of human's cities.

I am experimenting at the moment and I have found some problem during the experiment.

The way I used to make every form is like the image in above. I cut out the paper and make the shape first and then I attached covers on it.

The covers didn't mount very tightly so I made a hole on one of them and I could put my finger in to made it tight. That side will be attached on the on papers so that whole is not a matter.

Another thing that is annoying me seriously is the thing, these things, the bottoms of these things are not flat. Once the bottom is not flat, that form is not going to be useful.

As a Photographer for No Offence Intended

Being the photographer for the exhibition, No Offence Intended which is held by my classmates that was fantastic. It was much busier that I expected. So many people came to the opening night. That was a great success. Congratulation to them.

Live performance.

Cool pic!

Concept

The inspiration is from the community structure of Hong Kong. The numbers of high buildings makes you feel like living in a underground city, because you don't really see the sky by those high buildings.

Recreate Exhibition

Finally, the exhibition of the Recreate project was held last week at Link Gallery. That means the whole are finished successfully. We invited those little artists and their parents to visit the exhibition. There were the busiest moment I had ever seed at Link Gallery.

I made a video that was been playing during the exhibition. Everyone was attracted by the video when they came to the exhibition and they really enjoyed watching it. I was glad to see that because I spent a whole night to complete the editing.

Before setting exhibition, we were planned to make a slide show that would be displayed in the exhibition. I was not in charge of this but no one made or were going to make a video for the show. Then I said I would do at the night before the exhibition. Slide show is easy to make because there are just images. However, as long as I was in charge of this, I would make it more interesting. As I had taken quite a lot of short video clips during the project, I combined those clips to a montage as well.

The editing supposed to take less than 3 hours, but I started to do it at 8:00pm and finished it at 6:00am. Why did it take so long time? The first problem is that those clips were taken on three cameras, a Canon PowerShot G9, a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a Sony Nex 5 and those clips from them were all in different format files. I could use Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to open the clips from the Canon G9 and the Canon 5D Mark II, but not the Sony one. No problem! I have another video editing software, Sony Vagas Pro 9.0 which must be able to open the Sony files. Yes, it did but it could not open the Canon files. I didn't want to give any footages up so I tried so many different ways to export them to the same format video files. And finally, I could start the the editing.

After finishing the editing, I started to make the slide show. At the moment, I was so tired already. I just wanted to put all images together to complete it. I chose the song, Girlfriend of Avril Lavigne as a background music because in the video, there is a shot of kids playing a video dancing game and the song from the game is Girlfriend. I just made a little relationship between the video and the slide show.

While I was putting images together with the music on, I suddenly heard 'mother Fxxker...' and I was shocked. It was definitely not suitable to be played at the exhibition. Ah! I remembered I had a edited version of this song and started to look for it in my hard drive. But I couldn't find it out because I had deleted it in long time ago. It was 5:00am in the morning already. However, I was still able to get everything done but just little bit in lack of sleep.

In fact, I was hoping to finish this project earlier. Those kids in Hulme Adventure Playground were mental. They made every volunteer nervous. I can tell many volunteers didn't like working at this place. However, while I was watching the footages which I took of the kids, I couldn't stop laughing. They were just so cute. Moreover, the manager of the playground took a picture of me and other 3 volunteers and that picture will be posted on their board because we went to there almost every week. At the moment, I felt everything I have done for this project is worthy.

The school, the playground and the MMU Volunteer office were given a CD of those photos and the video.

Load another film to the Mamiya

Let's load another 120 film to the Mamiya M645 Super! It is almost summer time now. It is so much brighter. I hope I will have better result this time.

Canon EOS 30V with Fuji Color C200

This time, I used a roll of Fuji Color C200 on Canon EOS 30V auto film camera. I am pretty happy with the result because I have got a lot colourful, beautiful and interesting images.

The film was free from Jessops. When you develop a roll of film in Jessops, the will give you a roll of Fuji Colour C200 for free. I thought this was a cheap film, but in the following images, I can't tell you what the difference is between Fuji Color and Fuji Superia which is more expensive.

I didn't plan to use any automatic film cameras because if I need automatic mode to increase the photo shooting average, I would prefer digital camera. However, until I finished the first roll of film on Canon EOS 1000fn, I found there are still something digital cannot give me but films can. I can't thell you what that is because it is quite psychological yet physical. If you love to use film, you will understand what I am saying.

Canon EOS 30V is a semi-pro automatic film camera produced in 2004. I use it to replace the Canon EOS 1000fn, one of the reasons is that it has dual control dials which allow me to change settings faster. Another reason is the outlook of this camera is the best in the series of Canon EOS film cameras.

In this series of photographs, most images was taken in the country park near my house and Liverpool. And lenses I used were the Canon 17-40mm f4L USM and Canon 70-200 F4L USM.

With a CPL filter, the sky becomes so blue.

I was mainly to capture the reflections on the river. This image was taken with the 70-200mm lens without CPL filters, so you can see the difference.

The tracking focusing system is very good for capturing moving object.

The rest of photos were taken in Liverpool. Only the 17-40mm lens with a CPL filter was mounted on the camera.

Nikon FE2 with Agfa 100

I didn't get a good result when last time I used Agfa 100 on Nikon F3 because there was not so much sun light during the winter. In this spring time, it is time to try this film again.

I used the Agfa 100 on my Nikon FE2 this time and I spent most of the films in the country park near my house.

Agfa 100

Kodak UltraMax 200

I like the moss on this wood so I took two photos of the scene with two different cameras. I was go to compare the resolution of these two films but I forgot to use the same setting to scan these two films. However, it doesn't really matter. I use film because I enjoy the feeling when taking every shot. If I need high resolution images, I would go for digital.

I was so surprised that I captured this dog clearly on its eye because it was moving and I was using a manual camera. Unfortunately, this was the last frame of the film. I chopped this image when I was developing the film in the darkroom.

Ilford Hp5 400 on Mamiya 645 Super

As a photography lover, just 135 system will never satisfy me. Recently, I learnt how to use a 645 camera and finished the first roll of 120 film. The camera is Mamiya 645 Super which is a entry level camera for medium format system beginner.

As a medium format camera has many parts which are different to a full format camera, in order not to damage the camera, I downloaded a manual on the internet (there is one on the MMU website) and read it carefully. And then, I tried to take a few shots without films. Okay! That is how it works. Before loading films to the camera, I also watched a few videos of how to load a roll of 120 film to a medium format camera on Youtube. Once I confirmed I understood how to use this camera, I loaded the film and started to shoot.

After the first experience, I realized that it is not easy to get focus with this camera because most images are out of focus. The camera is attached a waist level viewfinder. I might not get used to use this type of viewfinder so I couldn't capture the clear images. When I use it more, that will be improve. Another reason could be that I used the maximum aperture to take the shots. The lens is a 80mm f2.8 lens which is standard lens on medium format camera like a 50mm lens on 135 camera. This 80mm lens on aperture f2.8 gives you a very shallow depth of view. If you hold the camera with you hands, even a very little move that is able to affect the focal point. I didn't use any tripods so my body moves might cause the images out of focus. Although I think f2.8 is not a very large aperture, the depth of view of 80mm on f2.8 is too shallow, I really need to stop it down in the next 120 film.

On f/4, the kettle is covered in the depth of view

On f/2.8, only the glass at the front is covered.

As there is no light meter on the camera, it supposes users use the camera with a light meter. However, I don't have any, so my method of light metering was to use my digital camera. As long as I put my digital camera toward the scene that I wanted to take with the Mamiya camera, the right numbers of aperture and shutter speed would be showed on the screen of the digital camera. And then I used those numbers on the Mamiya camera. It was surprisingly work well.